[ottod]

First Linux I bought was Walnut Creek Linux CD-ROM. Second was Redhat. I would still be on Redhat if it were not for IBM and their bad faith source-available interpretation of the GPL. Then I bought Mandrake and used it as long as it was Mandrake and not the thing that became Conectiva. Then I heard about Ubuntu which would mail free CDs anywhere in the world. I was in education back then and my students would ask Ubuntu for CDs for a class I was teaching, and Canonical sent them a cardboard display, flyers, stickers, and about 50 CDs. They watched in class Revolution OS and contacted many of the people on it, which were kind enough to answer them. Those were the times; I'm old, yet still looking for a job because I love the industry.

[dfc]

I can't remember the name of the Linux CD set I would buy. It had a red background and a picture of the globe. The cds contained slackware/sunsite/gnu etc. I think it started with an "I"...

EDIT:

Found it, wild nostalgia! It was infomagic. This was my first Linux install: https://archive.org/details/ldr_0895_4cd

[saltcured]

Hah, I downloaded floppy disk images from Walnut Creek CD-ROM's amazing FTP mirror site, wrote them to actual floppies in my university computer lab, and carried those home to try out SLS and later Slackware.

Starting with Linux in 1993, I was already using it productively for years before things like SSH and VMware existed!