Compiling a new kernel was an overnight or even weekend process
One friend and I had a competition who could make the smallest kernel configuration still functional on their hardware. I remember that at some point we could build it in ten minutes or so. This was somewhere in the nineties, I was envious of his DX2-50.
Compare that to Debian's apt-get or Suse's yast/yast2 of the time, both just handled all that for you.
One of the really huge benefits of S.u.S.E. in Europe in the nineties was that you could buy it in nearly every book shop and it came with an installation/administration book and multiple CD-ROMs with pretty much all packages. Since many people did not have internet at all or at most dial-up, it gave you everything to have a complete system.
One friend and I had a competition who could make the smallest kernel configuration still functional on their hardware. I remember that at some point we could build it in ten minutes or so. This was somewhere in the nineties, I was envious of his DX2-50.
Compare that to Debian's apt-get or Suse's yast/yast2 of the time, both just handled all that for you.
One of the really huge benefits of S.u.S.E. in Europe in the nineties was that you could buy it in nearly every book shop and it came with an installation/administration book and multiple CD-ROMs with pretty much all packages. Since many people did not have internet at all or at most dial-up, it gave you everything to have a complete system.