I spent the late '90s using Slackware on a Gateway 2000 laptop. I regularly recompiled the kernel to strip out anything vaguely unnecessary, mostly by trial and error, just so AbiWord or whatever would be 4% faster.

I spent many sleepless nights booting and rebooting and praying I'd see it come back to life. I learned that to love Linux is to love sovereignty more than productivity.

I'm still on Linux. I still love it. And I get into rebuilding servers now just for relaxation and flow-state.

I don't regard that time as a complete waste. I learned a lot, mostly about persistence.