![]() The Ubuntu Forums is a good compromise in that it has knowledgeable users but is generally free of the elitism and noob-disdain of other, more difficult distros’ forums.The free CDs worldwide (including shipping) is a nice gimmick that set Ubuntu apart, even if a lot of those CDs were given away to people who later threw them in the trash.Unlike homebrews Mepis and PCLinuxOS, though, Ubuntu had the backing of some serious money (Mark Shuttleworth’s).Unlike giants Red Hat and Novell, Canonical was targeting home users first with its catchy (if slightly misleading) “Linux for Human Beings” slogan.What got it off the ground? As far as I can tell, these are what Ubuntu had going for it: The amazing thing is that even back when Ubuntu was barely functional (no easy-codec-installation or restricted-drivers-manager or Ubiquity installer) it was getting buzz. No, it didn’t come with Flash, Java, Nvidia drivers, Skype, Adobe Reader, or MP3 playback. And, yet, only a month after using Mepis, I moved to Ubuntu and stuck with it for three years. In retrospect, I don’t know why I was so scared of it, but I was. The word terminal was a scary word to see. I figured in 2005 that distros like Mepis and Linspire would thrive and be at the forefront of bringing Linux to ex-Windows power users, if not “the masses.” After all, in Ubuntu, I couldn’t (in Hoary) edit the applications menu, get numlock to stick, install Nvidia drivers, or add software repositories without resorting to the command-line, which was a very daunting thing for me to use when I first started on Linux. Its documentation Wiki (especially at the time I started using it, less so now) is a mess. ![]() It doesn’t have additional CDs (meaning, for software installation, you probably need a broadband connection).It doesn’t come with popular proprietary software.On the surface, to a new user, Ubuntu would seem like a bad choice. The CD froze up part way through the installation, which led me to use Mepis for a month instead. My first experience with Ubuntu was not the best. I started with the next release, Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog). The very first release was Ubuntu 4.10, nicknamed Warty Warthog. I was there… not from the very start but from very close to the beginning. Ubuntu is the top distro on DistroWatch (again, just meaning there’s a lot of interest in it-not necessarily that the largest number of Linux users are choosing it over other distros). Many YouTube videos about how to do something on Linux will feature Ubuntu. Every tech news article about Linux mentions Ubuntu and will often recommend Ubuntu to new users. No one has hard numbers, of course, but based on how much it’s talked about on the web, Ubuntu appears to be the most popular Linux distribution for home use (as opposed to for servers).
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