One thing I miss about old-timey "user unfriendly" linux was the way it wasn't bloated with every possible feature, tool and library that tried to cater for every hypothetical future user's potential needs.

Like, unpacking and building a tarball was annoying and time consuming, but it meant that you could install a PDF parser on a headless server without automatically pulling in a window manager, a print stack, several gigs of UI widgets.

Old days: "You will need 2MB of disk space, plus another 150KB for the compiled executable. It will take an hour to build, and you're gonna have to repeat the process if we release any updates that you feel you need"

Now: "You will need 15GB of disk space to install all the dependencies and their dependencies and their dependencies and their dependencies, and now you have to check for updates every 6 hours because we just added 1150 packages __that you don't even know what they do__ and they all have published CVEs but you haven't read any of them because nobody has that's too many CVEs to worry about, and if you try to remove any of them the entire stack auto-uninstalls to protect you from accidentally clicking 'print' on a subdependency that you didn't know was there and then it won't print"

Anyway, I'm just annoyed that today's must-fix patch is for 28 different packages all with "cupsd" in their name on a laptop that has never installed a printer and never will.