"Because of the general bugginess of SLS" I was there, and I don't recall that. It all "just worked" in the summer of 93 which was mere months after this arti

"Because of the general bugginess of SLS" I was there, and I don't recall that. It all "just worked" in the summer of 93 which was mere months after this article. On a 40 mhz 386dx, a kernel recompile took about an hour with 4 megs of ram so I upgraded to 5 megs using 4 256K sticks (back then simms were 8 bits wide and the 386 had a 32 bit bus, so ...) and then compile times dropped to 15 minutes. X window system worked fine IIRC. The big problem with SLS is the distribution method was zipped floppy disk images downloaded from BBSes that were basically split up tar files. So the only update mechanism to fix a minor corner of the X window system would be to redownload all the "X" series disk images, then do a complete reinstall of the X window system. IIRC the A series of floppy disks was about three disks and would boot and do nothing, but it did verify your hardware worked with linux so it was a natural starting point. The B series installed a "complete unix CLI environment" and the C series installed the compilers although you needed to install the K series to get the kernel source. In those days I believe we did not have modules yet so I had to recompile to get the mitsumi proprietary "not quite IDE" cdrom driver, or at least if we had modules nobody distributed that module in compiled format. Also in the pre-PCI era we set our ports and IRQs manually and it was possible at boot to override but most people recompiled their kernel to their local soundblaster sound card settings or whatever. I believe there might have been a T series of floppies which installed TCL/TK. The superb innovation of Debian was once you got it installed and you connected to the internet you could download deb files and upgrade, perhaps, just perl. Or you could install, perhaps, just the gawk implementation of awk. About half a decade later came apt and you could now upgrade "automatically" over the internet which seemed quite magical at the time. A big part of Debian in the old days was all FOSS license so its safe to use at work, and the universal OS "everything should be possible" kind of the opposite of the modern debian systemd era "theres only one way we will let you compute, and you'll like it or leave". I don't recall any claims of being bug free or less bugs at all; if anything debian was worse LOL. It was not clear until the APT era that binary distribution was the way to do linux. In the "old days" if you wanted a fancy irc client you simply ftp downloaded the source and tar -xzf whatever.tar.gz ; make ; make install ; make clean it and it worked quite well.