Regarding the early days of Ubuntu, you've got to consider that where Ubuntu came from is not where we are now. When I first encountered Ubuntu, it was one of t

Regarding the early days of Ubuntu, you've got to consider that where Ubuntu came from is not where we are now. When I first encountered Ubuntu, it was one of the first to try to make something polished for the desktop and not try to charge a lot of money for it. This was and is a very different purpose to Debian and did require customization. Ubuntu's competitors were never Debian, but Mandrake Linux and SUSE. Ubuntu shipped out free CDs internationally and encouraged you to take more than you needed to spread the Ubuntu. In the days of 56k modems this was amazing. This was the era when compiling your own kernel was a fairly normal part of desktop Linux tinkering. Today there are polished distros that just work, Fedora being a great example. Ubuntu wouldn't personally be my choice for desktop or servers for some years now and I haven't used Ubuntu on the desktop since about 2006 and on a server since 2012. Already by 2007 there were nicer out the box experiences such as Linux Mint. Were it not for Ubuntu (and Mandrake before it), I would probably not have got into Linux until several years later. It was Gentoo, Slackware and Arch that taught me the internals.