When I installed Red Hat 7.2, that was very true. When I did Linux From Scratch the next year, more true.

This century - and especially in the 2020s - not so much.

My mother has no idea how her Linux laptop works, she just knows it doesn't barf errors and run like molasses as it did under Windows.

All this polish is sad. Thought of jumping ship to OpenBSD, but decided to tinker with bare metal instead :) That feels like OG Linux