You Can Buy Modern Linux Distros On A DVD??

Key Takeaways

nowadays if you want to install Linux the process is pretty streamlined you download niso from a website generally from the distros website you stick it on a thumb drive you plug it into your computer and you're pretty much good and then once the district is installed you can easily update your repos just by running a simple command but this is still a relatively new phenomenon it wasn't that long ago and especially in those super early days of Linux where you would install Linux from a CD that you either got in a magazine or got in the mail up until Ubuntu 11.04 you could contact canonical and ask them free free installation CD but if they didn't do that a lot of other gistros would sell a CD at a relatively cheap price usually the price the CD the price to get it printed and the price to send it out but nowadays most people can justify just downloading an ISO their internet is perfectly quick enough to do so so you might think that practice is completely dead Endo relic of the past well it might be a relic but it's certainly not of the past this is one service I found this is one of the more popular Services called shop Linux online and they will sell you actually up to date things like let's say let's go and search for Ubuntu for example and see what we find 20.04 22.04 okay wow that's a current release let's go and find something like Arch Linux this is an Arch Linux DVD for the latest ISO and not just Linux there's BSD on here as well let's say for example openbsd or net BSD or FreeBSD basically anything you could possibly want is going to be here not you know every single distro but anything remotely popular is probably going to be listed here are they allowed to do this well no one's stopping them so it's sort of Just Gonna Keep existing and this is not the only service available that's doing exactly this there's also the Linux DVD Center the Linux DVD shop or the Linux shop whatever the name is supposed to be they don't actually align and a ton of others all basically doing the exact same thing but the reason why this one in particular caught my attention is a uh a Reddit post that was making the rounds probably I don't know like a week or two ago Debian 11.5 full archive 19 DVDs 19 DVDs to update your Debian repos I have no idea who has the time to sit there and do that but surely someone does otherwise they probably wouldn't list it now you might be wondering why is there 19 DVDs why does this exist how do they decide to go and split things up between the different DVDs well that's actually very simple because Debian actually offers these DVD images what's in this directory these are files containing the installer and other software for the Debian Linux operating system the files in this directory are specifically for the AMD 64 architecture there's also a 32-bit version as well the files here are in jigdo format use jigdot tools to download the contents of the complete ISO image files from what's here and a normal Debian mirror you should end up with an exact copy of each ISO image as though you downloaded it via HTTP or FTP and then goes into more details about how this works how you actually use it and yeah so if all the DVD files are available for free online who in their right mind is going to pay twenty dollars to just have them printed and sent to them this isn't including uh shipping also the different U.S states do sales tax differently so tax isn't listed here either you guys are weird I don't know why you do that uh so it's probably like closer to 25 30 why would you do that what what is the point well there's actually a really good point anybody watching this video at 720p even 480p this is probably not a service for you you don't have the fastest connection out there but it's a reasonably usable connection you could download a multiple gigabyte ISO you can download some updates to your repos it's probably going to take quite a bit of time but you can do it in a reasonable amount of time that's not the case for everyone out there this service we've been looking at is just focused on the United States and in the United States you may not know this if you live in a big city a small City a town a village a place where people generally live there are people that still only have access to dial up this is the data from 2019 and it's obviously going down but there are still people that only have dial up in the US there are still so many people that there are lists from 2022 of the best dial-up providers I didn't think I would say best and dial up in 2023 but here they are so let's do a bit of quick maths and be super nice and use poppy Linux so poppy links has an ISO that's around 400 megabytes I'm just gonna round the numbers to make things easier and with a 56k modem running at Absolute full capacity which will never really happen on the internet due to you know servers and distance and ping but let's just say it's running at the full 56k it will take you an hour to download approximately 200 Meg two hours just to download poppy Linux and Poppy Linux is an intentionally small Linux distro this can get a lot worse if you want to use something like Ubuntu for example the latest Ubuntu LTS is about 3.6 gigabytes so about 18 hours just to download the iso not even do a system update the absolute bare minimum just to have a working system but let's be a little bit nicer let's say you don't only have dial up you have a satellite available but this satellite connection has an extreme data cap and you can't really justify using this downloading packages downloading isos you just want something you can easily install offline or you might be in a far worse State you're in an area where they do have electricity maybe not you know all of the time time but do have electricity but internet is a little bit harder to come by maybe it's only available at schools and libraries but it's not really common to have internet in your home excluding edge cases like Japan and Korea which are really well off countries this is exactly why a lot of areas of the world still have net cafes as a common thing they don't really exist in Australia there's like maybe one or two in my entire State and they're hidden down some random alley but there are many areas where using a net cafe might be the only way that you can reasonably get online so while this might seem completely pointless to internet natives internet dwellers whichever term you want to be using free service like this to be existing it's not pointless for a lot of people out there for many people this might be the only reasonable way to get your hands on Linux or get your hands on Linux in a reasonable length of time to justify actually doing so now I've just been looking at the CDs and DVDs there is also USB thumbsticks as well and many of the services out there don't even offer CDs only offer it as a thumb drive and the other people this is made for is for the dumb YouTubers who ask Their audience really dumb questions should I buy a 19 DVD collection of the domain I spelled it wrong ah Debian 11.5 archive for the sake of a bit 36 saying yes 25 saying of course you should and 39 saying send me the money instead is this a fairly worded poll no absolutely not but why would it be I was asking about buying 19 Debbie and DVDs of course it's not going to be serious so let me know your thoughts in the comment section down below if you've been using Linux for you know 10 plus years let me know what it was like getting Linux CDs in magazines in the mail and let me know if you still have any of them and what the first gesture you ever used actually was I would love to know so if you like this video remember to go and like the video and if you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here so I can buy 19 Debian DVDs uh check out my patreon scrubs the libero pay Link in the description down below that's gonna be it for me and I'm out [Applause] [Music]