I tried Arch recently in vbox … meh! It was a PITA sure - but not as hard or drudgeworthy** as I remember Slackware 3.0 was nearly quarter century ago 
** I’ll qualify that - didn’t seem drudgeworthy at the time - it was cool bananas having a NIX I could install at home on a spare 386 with 8 MB RAM and 380 MB ESDI hard drive - but everytime you added a new ISA card, e.g. a NIC or Soundblaster - you had to recompile the kernel! Even if you just wanted to change the DMA or IRQ being used by an ISA device - you had to build a new kernel! Thankfully most of the ISA NICs I used were Intel and you ould set the IRQ and DMA from software (DOS software) so didn’t need to break out a magnifying glass and pair of tweezers to shuffle jumper blocks around
Fun times - but aint got time for that these days… Ubuntu vanillla does most of the things I need out of the box - and I still get my *NIX shell!!!
