Slackware was one of the first distros and was Debian before there was a Debian[1] Also, there was a convenient offline CD archive version (Walnut Creek, IIRC)

Slackware was one of the first distros and was Debian before there was a Debian[1] Also, there was a convenient offline CD archive version (Walnut Creek, IIRC) of it you could get for ~$20 which included several CDs worth of software (i.e. a couple/few gigs of files) before inexpensive ISPs were a thing and the world was still largely on dialup. (i.e. download times were on the order of minutes per megabyte) So getting those Slackware CDs was a bargain and orders of magnitude faster than attempting to download software for most. [1] It was released a few months before Debian so there was no Debian, no Ubuntu, no RedHat etc... these were all distros that mostly started taking off in the to mid- to late-90's. (Ubuntu of course didn't start until early this century) For the very earliest releases of Linux you had to download boot and root floppy images and then piece together what you needed for a working system. Usually this also included recompiling or at least re-linking the kernel... it was that primitive. Then there was this new concept of a Linux 'distribution' with the likes of Slackware that took the pain out of the process and caught on very quickly.