Absolutely, I remember that until you could pass IO port, DMA and IRQ settings for things like Soundblaster cards on the kernel command line from LILO, it was essential to recompile your kernel with these settings specified in the kernel config. Compiling drivers for network cards and Soundblaster as kernel modules was error prone, and it often would only work if the driver was compiled directly into the kernel proper.

I don't think this situation improved until the PnP and PCI busses arrived.

Slackware was the distro I finally settled on from the Infomagic CD set, since some of the early Redhat and Debian releases were broken, they would install to the hard drive and then not boot.

I remember slackware being 13 3.5"/1.44Mb floppy disks, with perhaps some smaller minimal install collection. Somewhere near 1992? (Completely from memory, perhaps I'm off)