A few years later they were passing out free copies of OS/2 CDs as if there was no tomorrow (which, by then there really wasn't...)
Free as in beer unfortunately.
For my first install of Slackware in 1995 or 96, I downloaded 40 floppy disk images and copied them onto floppy disks at University, to install it on a friend's Pentium computer. The very last one ended up corrupted. That was part of the X11 "package". So we ended up without any GUI. But at least we could play Doom on the console!
Haha right! Quake also ran from the console. I spent my high school years working at an ISP NOC in the 90s with one of my responsibilities being to maintain the game server (battle.net & Quake)
many of my teenage years were spent downloading the "A" set of floppies over 28.8k modem, until I befriended somebody at a university who downloaded the whole thing to a QIC tape and just mailed it to me