Ubuntu Linux Killed The Commercial Desktop Distro
Вставка
- Опубліковано 18 вер 2024
- Nowadays it's crazy to think that you'd pay for a Linux distro as a regular desktop Linux user but there was a time where that had begun to form but Ubuntu is a big part of the reason that model completely fell off.
==========Support The Channel==========
► Patreon: brodierobertso...
► Paypal: brodierobertso...
► Liberapay: brodierobertso...
► Amazon USA: brodierobertso...
=========Video Platforms==========
🎥 Odysee: brodierobertso...
🎥 Podcast: techovertea.xy...
🎮 Gaming: brodierobertso...
==========Social Media==========
🎤 Discord: brodierobertso...
🐦 Twitter: brodierobertso...
🌐 Mastodon: brodierobertso...
🖥️ GitHub: brodierobertso...
==========Credits==========
🎨 Channel Art:
Profile Picture:
/ supercozman_draws
🎵 Ending music
Track: Debris & Jonth - Game Time [NCS Release]
Music provided by NoCopyrightSounds.
Watch: • Debris & Jonth - Game ...
Free Download / Stream: ncs.io/GameTime
#Linux #Ubuntu #FOSS #OpenSource
DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase I may receive a small commission or other compensation.
I bought a copy of SuSE Linux 7.2 Professional on literal September 11th, 2001. College classes had been cancelled and I was at a loss for what else to do with myself. 💀
Ouch! Had a similar experience and decided f-this and become an electrician lol
I always said that Suse was the best distro at that time. They really had together.
Same. it was SuSE Linux 7.1 for me.
This was my first exposure to linux!
was missing a mention of Suse in the video.
Sometime between late 1998 and early 2023, likely 2000/2001, a big Suse box (with manual and multiple cds, iirc) showed up in the pc programs/games section of a consumer electronics shop we (young adolsecents) used to frequent during lunch break.
Of course two friends 1-uped each other into buying it, but neither ended up doing anything with it other than trying it out.
I still have a box copy of Redhat Linux 5.2 from 1998. Can't believe I paid that much for an Operating System as an 18 yr old kid, but downloading a whole CD's worth of software on a 33.6k modem wasn't really feasible either.
How much was it back then?
@@unknowndummy9387 Retail price was $49.95 ($97 in 2024 dollars).
Yep. I bought one of those. I was in school at the time, but I was also working in IT, so I could afford it. Loved the fact that graphics worked out of the box for the installer without configuration. Came with StarOffice iirc.
@@tkenben wait so was redhat an actual competitor in the commercial distro space back then? I use fedora now but I feel like most people are just on mac/windows
That was my first Linux Distro
I'd actually pay for Fedora if they shipped codecs and such by default, just for the convenience :)
Fair enough... that's why people go for nobara
@@vaisakhkm783 Nobara is The Fedora should be by Default.
Yah, thats One of the reasons why I go for Bazzite
It's not even that hard to install them tho?
@@nh2seven it's not hard, it's tedious
I once requested a CD from Ubuntu, sometime around 2004, 2005. I received something like 100 cds in a big package. I remember they were really nice quality. I was 13 maybe 14 years old at the time and I thought i had done something really wrong and felt guilty for months afterwards waiting for some kind of payment request from canonical.
"Want to try my operating mixtape. this ish is fire yo."
Why did you order 100 cds? If you indeed did order 100 that was morally dubious.
@@fgregerfeaxcwfeffece i didn't.
@@fgregerfeaxcwfeffece full distro for debian was around 10 or 12 CDs (not sure if it was with sources or not).
@@fhunter1testI remember mine was like 8 cds in the early 2000s.
My Amazon order history shows that I paid $62.97 for Xandros Desktop Home Edition Premium V4 in 2007.
I payed £35 for Suse Linux back in the 90's which I've still got kicking about somewhere. First taste of Linux, thought at the time that the application fonts were fairly primitive.
...Use Linux.
This shit keeps respelling S_u_s_e Linux to Use. Grrrrr.
@@mojojomo6750 you can edit comments
@@mojojomo6750 You use iPhone?
Mandrake Linux and Suse were worth paying for. Well documented, polished. Suse came with basically a book!
I bought both of them back in the day: my Mandrake came with 3 Books.
@@Lemurion287maybe mine did too and I forget 😅
@@Lemurion287 SuSE 7.0 Professional as well. They were really good manuals, including instructions how to set up a development system and some introduction to C and even writing Drivers for Linux. Good Times :-). One book consisted of manpages of the most used cli programs printed out on paper. I paid a little over Fl.70,- (Dutch Guilders) for the entire package.
Yep, bought Mandra 7.2 at a newstand somewhere around 2004 ? (probably) I was so happy :-)
I use free distributions and donate when I can. If I were in a situation where my livelyhood depended on the software, I would get the commercial distribution, so I get access to a professional support team.
I'm actually one of those people who pays for elementaryOS. I run it on three machines-including my work laptop-and I just wish I could donate my time to help with development as well. Brodie's point at the end of his Playtron video about FOSS not being free is a really good one.
@@GSBarlev Really appreciate this. I'm no longer a eOS user, but as a (admittedly) freeloader, I'm thankful for people like you who chips in. eOS is a good distro, but it definitely needs more support.
A lot of people hate Ubuntu but its literally one of the pioneer distros.
A lot of people hate modern Ubuntu. I'd say before around when GNOME 3 was released, Ubuntu was actually a great system. It was basically like Linux Mint is today. Unfortunately, Canonical has gotten greedy and made bad choices which lead to Ubuntu becoming the mess it is today.
@@mjdxp5688 Got mixed thoughts on that, the Gnome people wrecked their own UI as far as I'm concerned; It's a heap of junk marketed to get ricers interested into linux lol
Without Ubuntu my Linux Mint never Happened!
*Modern Ubuntu
Never mind what haters say...ubuntu is the most stable linux distro ever period.
What if I told you there was a time when you could download red hat for free but that dial up was like 14.4kbs and so instead you would enter your (parents) credit card details into some random geo cities site and give your address to some stranger that would burn off the cd's and send them to you in the post.
Cheapbytes website
holly shit lol, that sounds like scenario where stuff could go very very wrong
I'd argue the Internet actually killed commercial desktop Linux. The reason Linux was sold in stores was more because people's download speeds were too slow to download an entire operating system, so it was the only option. The CDs included in the box would typically contain the system, the source code, and lots of software packages you could install from the CD instead of the Internet. You were typically paying for the accessibility more than the software itself, since it was all FOSS. I suppose Ubuntu did have the Ship It program that let you request an Ubuntu CD for free, but I don't think that's what killed commercial desktop Linux. It's more that around the same time, download speeds got faster and there wasn't really a reason to go down to the store to buy a boxed Linux distro.
It was also fairly common to find CD-ROMs in books and magazines which would teach you what Linux is, then have you try out the CD-ROM image, which was typically a live system you could try out and eventually install on your computer. My college library has a ton of old books like that, I even checked a few out and played with a few of them in VMs myself in the modern day.
Pretty much this. OS download sizes haven't kept up with the internet speed at all. Today, even a user in a developing country could download Ubuntu (which is one of, if not the biggest Linux distro) faster than going out to buy a CD.
I bought a copy of Yggdrasil when I was in the Navy in Japan, sometime around 1993 or 1994. It was my first experience with Linux.
I’m perfectly fine with LMDE. It’s got everything I need personally. Or atleast I’m able get what I need on it. And it’s not backed by a corporation that prioritizes profits over quality.
The voluntary donation also was a thing on Ubuntu for some time. I remember that you had to enter 0$ when downloading Ubuntu in the mid-2010s
I think the one company that COULD pull off selling a commercial distro is Valve
The same exact OS the super well optimized steamdeck working on a desktop? They could EASILY charge for steamOS and people will buy
The thing is that Valve, moreso than even Canonical, benefit the most from widescale adoption-every copy of Steam running on a system is a built-in revenue stream, even from people like me who mostly plays flatpak games on his Steam Deck-and minimizing their dependence on Microsol's stack is a *huge* mitigation of an existential risk.
Their business model relies on people buying games via Steam, so if they make it expensive to get on Steam, then this is like buying an OS based on PS5... They will start competing against other giants.
I guess it would fit more for manufacturers, because bazzite is a thing, that and you would be buying an os from the same store you buy games from
@@GSBarlev Do you think Valve wants ordinary PC gamers to move to desktop Linux even if they aren't running SteamOS and don't buy Steam Decks?
@@nervaproject They'd *prefer* it. SteamOS doesn't make them any more money than Steam-on-Ubuntu does. And it's not like you can't use other game stores on the Steam Deck.
Nitpicking: Corel Linux shipped with CDE, which - unlike what the Wikipedia article says - is not a variant of KDE and is actually a project older than Windows 95: it was developed by HP under "The Open Group" (the guys that made X) based on the Motif toolkit that was first released in 1989. The first Linux version of CDE was made by RedHat in 1997 - after the original maker abandoned the project...
My memory is that Coral Linux shipped wtih KDE but human memory is failable so I could be wrong.
@justinhall3243 It did. Corel Linux shipped with KDE but with a different file manager (not kfm, which was the KDE file manager at the time).
@@justinhall3243 Coral != Corel
Corel Linux did indeed ship with "Corel Desktop Environment" which was a fork of KDE, not the Common Desktop Enviroment.
A VARIANT OF KDE‽ What kind of ChatGPT bullshit is that wikipedia smoking? Good grief. If any DE anyone's ever heard of today has any relation whatsoever to CDE, it's XFCE and that's a pretty freakin' remote connection seeing as XFCE has basically been rewritten twice since its early incarnation as "CDE, but for the free Athena widget set." 🤦
I did find a magazine with Ubuntu 5.04 on their CD. I installed it on a Pentium II and I was impressed.
In 2008 I bought a Dell laptop with Windows Vista and remembered Ubuntu, so I dual booted Ubuntu and Vista. In 2009 I started using VirtualBox and in 2010 I installed Ubuntu 10.04 as Host OS and Windows XP with the programs I needed in a VirtualBox VM. Now I use Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and I still use that same Windows XP VM and 5 other VMs.
That's basically the same thing I was doing back in 08. Now I'm running 24 LTS, but no longer use any VMs, due to any proprietary software I use being on iOS and or Android. Things sure have changed a lot since then, but sadly a viable Linux phone hasn't become a thing yet.
@@xxHANNONxx I try to avoid phones, at least Android is a security problem. I run VMs for security reasons, I have one VM for email and social media messaging, because these messages are known for distributing malware. I once received an email with a compromised file from an old colleague, who had been hacked. Worse case I can delete the VM and step back to a 22.04 LTS VM or better restore 24.04 LTS from a snapshot (OpenZFS) from before the hack. I have another encrypted VM, that I use exclusively for banking.
I bought a box of Mandrake Linux off the shelf in 1997. Don't recall how much I paid for it. I think of it more as a convenience for not having to download CD (yeah, not sure if DVD was even a thing back then) than it was a "paid" distribution.
When Ubuntu came out it was a breath of fresh air. Their motto was getting things to "just work" and their first few releases focused on "papercut" issues. Then Gnome3 > Unity and it all went to hell. Beloved up until then though. Transition to pulseaudio (2006?) was a bit painful too.
In the beginning was the Kernel, and the Kernel was with the Distro, and the Kernel was the Distro.
It was with the Distro in the beginning. Through it all systems were made; without it, no system was made that has been made. In it was life, and that life was the light of all computing.
The Kernel became code and made its dwelling among us. We have seen its power, the glory of the open-source, full of grace and stability.
The Desktop Environment proceeded from the Distro and from the Kernel, bringing customization and freedom, and those who embrace it shall find endless productivity.
Something about Toms root and boot, then MCC interim and then SLS needs to go in there 🙂
It's still possible for a linux distro to be commercial, simply because 80-90% of people out there have still never heard of linux. If someone wanted to really advertise and market a new distro, they could pull in a lot of those people that have no idea that linux is free and open source. Customers would most likely eventually realize they had been had, but the company would already have their money.
It would not be a scam if you get physical discs and documentation for a reasonable price. I think that it would be far more successful if someone got deals going to get a distro preinstalled on new computers as most people just walk into store and buy whatever they are told to and so not know how to install an OS or even know what an OS is, or really anything about computers. Most people these days use crappy smartphone only unfortunately. Linux will likely never be mainstream as it requires a little effort sometimes.
There are commercial distros, they are just business based. RH, Suse, and Ubuntu all have commercial distos widely in use. It's just directed at business because they want tested, verified, stable, and SUPPORT. People like to say that the internet runs on Linux and that is true. They ignore that the majority of those systems are commercial versions of Linux. Companies pay and license them.
There really is not a reason that a home user needs a commercial version currently..
It amazes me that people still use Elementary
People still like to blindly recommend it as a "replacement for Mac OS" to this day, while glossing over all of its problems
elementaryOS Stan here. Pantheon is the definition of a DE that does its job and gets out of your way. It's for people who loved OSX but think macOS is waay too busy.
The main problem with it right now is that the development team is *tiny,* and they're rebuilding the DE from the ground-up to work with Wayland, so the current stable version is still based on Ubuntu 22.04, while the Arch packages break fairly often. That said: elementaryOS 8 is nearing the finish line, and I'm pretty psyched to see how it compares to COSMIC Alpha.
I think it's neat
It seemed promising years ago but I haven't kept up. What's the deal with Elementary nowadays? I presume it's still maintained.
It amazes me people still make comments like this
I started at 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon, and got hooked with 8.04, Hardy Heron. Have been using Ubuntu privately ever since. It just works and most of the time the terminal isn't needed.
I remember buying Red Hat Linux, Mandrake Linux, SuSE Linux and there might have been another one back in late 90's and early 2000's. I remember getting them at Best Buy or a local store called Hastings. Fond memories!
Yeah, I got SuSE 6.3 as a commercial distro, sold in a bookstore in France.
I remember seeing it in the store and convincing my grandfather to buy it for me, saying shit like "it's the future of computers!", and I was like 12 at the time.
He even let me set it up as dual-boot on his computer, so during vacations I'd tinker with the distro and apps, trying to know most of them.
Inside the box with the CDs, the most interesting thing was the book explaining users how to setup everything, like OSS for sound (it was before ALSA), the XF86Config file (because the keyboard and mouse were managed there) or the network drivers.
So I think distros could still be sold that way, with a guide/manual for users who don't even know what to search for online.
During these times where people want to leave Windows because 11 is complete dogshit, having a nice offline reference for all users (from boomers to new geeks) would really be helpful.
First Linux I ever used was Slackware 2.0. Back then I had a dial up connection at 14.4K, so I had a physical copy mailed to me-- I still have the CDs. I don't remember exactly how much it cost-- this was nearly thirty years ago-- but it didn't seem outlandish given that the box, manuals, CD case, insert, and CDs themselves weren't exactly cheap to produce in the mid 90s. It really was the only option for most people back in the day. Now, of course, between package managers and broadband connections, the idea of *having* to pay for Linux may even seem absurd, but the world has a way of changing in bursts. We may be surprised by what comes next.
Punctuated equilibrium is a helluva thing.
I would honestly be willing to pay for distro that has strong gaming focus. I know that there are tons of instructions that you can get it done to any distro or you could pick nobara, but afaik that is maintained by one person. Maybe it is just me, but I would value my time more than paying something like ~$100 one time payment for 5 years (minimal) support & updates & new version for something like nobara but with actual support and more people than one so that whole project wont die when that one guy decides he had enough.
I'm curious what you mean by "strong gaming focus." Do you just mean, "comes pre-configured with Steam, ProtonGE, Lutris, Bottles, MangoHud, Gamescope, etc." do you mean, like, has an optimized kernel, or do you mean is essentially a FOSS console like SteamOS or Batocera?
@@GSBarlevall of them, a paid nobara-like distro with actual game support would be wonderful
CrossOver/CodeWeavers is basically that, including support.
There's a free one with these criteria already. Bazzite.
I'd pay the same price for a Windows 11 license for 24/7 skilled and close to immediate technical support for something like Nobara/Bazzite. Or even a monthly subscription, as long as I got to use the OS without the payment. Paid technical support is what I want.
I think i still have my SuSE Linux 9.0 DVD i payed money for somewhere lol sadly the Box was lost in time.
Ubuntu 5.10 CD shipped to SEA country for free, it was magical
After using ubuntu for over 15 years now as my "I just want something that works" distro, I am finally, moving to switch to debian. (Maybe there is something better, idk, I'm just sticking with what I know) At the moment I am just sticking a toe in the water, but as soon as Ubuntu completely replaces apt with snap packages exclusively that will be the day I fully jump ship. I'm sure there will be snags with debian, but at this point I just want something stable.
mint is ubuntu without snap if you want to stick with that. honestly tho, you'll be ok with debian.
haha, yeah I remember pulling my hair out trying to find out why firefox kept breaking and reinstalling itself as a snap. Debian is fantastic, you can just choose what DE you want in the installer... and then it just works. Only downside is you are stuck with stuff like KDE Plasma 5.27 instead of 6.x
Guys what’s stopping Linux distros that are geared towards the normies/general public from using highly polished modern desktop environments similar to cute fish or deepin desktops? I think finances is a major factor since someone has to pay the designers and developers to commit to the extra time and effort such a design language may entail.
Not being shipped with the computers. Normal people just care about aesthetics, some kind of stability and snappiness, If you tune a Linux distro to look like Windows 7 up to the core and install Office 2016 you can fool a lot of people in the third world. They don't update anything, they don't care about privacy, godamn they don't even try to troubleshoot their shit when Windows get crazy they just take it to some "IT" guy that search for tutorials on UA-cam to fix the problem, they just want something that runs MS Office and that can open UA-cam or any social network
The market. For normies to use your OS, it has to come pre-installed on what they buy and the software they use has to support it.
This is a lot easier nowadays because of how popular web apps are becoming, but stuff like Photoshop still prevent many people from using Linux. Also, good luck getting a Linux computer into Walmart or Bestbuy, you're competing with massive companies like Microsoft who would love to set up a deal with retailers to kick you out if you ever caught any traction.
And finally, on top of that, normies are terrified of change. Look at how hated ChromeOS is. This hypothetical Linux distro would have to run every obscure piece of Windows software around without issue or people would flip shit
Zorin OS literally exists and is paid.
I can remember paying for a Redhat Distro in the day and it cost me $29.95 from a computer shop, it was terrible but it got me started back in the late 90s
IIRC Canonical initially recommended getting discs by the box since it was more economical than shipping one disc at a time. I remember ordering a box, keeping one, and giving the rest out like candy.
Our LUG definitely did get a box of them. We basically handed them out to anyone who was curious. More than a few Linux users got their start that way.
Tell that to the other guy in the comment section who got a box by accident and felt bad for it.
I am one of the ones who tried Corel Linux, it came with a Chip magazine CD, if I remember it right. I don't remeber exactly all the details, but I think that some pieces of hardware were not working, so it was a short experiment. Nowadays, depending on the price, I would pay for some service that brings a very good life improvement and/or security: let's say some mixture of desktop feature set (cloud back-up (at least settings, list of apps that could be reinstalled automatically on a newly installed system etc.) with something like Proton Mail and maybe a VPN.
This video brings back so many memories. Caldera OpenLinux was my first Linux installation. It used KDE probably version 2 IIRC. All those distro hopping and tinkering have shaped me to who I am today.
Coral and later Xandros shipped with KDE my friend. I remember them well. Yggdrasil was the one that shipped with CDE. Er... fact checked myself on this one. While this is what I remember I cannot locate any documentation to confirm it and human memory is crap when it comes to reliability.
I was 10 years old in 2008 when I first learned about ShipIt. I tried both Ubuntu & Kubuntu that way by requesting CDs. I remember telling my dad about it and him telling me nothing in life was free then him being shocked when the discs turned up 🤣🤣
Scalpers wew requesting the CD more than genuine users.
Me: "Brodie, why this ${Linux-issue} went south?
Brodie: "Well, Ubuntu..."
Also me: "Ah, I got it..."
I ordered one CD back in 2006 and got it delivered to my small town in the Dominican republic it was the best thing ever
Bought my first Slackware Linux on CD 1994, found it on an tech/computer show. Paid around $5
if you still had to buy distro CDs i feel like distro-hopping would be a lot less prevalent lmfao
Magazines with free CDs, both were pretty much killed by the Internet.
I would buy a beginner-friendly distro that offered end-user phone support for my non-tech family and friends so that if they have a question, they can call an 800-number instead of me.
I used to buy my distros at local computer stores for about $10 for the CD or get them on the cover of magazines. That was fair enough because it took me 9 hours to download a demo version of SPSS. The box sets usually contained a beautiful printed manual and we're probably worth a purchase for that alone, but not necessarily worth the price.
Ubuntu killed commercial desktop Linux? So did ChromeOS *runs away*
Without Ubuntu,everybody could be speaking"Arch btw",thanks Canonical
In mid 2000s I purchased SUSE Linux 9.2 on multiple discs and with a big book in a store in Germany. And it was just like 20 Euros or like that, with two ways of installing: 6 CDs and 2 DVDs in one box, depending on if your drive could read DVD. It's the first distribution I had installed locally. That was a long time before openSUSE.
old enough to have used ship-it, you also could get stickers through it! had ubuntu stickers on so much stuff.
In 2006 I've got Linux ISO from LAN. Internet was expensive, LAN covered thousands of users, files shared with DC. We've browsed web with pictures turned off.
Just a few years later even mobile internet was cheap enough to download distributions.
Errr, before 2004 you were already able to get SuSE and RetHat CD's... for free, possibly others as well!
Fun fact, I even found one of such SuSE CD's in my garden last summer!
I bought a retail Mandriva at a bookstore back in 1998. Burned a lot a time on that.
6:45 I first used Linux on my RasPi, but my first PC Linux experience and the reason I finally understood why I couldn't get at my files on my RasPi using my dads's computer (running Win7 at the time) was from an "Ubuntu 20.04 LTS" disk that had Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on it. That was just a few days before the "pandemic" started causing chaos in Germany.
SuSE 7.0 survivor here. Having everything you need in that box was actually nice. Unlike today, back then it seemed software was less often updated so your box would stay relevant for longer.
And later in the early 2000s SuSE, Debian, Dead Rat and Arch where pretty much the only choices you had if you wanted to do more than just staring at a blinking cursor.
Funny enough, even back than, red hat had a reputation for being a little shady, riddled with bad decisions and wasn't popular at all in my peer group.
Imagine trying to pack Arch on 7 DVDs and include a manual. There aren't enough therapists in the world to save the individual who tries that 😀
I would pay for Ubuntu if Canonical get rid of snaps lol
There was no commercial dialup internet available in Adelaide when I first downloaded a Linux disk set. Even the academic internet was very slow by todays standards. My first PC didn't have a CDROM but when I finally got one physical media was a lot more convenient than dialup. The commercial desktop OSs were always a tiny niche and their PR made them appear more than they were in media. Most people used slackware or debian but they weren't providing computer magazines with stories. Ubuntu Warty Warthog arrived in 2004 and it was revolutionary for a lot of reasons but broadband had been growing rapidly at the same time and that is what really changed linux software distribution. Fast Internet killed a lot of old business models including the music industry, magazines and video stores.
I remember requesting a stack of the Ubuntu cds, and put them in a ‘free’ stack on my desk at work. People would take them and then call me later for help installing them. Turned more than a few to Linux.
for a new distro to be successful, it needs crowdfunding, i think.
It's gonna be real hard to secure crowdfunding, unless your distro does something unique... Like for instance, be ENTIRELY coded in Rust or some shiz.
Thanks Mark Shuttleworth to Push Linux to all the world that we Living now.
Linspire who bought out Xandros still sells their distro, its $29.99 for a no support license and $60 for a 12 month support license.
Tbh I don't think it was the model of distribution combined with Internet and CD burning but just the rise of quality of free distributions and yes, especially Ubuntu. I remember early 2000s that different distros were widely available because they were on cds attached to computer magazines - and everybody was buying, reading them and installing software attached on CDs. By the time Ubuntu started sending CDs, I wasn't even aware of it - every month you could get a local "Linux Magazine" with a new distro attached and about 2005 practically every kid in my high school had a 24h Internet connection independent of dial-up. And that was Eastern Europe, not US. It did took few nights to download a whole distro, but it didn't cost you any extra.
And even if you were poor but into PCs - someone could easily and legally burn you a distro on CD-R.
I like how he has "BLAME UBUNTU AGAIN" written on his whiteboard in the background while describing achievements of Ubuntu. 😊
In the early 00s I saw my dad struggle to download a...I think it was single digit SuSe Linux release? and after a few days of trying and the download repeatedly failing overnight he gave up and we drove to CompUSA to buy a disc
So many parts of that story just aren't a thing anymore
I used to have one of those Ubuntu CDs, being on dial up was the worst. Getting one of those install CDs was a real blessing.
I think the desktop distro as a commercial distro is still viable. But I think it needs to really invest in apps, and more specifically their instalation and themes.
So to reframe the question, what would _I_ pay for?
Linux has its flatpack/appimage/snap/deb/rpm and so on. Whoever can crack the nut to say. "Yep, we'll install that for you, don't worry about how it's packaged, it will install and look the same as everything else" will have a real winner on its hands. I would pay happily to be able to install (and update) apps from any of these where its completely transparent to me.
I remember working at Staples in the US around 2003ish and we sold Red Hat Linux for $49.99 in a box.
I wondered when Corel Linux would come up. I remember being given a shortish presentation and then demonstration of it, and a free copy (which I tried and couldn't figure out at all as I had zero knowledge of Linux except that lots of servers run it), I do hope I have the original CD still........
I think distros should be paid for and that we should pay for them, open source communities need financial support otherwise we'll eventually end up going to bloatware and spyware.
Had a conversation the other day with someone who still has Win7. He wanted to know what options he had, the premise, he is non-technical and needed something he could just install and upgrade his existing system. He had no idea how to backup or save his data. He wanted his email, bookmarks and files to remain. He would have tried Linux if he was able to upgrade to it from Win7. Obviously as far as I know you can't do that, but for a normal user I would think if there was an upgrade path from Windows to Linux that kept all your data that would be a seller. People are sick of Windows or hate it but feel like they have limited options for upgrading.
I paid for my first Linux distro in 1999. A cd from Macmillan called Linux For Windows which installed Mandrake 6.1 on your windows 98SE / ME file systems and you could dual boot. It was amazing and the game Clan Bomber was on it which is still one of my favorite pc games. Yes, I paid for Linux my first time.
I was one of the people who requested a ton of CDs. I was excited and tried to share Linux with everyone. In hindsight I dunno if it was a good idea, I was young at the time.
I still have one copy left of Kubuntu 6.06, that I'm keeping as a memento from that era.
Its worth saying i did *not* have the bandwitch at the time, and i just wanted to share it and stick it to "the big corporations". Good times.
Early Ubuntu was cool. OpenSUSE was cool too.
No, just make a free regular distro, and only offer pay-for Enterprise packages that businesses and corporations would purchase. If Canonical goes "Windows 11", Ubuntu's popularity will plunge horribly :/
Are you talking the time that Linux distros came to the big box stores for $19.95?
I would buy distro that works very similar to Windows with working Nvidia drivers, that all games works, game video captures, that Adobe works ... basically a Linux OS that just works.
I remember Adobe sending copies of their software free of charge, if requested. They were the full installers but with a trial period, after which you had to enter your serial. If I remember correctly, they were shipping 2 DVDs at a time where your averge user may have had some form of dial-up or a WAP hotspot from some facy Ericsson or Siemens mobile phone.
I've paid for Proxmox before . . . so probably, bout to do it again once the Epyc heat sink comes in.
I'd gladly pay whatever is the price of a windows license for a distro that works as well as windows for gaming, using multiple monitors, using freesync and the like. I've been trying all sorts of distros for a while and they're all a massive chore. Got nobara working sort of decently but it would still sometimes shit the bed with random weird bugs, like maximized windows not having the top bar with minimize, maximize and exit icons, taskbars getting messed up outta nowhere and so on.
Infomagic box with several CDs was the closest thing to real magic I could get on 90s. So much knowledge in distros and OSS! ❤😊
I got Red Hat Linux 5.0 and 5.1 from magazines (not even linux magazines, just generic technology magazines, the kinds that later would shift BeOS and the like), Red Hat Linux 5.2 from a really thick linux book. Back then I would probably have paid some amount similar to a high end game at most. The reason I never stayed on those for long was the fact I couldn't run my games, and I was a teenager with a dialup. I had a friend who bought SlackWare though.
At this time in my life, I feel like I'd be prepared to pay for a distro as long as it's a nonprofit organisation that clearly advertises where it's expenditures go and what it's funds go to - not in a financial report, it should literally be something you know from hitting their main page by the time you reach the buy/donate/download button, whether that is on the same page or a separate one.
It is possible. Imagine buying a CD, but, depending on how much you want to pay, you can also get merch like a t-shirt, a desk mat, or a distro waifu fig. lmao.
Somewhere I still have my 8.04, 8.10, 9.04, 9.10 and 10.04 CDs for both Ubuntu and Kubuntu, also some OpenSolaris copies - those were the times
I bought a retail boxed copy of Slackware back in 1995 from a CompUSA... I think it cost $24.99, but I could be wrong.
Bought it because it came on CD's, with bundled extras, while other distro's were still doing floppies at the time.
I remember back around 1997 getting a couple of Linux tarballs without understanding what Linux really was and being defeated when it came to actually getting a running system, then hearing a while later of a local outfit selling Red Hat 5 CDs for 10 bucks, so I bought one of those and that's how I got started. Back in those days we only had dial-up internet over a very shaky telephone system, very low speeds, so buying a CD was really the only way.
There is Zorin OS for which there is a version that you do have to pay for. It adds some bells and whistles to the user interface but, I guess, people still see it as a way to support the project rather that to actually get access to those bells and whistles.
I would argue strongly that high speed internet (aka not dialup) is what killed commercial Linux desktop distributions. There was a business model where buying the CD/DVD was a better experience than downloading. Then along came ADSL and then VDSL and now buying a CD/DVD was a worse experience than just downloading. Today you can get a minimal boot USB key and install directly from the internet just as fast if not faster than the USB key.
creators in their 20's and 30's on youtube: Today let's talk about something that happened not too long ago like I'm Indiana Jones discovering the Ark of The Covenant!
When I'm in a little better of a financial situation, I'll send some money to the projects I use.
If a distro could someone convince the proprietary softwares to work on it without issues I could see a paid distro being a thing. How they would keep people from reverse engineering things I have no clue.
Ubuntu killed the paid distro
Ubuntu killed the paid distro
Free discs came and changed it up
We can't rewind, there's no backup 🎵
and here we are at in 2024 with the Ubuntu Pro ads in the terminal trying to sell you users to buy ubuntu pro if you want to "upgrade your system".... ....the moment i saw that I deleted it.
I remember buying Mandrake Linux in a computer store packaged and with CDs. It was one of the few distros that worked pretty well with my hardware at the time without having to recompile the kernel.
I actually remember a long time ago my friend got a CD from somewhere that had some old linux distro on it, but I could never actually install it because installer required a cd-key that was missing
Buy? Never. If you ask to pay, I'll crack it. If you make something really good, I'll donate. Recently the Android kernel I was using stopped being maintained (Kirisakura my beloved) so I sent the dev a nice thank you donation for the amazing work.
I remember the short-lived buying a desktop computer at Walmart with Linux installed. Yeah that was a failed venture.
That Walmart Linux on those early 2000s computers were complete garbage. Worse yet, they were no "users" and you were always logged in as "root" :/
@@mchenrynick Yep I laughed when I first saw them. That distro was so trash.
Corel Linux actually appears to use KDE, not CDE.
I remember this!! It was the first way I got to use Kubuntu in 2009. Until then, I only managed to get an old copy of Fedora my dad brought home from work.
I got Caldera working on a cable modem around 2002. It was amazing. Storm Linux, Suse, Redhat, Mandrake were great but Ubuntu changed everthing. A fully capable polished desktop that I did alot of professional writing on.
I still remember that Ubuntu startup tribal sound and the 500mb iso.
I remember buying Mandrake Linux in the early 2000s and for $60 you got a crap ton of CDs and a thick printed manual that was such a useful reference guide.
I didn’t have an internet connection so it was an absolute godsend to have all of the software I could ever want in a single box at Best Buy
I do think the bigger non-paid distros can still use paid boxed copies as a distro merch for people who want to support the distro. But yeah aside from selling support which most home users don't care about, I cannot see anything that can be commercially sold, unless you wanna just sell the convenience of having some particular packages or configuration pre-installed.