Not to put too fine a point on it: in the olden days, you could change resolutions without either editing your Xconfig file or clicking anywhere, just by pressing Ctrl-Alt-(KP+/KP-). Most distributions disable that nowadays, because it tends to confuse people if they have a viewport larger than their screen.
I wonder if a lot of that is the death of CRTs, which didn't have a "native" resolution. That's the one thing I really miss about old gaming. Playing something at 640x480 and having it look good, and not be resampled. Might be why the current crop of pixel-art indie games annoys me too, come to think of it. The natural slight blur from CRT overscan is gone.
That's another Old Linux Guy-ism, thinking that there's even a distinction between "viewport" and "resolution". When non-OLGs talk about "changing resolution", the don't mean, well, anything about view ports, because nobody thinks about view ports.
