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.
I miss the days, when Ubuntu was still a fun distribution to recommend to anyone.
Their initial idea of creating “Linux for human beings” was great and they were leading the way in user-friendly installers, graphical distribution upgrades and making the Linux desktop more accessible to everyone in general! I especially loved their predictable release cycle. Having the choice between an LTS and a more recent version is very useful and with Ubuntu you can make that decision again every two years. Very practical!
The negative part ...
Unfortunately things started to change in the 2010s and by the 2020s I started to advise against it.
Their new installers (subiquity and ubuntu-desktop-installer) can’t do simple partitioning anymore, e. g. they can’t create a boot partition (or better: encrypted boot) + an encrypted btrfs partition that fills the rest of the space. Since the discontinuation of the mini.iso (Debian Installer) and Ubiquity (old desktop installer) images, I am therefore no longer able to install Ubuntu.
Snapd can still only manage a single repository and Canonical is therefore the only one in control of snap package distribution. This makes snapd a no-go in my opinion. But Ubuntu is still transitioning towards it, even though every other distribution is going to Flatpak because of snapd’s walled garden approach. With Flatpak you can add as many remotes as you want or you can decide to stick to Flathub, if it meets your needs. The same is true for Docker / Podman on the server: Sure there’s Docker Hub, which is very popular, but you are able to add any container repository, if you so choose.
I’m now using Fedora Silverblue on my desktops and will soon transition my Ubuntu server from 20.04 to Debian 12. I’ve already archived all my Ubuntu documentation. Sad times …
Hopefully new distributions, like Vanilla OS 2, will soon be able to fill the gaps that Ubuntu left.
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!
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!
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
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 ordered a box of Ubuntu CDs and they came in a wooden box packed with hay!
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.
This is more or less how I got started. I’d order a few of them, and my computers class teacher was super cool. Let me install it on some older machines destined for ewaste.
Nostalgic! Ordered 5 of these at the time and distributed among the good people :)
Mine came in a cardboard sleeve. I still have it somewhere.
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.
have one from the 10.10 version and a Kubuntu 10.10…I was super excited about receiving international mail for the first time in my life! tried uploading the pictures but I get error messages by jerboa 🥲
Hey fellow jerboaer, sometimes the spouted errors are nonsense and if you actually try to upload the image from the website it tells you the image is too big
Thanks man
Lemmy know if u find an easy way to compress images, I’m interested in uploading some too
Yeah, try compressing the images smaller. Some Lemmy servers have upload size limits. Or you can host the picture elsewhere and then just link it using:
```
