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When Ubuntu came along, it was VASTLY more friendly for laptop and desktop use than the other flavors of its day. Hardware that required me to tweak config fil

When Ubuntu came along, it was VASTLY more friendly for laptop and desktop use than the other flavors of its day. Hardware that required me to tweak config files in RedHat "just worked" with Ubuntu. It was much simpler to install Java for development. Etc. So I read all of the holy wars about APT vs. RPM, Unity vs. whatever, etc. I can imagine that LTS support is important to a lot of people. But honestly, for me I just spent 10 years learning Ubuntu on my local machine. So in a situation where a developer like me gets to influence which OS will be used on the servers (a situation that happens surprisingly often!), I'll generally go with what I know. I suspect that this is the origin story for most of Ubuntu's base.

asark 8y ago
Ubuntu had saner default desktop package sets than most other distros at the time, for a good long while. You wanted Firefox. Everyone wanted Firefox, pretty much. Obviously. Yet other distros liked to package up Epiphany or some such weirdness when you let them give you the deluxe desktop software installation. Same for lots of other categories of desktop software. Ubuntu's defaults and the options they pushed to the front were consistently the right ones, for the time. I can only assume politics and oddball personal preferences were behind every other distro getting that so wrong for so long. And yeah it didn't matter that much if you were fine picking your own packages, but Ubuntu tested with their defaults and things worked pretty smoothly with them, plus they were mostly the programs you'd have chosen yourself, anyway. I've never seen another distro where I could just say "gimme the desktop, the whole shebang" and be more or less ready to get going when it was done—all the others it's "no, god no, give me barebones and I'll install what I want". This is early Ubuntu, mind you. I stopped using it (and, for the most part, desktop linux generally) when they brought in PulseAudio and wrecked audio—previously among the most reliable things on my Linux systems, for almost a decade—and I basically rage-quit Linux.

asark 8y ago

Ubuntu had saner default desktop package sets than most other distros at the time, for a good long while. You wanted Firefox. Everyone wanted Firefox, pretty much. Obviously. Yet other distros liked to package up Epiphany or some such weirdness when you let them give you the deluxe desktop software installation. Same for lots of other categories of desktop software. Ubuntu's defaults and the options they pushed to the front were consistently the right ones, for the time. I can only assume politics and oddball personal preferences were behind every other distro getting that so wrong for so long. And yeah it didn't matter that much if you were fine picking your own packages, but Ubuntu tested with their defaults and things worked pretty smoothly with them, plus they were mostly the programs you'd have chosen yourself, anyway. I've never seen another distro where I could just say "gimme the desktop, the whole shebang" and be more or less ready to get going when it was done—all the others it's "no, god no, give me barebones and I'll install what I want". This is early Ubuntu, mind you. I stopped using it (and, for the most part, desktop linux generally) when they brought in PulseAudio and wrecked audio—previously among the most reliable things on my Linux systems, for almost a decade—and I basically rage-quit Linux.