There were Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, Slackware, and dozens of others then too. Software still switched its method of configuration between versions, and

There were Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, Slackware, and dozens of others then too. Software still switched its method of configuration between versions, and distros still had their own incompatible ways of doing things. Linux was farther from mainstream, StackExchange didn't exist, Google wasn't as good, and Linux in general was less polished (and required more manual intervention to get things going).