Slackware 2.0 was released in August 1994.  Even 1.0 (which is probably the first distro to have XFree86) was released in July 1993.  I used MCC before that and I don&#x27;t think X was available (though, to be fair, I can&#x27;t really remember when I first got X working on my machine).  I distinctly remember having to wait until mmap() was implemented before anyone could even think about getting X to work. :-)<p>It is quite possible that one had to still edit modelines by hand at that time, but it really wasn&#x27;t long before the modeline db came out and you could just plonk in canned values with a good expectation it would work untouched.  Certainly after that time I never had any difficulty.  About the only thing I ever did was to follow instructions to modify a couple of numbers for monitors that had bizarre refresh rates.<p>I think that this would probably fall pretty close to the &quot;20 years ago&quot; time frame (August 1995).  Slackware 3.0 came out in November of that year.  2.0 of the kernel came out in 1996 and I&#x27;m quite sure that I wasn&#x27;t spending any time editing modelines then.<p>If you wanted to get total plug an play without any configuration at all, I think you would have to wait until 2004, when Ubuntu was first released.  So while the original statement that it took 10 years to get video drivers working is completely wrong, I think it would be fair to say that it took 10 years to have an equivalent install experience to Windows on that front.