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 m

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.