Circa 2001/2002, I had a lot of fun learning SUSE Linux where we had CDs of the OS that we could install. I remember being able to do a partition on my Windows (98/XP) and installing SuSE Linux on it. Fun times.
But what to say about the manuals?
Those manuals and books included with the CDs, in the box.
For me they were a catalyst in my Linux learning.
Really good quality manuals, with reference tables, and covering many (many) topics. From the the graphical environment to the command line, from the administration of the local system, to network services, good structure, nice tips, cheatsheets, reference tables, even covering kernel compilation!
As you say, they did include everything needed, to live together with win98... tools, floppy images, etc... and the documentation about howto do it beforehand.
In that modem times, with low speed internet, the CDs where valuable, indeed.
But those books included in the box, for people like me in such times (self-taught beginner with Linux) those manuals were like gold!
Did use my first linux from a CD in a computers magazine.
Did play with redhat, and debian, then I did buy my first suse box with suse 6.0 (around 1999), and did buy again the box for suse 7 and 8.
Latter I did get faster internet, and did jump 100% to debian for everything. But I still have those manuals with my books.
The complete package (cds + books) is something that I remember fondly for how useful it was to me, and a lot of respect for the work of the people who made it.
But I've never ever found something so cohesive, comprehensive,understandable and with a great guided curve. I kept them long past obsolescence as they just couldn't be replaced by anything better :-/
Sometime in the late 90s I ordered a Red Hat CD from cheapbytes.com (CD burners weren't common yet). I didn't have a credit card yet, but I did have a checking account, so I paid for the order by mailing in a check.
Yep. They used to be premium in the 90s and even early 2000s. I remember how you were special if you had a CD burner on your computer instead of a regular CD Player :). Kinda like difference between a VCP and VCR for even older kids.
Is still fun! There is Tumbleweed, a full rolling distribution (all packages with its own update cadence, and OBS fully building the dependencies that are impacted). There is also MicroOS, a transactional OS (BtrFS subvolumes for rootfs are read-only, and the update happens in the snapshot that will be activated after the reboot, providing a self-healing system when an upgrade does not affect the running environment)
Also Leap, but this is indeed boring (15.3 will be based fully in SLE binaries)
Coming back to Suse was a bit like coming home. (-:
Oh that's so true, i started with 7.2 or .1, but never worked well, so i switched to mandrake, then a ~decade Debian, and now back (about 2years ago) to OpenSuse Leap (but with XFS as / and just on the laptop) everything else FreeBSD.
I wish them nothing but success, now that IBM has RHEL, maybe SLES will get new attention.
https://siasky.net/NACTymsHp70KBDeyHDUlyO-XHW6nMidXO-4PM4aYy...
That was that until it worked like a charm with better driver support (and a Debian based distro) a few years later.
I did not anticipate how much of an impact on my life that was going to have.
TL;DR - Go Suse! (-: