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What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way I'm not sure you remember what the Linux landscape looked like when Ubuntu was first released, but

by dagw 3y ago

What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way I'm not sure you remember what the Linux landscape looked like when Ubuntu was first released, but it was a pretty huge deal at the time. So much more hardware and software (esp. media playback) worked out of the box than any other distro at the time. USB and wireless networking just worked. The desktop they provided was was really nice and well configured as well with most defaults working the way most people expecting them to. Plus the pretty amazing fact that they would send you an install CD, for free, basically anywhere in the world. Back when downloading 700 MB over the internet was an impossibility for most people, this was a seriously huge deal for getting Linux into the hands of people. You could take that free CD, pop it into almost any computers, just accept all the defaults and be pretty sure to have a working Linux desktop at the end. At the time, that was a huge accomplishment. We can all have opinions about the choices Canonical has made over the years and what they have become, but let's not pretend that they weren't one of the biggest and most significant drivers of Linux on the desktop back in the day.

aulin 3y ago
Please, desktop was plain GNOME. Same experience as fedora, arch, and every other gnome based distro. They had a good installer (ubiquity?) and a permissive policy with proprietary software and codecs. They had a dedicated installer for proprietary drivers (jockey?) and a huge repository (universe) with packages, drivers and codecs that other distros like fedora and debian deemed more ideologically or legally questionable. That's what set them apart, people wanted mp3 codecs and Nvidia drivers. And they had consistent branding, with nice identitary themes, color, wallpapers. Something community based projects always failed to achieve.
- NegativeLatency 3y ago
  On what planet is the Arch Linux install process the same as the Ubuntu install process. As someone at the time who didn’t know anything about Linux and had dialup internet, it was extremely handy to be able to pop in a disk and get running like I was used to with other OSes
  - boomboomsubban 3y ago
    >what planet is the Arch Linux install process the same as the Ubuntu install process. That is not what they said, the desktop was plain GNOME and that experience was the same as any other distro running plain GNOME. What set them apart was the installer and the rest of their post.
    - vetinari 3y ago
      But the desktop was not plain GNOME. It was polished GNOME. They were but of the jokes at the time for the color theme chosen, but it had polish that plain GNOME didn't. That is valid even today; just the choice of default font is huge. Ubuntu font vs Cantarell? They are not even in the same league.
      - deaddodo 3y ago
        In the early days it wasn't "polished" in any way other than the font or color choice. Which just about every distro was doing at the time (Fedora also had a clean and liked theme). But sure, here's the comparison. Ubuntu 4.10: https://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=664&image=ubuntu_history_warty4 https://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=664&image=ubuntu_histo... Fedora Core 3: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Fedora_Core_3.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Fedora_C...
        forgetfulness 3y ago
        Both looked dated back then, but Fedora Core 3 more so. Besides a slightly less clunky selection for theming, the game changer was the installer and the willingness to chuck the Free Software purity, back when the FSF was at the height of its influence and the terrible that was setting up Linux made it inaccessible to even CompSci students, let alone the general public. The delivery of Live CDs (I believe initially they still had a Live/Install split like other contemporary distros) was _huge_ also in places where broadband was too slow to make downloading the ISOs practical if you weren't 100% committed since before even starting, and it reached many countries, in South America it'd for sure be a huge pain to download ISOs. All these actions to make Linux more accessible were a pretty big deal.
- forgetfulness 3y ago
  Goes to show that one thing is creating technology, and another thing is creating a product people can use. That entrance to the market and that initial leg up was also the height of accomplishment for Canonical. They were weaker in the technology aspect and, ultimately, they were a privately-owned corporation, so space for community participation was limited, which made them lose the mystique by year two or three. As they tried to find ways to monetize, as a nicely packaged desktop OS in live CDs wasn't the way to go, they tried to get into vertical integration and more infrastructure-centric developments, that again, weren't their forte. As this went on, they went more noticeably corporate, making them lose further appeal and goodwill.
- ftaghn 3y ago
  > That's what set them apart, people wanted mp3 codecs and Nvidia drivers. Oh, it was far, far more than that. For example, wifi support was still extremely immature when the first ubuntu releases came out and a lot of people made out-of-tree drivers to support the various wifi chips that were on the market. Out-of-tree drivers were not included in any distro but Ubuntu, and installing them on a distro like Fedora was a major pain, my laptop of the time depended on one of those drivers, the original developer probably got tired of the process of mainlining a driver and abandoned it and I had to modify the source code to adapt it to whatever API refactoring happened at the time on the kernel version used by Fedora to get it running. Running a roller like arch while depending on this stuff? ah, nonono. By out-of-tree I don't necessarily mean proprietary driver, there were a lot of open source drivers that weren't mainlined, it was kind of a wild west. It was also the first major distro to feature a Live CD installer. Sure, you could theoretically install LiveCD distros like Knoppix, but it wasn't recommended - and the desktop and assortment of apps lacked polish compared to what Ubuntu preselected. It gave you a fresh debian system with recent packages without the breakages that happened routinely in sid (Ubuntu came out in an era where debian had major struggles with stable releases. These days it has gotten a lot better and I use debian stable now. Flatpak and containers also solved one of the pain points of LTS.) As a long time linux user who started with slackware and the pain of configuring xfree86, the pains of winmodems and other hardware troubles of the past, I've come to appreciate polish and when Ubuntu came out I really liked it. The more the years come by, the less I want to fuss with my system. Ubuntu had a level of polish that was absolutely unmatched. These days, the differences between distros have massively shrank and I do not find Ubuntu any more convenient than regular debian and even arch isn't that harsh to use (though, after experiencing some package updates causing breakages I don't want to fuss with anything rolling anymore), but when Ubuntu came out, it was a revelation. And the revelation lasted for quite a while, it didnt stop at the original release, because when Gnome 3 came out, it was incredibly barebones and painful to use (they didn't even want a menu entry to reboot your computer. Seriously. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/06/howto-four-tweaks-to-bring-back-missing-functionality-in-gnome-30/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/06/howto... "The developers argue that users should generally suspend their computers instead of shutting down." I mean, what the eff? ), while Unity introduced really innovative features that I still miss to this day, like the global menu that allowed you to use functions from any GTK software by typing words on your keyboard, showing all entries that matched. It was a very efficient way to navigate software, more than moving the mouse and hunting for entries trying to find the right submenu. Using Ubuntu when Ubuntu introduced Unity meant avoiding the worst time period of Linux desktops. It was also the era of KDE 4 which should have been named "SIGSEGV 4.0" a full featured desktop that showed constant segmentation fault dialogs. Ubuntu didn't become popular for no reason. It was a really sad state of affair. I don't like Ubuntu anymore. Since they dropped Unity they completely abandoned any contribution to the linux desktop as a whole, while snaps are flatpak but much worse (the more you install, the slower your boot, and apps launch much slower than on flatpak) and with a proprietary backend. I see it now as a me-too distro that does everything worse. But I have fond memories of it. Debian stable + flatpak + podman is giving me the experience I seek in a desktop these days : no fuss, the OS has all the packages I need, if I need something more recent I can use a pet container or flatpak, the polish is good enough (and, unfortunately, other distros don't really improve enough there to justify their existence), I don't have to /think/ about my system for the duration of the stable release, only when the time comes for the next full-upgrade, the modern installer sets up a sane desktop out of the box and now they even include firmware by default. It's the zen I need.
- lannisterstark 3y ago
  >Same experience as fedora, arch, and every other gnome based distro This really shows your disconnect with reality. Arch is nowhere close to as 'easy' for a beginner as Ubuntu is. Canonical and Ubuntu have established themselves as one of the most user and beginner friendly Linux distros out there. Arch ain't it.
Foobar8568 3y ago
Mandrake/Mandriva distribution was easy to use/install, but since it was from a French company, it never had any traction, if I remember were, it was created in late 90s.
deaddodo 3y ago
> So much more hardware and software (esp. media playback) worked out of the box than any other distro at the time SuSE and other mainstream distros worked "out-of-the box" just as well, or better, than the early Ubuntu versions. Fedora, Debian, etc didn't not work because they couldn't, but they were trying to make a point about free software and what that meant, so they took a strict stance on included licensed code. It was 2 minutes of adding RPMForge to your repos to fix, however. The early versions of Ubuntu weren't popular because they were easier, they were popular because they followed the AOL model and would send you an install disc for free. They leaned into making the install process easier much later (around the 6-7 versions). > The desktop they provided was was really nice and well configured as well with most defaults working the way most people expecting them to. Again, it was bog standard GNOME with the Humanity theme. The experience and "defaults" were about equivalent to Fedora, until they started forcing in their own customizations (ads, their sidebar, macOS style titlebars/menus, etc). > Plus the pretty amazing fact that they would send you an install CD, for free, basically anywhere in the world. Back when downloading 700 MB over the internet was an impossibility for most people, this was a seriously huge deal for getting Linux into the hands of people. Sure, there you go. The one real reason they were popular and the one real accomplishment. No doubt. Too bad it came at the expense of them not upstreaming any of their work, taking overly opinionated stances that rarely panned out and created temporary schisms in multiple communities (GNOME, systemd, Wayland, Debian, Flatpak, etc) over their collective ego until their personal projects inevitably fail, setting each back considerably each time.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  I think you shouldn't undersell the impact of Ubuntu shipping with binaries/installers for proprietary drivers, media codecs and things like adobe flash. These were easy enough to install on other distros, but for a noob user Ubuntu was more streamlined. Of course this wasn't a technical innovation, it was just an exercise in pragmatic legal risk-taking.
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    No one's underselling this, you're overselling this. Jockey (their proprietary software installer) didn't become a thing in Ubuntu until their 6.10-7.04 releases. 2-2.5 years after the first version. SuSE, Mandrake and other distributions were shipping proprietary software in their base installs in 2003-ish; four years before Ubuntu did. There's no doubt that Fedora and Debian's hard stance on Free Software turned people away. However, even if they did include them, Ubuntu would still be where it is today. Because their popularity mostly came from the millions of CDs they shipped to people for free. Fedora (or Mandriva, Xandros, Linspire, etc) would be the most popular distro today, if Shuttleworth did the same for them (and just included jockey on the Fedora discs, with the RPMForge repos pre-installed). But then his ego wouldn't have been stroked and he couldn't be in charge, despite the outcome being far greater for the Linux community overall.

by dagw 3y ago

aulin 3y ago

Please, desktop was plain GNOME. Same experience as fedora, arch, and every other gnome based distro. They had a good installer (ubiquity?) and a permissive policy with proprietary software and codecs. They had a dedicated installer for proprietary drivers (jockey?) and a huge repository (universe) with packages, drivers and codecs that other distros like fedora and debian deemed more ideologically or legally questionable. That's what set them apart, people wanted mp3 codecs and Nvidia drivers. And they had consistent branding, with nice identitary themes, color, wallpapers. Something community based projects always failed to achieve.

NegativeLatency 3y ago
On what planet is the Arch Linux install process the same as the Ubuntu install process. As someone at the time who didn’t know anything about Linux and had dialup internet, it was extremely handy to be able to pop in a disk and get running like I was used to with other OSes
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  >what planet is the Arch Linux install process the same as the Ubuntu install process. That is not what they said, the desktop was plain GNOME and that experience was the same as any other distro running plain GNOME. What set them apart was the installer and the rest of their post.
  - vetinari 3y ago
    But the desktop was not plain GNOME. It was polished GNOME. They were but of the jokes at the time for the color theme chosen, but it had polish that plain GNOME didn't. That is valid even today; just the choice of default font is huge. Ubuntu font vs Cantarell? They are not even in the same league.
    - deaddodo 3y ago
      In the early days it wasn't "polished" in any way other than the font or color choice. Which just about every distro was doing at the time (Fedora also had a clean and liked theme). But sure, here's the comparison. Ubuntu 4.10: https://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=664&image=ubuntu_history_warty4 https://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=664&image=ubuntu_histo... Fedora Core 3: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Fedora_Core_3.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Fedora_C...
      - forgetfulness 3y ago
        Both looked dated back then, but Fedora Core 3 more so. Besides a slightly less clunky selection for theming, the game changer was the installer and the willingness to chuck the Free Software purity, back when the FSF was at the height of its influence and the terrible that was setting up Linux made it inaccessible to even CompSci students, let alone the general public. The delivery of Live CDs (I believe initially they still had a Live/Install split like other contemporary distros) was _huge_ also in places where broadband was too slow to make downloading the ISOs practical if you weren't 100% committed since before even starting, and it reached many countries, in South America it'd for sure be a huge pain to download ISOs. All these actions to make Linux more accessible were a pretty big deal.
forgetfulness 3y ago
Goes to show that one thing is creating technology, and another thing is creating a product people can use. That entrance to the market and that initial leg up was also the height of accomplishment for Canonical. They were weaker in the technology aspect and, ultimately, they were a privately-owned corporation, so space for community participation was limited, which made them lose the mystique by year two or three. As they tried to find ways to monetize, as a nicely packaged desktop OS in live CDs wasn't the way to go, they tried to get into vertical integration and more infrastructure-centric developments, that again, weren't their forte. As this went on, they went more noticeably corporate, making them lose further appeal and goodwill.
ftaghn 3y ago
> That's what set them apart, people wanted mp3 codecs and Nvidia drivers. Oh, it was far, far more than that. For example, wifi support was still extremely immature when the first ubuntu releases came out and a lot of people made out-of-tree drivers to support the various wifi chips that were on the market. Out-of-tree drivers were not included in any distro but Ubuntu, and installing them on a distro like Fedora was a major pain, my laptop of the time depended on one of those drivers, the original developer probably got tired of the process of mainlining a driver and abandoned it and I had to modify the source code to adapt it to whatever API refactoring happened at the time on the kernel version used by Fedora to get it running. Running a roller like arch while depending on this stuff? ah, nonono. By out-of-tree I don't necessarily mean proprietary driver, there were a lot of open source drivers that weren't mainlined, it was kind of a wild west. It was also the first major distro to feature a Live CD installer. Sure, you could theoretically install LiveCD distros like Knoppix, but it wasn't recommended - and the desktop and assortment of apps lacked polish compared to what Ubuntu preselected. It gave you a fresh debian system with recent packages without the breakages that happened routinely in sid (Ubuntu came out in an era where debian had major struggles with stable releases. These days it has gotten a lot better and I use debian stable now. Flatpak and containers also solved one of the pain points of LTS.) As a long time linux user who started with slackware and the pain of configuring xfree86, the pains of winmodems and other hardware troubles of the past, I've come to appreciate polish and when Ubuntu came out I really liked it. The more the years come by, the less I want to fuss with my system. Ubuntu had a level of polish that was absolutely unmatched. These days, the differences between distros have massively shrank and I do not find Ubuntu any more convenient than regular debian and even arch isn't that harsh to use (though, after experiencing some package updates causing breakages I don't want to fuss with anything rolling anymore), but when Ubuntu came out, it was a revelation. And the revelation lasted for quite a while, it didnt stop at the original release, because when Gnome 3 came out, it was incredibly barebones and painful to use (they didn't even want a menu entry to reboot your computer. Seriously. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/06/howto-four-tweaks-to-bring-back-missing-functionality-in-gnome-30/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/06/howto... "The developers argue that users should generally suspend their computers instead of shutting down." I mean, what the eff? ), while Unity introduced really innovative features that I still miss to this day, like the global menu that allowed you to use functions from any GTK software by typing words on your keyboard, showing all entries that matched. It was a very efficient way to navigate software, more than moving the mouse and hunting for entries trying to find the right submenu. Using Ubuntu when Ubuntu introduced Unity meant avoiding the worst time period of Linux desktops. It was also the era of KDE 4 which should have been named "SIGSEGV 4.0" a full featured desktop that showed constant segmentation fault dialogs. Ubuntu didn't become popular for no reason. It was a really sad state of affair. I don't like Ubuntu anymore. Since they dropped Unity they completely abandoned any contribution to the linux desktop as a whole, while snaps are flatpak but much worse (the more you install, the slower your boot, and apps launch much slower than on flatpak) and with a proprietary backend. I see it now as a me-too distro that does everything worse. But I have fond memories of it. Debian stable + flatpak + podman is giving me the experience I seek in a desktop these days : no fuss, the OS has all the packages I need, if I need something more recent I can use a pet container or flatpak, the polish is good enough (and, unfortunately, other distros don't really improve enough there to justify their existence), I don't have to /think/ about my system for the duration of the stable release, only when the time comes for the next full-upgrade, the modern installer sets up a sane desktop out of the box and now they even include firmware by default. It's the zen I need.
lannisterstark 3y ago
>Same experience as fedora, arch, and every other gnome based distro This really shows your disconnect with reality. Arch is nowhere close to as 'easy' for a beginner as Ubuntu is. Canonical and Ubuntu have established themselves as one of the most user and beginner friendly Linux distros out there. Arch ain't it.

Foobar8568 3y ago

Mandrake/Mandriva distribution was easy to use/install, but since it was from a French company, it never had any traction, if I remember were, it was created in late 90s.

deaddodo 3y ago

> So much more hardware and software (esp. media playback) worked out of the box than any other distro at the time SuSE and other mainstream distros worked "out-of-the box" just as well, or better, than the early Ubuntu versions. Fedora, Debian, etc didn't not work because they couldn't, but they were trying to make a point about free software and what that meant, so they took a strict stance on included licensed code. It was 2 minutes of adding RPMForge to your repos to fix, however. The early versions of Ubuntu weren't popular because they were easier, they were popular because they followed the AOL model and would send you an install disc for free. They leaned into making the install process easier much later (around the 6-7 versions). > The desktop they provided was was really nice and well configured as well with most defaults working the way most people expecting them to. Again, it was bog standard GNOME with the Humanity theme. The experience and "defaults" were about equivalent to Fedora, until they started forcing in their own customizations (ads, their sidebar, macOS style titlebars/menus, etc). > Plus the pretty amazing fact that they would send you an install CD, for free, basically anywhere in the world. Back when downloading 700 MB over the internet was an impossibility for most people, this was a seriously huge deal for getting Linux into the hands of people. Sure, there you go. The one real reason they were popular and the one real accomplishment. No doubt. Too bad it came at the expense of them not upstreaming any of their work, taking overly opinionated stances that rarely panned out and created temporary schisms in multiple communities (GNOME, systemd, Wayland, Debian, Flatpak, etc) over their collective ego until their personal projects inevitably fail, setting each back considerably each time.

mcpackieh 3y ago
I think you shouldn't undersell the impact of Ubuntu shipping with binaries/installers for proprietary drivers, media codecs and things like adobe flash. These were easy enough to install on other distros, but for a noob user Ubuntu was more streamlined. Of course this wasn't a technical innovation, it was just an exercise in pragmatic legal risk-taking.
- deaddodo 3y ago
  No one's underselling this, you're overselling this. Jockey (their proprietary software installer) didn't become a thing in Ubuntu until their 6.10-7.04 releases. 2-2.5 years after the first version. SuSE, Mandrake and other distributions were shipping proprietary software in their base installs in 2003-ish; four years before Ubuntu did. There's no doubt that Fedora and Debian's hard stance on Free Software turned people away. However, even if they did include them, Ubuntu would still be where it is today. Because their popularity mostly came from the millions of CDs they shipped to people for free. Fedora (or Mandriva, Xandros, Linspire, etc) would be the most popular distro today, if Shuttleworth did the same for them (and just included jockey on the Fedora discs, with the RPMForge repos pre-installed). But then his ego wouldn't have been stroked and he couldn't be in charge, despite the outcome being far greater for the Linux community overall.