LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS have come a long way since the good old days. In the beginning, of course, there were no distros (actually in the beginning there was no Linux, and no space-time, then there was a big bang- but you get the point). You’d start with the kernel, somehow bootstrap a barebones system, fetch some GNU tools, mess with the make files, compile those packages, install them, realize you’d got your Make file wrong, tidy up the mess. Rinse, lather, repeat. It was great fun.
Don’t worry if you think something’s not right with a particular Linux distribution. You’re entitled to a full refund after all. Only kidding. In 2012 even the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds himself, raged at OpenSUSE developers when he discovered that adding a printer (on his daughter’s laptop) required the root password. Sometimes there are reasons why things are that way (in 2012 there wasn’t the notion of a privileged local user; it’s handled by systemd these days), sometimes it’s a genuine bug, and sometimes you’re just using it wrong.
More often than not you had to get these things on CD or even floppy disk in the post, unless you had access to the internet (or a friend in a computer science department). Then in 1992 came SLS, which inspired Slackware and later frustrated Ian Murdock into creating Debian. Yggdrasil, the first Linux live CD, was launched shortly after SLS, which required a gluttonous 8MB of memory and a gargantuan 100MB of disk space. The first stable version of Debian didn’t appear until 1996, by which time Red Hat Linux was on the scene, and all of a sudden people realized there was money to be made with Linux.