How old are your "older colleagues"? I'm 35 and I remember "the land before Git", let alone the time before GUI Git clients...

My first Linux install didn't have a GUI at all, at the start. I didn't have enough floppy disks to download all of the Slackware A, N, and X packages, so I downloaded A and a subset of N onto floppies, which let me bootstrap PPP so that I could start downloading the X packages to get a working GUI going. That was on 33k6, and only when my parents didn't want to use the phone, so it took a while...