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Debian Celebrates 30 years!
(bits.debian.org)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
You also had to manually cut your partitions, then to manually setup everything after install - himem, mouse, sound... It was mostly loading drivers and in Arch it's installing and configuring packages. Sure, it's more complex due to vastly more possibilities but the actual doing is pretty similar. And there was no wiki back then. ;)