Remember when they'd send you these for free?

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

- 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.
  
  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
- I feel the same. I can't recommend it to anyone anymore.
- ~~What are the reasons you advise against it now?~~
  Ignore this, iOS app bug.
  
  expand their comment, tbey said
- 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
  
  @user224
  @sabreW4K3
  To bad there's no app to turn your phone itself into a live USB, I would have loved that a few months 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
  
  😱 I'd never heard of a Ventoy stick until you mentioned it. Thank you.
- 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.
  
  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.

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!

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!

Wow the design is incredibly polished and modern

I remember I had a few of these. If I recall correctly there was also a blue Kububtu one.
- Oh wow, wish I had one of those. The blue looks pretty nice.

I still have a ton of AOL coasters laying around.
- They always had them at the grocery store XD

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!
- I downloaded several distros in the last days and it was faster to download them then copying them on the USB drive. That felt weird.
  
  Was it USB 3?

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.

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.

I ordered a box of Ubuntu CDs and they came in a wooden box packed with hay!

I had a bunch of these for the first release. I threw them away ages ago sadly.

I might still have one kicking around somewhere. Probably with my OG Quake discs.

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.

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.

They don't anymore?
- https://canonical.com/blog/shipit-comes-to-an-end
  They've switched to just downloads these days. There are some third parties that still make and sell discs for pretty cheap though.

Mine came in a cardboard sleeve. I still have it somewhere.

Nostalgic! Ordered 5 of these at the time and distributed among the good people :)
- One of my friends did that and I was amongst the good people. This is how I discovered Linux.

That was the first way I installed Ubuntu. I remember the bootleg ones on eBay for $5 also.

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 🥲
- 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:
  
  ![](URL HERE)
- 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

I do remember
- i still have a few in a desk drawer at the office.. and was just thinking about them, too, the other day as i watched an .iso download on crappy DSL.

I remember my dad had one of these when I was young. I think it comes with a sticker too, cuz I remember sticking it onto a kitchen cabinet.
- 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.