Installing Mandrake 9.2 (2003?) was in many respects better than installing Windows XP. The graphic installer was incredibly smooth, it had a real integrated partition manager (something that looked like Paragon PM), and a much more accurate estimate of expected time. If you had old enough hardware, everything would just work perfectly. I still have fond memories of Mandrake.

For Red Hat the big jump was with version 6.0. The earlier release, 5.2, still had the text based installer. But still, I do remember looking up the horizontal and vertical frequencies in my monitor's manual :)