LinuxScreenshots.org Closes. All Screenshot Tours Released For Downloading

A new announcement on their web site reads: LinuxScreenshots.org is closed. An archive of all screenshot tours from this site has been made freely available to the community, which consists of 2300 releases from 580 distributions. You may download this archive for fun, or to start your own Linux screenshots website. Please help seed torrents. I contacted the site's owner, who confirmed the news, saying their goal is to let the community take control of the screenshots. The archives are available on Dropbox and BitTorrent.

Re:

[JustOK]

or at least no more than 640K times.

Re:

[zrobotics]

Personally, I think I had already seen that joke 640k times by the mid 2000s.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all of us are little kids like you.

I Can has Cheezburger? is more important

[jfdavis668]

Pictures of Linux desktops? Why was someone even collecting them in the first place? At least pictures of cats are funny.

Re:

[NotInHere]

If not for meat production, the animal wouldn't have been born in the first place. As long as you treat the animals well where should be the problem?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Killing an animal when it is not necessary to do so is treating them well?

Not letting it live in the first place is better? Are you saying that denying the animal its birth is preferable? In all cases? Why?

Re:

[Hylandr]

Good Idea, lets start by eating hipsters instead.

The only problem with that is the irony-rich blood would give constipate me.

Ah, a newbie

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't remember how it was back in the day... aesthetics does matter; you don't want to work with on a desktop that hurts your eyes. Back around 2000-2005, the quality of linux desktops varied widely. Some of the KDE centric ones would render GTK stuff all wrong (Mandrake, for example); some of the Gnome centric ones were just uglier than sin. All of them had something wonky, so the only way to know if you would likely be able to live with a distro's wonkiness was to take a look at.

Now, back in the day, you didn't just download an image of every distro to come down the pipe (there were way more of them 15 years ago) and install it in a VM, like you can do today. It took all day to download a distro, and usually ate up a big chunk of your bandwidth cap. Then, in order so see how it would really behave you had to install it on the real hardware you were planning to use it on.

So, instead of installing it or looking at a youtube video like you do today, you'd look at linuxscreenshots.org to see if you thought a new distro was worth a shot. I agree that today in the world of standardized desktop software, fewer distros, fast internet connections and lightweight VMs on overpowered desktop hardware it's kind of lost its purpose. Which is why they're shutting down.

But back in the day, they had a purpose and I'm happy they filled it.

Re:Ah, a newbie

[willoughby]

Yeah, I remember going there to check out the differences between Windowmaker & Afterstep.

Re:

[darkain]

"fewer" distributions... LOL. https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]

Re:

[zrobotics]

They didn't have caps, but I was billed per minute. Ah, the joys of rural living, paying exorbitant amounts of money for a 56k connection that in reality was closer to 14kbps. Oh, and the line was such poor quality that it would fry modems and cordless phones regularly. We never were able to get that fixed, I just kept a spare modem around, and we went back to basic analog phones that would likely survive a nuke blast. Dial-up tones cause my eye to twitch to this day.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

For those thinking of installing Windows 10, here's the screenshots website: http://www.theworldsworstwebsiteever.com/

Re:

[jfdavis668]

My "back in the day" proceeded Linux even existing. I still don't see the point behind LinuxScreenShots.org.

Re:

[swalve]

True. Installing operating systems is universally acknowleged as objectively fun. Kill yourself.

In Case Anyone Was Wondering

[boudie2]

It's a 47 gigabyte download ... you'd have to be really dedicated to get that one.

Re:

[Zontar The Mindless]

Eh? That's 7GB less than all 4 seasons of The Man from UNCLE including the DVD-only extras.

Re:

[eWarz]

meh, would take me 3 minutes to download the entire thing provided they have decent seeds.

Flckr?

[grumpy-cowboy]

Is it possible to simply drop it on Flickr?