I started with Slackware Linux—something arguably even more “hard-core” than Arch.

What mattered most at the beginning was good installation documentation, and both Arch and Slackware delivered on that front. Slackware, however, had an additional appeal: it was intentionally simple, largely because it was created and maintained by a single person at the time. That simplicity made it feel conceivable that the system could be fundamentally understood by a single human mind.

Whether a newcomer appreciates the Slackware/Arch approach depends heavily on learning style and goals. You can click through a GUI installer and end up with a working distro, but then what? From a beginner’s perspective, you’ve just installed something somehow—and it looks like a crippled Windows machine with fewer buttons.

Starting with Slackware gave me a completely different starting reference point. Installing the system piece by piece was genuinely exciting, because every step involved learning what each component was and how it fit into the whole. The realization that Linux is essentially a set of Lego bricks—and that I might actually master the entire structure, or even build my own pieces—was deeply motivating.

That mindset was strongly shaped by how Slackware and similar distros present themselves. Even the lack of automatic dependency management acted as an early nudge toward thinking seriously about complexity, trade-offs, and minimalism, which stayed with me forever.

Ah yes, Slackware. I remember downloading something like 15 floppy disks over the 56k modem for my first install. Maybe a v1.1 kernel?

Yeah agree completely. Started with Slack at around 2.x, took a long time to switch to Debian and occasionally Ubuntu.

That was when you compiled your own kernel and installed software by running ./configure && make && make install

Normies fleeing Windows dumpster fire today won't do that.