The early releases of Linux were on floppy disks. More than 20 disks. You could not compile the kernel while X was running unless you had at least 8 Mb. I was the lucky owner of a 486dx33 with 16 Mb.
My first Linux distribution was Slackware 2.0, bought during 1995 Summer.
It came on a CD-ROM, whose contents I had to copy into the hard disk and start the installation from there, because IDE CD-ROM drives were mostly unsupported.
My monitor was 1024x768, but X could not do higher than 800x600 with my card.
Nowadays I have Ubuntu on my travel laptop, and still have hardware acceleration issues with its Brazos GPU.
Linux required a hardware FPU, which the 030 Mac IIsi did not have. I bought and installed a daughterboard that provided a math coprocessor, allowing me to install Linux on my Mac, circa mid 90s.