jimt, which distros and versions did you try?
I sympathize with you; not all my installations went well either and, like you, most of the trouble centered on getting X going. But nearly all of that occurred in the time from Mandrake 5 through Red Hat 6. I've had no trouble with RH7.2 or 7.3, and Lycoris (formerly Redmond Linux) was the easiest install ever.
I'm running RH7.3 at home on my primary machine. (The Win machine rarely gets booted up now.) Linux is still "expert-friendly," but it's getting better.
Another peeve, while I'm crabbing, is the overall "installation". They give you time estimates that remind me of government project budgets: start out low and finish up many times higher. Red Hat's projection started out at 23 minutes and finished at 1 hour 26 minutes. There's just no excuse for that, especially as the "packages" to be installed are already known. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to write enough code to figure rough disk and processor system performance. These would be sufficient to give way more accurate times than the install program does.
At least they ought to be smart enough to start high and come down rather than vice versa.
I will admit my patience level and willingness to diddle with Linux has been low. But when my machine locks up solid as a rock, or has a screen image offset 3/8" up and to the left, or has the hard disk light flashing like a Las Vegas neon sign (when I'm doing nothing for minutes!), or produces illegible screen fonts, my patience level wears very thin.
The whole "user" and "security" thing bugs me all to heck as well. Gee, how did I ever get by running MS-DOS all those years while having "super user" privileges and no nanny system slapping my fingers for exceeding my authority? I tolerate some of that at work, as there are good business reasons not to let users run willy-nilly. But at home!!??
Sorry for the rant - you seem typical of Linux users: friendly, helpful and enthusiastic. I'm glad it's working well for you. But I when can't get it to run on a plain vanilla Toshiba laptop, noted for stability and compatibility, my enthusiasm wanes. BTW, I tried the Mandrake installation at least 5 times (variations on recommended & expert) and the Red Hat installation 3 times.
Please note that this was after getting MS-DOS 6.2, Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 triple booting independently in their own primary partitions under V-Comm's System Commander. All work perfectly, and all deal with my Selectbay floppy/zip drive/CDROM/hard disk swapping as though it was second nature, albeit with a bit of MS-DOS multi-config fiddling.
How the heck is it that both Mandrake and Red Hat can show a perfect 800 X 600 installation screen with NO configuration, but X-Windows hoses up 1024 X 768 while having system details down to the very chip level? Have the X-Windows chumps never heard of VESA, or is early '90's technology too far advanced?
Oops, pardon me, I'm frothing again. Thanks for your interest.
Have you seen Red Hat 8.0 yet? I'm a serious Slack user, but I have to admit that RH8.0 is very sweet. I'm extremely pleased with it.