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I don’t think it became easier at all until it was forked off into Xorg and they started making dramatic improvements.
I think it was trial and error for hours at least.
It certainly was until I discovered the monitor I hadn’t fried had the modelines printed on a sticker on the back…
So I’m not the only one who fried a monitor trying to get X11 working…
and how hard it was to get x11 working
Oh good God. If you really want to test someone’s resolve, sit them down at an old computer with a CRT and no Internet and have them configure X11 from scratch. Seeing that default X11 crosshatch background for the first time was practically orgasmic after the bullshit I went through to make it work.
That’s one of those traumatizing experiences I’d completely blocked from my memory until I read your comment.
Traumatizing experience #2 that just came back to me was getting a winmodem working and connected to my ISP via minicom.
At work/for business, you can’t beat Veeam. It’s the gold standard and there is literally nothing better.
At home, Duplicity. Set it up once and then just let it go, and it supports a million different backup targets you can ship your backups off to, including the local filesystem. Has auto-aging/removal rules, easy restores, incrementals, etc. Encrypts by default too.
Look in to Rocky Linux. It was started by the original developer of CentOS the day Red Hat announced that CentOS would be moving upstream of RHEL. They’ve already put out an announcement saying that it’s essentially going to be business as usual for them.
Fedora isn’t the testing distribution for RHEL, CentOS is. Fedora is upstream of CentOS and could be viewed as the bleeding edge in that regard. CentOS used to be downstream of RHEL, but that changed a few years ago when IBM did its first shitty thing at Red Hat. The tree is like:
Fedora (Top of code stream, “unstable” from a business perspective)
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v
CentOS (midstream, much less frequent feature updates)
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v
RHEL (end of stream, stable/predictable/reliable/etc)
And I couldn’t disagree more about RHEL adding little value. You’re not going to run a server on Fedora for something you want/need to rely on, and especially rely on not to change much/cause breaking changes. That’s what RHEL is for and it is the gold standard in that regard.
And that’s not even mentioning the fact that Red Hat support is some of the absolute best in the world. Motherfuckers will write a bespoke kernel module for you if that’s what it takes to fix your issue. Not sure if that’s still true after the IBM takeover though, but that was my experience with them before that.
That certainly makes me feel better for letting the Magic Smoke out.