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LinuxScreenshots.org Closes. All Screenshot Tours Released For Downloading (linuxscreenshots.org)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the coming-soon-to-BitTorrent dept.

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.

6 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. I Can has Cheezburger? is more important by jfdavis668 · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

  2. Ah, a newbie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Ah, a newbie by willoughby · · Score: 3, Informative

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

    2. Re:Ah, a newbie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

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

    3. Re:Ah, a newbie by zrobotics · · Score: 2

      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.

  3. In Case Anyone Was Wondering by boudie2 · · Score: 4, Informative

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