16 years old me had sweaty palms writing those XFree86 config files at first in the early 2000s. I remember all the warnings saying if you screw up this file say goodbye to your monitor, Luckily never happened.

I started with CDs on magazines, my first ones were mandrake 7.2 and suse (can’t remember the version), and later moved to my university’s Linux Users Groups’ Install Fests for CD burning.

I remember a little later still having dial up on my student apartment, I would download the repo data and then make a download script and use uni broadband to download updates, that was in Mandrake 9.

Later on, you could sign up with Ubuntu to get the CDs shipped for free. The package came with 5 CDs and a bunch of stickers, in a paper/bubble wrapp envelope.