I used to like Debian when configuring ALSA/OSS, XFree86 and such was a source of nightmares. Thus, debconf as a middle layer mechanism to handle several disti

I used to like Debian when configuring ALSA/OSS, XFree86 and such was a source of nightmares. Thus, debconf as a middle layer mechanism to handle several distinct architectures, setups and hardware was a neccesity. Ditto with Yast2 on SuSE. By 2004-2005... not much. Even a bare Slackware with KDE and KDEi (and even XFCE) can do tons of work by itself by just adding an user and accepting the default group belonging array by pressing 'up' at the prompt. Heck, even OpenBSD, minus the volume automount, which can be handled in a breeze with toadd or tray-app in seconds; and if you are smart you can figure DBUS/FDo mount points and integrate then with XFCE/Plasma/Gnome without too much issues (hotplugd can handle device umounting if you set up doas.conf accordinly). The rest? MESA and X.org will handle most of the graphics stuff. Video and audio drivers are autodetected on almost every GNU and *BSD. Printers are often wireless bound so any assistant with look it up fast and attach it to CUPS. Still, I can't handle DPKG/APT's slowness, even if there are libre distros as Trisquel with it. If they rebased their distro as a simpler Parabola LTS release with either Mate or LXDE setups, the user experience would be almost the same, but installing packages would happen at a much faster pace.