I had been using linux for for almost 10 years by the time Ubuntu came out, starting with SLS and then moving to Slackware. The concept of not having a compiler was foreign to me as it was required to build the kernel so your system would have necessary device drivers and features.

> ... after all if you need the compiler is it that painful to run `apt install -y build-essential`?

No, of course not. But that's when it became obvious to me that I was not the target audience for that distribution, and had switched to Gentoo shortly after.