Yup. All of that is true. It also protects you from yourself by preventing you from making changes outside of the home directory so you can’t hose your system accidentally. It’s intentional.

I was thinking not only about the finicky drivers, but also the different audio backends, like ALSA and OSS, Pulse would have just come out at the time, so it was definitely getting better, but it was fresh off the presses back then, so it wasn’t good enough yet either. Nowadays, Pulse works pretty well, pipewire works pretty well, things more or less just work, Bluetooth can be a little weird, but usually you just need to change the settings on pulse/pipewire to your preference.

Audio and networking were a shitshow back then, nowadays almost everything just works on those two fronts. Also, having to edit your Xorg.conf is not what I’d call user friendly…