Why Ubuntu?

[monktbd]

Well I can just speak for myself, but I started off with Gentoo right away, and had a VERY hard time figuring things out...

well i think that is to be expected with being new to linux and using gentoo. but i guess you leanred more within the first week about linux than a lot of ubuntu users do in their first year....


about redhat/novell and their free distribution spinoffs: i doubt that you can detach them from the main corporation behind it, as you cannot detach ubuntu from canonical and mark shuttleworth surely will want to make some more money with it and his goal surely is as well to make good business with ubuntu. big graphical desktop applications and the desktops itself would not be where they are right now without the help of corporations (trolltech, novell, sun, ibm, redhat ....).

[Seneche]

That is true, I learned more in an hour using the Linux From Scratch Project, than I did in the 2 1/2 years on Ubuntu.

[Het Irv]

For me it was convenience.  The first Linux I was handed was a Ubuntu disk and told go have fun.  And I have, the community is great, some software doesn't work quite right but in what distro does everything work.  Drivers suck. I spent 2 weeks trying to get my wireless to work but all in all.  I like it.  Mebey after I am more confident I'll pick up another disto and mess with it. Ubuntu = n00b friendly

[mawdryn]

I've been running Ubuntu for well over a year now and I have no complaints it.

It was the first debian based distro I tried. I had previously used Slackware 2.1, Redhat 7.3 through to 9 , Mandrake 10.1 and Fedora 4 and 5, but Ubuntu surprised me with it's live CD function and various other features that I had not seen previously in linux.

It installed with ease and it worked first time which amazed me, and I've never had any real issues with it. I can't say I've seen a more user friendly distro in my experience. Even my wife who's ... er... average with computers had no problems adapting to it's ease of use. I've stuck with it ever since.

[overlow]

My reasons why ubuntu is simple, it's only distro where i can find help for finnish. I like more about fedora but when i come to any prob with it i can't get help with my own language. I bet that's one of the biggest reason why use ubuntu, that it is for most languages in the world, and many of them has their own forum, that other distros have forums maybe english, french, german and spanish, or some more large languages, but not to small countries languages what ubuntu have.

[geloren]

I have been asking myself the same question lately.
After Fedora Core, (K)ubuntu, Mepis, Mandriva and finaly Opensuse... i have never really understood why people seem to like ubuntu-based distros the most.

For me... Fedora and Opensuse kick ass...
Ubuntu based systems always got me into trouble... most of the times, i couldn't even install it properly or it wouldn't boot the live cd well.

I guess what makes it popular is (and we can't ignore the impact of it) the free cd's you can request by the ship-it service. leave your adress, and ubuntu linux is coming to your home.

That's the only reason i can think of.

[Xordan]

Ubuntu uses apt, which is the best binary package manager imo. That alone makes it one of the best for me It feels quite polished and 'just works' when doing many things too. I suppose experience depends quite a bit on hardware. Wireless support is still horrible compared to Windows, but that's true for all distros.

[sliss]

I love ubuntu! I work on Linux for like 10 years redhat 5 was my first. Than for a long time Mandrake. Went on with Gentoo and still am as I think it is the best.

But.. Ubuntu is quite nice.. I use the development version Gutsy (7.10) on my laptop and I am very happy with the result. end of October Gutsy will come out of development and man it will be great! compiz-fusion out of the box. Lots of nice features are on its way. And to compare it back to gentoo installing a new package is way quicker.

ps is not working properly on ubuntu though ;-) but didnt put much time in it either.

Well I can just speak for myself, but I started off with Gentoo right away, and had a VERY hard time figuring things out...

aii   well it is a good start I think as it shows you how the system really works and gives you very much options.

cheers,

[disi]

I like Ubuntu, just for the reason that it makes the Linux community larger. If there are more Linux users, there will be more drivers and apps for everyone 

For myself I switch a lot, but since 2003 always fall back to Gentoo. Before that I liked Slackware and Debian.

I tried Ubuntu and you can get your System installed within 10min up to your Desktop and all drivers, they did a good work to make things easier for users.

edit:// for comparison, it took me 4 days with my last Gentoo to get a proper Desktop... and still testing around (atm I try to get the temperature of my gpu's down)