this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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Yes, in 1995, I was very disappointed that red hat 2.0 made me compile my own goddamn disk images before I had to write them to floppy. Which took several days on my 486SX 25 MHz processor, and that’s after almost a week I spent downloading all of the damn source code on a 28.8 baud modem. 7 disks, 13 if you wanted printer drivers. At least it had a somewhat helpful installer, not that it was capable of helping with much.
It wasn’t until red hat 2.5 that they started distributing pre-compiled disk images
Edit: tbf, nobody else did at the time, and at least red hat was one of the first start distributing it software in packages (rpm) like debian (deb), although both soon began offering software pre-compiled as they noticed people other than software developers were beginning to use Linux, and there was legitimate demand to put in the effort. By late 1995 in early 1996, pre-compiled install disks were available for both red hat, Debian, and SuSE IIRC. It took a while for Slackware to come around.