3 ms·

I'm not completely convinced about the free discs argument. I grew up in a modest family, small village (3k people), 14k modem, and yet every (all the two of t

by aulin 3y ago

I'm not completely convinced about the free discs argument. I grew up in a modest family, small village (3k people), 14k modem, and yet every (all the two of them) newsstand had at least two biweekly Linux magazines. They cost something like 5€ (or whatever currency we had at the time) and they always had either 2 linux installer cd or one installer and one cd with some cool software to try. And they had serious quality articles too. I still remember one where they described in detail how they built a DIY magnetic tunneling microscope and used it to recover some data from an hard drive. By the time Ubuntu free cds came out I already had a big collection of Linux installers, none of them downloaded on my own. Agreed about the rest. They've always been poisonous towards upstreams and probably contributed to set back the famous year of the Linux Desktop by diluting the efforts in dead-end projects instead of working with upstream towards a common goal.

deaddodo 3y ago
Oh, definitely. I should be clear that this is a very US-centric viewpoint. The European scene (especially France and Germany) was drastically different. Whereas Red Hat/Fedora had a massive slice of the pie in the US, SuSE reigned over Germany. Additionally, Europeans (especially the hacker/developer scene) globbed onto Free Software much more quickly. So, to clarify: when Ubuntu came out in the US, the only truly accessible methods to get access to Linux were to live in a city large enough to have big box tech stores with hobbyist/DIY sections or to order online. And to have some reason to want to try it. The US was much more entrenched in a monoculture/duopoly from the early Mac and DOS days; while Europeans were still happily hacking about on Amigas, Commodores/Ataris, BeBoxen, etc. As to why Ubuntu took over, over there? I can only hazard that the gains they benefited from near ubiquity and eventual ease of use just osmotically permeated across the pond. But you're correct, I think the free discs probably had less of an influence.

by aulin 3y ago

deaddodo 3y ago

Oh, definitely. I should be clear that this is a very US-centric viewpoint. The European scene (especially France and Germany) was drastically different. Whereas Red Hat/Fedora had a massive slice of the pie in the US, SuSE reigned over Germany. Additionally, Europeans (especially the hacker/developer scene) globbed onto Free Software much more quickly. So, to clarify: when Ubuntu came out in the US, the only truly accessible methods to get access to Linux were to live in a city large enough to have big box tech stores with hobbyist/DIY sections or to order online. And to have some reason to want to try it. The US was much more entrenched in a monoculture/duopoly from the early Mac and DOS days; while Europeans were still happily hacking about on Amigas, Commodores/Ataris, BeBoxen, etc. As to why Ubuntu took over, over there? I can only hazard that the gains they benefited from near ubiquity and eventual ease of use just osmotically permeated across the pond. But you're correct, I think the free discs probably had less of an influence.