Path: csiph.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: rbowman Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: Linux Mint may make fewer releases a year Date: 15 Feb 2026 19:40:32 GMT Lines: 21 Message-ID: References: <20260212090830.00007b03@gmail.com> <10msg39$3vqvf$6@dont-email.me> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: individual.net yWSKrnSnTZZRv2AhZNA9YQvAQNKzd/xnQIK3yiQsnvoeSE8WtV Cancel-Lock: sha1:QnuxWh8kFyRUvPsKj3YDCePV7pI= sha256:CBAfJY3Bs5CPR1zbUWsaksGIoggdJnSNCiwUtMaUXJ4= User-Agent: Pan/0.162 (Pokrosvk) Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.misc:82033 On Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:27:46 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote: > When I first decided to set up a Linux machine, I went to the local > bookstore and perused the various Linux books which had an installation > CD included. The book I liked best happened to be by Patrick > Volkerding, so my first distro was Slackware 3.5, which ran happily on a > laptop with 48MB of memory and a 1.3G hard drive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware#Birth I must have caught it somewhere between the 24 floppies in 1993 and the 73 in 1994, I've got an unopened box of Memorex 3.5" floppies -- $3.99 for 10. No idea when I bought them but it was sometime after 2002. They may or may not have been cheaper in the '90s but 8 boxes, plus the time to ftp them down was a serious commitment. I don't remember when CD drives became common. I have a '93 Compaq Concerto laptop with a floppy drive and an optional PCMCIA CD-ROM drive. Funny how that works. All my current laptops need an optional USB optical drive. I do have a big old one that has escaped turning into a Linux box that has a builtin drive. It's XP, I think.