With Slackware you could find a kernel that would support your basic hardware configuration, install that kernel on your bootdisk, and then go from there, hopefully. In other words, the installation routine has some intelligence. It can tell you if it's having trouble, and you know what the problem is immediately. With older installation routines, you were not always so lucky. Of course, you'll need to check to see how recently the document was revised, since new devices are constantly being added.
Most hardware related problems arise with very new machines.
Since it's very rare that device manufacturers build drivers for Linux, it's necessary for device drivers to be built by the Linux community. This they do very well. Still, if you are using some oddball SCSI card or some unusual chipset from Mars, you may run into problems. In the beginning, some Cyrix CPUs had problems with the kernel, simply because most Linux users had been using Intel CPUs and Cyrix support lagged behind Intel. However, I hear there's plenty of Cyrix support out there now.