> op in a Debian CD and select a ready made profile for it.
At the time in question here tasksel wasn't a thing, I think merely a concept. It made its way in Debian installer around 20005 IIRC, right along "one-click installs" from hosting services mentioned in the other reply. The whole decade before that, indeed manual set up was needed.
> at /r/homelab or somewhere selfhosters hang out today [...] That's orders of magnitude more manual work
There is two kinds of self-hosters, those who aim at reproducibility and those who don't. The latter is more fun, the former gets quickly mandatory when you _rely_ on your homelab.
At the time in question here tasksel wasn't a thing, I think merely a concept. It made its way in Debian installer around 20005 IIRC, right along "one-click installs" from hosting services mentioned in the other reply. The whole decade before that, indeed manual set up was needed.
> at /r/homelab or somewhere selfhosters hang out today [...] That's orders of magnitude more manual work
There is two kinds of self-hosters, those who aim at reproducibility and those who don't. The latter is more fun, the former gets quickly mandatory when you _rely_ on your homelab.