This will have a number of factors, but some key ones for me: Brand recognition. Ubunutu is big, when I needed a linux VM distro guess what I chose? When I bo

This will have a number of factors, but some key ones for me: Brand recognition. Ubunutu is big, when I needed a linux VM distro guess what I chose? When I bought a linode, guess what I chose? Popularity of the cloud/servers. More people are running servers these days for various things. EC2 and cheap VPS are making a lot more people interested in a free, powerful and stable OS that will run their server with minimum hassle and maximum ability to find articles on google. Ease. Ubuntu has great docs, lots of easy to understand tutorials and easy package management. There are others, but this is it for me. Ubunutu is so much win.