Bringing back memories of my own. Mandrake in 2004 was a but before my time, but I’m sure I’ve still got my Ubuntu discs I downloaded at the local library and burned myself almost a decade after this Mandrake disk.
Mine was Mandrake 6. RedHat 5.2 was my first, and I was surprised how much easier Mandrake was in comparison. But the one that really wowed me was SuSE (before they became OpenSUSE), I was blown away how polished and user-friendly it was. Windows 9x/ME felt like a joke in comparison at time. And some people still claim Linux isn’t user friendly… and I’m like, bruh it’s been user friendly for about three decades now…
A few years before Ubuntu quite a few companies tried doing their own distributions. Back then it still was common to sell them in a proper software box - CDs or DVDs, manuals and some swag, at minimum stickers, but quite often also pins or some other stuff.
On exhibitions they’d often give away full boxes to get people to try - sometimes the current version, sometimes the last release. I still have a bunch of those in the garage - I think Corel (yes, the painting program guys) should be one of them.
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