One of my earlier memories of it back then was that _every single time I recompiled my kernel_ (which was frequent), my LILO bootloader ended up corrupted. There was just a totally broken default in whatever version that was.

SO MANY rescue boots.

Related, it took 8h to compile a kernel with 4MB of RAM. I didn't realize that was slow, honestly. I just thought that's how long it took. When I finally did get more RAM, and the system stopped swapping, and it took 12 minutes to recompile, it blew me away.

Anyway, it was fine. Well more than fine, great. Running a dozen virtual consoles (alt-f1 thru alt-f12) gave me everything i needed; interactive sessions, sessions I left logged into IRC clients, PINE for email, etc.

I didn't have enough RAM to run X Windows until later but once I did, that was a revelation as well. Remote X servers was so much more advanced than stuff we got in Windows/Mac until much much later.