In fact my friend who studied in UMIST (now part of University of Manchester) introduced me to Linux. The fact that Manchester Computing Centre (MCC) is based inside UoM probably make it accessible to him because at the time Linux was installed from floppies.
Yggdrasil was released half a year or so later, and included most of these tools.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCC_Interim_Linux