Heh, I remember tinkering with linux waaay back in the day. I had a shitty Slackware install I farted around with, and something I was doing required bootstrapping gcc. I clung to that man page like it was the last lifeboat off the Titanic, but by the end when it worked I felt exactly like this.
Haha, yep. My very first linux install I had to do similar because I had a fucky video card that X11 didn’t support natively, ultimately I had to, er, acquire a commercial X server that did support it to make it work. It was a mess.