Did a large numbers of people use those? Legitimate question—it always struck me as a cool initiative for a very small number of people, but only that.

I'd expect most people tech-savvy enough to install Ubuntu would also have a decent enough internet to download a ~700mb file.

Back in the day, not much of my country, or even the US, had particularly fast internet. Nor did everybody have a disc burner in the days before USB booting being supported by the majority of computers' firmware.

If my memory serves correctly, this was 2004/2005, around the time I was discovering my home burnt CDs and DVDs were going bad.

This was also around the time I would often brick my primary (only) workstation for whatever reason. Having a properly mastered Live CD was super useful.

I would order at least two with every release cycle for a few years at least.

Thankfully, I saw the light early with Ubuntu-server, and stayed with Debian. Ubuntu-desktop makes for a good enough live / recovery / troubleshooting environment, but not sure I’d use it for anything more.

The free LiveCDs were great marketing. As a teenage computer geek, it was way easier to convince casual computer users to try it out when I could lend them a nicely printed CD. And it looked way better than handing them a sketchy CD-R with some marker scribbles on it.

> I'd expect most people tech-savvy enough to install Ubuntu

we installed ubuntu with friends in freakin junior high school. it's not like it's rocket science...

OTOH the village where I grew up as a child only got DSL > 512k around 2008 iirc.

Checked a bit, the figure I could find was an ubuntu employee estimating the figure to half a million in 2004, so at the beginning of the programme -> https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1691&page=2&p=3255...

So yeah, lot of people got those.

I ordered a few back in the day - the sleeve design was really nicely done.