From its earliest releases through IIRC '08 or so, one of the nicest things about it was that its default installation and config choices were obviously better

From its earliest releases through IIRC '08 or so, one of the nicest things about it was that its default installation and config choices were obviously better for most users than what other distros picked. "No, goddamnit, I don't want Epiphany or whatever, I want Firefox". Sure enough, Ubuntu installs Firefox by default. "If you've got wifi and you want to manage it from the GUI you'll want to install and configure X, Y, and Z, and you'll need to uninstall the default that Y replaces because it's bad" Or, you know, why doesn't the damn distro do that for me? And Ubuntu (mostly) did. Any other distro at the time, I'd have to install & uninstall a bunch of crap on first boot, or spend time selecting packages in the installer. Ubuntu was the only one I could just hit "install" on and end up pretty close to a reasonable initial set-up. [EDIT] Of course, that went to hell pretty much immediately when they started trying to "lead" on Linux desktop with their own projects, rather than curating & tweaking existing community software. I despise most of what Red Hat's created and done along the way, but they've played the same game and clearly come out on top—Ubuntu both made their distro worse and burned resources getting their ass whupped by Red Hat at the influence-and-control-the-Linux-desktop game, over and over. Ubuntu's init system competitor? Dead, Red Hat's systemd won. Their GTK alternative DE to Red Hat dominated Gnome? Dead, Gnome won. Mir? Dead, Red Hat backed Wayland won. Snap? I dunno but it sucks and everyone hates it so I assume it's heading the same way, and Flatpack or AppImage will win instead (probably Flatpack, though I prefer AppImage).