I got a 6.0ish disk after giving them an email back in the day. I also remember the UI being easily modified. It was by far the easiest linux to get up and running with drivers for a couple of years.
I remember when Ubuntu came out I was working in a PC repair shop. Not gonna give any opinion on this but the standard procedure for people wanting a fresh XP but didn’t have a license key was “well it’s $90 for a fresh install, or we can put a pirate pro corporate on it”. I e-mailed canonical and they sent me a whole stack of Ubuntu CDs in nice branded sleeves. I kept it by the register and started offering that as an alternative to piracy for people that didn’t have a license key and didn’t wanna fork over the cash for one, Not many people chose that option, but I had a lot of good talks with people and plenty of people took a CD to try the live Ubuntu. I hope some of them ended up making the switch. I’m kinda disgruntled with conical these days but I’m an old greybeard who grew up in Slackware. I still recommend Ubuntu to beginners along with fedora.
6.06 “Dapper Drake” (iirc) was my first GNU/Linux distro back in the day. I was about 15 and spent a week tinkering with it trying to get the wifi to work on my old HP Pavilion.
I remember those old UI elements. I tried it a couple years later (edgy eft) but I just toyed with it in VirtualBox. And my computer at the time wasn’t able to give a virtual machine a whole lot of oomph, so the experience was lackluster.
But it was a marvel to me to see what a UI really could be other than specifically Windows. I knew conceptually what an OS. I knew that DOS was one (even if it looked totally different), and that Windows was basically just a graphical version of a terminal at the end of the day. I knew Windows was just one example of an OS, but it was still the only reference point I had to what one looked like and how it worked. I never even saw a Mac computer in person til my first year in college when I started seeing MacBooks on campus.
So I knew of Linux, but if you remember 2004, it was such a primitive time for computer power and operating system design, and setup was much clunkier than the easy installers we have now.
Ubuntu was the first one I heard of that had an installer similar to Windows that didn’t need a tech manual or crash course in using the CLI to get running.
I am not a canonical fan or anything, but I didn’t know anything about so that back then, and was just giving it a whirl.
I didn’t give it a whole lot of time tho, as most of my computer use was for gaming and I didn’t have games for Linux, and proton wasn’t a thing yet. I had just heard of Steam. It wasn’t even a year old yet at the time. Not that any of that mattered since I was running in in a virtual machine anyway, so even if I had gotten the games to work, they would’ve been super underpowered. My AthlonXP system with my Radeon9800pro and 512MB RAM wasn’t gonna have the overhead to run the game that way in a virtual machine less than half the power of that machine. Halo just wouldn’t have been fun.
Which now that I think about it, that was the first simultaneous online game I ever played. I had messed with pool on Yahoo before, but that’s just turn based. Brand New horizon for me. We only had dial up until the time I got that computer.
I recently found one of the liveCD I received with Ubuntu 8.04 on it. Canonical was sending them for free for people interested in Linux.
I was in high school and tried it on my first computer, it was my first connect with Linux and honestly I think that without Ubuntu I would not have discovered Linux until much later in life.
I had most of Ubuntu CDs starting from 6.06, I even remember 10.04 or 10.10 which was about the last one they were sending or soon before. I usually gave all of them away in school hoping someone will like it.
A lot of us were running Debian when Ubuntu came out. It was polished and integrated to a degree that Debian wasn’t. It became popular for very good reasons.
I think even Samsung was funding it for a while. They took a long time building libraries supporting rendering on X11 what I remember. I used the 0.16.x version with my 1GHz Athlon years ago, it was very cool.
I know we all like to shit on what Canonical has become, but you have to respect just how much work they’ve put into the Linux ecosystem to make it more user friendly and mainstream over the years.
Agreed. Before the dark times, Ubuntu was the kickstarter for “wide” adoption to the “masses” (notice the quotes, lol) and making Linux even more accessible at that time. Similar to a degree of what Valve has an effect nowadays.
I actually never used the very first Ubuntu version and need to test it in a VM too. My first experience with Linux was probably Knoppix and my first installation SUSE Linux 9.2, but it was not ready back then. I switched to Linux full time by removing Windows XP and installing Ubuntu 8.04. Time definitely has passed, you can’t argue with that.
Nice! I read about that they would sent CDs for no cost. Also in countries where internet infrastructure wasn’t there yet, they were giving out CDs for free locally in a bus in example, like advertisements. Having a millionaire backing up a distribution surely helped its adoption. :D Actually this was one of the reason why I had confidence in the future of Ubuntu, back then.
GIMP is fine but who can find me replacements for After Effects and Premiere Pro? I need software for video editing/motion graphics and these are the two apps keeping me shackled to Adobe for now…
fedia.io
Active