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.
As much as I prefer other distributions over it, I am grateful for everything that Ubuntu has done to grow the Linux userbase.
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Genuine question, because I wasn’t there back in the day, what has changed since then?
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.
Unity was what made me move to Mint.
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
What are the reasons you advise against it now?Ignore this, iOS app bug.
expand their comment, tbey said
Oh, that whole thing did not show up in Memmy, just the first paragraph. Bug report inccoming!
I was also on Memmy thinking “what a tease…” 😂
I also remember WUBI - that was a brilliant installer. Probably wouldn’t have tried Linux as soon as I did without it.
I was listed on the page of people who might burn one for you for free!
How often did someone take you up on the offer?
Twice, I think? It’s been many years, I think I added myself there when 9.04 was the hot new thing, so around 2009.
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!
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.
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.
This could be of help if you have Android: https://f-droid.org/packages/eu.depau.etchdroid/
Oh, that’s epic. Thank you
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
😱 I’d never heard of a Ventoy stick until you mentioned it. Thank you.
I remember wishing AOL’s free disks were on CD-RW :-)
AOL came on floppies originally, but the quality was so poor that you could barely rewrite them.
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!
They even shipped this to me in India. Pleasantly surprised at that point.
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!
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!
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.
You’d have to use a DVD as well, since it’s too big to fit on CDs now XP
I think the minimal/net-installer can still fit on a CD. But then you need an internet connection.
Of course. Especially since they now include Nvidia drivers which are like 300 MB each and there’s more than one IIRC
I wish I had this. Although I don’t use Ubuntu anymore, it was the first distro that I used and I feel grateful.
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.
Wow the design is incredibly polished and modern
Yes that’s how they killed Mandrake/Mandriva, which was superior IMO at that time (easier install, KDE based, better hardware support).
Of course, Mandriva’s management is not blameless, but Ubuntu’s free CDs were the cherry on top of the cake.
I might still have one kicking around somewhere. Probably with my OG Quake discs.
I had a bunch of these for the first release. I threw them away ages ago sadly.
