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I don't think it's a secret that Shuttleworth is looking for outside investment, or at least to put the company on a more stable financial footing. That's why U

I don't think it's a secret that Shuttleworth is looking for outside investment, or at least to put the company on a more stable financial footing. That's why Unity was dropped. As to you other point, their goal was to make a Linux distro that was easy to install, setup and use for the ordinary person (or ordinary geek at least). They might have lost their way a bit in recent years but they were initially remarkably successful. Sure others had tried to do the same before them but for its time Ubuntu was by far the best of them. That's more arguable nowadays but that doesn't undermine what they achieved.

kev009 9y ago
I've been doing Linux for two decades so I know that was the perception at the time. It was almost all marketing though, with just a bit of lucky time window alignment, i.e. the releases happened to be at slightly better cutoff points and therefore had better upstream kernel/xorg/mesa/cups/whatever in the most critical days of 6.04 and 8.04.
- ChrisSD 9y ago
  So you thought Debian's desktop install and setup process was as simple as Ubuntu's? I don't think that's true even today. And Ubuntu made changes and compromises that I don't think Debian ever would so simply being a Debian installer wouldn't have worked out. It feels like rewriting history to simply brush off most of their engineering efforts as simple being marketing.
  - kev009 9y ago
    Yes, I did think that. The only hard part about Debian was finding the right ISO. The docs and installation experience were fantastic. To this day their landing page is kind of confusing, especially to a layman, so I'll give you that.
    - ensiferum 9y ago
      Does debian support USB installs yet? ;-)
      - kev009 9y ago
        It did since Sarge https://www.debian.org/releases/sarge/i386/ch04s04.html.en https://www.debian.org/releases/sarge/i386/ch04s04.html.en
      - detaro 9y ago
        Yes, and has for ages.
lawl 9y ago
Yup, things were different 10 years ago and Ubuntu really made a lot of things easier. Back then getting 3D acceleration to work was a real nightmare (for a linux newbie like me) at the time. Or WiFi drivers. Or getting your system to play videos, because you didn't have the correct gstreamer-* packages. 10 years later and pretty much every distro works out of the box on pretty much all hardware, but back then Ubuntu was definitely ahead of the pack in these regards.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Only if you don't consider laptops as part of "pretty much all hardware". Even my Eee PC 1215B, which was sold with Linux pre-installed, had wlan driver issues. And nowadays with the whole AMD driver split, the 3D acceleration went down. For example, now I have to force enable it on Firefox.
- jimnotgym 9y ago
  I made the jump to Linux in the last 5 years. Confused by the myriad of distributions I downloaded a few of the more popular ones and ran them in Virtualbox. Ubuntu was noticeably faster and more stable so I chose Ubuntu. It turns out that what I was really seeing was Ubuntu was faster and more stable in Virtualbox and since that is the only way I can get Linux on my work desktop this is important to me. I'm sure many people use Linux this way, so this will continue to be important. Maybe Debian would be OK now, but Gnome 3 takes up far too much of the screen on my laptop with menu bars, and this is why I am sticking with Unity for now
- veidr 9y ago
  > 10 years later and pretty much every distro works out of the box on pretty much all hardware I do appreciate the strides Linux has made since a decade ago, but I still think that's crazy talk. I've never seen laptop hardware that Linux "works out of the box" on, and I've installed it on at least 15 laptops in those ten years. I mean if "works" is defined to mean something equivalent to what macOS or Windows do. Wi-Fi, webcam, bluetooth, graphics acceleration, highres screen, sound, fingerprint reader, keyboard backlight, hardware volume/brightness controls, multitouch trackpad... at least some of those things are always broken on any mainstream distro I've tried, including Ubuntu. Doesn't mean Linux isn't awesome, but saying it works out of the box on almost all hardware is a pretty radical downward redefinition of "works".

kev009 9y ago

I've been doing Linux for two decades so I know that was the perception at the time. It was almost all marketing though, with just a bit of lucky time window alignment, i.e. the releases happened to be at slightly better cutoff points and therefore had better upstream kernel/xorg/mesa/cups/whatever in the most critical days of 6.04 and 8.04.

ChrisSD 9y ago
So you thought Debian's desktop install and setup process was as simple as Ubuntu's? I don't think that's true even today. And Ubuntu made changes and compromises that I don't think Debian ever would so simply being a Debian installer wouldn't have worked out. It feels like rewriting history to simply brush off most of their engineering efforts as simple being marketing.
- kev009 9y ago
  Yes, I did think that. The only hard part about Debian was finding the right ISO. The docs and installation experience were fantastic. To this day their landing page is kind of confusing, especially to a layman, so I'll give you that.
  - ensiferum 9y ago
    Does debian support USB installs yet? ;-)
    - kev009 9y ago
      It did since Sarge https://www.debian.org/releases/sarge/i386/ch04s04.html.en https://www.debian.org/releases/sarge/i386/ch04s04.html.en
    - detaro 9y ago
      Yes, and has for ages.

lawl 9y ago

Yup, things were different 10 years ago and Ubuntu really made a lot of things easier. Back then getting 3D acceleration to work was a real nightmare (for a linux newbie like me) at the time. Or WiFi drivers. Or getting your system to play videos, because you didn't have the correct gstreamer-* packages. 10 years later and pretty much every distro works out of the box on pretty much all hardware, but back then Ubuntu was definitely ahead of the pack in these regards.

pjmlp 9y ago
Only if you don't consider laptops as part of "pretty much all hardware". Even my Eee PC 1215B, which was sold with Linux pre-installed, had wlan driver issues. And nowadays with the whole AMD driver split, the 3D acceleration went down. For example, now I have to force enable it on Firefox.
jimnotgym 9y ago
I made the jump to Linux in the last 5 years. Confused by the myriad of distributions I downloaded a few of the more popular ones and ran them in Virtualbox. Ubuntu was noticeably faster and more stable so I chose Ubuntu. It turns out that what I was really seeing was Ubuntu was faster and more stable in Virtualbox and since that is the only way I can get Linux on my work desktop this is important to me. I'm sure many people use Linux this way, so this will continue to be important. Maybe Debian would be OK now, but Gnome 3 takes up far too much of the screen on my laptop with menu bars, and this is why I am sticking with Unity for now
veidr 9y ago
> 10 years later and pretty much every distro works out of the box on pretty much all hardware I do appreciate the strides Linux has made since a decade ago, but I still think that's crazy talk. I've never seen laptop hardware that Linux "works out of the box" on, and I've installed it on at least 15 laptops in those ten years. I mean if "works" is defined to mean something equivalent to what macOS or Windows do. Wi-Fi, webcam, bluetooth, graphics acceleration, highres screen, sound, fingerprint reader, keyboard backlight, hardware volume/brightness controls, multitouch trackpad... at least some of those things are always broken on any mainstream distro I've tried, including Ubuntu. Doesn't mean Linux isn't awesome, but saying it works out of the box on almost all hardware is a pretty radical downward redefinition of "works".