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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 😅
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.
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.
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.
The stickers are that folded white slip behind the disc in the picture. I forgot to take a picture of them, but they don't look great since they were transparent and the adhesive has degraded into a patchy yellow/orange mess. A bit of a shame, but time marches on.
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
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: