It's not only that it was text based, but that it failed in all sorts of ways.

I had a particularly bad afternoon in early 2000s when I tried to install Linux on various machines (4 or 5, each one with different hardware) and failed with all of them. Of course, I wasn't as savvy as I am now, but it's been years since I've seen an issue with a Linux install; although I might have to download and compile a driver for one thing or another, the install itself doesn't fail.