2002 was not too difficult either - just install Slackware and then compile KDE from scratch. Only took 1-2 days. Tulip chip worked great for 100Mbit ethernet, both desktop and PCMCIA. Audio worked fine. And if you wanted a fancy GUI "Enlightenment" was the best.
Well, that's probably true, if not installing on new hardware of the time. My socket 462 system wasn't supported, pretty much! On my T-bird build, I had to go right back to Windows.
About 4 MB of RAM, sounds like the same ballpark as Windows 95. It will suck at less than 8 MB of RAM.
Was there even any Linux distro that would do as good as Windows 3.1? Your experience, was like running Windows 95 on a 386 with 4 MB of RAM. The distro you used, definitely required more than 3.1!
2010= In the summer, IIRC, I was able to bootstrap and compile Gentoo packages. I swore KDE took the longest, which that was on a Pentium E2180 (65nm Core 2) (dual-core with 1 MB of L2 cache, IIRC)
It took about 12 hours easily for KDE! If not longer!
At least, Gentoo's documentation, is excellent! IIRC, I saw multiple Linux distros with bad documentation!
With KDE, I had to use the "extras" use-flag, IIRC, otherwise, it would terminate with an almost totally unhelpful error message. The package management system literally demanded that I used "extras", IIRC, more like I would expect in the proprietary software world, if you ask me, with that demanding episode, which was possibly unexpected behavior.
