Once I spent two weeks without proper graphics on my day-to-day machine. I wasn’t trying to run anything exotic, believe it or not, I was running Debian.
Now the laptop I was using had a particular graphics setup. When demand was low, it could use the on-chip Intel graphics hardware, which was low power. When demand was high, it could switch to using the dedicated NVIDIA graphics card, off cpu.
Debugging the driver support for this graphics setup was gnarly. I spent no less than two weeks running without an X server, trying to make things work.
I finally got the system working the way I wanted, but much to my disappointment when months later I was installing Ubuntu, the automatic driver installation got my graphics hardware working the very first time.
I felt pretty silly having spent so much time and energy on it the first time. C’est la vie.