Seriously. Weekend long marathons of dependency chasing (in the snow, uphill both ways) to finally get config/make/make install to run were not only a thing but disturbingly commonplace. These kids don't know how good they've got it. God I feel old.

At least you had a package manager with a reasonable number of packages. My first distro as a main OS was Puppy Linux because it was a small download (remember dialup?) Actually at the time I didn't even have internet in my apartment, so installing software went something like this:

1) Identify a really interesting piece of software, like OpenFOAM, with (unbeknownst to me) lots of dependencies

2) Take a half hour walk to the local library with my shiny 4gb flash drive (89 dollars, a Christmas present to myself).

3) Download the .tar.gz of the software.

4) Walk home.

5) Unpack the .tar.gz and run ./configure. Watch it fail.

6) Walk back to the library to download the missing dependency. Walk home.

7) Goto 5.

I ended up very irritated that configure always fails on the first missing dependency, instead of comprehensively listing the missing requirements in one go. Things did get a bit easier when I learned to scour the documention for any libraries referenced, but of course reading the docs still often required a trip back home to unpack the tarball...

It feels so good to not have to look at that book with the guy on a horse, to get networking going every time I installled a new distro, or sometimes upgrading. Especially because I usually didn't know what I was doing to fix the issue, I didn't even know what I was looking for.

Thanks to everyone who did read that book and others cover to cover (or wrote them), so that my linux install just works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Network_Administrator's_...

That's no horse, that's a nag!

You could recreate the experience for younger colleagues using a slackware install and deliberately not using any of the more advanced tools (slackpkg+ &c) and hiding the existence of slackbuild scripts.