I was digging through some stuff and stumbled on this. To think it’s been 15 years. Crazy what you used to be able to get a free CD of back in the day.

  • hatchet
    121·
    1 year ago

    As much as I prefer other distributions over it, I am grateful for everything that Ubuntu has done to grow the Linux userbase.

    • moup@lemm.ee
      7·
      1 year ago

      Genuine question, because I wasn’t there back in the day, what has changed since then?

      • fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk
        111·
        1 year ago

        It used to be a beautiful, friendly shade of brown and orange, and now it’s a vile shade of purple.

        Other than that, if you look at Linux Mint today, you get a rough idea of what it was like. An easy to use desktop, with menus and settings exactly where you’d expect them. It was relatively easy to install, with an easy to understand graphical menu guiding you through the process. It had sane defaults for everything. It was fast, stable and improving all the time. Most things just worked. It was fast and reliable compared to Windows XP/Vista.

        Slightly “Rose Tinted Glasses” view of things, but essentially their slogan “Linux for Humans” was true. An inexperienced computer user or previous Windows user could pick it up and use it straight away. There was quite a lot of innovation towards user experience, in line with community wants, hopes and ideas. It was all about customising things to your own needs.

        The change was essentially they innovated towards their own ideas and not those of the community. It was all about customising things to their idea of what things should be like.

        They designed their own Unity desktop to replace Gnome, changed to a more obtuse “Mac-like” interface, removing menus, settings, options etc. They were trying for this cool “convergent” OS for seamless mobile phone and computer usage. This made a lot of compromises in desktop usability. They eventually binned the mobile phone thing and Unity, then tried to remake everything again in Gnome, but left all the weird defaults and missing options.

        Then a few other things in a similar direction.

        Then Snaps, but that’s its own story.

      • ozymandias117@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        My two cents - change in priorities over the years

        It started as almost a pet project funded by Mark Shuttleworth to make Linux easier to use, and was focused on desktop Linux

        Over the years, the focus changed to becoming profitable, and their main focus now is the server and IoT space

  • shigutso@lemmy.world
    37·
    1 year ago

    A friend once ordered a box of 50 to share with students from university and they delivered to the other side of the world not even charging shipping!

    • thelastknowngod@lemm.ee
      12·
      1 year ago

      I worked at CompUSA back in the day. I did the same thing for coworkers. It was breezy 5.10. Crazy yo this it’s been nearly 20 years since then.

  • sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf
    19·
    1 year ago

    Don’t, you’re making me well up. A while ago my hard drive died and I was looking for a flash drive to live boot. Only one I had was months old. Tried to get a new one, couldn’t. Tried to order online, couldn’t. It’s crazy how hard it is when they used to literally send out the things for free.

    • metaStatic@kbin.social
      13·
      1 year ago

      to be fair if you don’t have a Ventoy stick with a dozen or so distros and recovery tools by now you deserve to be scrambling for a boot disk

    • Square Singer@feddit.de
      3·
      1 year ago

      What’s the issue with a months old version? Install and then upgrade.

      In general, all that free stuff is just not necessary anymore since everyone has fast-enough internet.

      Worst case, if you can’t write the stick from your phone, go to the local library and do it from there.

      Complaining that you only get the OS and the download totally for free without even ads is a bit of a high level to complain about.

      • sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf
        3·
        1 year ago

        Eh? I can’t install because the harddrive died, there’s nothing to install to. Regardless, there’s not been anything new which I’m in love with enough to buy yet and since this happened, the law regarding USB C got passed, so that meant that I wanted a laptop that was good enough to use everyday for writing, the occasional game and lots of media consumption that I could abuse the fuck out of, wouldn’t have to deal with the NVIDIA nightmare and was powered by USB. Maybe it is a high level complain, whatever that means but it’s just an experience that happened to me. At the same time, my older laptop that I had running something lightweight and also used just to download stuff and then send it to my NAS also died. So I was just that person that was unlucky enough to be in a position where I was running what I could off a live CD while on the lookout for a decent replacement. Luckily I’m a carer and so I don’t actually need my laptop for much.

        • Square Singer@feddit.de
          2·
          1 year ago

          So getting an €5 USB stick from Amazon is too much to invest?

          You can get a 120GB SSD for your laptop for <€10 and that would give you a better performing PC than what you had before.

          So I don’t really get your point.

          So all in all: Spend €10 on an SSD, borrow an USB stick from a friend and use their PC to flash it with Linux. And now you got a PC that can last another few years.

          Why would you even run this system from a CD? Performance is incredibly bad from the CD and you can’t update or install anything on the CD.

          PS: Didn’t you say you had a “months old” live USB stick? How would running it from a Live CD improve the situation over a much faster Live USB stick?

          • sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf
            2·
            1 year ago

            The USB stick is fine, but where am I downloading the stick too. I didn’t know I could get a SSD for cheap? I just hadn’t had a conversation with anyone about it. Ignorance isn’t a crime, is it? This whole thread has been an eye opener to me and I’ve learned of things I didn’t know existed. The live CD is a Fedora USB, I bought a bunch of USB sticks months ago and flashed various different systems to them. Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, Qubes and Tails.

            • Square Singer@feddit.de
              4·
              1 year ago

              Sorry, it wasn’t meant to be offensive.

              I was just wondering what the issue actually was.

              This makes a bit more sense.

              The probably best way to go would be to get a 2.5" SSD, which should be compatible with your PC if you had a harddrive in it.

              Any one you can get will be better than the HDD you had before. The only relevant point to look for is the capacity, but if you are considering running of a Live CD, I guess you don’t need much.

              Since you already have some sticks, you can just use any of these to install any Linux to the hard drive, then boot off that, download any Linux variant you want, put it on the stick, boot from the stick and install the OS you actually want.

              Since you have multiple sticks, you can even boot from one stick, download the OS you want, install to the other stick and boot from that.

              • sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf
                1·
                1 year ago

                Coming back to this, if you ever see me in a thread in the future. Please just assume I’m the dumbest fuck in the world who is in desperate need of your knowledge 🙏

                • Square Singer@feddit.de
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  Sorry, at no point did I want to imply that you are dumb or something.

                  I just misread your first post and thought you complained that the Ubuntu people don’t give you free hardware. And I’m sorry for jumping to this conclusion without understanding your actual problem correctly.

      • theduncan@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        Also with the install disk’s running a live version, even a version from a couple of years ago might get you far enough that you could download the newest version from the website and put it on a stick.

    • selokichtli@lemmy.ml
      3·
      1 year ago

      Mexico, too. First time I felt the internet was a part of the real world. Took a couple of months but they even sent stickers!

    • p1mrx@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      AOL came on floppies originally, but the quality was so poor that you could barely rewrite them.

      • ChrysanthemumIndica@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        You are reminding me that I used to keep a copy of Nesticle (for DOS!) on an AOL floppy, along with a couple of ROMs. I saved the fancy Imation Disney disks for my data 😅

        Thank you for the flashback!

  • Coeus@coeus.sbs
    15·
    1 year ago

    I remember I had a few of these. If I recall correctly there was also a blue Kububtu one.

    • jayandpOP
      16·
      1 year ago

      Oh wow, wish I had one of those. The blue looks pretty nice.

    • jayandpOP
      4·
      1 year ago

      They always had them at the grocery store XD

  • rikonium@discuss.tchncs.de
    13·
    1 year ago

    Man, I remember buying a Linux Format(?) magazine once and breaking out the included 7.10 CD.

    Later distros I messed with I remember waiting hours for those few hundred MB to download on my parent’s DSL connection, oh how times have changed!

  • dandu3@lemmy.world
    153·
    1 year ago

    Nowadays you can’t even boot Ubuntu from disc. The loader is completely bugged out and you need to specify a few boot args to get it to boot within a semi reasonable amount of time. Last time I did, it took 20 minutes to load lol.

    • jayandpOP
      10·
      1 year ago

      You’d have to use a DVD as well, since it’s too big to fit on CDs now XP

      • dandu3@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        Of course. Especially since they now include Nvidia drivers which are like 300 MB each and there’s more than one IIRC

  • Thorned_Rose@kbin.social
    12·
    1 year ago

    And here’s me having paid $110 (~$170 in today $) for Red Hat back when I was a poor cash-strapped tech student. 😬 TBF it came with an absolute tome of a manual.

  • cevmantius @lemm.ee
    12·
    1 year ago

    I wish I had this. Although I don’t use Ubuntu anymore, it was the first distro that I used and I feel grateful.

  • mikey242@lemmy.ml
    10·
    1 year ago

    I loved that Ubuntu did this back in the day, it really made linux easier to get into for me, especially with my not-so-good internet connection. I still have a collection of these CDs somewhere.