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.
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
What are the reasons you advise against it now?
Ignore this, iOS app bug.
Oh, that whole thing did not show up in Memmy, just the first paragraph. Bug report inccoming!
I was listed on the page of people who might burn one for you for free!
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!
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/
@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
Something like DriveDroid (requires root): https://softwarebakery.com/projects/drivedroid ?
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
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?
