Speaking for myself only, it was my first linux distro in mid to late 1990s. Computer books, large reference type computer books were a thing back then. You co

Speaking for myself only, it was my first linux distro in mid to late 1990s. Computer books, large reference type computer books were a thing back then. You could buy books titled something like "Slackware Bible" in very large print on the cover that promised to tell you how to run your own web server and maybe email server. In the back of the book were cd roms that had the Slackware source ready to build. It was immensely attractive to me. The internet was not much a thing back then, mostly AOL for regular Joe's. For academics or adventurous types there were universities and independent isps offering gopher,www and Usenet sites. Downloading distros over 2800k modems was not something you wanted to do. I remember installing Slackware but imo at the time it was horribly primitive and esoteric and promised days of driver and build hell. I remember having to build everything from source and wondering why in the hell was that required and it was not uncommon to o completely wreck your system by installing the wrong library or passing the scripts the wrong flags, etc. But it did get you a web server and other cool stuff. You could for nearly free host a website in your bedroom. But it could break at any time (I mean the whole system, requiring rebuild from scratch). I never enjoyed linux installs until I discovered debian in the early 2000s which was a God send. My apologies if my memories are off and no take slight to Slackware developers intended, it was just the state of the technology at the time. For the time the efforts were amazing.