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One of the defining moments of my life was installing FreeBSD and figuring out how to get X11 working. Everyday after school I would try something new and one d

• giantrobot 3y ago
  Back in the day when a bad config might burn out your monitor. Fun times. But it was similar for me. XFree86 3.x was a dumpster fire with having to guess (of scan through dmsg logs) which of several individual servers was right for your card, since the system might recognize only the graphics chip but rarely the marketing name of the card you owned. If you were lucky you'd be able to escape a bad config. Messing with X11 is what taught me to use a serial console since I could connect from another machine (before I had a network) to kill the errant X server. I bought so many damn O'Reilly books trying to master my little home Unix machine. I learned so much and appreciate having that knowledge but I do not miss the process of learning it at all. No StackOverflow, just assholes on IRC dismissively saying "RTFM" despite the manual being terrible or non-existent. That was unless of course you were being berated for calling it X Windows because assholes have to asshole.