Personally I believe Linux has matured to a pretty decent usability level for the average user. Ubuntu, Opensuse, Linux Mint and some of the like have taken a lot of the hard work out of managing and installing a linux OS. It used to be that you would slave hours of getting your specific hardware to work with a particular flavor of Linux. Now you have drivers that are plentiful and up to date, bugs that get fixed fast, and large communities at near enterprise levels maintaining the updates. Frankly a pretty good time to be a Linux user.
While the Linux installers and hardware support have improved more than any other part of Linux distros hardware support still lags well behind actual hardware availability.
That you belive that the installers have advanced to "average user" level really misses the point though. The rest of the os is as disjointed and messy as ever.
Are there any, I don’t know, archives of what it used to be like to install linux? My first linux experience was Ubuntu maybe a decade so ago and it installed fine.
What’s not immediately obvious from this is that it was not uncommon for an installation to require about 30 floppies. Floppies of course are not 100% reliable and in my experience there’s a pretty good chance that at least one of the floppies will be corrupt. For me, this meant a trip into the campus computer lab to download and write a fresh copy of the needed disk.
When you decided that you wanted X11, you would need to follow the readme with the understanding that getting it wrong could fry your monitor.
This also reminds me of a Softlanding Linux System (SLS) boot floppy disk set that was our gateway into Linux. It served the use case that people would use Live ISO images now. You booted a PC off floppy and used a single floppy for the root system image, and could use the typically available second floppy drive to save some user files. This let you preview Linux on a system without the leap to wipe and reformat the HDD.
Seeing multiple virtual consoles with login prompts on your first PC was a revelation if you had been amazed by the multi-user systems in school labs and assumed PCs were inherently single user.
Maybe Slackware could be used that way too, but I never tried. By the time we started downloading Slackware floppies, we planned to wipe a system and do an HDD based install to get all those extra packages that would never fit in a single floppy.
Looks to me the same as it is now. Figure out where to install, partition block devices, format filesystems, copy initial rootfs content somehow, configure basics like fstab, networking, setup users/passwords, install bootloader, reboot. Done.
Slackware just has very detailed documentation. :)
