Comment by cesarb

> If someone started reading all the package descriptions and READMEs we're meant to be thoroughly familiar with when Trixie was released a few days ago, they'd still be reading them.

That used to be viable back in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I first used Debian. It would take an afternoon of going through all the packages in dselect (does anyone here still remember dselect?) and marking the ones you wanted to install, and around the same amount of time going through every option on the kernel's menuconfig to precisely tailor the kernel to your specific hardware configuration (things were much less dynamic back then).

Nowadays, there are simply too many packages and kernel configuration options to go through (also, does anyone still use dselect?).