Yeah back then I was in elementary school. I chased single percent performance gains from bleeding edge because I couldn't just buy better hardware. If you wanted the latest versions of anything ubuntu couldn't do it without iffy unofficial repos and dependency hell. I did it anyway and it sucked.

If you compiled the kernel but forgot to rebuild the graphics modules you had to live cd in, because a 64mb usb stick was like 300 bucks back then and booting off usb wasn't really a thing yet. Then next would be some janky terminal instructions off someones blog printed at the library because phones weren't even moto razr and arch wiki didnt exist yet, then pray it worked and that there was enough time left in the day to do whatever stupid homework needed the computer.

I never liked the nvidia installer and it's control panel that seemingly needed root then somehow fucked up the monitor config while not even applying the driver config, but it was all I knew as I never had a radeon until after the amd acquisition of ati. I also have no idea if the driver was always in kernel or if that was more recent but being able to compile a kernel with some silly buzzword feature that probably only situationally added 2fps to maybe one or two games and not risk graphics related boot failure was a game changer to my broke ass in the early days of working.

Anyway that was peak ubuntu era as I remember it. I mainly used ubuntu with spots of opensuse and some others here and there until whenever the r9 280 came out and then primarily used arch until the the early immutable distros showed up. Now even my dad and grandparents are on bazzite and my mom on aurora and its literally the best thing ever because they actually don't fuck it up anymore and I don't spend every waking hour on call for tech support.