You had to recompile a kernel module to support your dang modem and network card or no networking. X11 was a royal pain cuz there was no it just works desktops.

Package mgmt was a nightmare and dependency based managers like yellow dogs APT and nonexistent redhats rpm didn't exist.

More like than not you had to compile some random a55 tarball from src and hoped ./configure && make && make all would work or spend hours on USENET looking for solutions (or mailing lists!).