Ubuntu 6.06 (2006) | TheaterFire

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Known-Fruit931@reddit

Why were Icons so much more detailed and visually descriptive back then, even on old android and windows 98, Icons were better, now everything is just blobs of colour mostly unrelated to the what it does

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HeitorMD2@reddit (OP)

frutiger aero and y2k were amazing

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nick42d@reddit

How good was the free shipit CDs!

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TheFraTrain@reddit

I still have the CD for this. Came with 3 stickers

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nerdandproud@reddit

And you could get the CD sent to you for free

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ren01r@reddit

I got a couple CD's delivered circa 2009-10 Kubuntu and Ubuntu ones because I had no way to download an ISO on a 2G mobile internet tether that I was using to get online. If I had started then, the download would've been still going on because how spotty that connection was. Feels pretty nice to just download images of a couple distros and choose between them now.

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e7RdkjQVzw@reddit

Fucking Mark Shuttleworth, remember when we thought all billionaires weren't evil?

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Nevermind04@reddit

I mailed Canonical a $10 bill for a CD back in the day and got a £5 note back with it for some reason.

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Cvarns@reddit

Depending on where it was being shipped to. I remember having limited bandwidth and getting it by mail. Fatal mistake was running a full upgrade when it arrived.

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TheFraTrain@reddit

Yep! It was 100% free!

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HeitorMD2@reddit (OP)

oh wait, it was free? well thats actually pretty nice of them

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HeitorMD2@reddit (OP)

ok so after some research, they were free but apparently it was part of a service they had called shipit

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Shap6@reddit

i used to give these out to my friends at school they used to send me like 20 at a time lol

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papa_maker@reddit

I was running a local Linux user group back then. Canonical sent me (several times) huge quantities of CD even with display boxes and I distributed hundreds of them in every manifestation.

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30MHz@reddit

I still have the CD for 5.10. Got it from a friend in middle school. He was into freebies at the time and found a website that was shipping boxes of Ubuntu installation CDs free of charge. He ordered one thinking that they would never send him the box, but it turned out that he was wrong. He managed to give away only a couple of CDs out of a few dozen since not that many people were interested in trying out some obscure OS.

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ZookeepergameDry6739@reddit

I remember it well. That was the year I switched permanently to Linux.. the classic Ubuntu orange and brown color scheme was awesome 😎

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balleyne@reddit

Same vibe for me, I switched to 6.06 LTS in Feb 2007

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ClashOrCrashman@reddit

Oh yeah, I was on 6.10. Coming from OpenSuSE and Fedora, Ubuntu just felt like a perfect out of the box experience with no fiddling around needed. Nearly 20 years later, I'm back on Fedora though.

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NeverMindToday@reddit

I had tried out 4.10 onwards, but I think 6.06 was the first one I switched to full time from Debian though as all the little added conveniences were starting to add up.

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richardsequeira@reddit

the Ubuntu poop theme

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TheOtherWhiteMeat@reddit

Ah yes, Poobuntu

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krncnr@reddit

Ubunpu

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HeitorMD2@reddit (OP)

ubunpoo

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yestaes@reddit

The same happened to me. That was a good year

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altermeetax@reddit

It was 8.04 for me. The looks were pretty much identical though

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XzwordfeudzX@reddit

Same, 8.04 had my favorite wallpaper of any Ubuntu release.

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amorangi@reddit

Not my first distro, but I've been using Ubuntu in some form since 4.10.

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BrotherAmbitious2413@reddit

Are you still on Linux? What is your usage? Are you a developer?

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chilabot@reddit

Same.

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ten-oh-four@reddit

Hot take - this Gnome is better than modern Gnome

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JohnSane@reddit

this not a hot take... its just nostalgia.

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Cyhawk@reddit

Not nostalgia. Sun spent millions in R&D about UI usability and features for Gnome during their tenure with it which resulted in the screenshot you see.

They tossed it all with Gnome 3 and said, F it.

In their own words:

GNOME 2 was good, but not good enough. Only good for Linux users

Except it mirrored every other desktop OS out there with major usability improvements for average/low skilled users. They tried to copy OSX (because ooo Pretty) and failed on every front.

Hence the massive fracturing of projects at the same time Gnome 3 hit the fan.

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DeadlyGlasses@reddit

Microsoft spend billions on their OS... And it is shit. If that was great then we would have been using that. It is like people compare Pyramids which have lasted for centuries to modern bridges which fall in a decade... Go run hundreds or thousand tons of metal over a pyramid which took hundreds or thousands of slave workers and decades or centuries to build compare to the few million dollar (just estimating I am not from US) and a year to build with no causualities.

Same shit here. Why don't you try to run that on a monitor with 12bit colour resolution and HDR with 144 Hz display with another without HDR and 60Hz display... let's see how far you go. Same shit with X vs Wayland "BuT iT jUst wOrKs" no it doesn't

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JohnSane@reddit

I use Linux since around then and the state and usability of gnome has never been better. Just because some people are stuck in their workflow does not mean its a good one.

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HeitorMD2@reddit (OP)

without extensions i agree, extensions make modern gnome way better and you can even restore the old layout

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BHSPitMonkey@reddit

You can still install MATE

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mico85@reddit

Per me, il primo ubuntu è stato con la Distro 11.10. Sembra passata una vita...

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pr0ltergeist@reddit

Breezy Badger, those were times, playing with Beryl/Emerald and using ndiswrapper for running the wifi-device.

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SUPREMACY_SAD_AI@reddit

gnome 2 was peak

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parm3nion@reddit

I had original CDs sent to me. Also back then gnome was better

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Kok_Nikol@reddit

Also back then gnome was better

Agreed, still the way I use it (thanks to MATE), or with extensions on regular GNOME.

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therandombaka0@reddit

There's also gnome classic

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Kok_Nikol@reddit

Haven't looked at it in a while, but last I checked it was a bit inconsistent since it wasn't actively maintained.

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therandombaka0@reddit

Guess I'll just stick to using extensions that make the new gnome look like the old one

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Kok_Nikol@reddit

Try it out!

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neeeeow@reddit

iirc sun spent $millions on ux research that went towards gnome 2, only for gnome 3 to toss it out the window...

there's a very good reason why gnome 2's interface is infinitely more usable.

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Cry_Wolff@reddit

there's a very good reason why gnome 2's interface is infinitely more usable.

GNOME 3 was released 14 years ago, and some of you are still butt hurt about it.

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bombycina@reddit

I miss my compiz cube. :'(

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danburke@reddit

Burning windows too!

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DoctorJunglist@reddit

On GNOME, there's an extension for that - Burn My Windows.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4679/burn-my-windows/

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HeitorMD2@reddit (OP)

it can run doom btw

the doom loading animation thing

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Cyhawk@reddit

Gnome Extensions has compiz effects including desktop cube. I use one cube per remote session, its quite nice. Also theres WayFire which has similar effects/basically is Compiz for the modern day.

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sky_blue_111@reddit

And compare gnome 2 to gnome 3, which desktop is more powerful/stable/useful. Gnome 3 has no dock, no system tray, doesn't understand the difference between "search", "jump to", and "filter" etc etc.

Gnome 3 doesn't do anything better than gnome 2, but loses features. Of course gnome users are going to bring that up.

Us KDE guys don't care though, we know what's up.

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_oscar_goldman_@reddit

And if your machine is stuck in the 90s too, there's always LXDE

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JockstrapCummies@reddit

Forever stuck in the 90s

I take that as a compliment. 🕺🏻

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neeeeow@reddit

GNOME 3's redesign was pure retardation; this isn't a viewpoint exclusive to reddit.

Without any plugins, an average user isn't going to have a clue how to use GNOME 3+

That was the magic with GNOME 2, it was extremely user friendly, anyone could pick it up and understand what was happening.

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Nesman64@reddit

I had to look up the CD. That's the version I started with.

https://i.redd.it/exiy56bzf0751.jpg

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grstein@reddit

That’s why there is Mate

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FreeElective@reddit

There is what, mate?

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satriale@reddit

It’s a tea, you’re supposed to pour it on any computer with gnome installed.

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FreeElective@reddit

Oh I've seen it, Messi is always sipping that thing

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thrakkerzog@reddit

It's the bombilla!

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sentinelbub@reddit

Yep, canonical was great at that time. They shipped their CDs worldwide.

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HeitorMD2@reddit (OP)

i still think the current gnome is okayish (its way better with extensions, i think the setup ubuntu has currently is pretty good) but even then i still quite like gnome 2

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cgoldberg@reddit

glory days

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simism@reddit

I started with Ubuntu in 2017; soon this will be closer in time to 2017 than 2017 is to the present.

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wurmphlegm@reddit

That's the gnome I miss.

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pr0fic1ency@reddit

That's pretty much how XFCE still looks today lmao.

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ViceAdmiralWalrus@reddit

My first distro. Spent a whole Saturday trying to get the wireless drivers to work on an old dell laptop. Gave up, switched back to windows. Now 25 years later I’m a Linux admin, go figure.

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ExoticAsparagus333@reddit

Wireless drivers were norotiously bad in that era. I think it wasnt until maybe 2012-2015 ish that wireless stopped being a pita.

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_Sgt-Pepper_@reddit

Didn't we have a terrible kernel wrapper back then, that actually loaded the windows device drivers for WiFi?

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JindraLne@reddit

Fck, your comment just unlocked a shitload of repressed trauma from setting up ndiswrapper on my old ThinkPad T30 back in the day.

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Malsententia@reddit

After just one wrestle with ndiswrapper back in 2005, I just made a policy of spending the extra $30 (or w/e) to buy atheros chips for any given devices.

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Nevermind04@reddit

ndiswrapper

Oh.

Life was so much better 20 seconds ago before you reminded me of that.

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NeverMindToday@reddit

I seem to remember the Intel Centrino Wifi drivers written natively by Intel as being the first real non shit WiFi experience. It was earlier than 2012 (2008 maybe?), and worth specifically looking for Intel Wifi hardware just for that reason.

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HeitorMD2@reddit (OP)

every linux beginner has some sort of issue getting it to work properly

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Bingo-heeler@reddit

It's always wireless drivers

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SileNce5k@reddit

My first issue was audio drivers. But that was in 2019. Never got it to properly work so I unfortunately had to move back to windows. There were other reasons as well, but that was the biggest one.

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mimavox@reddit

These days it's Bluetooth. Don't think I've ever gotten Bluetooth to work properly in Linux.

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FrozenLogger@reddit

I always had pretty good luck with wireless drivers, we were out war driving using Linux by 2001 or 2002.

But there were a lot of shitty chip-sets out there and if you got stuck with one, pain in the ass.

But I just wanted to say: My kids laptop in 2007 or so would throttle the wireless when on windows. But not on Linux. Because the chipset was the same, the intel driver was based on what the chip was sold as, not what it was capable of. Every now and then a win with linux on wireless!

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Kok_Nikol@reddit

That was my experience as well (only on Ubuntu 9.10 or something)!

Fortunately I managed to solve it by using NDISwrapper, but it took me a while.

Now I'm the office Linux expert at every job I had. I'm seriously considering switching to being a full time linux admin/devops guy.

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DynoMenace@reddit

I remember a similar stint with my old Acer Ferrari 3400. I could not get WiFi to work for the life of me. I later tried macOS on it and it worked out of the box. Go figure.

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Alycidon94@reddit

Ubuntu 8.04 was the first Linux I used regularly. 14-year-old me sat up all night one night with my Compaq Presario laptop connected to the first-generation BT Home Hub with an Ethernet cable so I could download and compile the Atheros WiFi chipset drivers. Fun times.

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thyristor_pt@reddit

My first one also. I had to compile the drivers for my ADSL modem by hand, like a man. So many trial and error attempts while dual booting back to windows to download different drivers and check the error messages in forums.

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FrozenLogger@reddit

I had been using Linux for awhile by then and I found Ubuntu to be a pain in the ass and way too easily broken. I wished them luck, but it never would have been a recommendation I could stand behind. I think that bit more than one person.

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musiquededemain@reddit

Ahhhhh....I have fond memories of those days. I briefly used 6.06 and then switched to Debian but kept the GNOME 2.x environment. Seems almost primitive then especially when fighting with Adobe Flash to watch YouTube videos....

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The_Mauldalorian@reddit

We had a few of these in my middle school 🥲 no one knew what it was

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HeitorMD2@reddit (OP)

its a driver's license right?

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bali_NOOB@reddit

gnome looked just like lxde

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jmeggs@reddit

Pretty old times 😁 Canonical sent me a CD containing that version 💪🏽💪🏽💪🏽

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MrScotchyScotch@reddit

God I miss those days. There weren't 20,000 subsystems and protocols and libraries and blah blah blah. Your sound card was a device file and your sound mixer just opened it. The window manager was fast as hell on old hardware, and the buttons and menus and things just worked like every other OS.

MAKE LINUX BORING AGAIN

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nevadita@reddit

i remember this. i was trying to move from slackware and tried one of these CDs canonical would send to you. it ran like shit on my PC, i couldnt understand why. slackware ran fine. but ubuntu on fresh install choked my PC very hard.

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cetjunior@reddit

Good times...miss my Hoary Hedgehog (5.04) CD and fight for connecting through dial-up...in some ocasions, were faster asking for the CD than downloading the ISO file...

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Clydosphere@reddit

I barely missed that release. The next one, Ubuntu 6.10, was my first contact with Ubuntu, and it made me switch from Windows XP after only two weeks. I had ogled at Linux for some time then, but other distributions (like SUSE) weren't as easy and beginner friendly as Ubuntu back then. And it also came with a nice philosophy and a big and friendly community.

I'm using Ubuntu variants up until this day, namely Kubuntu and Ubuntu MATE, and I still have this poster hanging in my living room:

https://hadinux.blogspot.com/2010/12/highway-to-freedom.html

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Netizen_Kain@reddit

Back when GNOME was actually good. No CSD, no fullscreen launcher. It even had a systray and a taskbar, imagine that!

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Clydosphere@reddit

MATE continues all this up until today.

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ProofDatabase5615@reddit

This is the distro which started my journey away from Windows. Since then I used opensuse, Mac OS, Ubuntu, Debian, manjaro, arch and now I am on Fedora.

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soopastar@reddit

I still have about 50 servers running 6.06 LTS Server.

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Current-Suggestion69@reddit

Yeah used this my first semmester at school, got a CD in the mail with a sticker that I have now on my macbook (saved it for years for ironic effect hahahah)

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gclaws@reddit

Man I miss those days...

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techlatest_net@reddit

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS was such a landmark release! The polished GNOME 2 desktop and Canonical’s ShipIt program really helped bring Linux to the masses. It’s amazing to see how far hardware support and usability have come since then. Definitely a nostalgic favorite for many!

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GameKing505@reddit

Think this was my first Linux distribution. I remember thinking those free CDs were the bomb.

I also liked the theming a lot more back then- the drums when you log in were a great touch.

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BluejayJazzlike2754@reddit

wow how many changes for 19 years

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OkNoble@reddit

Look like xfce today

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Houfino@reddit

My first Ubuntu was 10.10 and it was the best because of the compiz effects 3D..Later it is no longer there..Too bad

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Cyhawk@reddit

There are Gnome Extensions that copy the Compiz effects that work seamlessly.

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e7RdkjQVzw@reddit

I just found out and installed wobbly windows yesterday. Man, what a time!

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tuxbass@reddit

Eyy, maverick meerkat gang! I, too, was spinnin' them cubez.

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ericek111@reddit

Compiz still works fine, with wobbly windows and fire painting, on Arch with MATE.

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borg_6s@reddit

Back when GNOME used to focus on usability and accessibility.

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masutilquelah@reddit

Before the unity debacle

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Ok-Anywhere-9416@reddit

It was simply beautiful and easy to use. I started with 8.04 and I felt astonished.

A few years later, around version 9.04 or 10.04, I could use a 3G USB modem with zero apps and drivers. Just plug it, done.

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Santosh83@reddit

Was my first Ubuntu distro, and the one I like best even till this day.

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g-unit2@reddit

i would like to see a whole demo video on this

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Minteck@reddit

Back when Ubuntu was actually good.

My first version was 16.04 and it was awesome.

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nandru@reddit

I must have a couple of those free DVDs somewhere, would be cool to try them again

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SpeedOfSound343@reddit

I was a kid in India and I used to order these free CDs with free shipping and used to get them from Netherlands. Perhaps I was the only person in my small town getting international parcels.

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Adventurous_Meal1979@reddit

I wish there was a modern district that used that UI. People say MATE or Xfce are similar but they just don’t have the charm and clarity of this older version of GNOME.

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Beast_Viper_007@reddit

So this was ubuntu when I was born.

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Far_Departure_1580@reddit

Ah, the Nostalgia.

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Abstract_Doggy@reddit

God only knows, how much I loved Ubuntu back then. Despite the broadcom wifi driver not working, it was perfect.

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ModernUS3R@reddit

The system you bootup on the school computer school to side step every admin setting the teacher configured on the windows. That's freedom.

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ModernUS3R@reddit

This is where it began for me. If it wasn't for that free cd, I wouldn't have known or gotten into linux as early. It was still rough for me, but I'm glad I stuck around and kept up with the releases.

Now I'm daily driving arch with windows being the thing there for some very specific case.

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Jaded_Cookie_8838@reddit

When I was a kid I put ubuntu on a CD and wrote in sharpie on it "fixes your computer" felt rlly smart back then but linux has indeed fixed my computer

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pol5xc@reddit

i switched from debian to dapper drake when it was released

it's the last one with that beautiful startup sound

one year later i tried debian sid and noticed it was much faster so i went back to debian lol

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PlanAutomatic2380@reddit

Is it possible to emulate this look today

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HeitorMD2@reddit (OP)

sorta, you cant get the theme in modern gnome but you can get the layout

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mattias_jcb@reddit

Ubuntu was my first "grown up" Linux distribution. I was on Slackware for 2,5 years and Gentoo for 3,5 before that.

I stuck with Ubuntu for 5 years and then switched to Fedora for the GNOME 3.0 release.

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HeitorMD2@reddit (OP)

they used unity starting from 2011, they did come back to gnome

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mattias_jcb@reddit

Yep! I don't remember the exact year they came back to GNOME but they did come back (albeit with a pretty heavily patched version).

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HeitorMD2@reddit (OP)

it was in 2017 with 17.10

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visor841@reddit

Is it just me or is this basically how XFCE looks today?

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Atlas_6451@reddit

It was beautiful and worked well, I still get a warm feeling when I see screenshots like these.

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HeitorMD2@reddit (OP)

i really like the human theme, gnome 2 also had a pretty user friendly interface (even tho its a bit alien)

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MorningCareful@reddit

Honestly its interface is better than modern GNOME

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wombat1@reddit

It's why Mint to this day remains so popular, Cinnamon and MATE are both answers to those who reject GNOME 3

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GolemancerVekk@reddit

XFCE too, the modern XFCE desktop would be instantly recognizable and usable to someone from 2006 even though so much has changed. The desktop paradigm with the Applications/Places menus and customizable widgets on panels still works and it's intuitive.

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kriebz@reddit

What's alien is current gnome. 6.06 was peak Linux. A breath of fresh air if you were coming from Windows or from UNIX or if it was your first "real computer".

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TheTwelveYearOld@reddit

In 20 years someone will make this exact post but for 2025 and talk about how much better things were

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perkited@reddit

Back in 2025 you had to know which buttons to click or commands to type (yes, if you typed the command incorrectly it wouldn't do anything). Now the AI has memorized your patterns and presents what you want before you even ask for it.

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HeitorMD2@reddit (OP)

back in my day everything was flat

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faigy245@reddit

The human poo phase, yea, those were different times. Windows using fisher price style, macOS and every cool website the glass style.

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enoughsaid05@reddit

I remember it was end 2006 when I bought a laptop advertised as “Linux laptop” for 800 dollars based on my internship pay. I was very shocked it was running on some distribution with no gui. Having zero experience with Linux at that time, I freaked out and installed xp on it and used it for a while before I heard about Ubuntu. I gave it a try, felt very pleased with the vibes it gave like what OP posted. I have never gone back to Windows since. Can’t imagine 18 years of Linux!

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joseph_fourier@reddit

This was the first version of Linux that I used as a proper daily driver. It's a shame the gnome team stepped away from this design - current gnome is a massive step back from this IMO.

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can72@reddit

I’d played with RedHat on and off from the early noughties, and most recently settled on Centos before a colleague suggested trying Ubuntu in 2006.

I still remember the lightbulb moment when I tried the apt-get command for the first time. I’ve dabbled with Debian, Mint and a few other variants over the last 19 or so years, but keep coming back to Ubuntu!

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Leimina@reddit

Simpler times haha

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nlsthzn@reddit

Double CD as I recall, one was a "live" disc. Blew my mind back in the day.

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PsyOmega@reddit

Burning knoppix back in the day to get around school computer restrictions. good times. Ubuntu just made it slightly easier.

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loquacious@reddit

Holy crap, I can't believe I forgot about knoppix.

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axxond@reddit

Gnome has come a long way

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ArcIgnis@reddit

This was my introduction to Linux, but being unable to run games on it properly, I crawled back to Windows reluctantly.

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Known-Fruit931@reddit

This version of Ubuntu is why I can now wire cat5 with my eyes closed.

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arbitrary_code@reddit

enjoyed these earlier distros that had a video of Nelson Mandela explaining, and correctly pronouncing, 'ubuntu'.

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yoshiK@reddit

The Linux where I actually didn't switch back to windows. I had over-overclocked my cpu and borrowed a really old pc from a friend. On that potato no interesting time sink would run, so I just committed to Linux for the summer. When I got a new PC I actually had to figure out that 6.10 (Dapper?) was released and that things worked (very) slightly different.

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brianx87@reddit

How dare you make me feel old

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Devilotx@reddit

aww man, Dapper Drake, I loved that release.

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Worried-Schedule6677@reddit

Happily used it on my Athlon 64

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Ami00@reddit

good old ubuntu without unity and snap and whatever else they stuffed into it xD

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Big-Promise-5255@reddit

My firt ubuntu version! And from this i still use ubuntu!

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roundart@reddit

Before I saw the title I said YES! Love the old school look

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BrightCold2747@reddit

The first version of Linux I ever tried was Ubuntu Hardy Heron... I don't really remember WHY I tried it. I think I just wanted free office programs to use for school assignments.

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fat_cock_freddy@reddit

I ran this on a powermac g4 back then

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Icy-Cup@reddit

Old Gnome was awesome

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Beersink@reddit

Dapper Drake. I jumped on board the Ubuntu train at 8.04 Hardy Heron and stuck with it until Unity (11.04 iirc). My favourite Ubuntu was 10.04 Lucid Lynx. Then I had a spell with Debian and moved to Mint when I saw how Cinnamon was shaping up, been on Mint ever since. Heady days: I remember blowing my Windows friends' minds with the Compiz Cube in Lucid Lynx.

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