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.
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
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
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
@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 agoSomething like DriveDroid (requires root): https://softwarebakery.com/projects/drivedroid ?
@user224
Unfortunately my phone is not rootable (every phone I get from now on I’m gonna do more research on first to make sure I don’t make that mistake again) but otherwise yeah that’s amazingI feel you so much on this. My previous phone was a Samsung Note 3 and man that thing just kept going. I used about 5 different ROMs on it over the years. But it wasn’t keeping up with apps anymore. Thought I did thorough research when I replaced it with a S9+. Realised too late that some models can’t be rooted and guess what I have? Yep, one of those models 🤦🏻♀️ Now stuck with Samsung crap for the next however many years because I can’t afford to just buy a different phone. Even more so because the screen has cracked twice (fixed first time, can’t afford again). My Note3 got thrown off a 2nd story deck onto concrete twice and abused by my kids and kept on trucking no problem (apart from some scratches and dent to the frame). This S9 feels like it breaks being sneezed at 😞
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 hadn’t heard of it either, this is super useful! It’s funny the things you’ll find just around the place on Lemmy.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Thank you very much, I appreciate the advice.
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 🙏
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.
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
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
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?
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.
