my linux history
I started using Linux when I was in 8th grade close to 15 years ago. I started with Ubuntu dapper 6.06. My personal computer had 256 MB of RAM. I remember staying up late one night partitioning my hard disk to dual boot with Windows XP. Even installing and getting Ubuntu to work well was a wildly different experience then compared to how it is now. Nowadays a lot of user-friendly distributions like ubuntu or manjaro run pretty well out of the box. I am typing this on a Dell Latitude E7450 running Manjaro Linux and I had absolutely zero issues during the install and setuping up thereafter. No problems with video drivers, no issues with power management or wifi. It has been an absolutely delightful experience, installing and using Manjaro on this laptop. The same couldn't be said for my experience 15 years ago.
The live environment for installing the system usually worked well enough. However upon first boot the trouble would start. My resolution was stuck at 800x600, my monitor's native resolution wasn't even listed as an option. Fixing this entailed patching my intel graphics drivers then going through the lengthy and tedious process of fixing my xorg.conf file. Messing around with xorg was a recurrent theme back then after doing a fresh system install. Then came the time to fix wifi drivers. Wifi never ran out of the box for me. I had to install Windows network drivers using ndiswrapper. There were always sound problems. There wasn't pulse audio back then, so sound in one application would often prevent audio from every other app. It was a giant pain in the ass and the only way to fix it often was to restart the app. The clipboard was also buggy. If you copied something from an app into the clipboard, and then you closed the app, you'd also lose what's inside the clipboard. It was frankly infuriating. Nothing is more annoying than copying something into the clipboard, closing the window, only to find that you can't paste what you copied because it's no longer in the clipboard.
Installing new software was also a different experience. Linux wasn't nearly as popular then as it is now, especially in the consumer market for general purpose everyday use. Linux enjoys a much wider support for applications, especially technical ones, now, then it did 15 years ago. I would often times have to use WINE to run software that I needed. Speaking of which, WINE was also terrible back then. It ran simple cli apps fine, but anything even slightly non-trivial would fail spectacularly. Any app with a Window usually failed within the first five mins of using it in some way, and that is if it managed to start at all. The software that was natively supported had to be installed often from source. The Ubuntu repos often had a very outdated version of software that I wanted to install, and that is if a package existed at all. Rarely would you see a .deb package being distributed from official sources. Red Hat was far more popular back then, so software that supported linux often provided rpm files, if they provided any pre-compiled binaries at all. I remember having to convert from rpm to .deb quiet often. These days we have a lot of different stand alone app containers like snaps.
There was a time when an optimus enabled system used to demand a lot of patience and tinkering to get working in linux. You either had to turn off the discreet GPU from the BIOS or you suffered terrible battery life due to the discreet GPU always being active. It'd also cause the thermal performance to tank. Bumblebee came along and made things better. But it too was difficult to install and configure. Plus you had to launch programs with the optirun command and that too was a pain in the ass. Nowadays distributions like Pop!_OS allow you to seamlessly run programs using either GPU in a very user-friendly way.