Slackware was my first and I didn’t know that package managers existed (or maybe they didn’t at the time) to resolve dependencies and even if they did, they probably lagged on versions. I learned true dependency hell when trying to build my own apache, sendmail, etc from source while missing a ton of dependency libraries (or I needed newer versions) and then keeping things relatively up to date. Masochistic? Definitely for me, but idk how much of that was self inflicted by not using the package tool. Amazing learning at the time. This would have been mainly Slackware 3.x and 4.x. I switched to Debian (not arch BTW).
Slackware was my first and I didn’t know that package managers existed (or maybe they didn’t at the time) to resolve dependencies and even if they did, they probably lagged on versions. I learned true dependency hell when trying to build my own apache, sendmail, etc from source while missing a ton of dependency libraries (or I needed newer versions) and then keeping things relatively up to date. Masochistic? Definitely for me, but idk how much of that was self inflicted by not using the package tool. Amazing learning at the time. This would have been mainly Slackware 3.x and 4.x. I switched to Debian (not arch BTW).