13 ms·

Ten years of Ubuntu

246 points by hpaavola 12y ago

hpaavola 12y ago
For me the biggest thing about Ubuntu is that it does not feel like a distribution. It's an OS. They don't just pack others stuff inside one image and call it a day. Ubuntu does things in a way that they feel is the correct way. If there is a suitable OSS package for that, great. If not, then they make it. Fedora, Debian and others just gather what's there and ship it. AFAIK Elementary OS is the only other distro that works kinda like Ubuntu, but it looks like an OSX clone.
- SunShiranui 12y ago
  Elementary does look like OSX, but I wouldn't judge them negatively for that. I've been using the distro for a while and I'm quite happy with it.
  - rkuykendall-com 12y ago
    As a mac user that gets nervous when Apple announces new OS X versions, I'm glad there are linux users out there keeping the principles that make OS X great alive. If OS X ever goes too iOS / iCloud for me to bare, I hope Elementary is waiting for me with the same attention to detail, stability, and ease of use that god me hooked on OS X.
    - t0mislav 12y ago
      Same thing here.
cyphax 12y ago
I was an Ubuntu user for a few years. I remember when they'd ship the CD's out for free. One of those things that made Ubuntu great. It was also really good at presenting a very usable Gnome 2.x desktop that was ready to use from the first boot, and I was a very happy user for a while, until they started shipping software a little bit too soon (PulseAudio for example; suddenly Ubuntu didn't have sound out-of-the-box anymore on my machine) and I've once been bitten in the behind by an update that made my video card unsupported all of a sudden, so that prevented X from starting... and then they replaced Gnome with Unity and I kind of stopped caring around that time so I went back to my previous distro. Hopefully for good. :) Congratulations to Mark for starting this otherwise great project! May it have many years ahead of it!
- ooz 12y ago
  Similar story. It started as a tidied up Debian fork. Then since about 12.04 LTS it turned into a tidied up Debian unstable fork with all the bugs in it. As a server only and LTS only user, I had no end of problems from there on with unstable kernels, duff and buggy packages, update roulette and terrible support. We're on Debian 7 now and it's rock solid, relatively bug free in comparison and the support is good. Just where I want it to be. The best outcome for me was that it caused Debian to rethink their release cycles a bit.
  - icelancer 12y ago
    Totally agree. After 11.x, Ubuntu's "desktop" uses crashed for me and many I know.
- kornakiewicz 12y ago
  Remember those CDs! I was finishing my primary school that time and couldn't even download ISO (used dial-up modem, aproximately 1000 times slower than my current connection) or install, because looking for driver was painful), but Linux stayed in the back of my mind. Similary to you, now I don't care much what Canonical does.
- enobrev 12y ago
  I've had Ubuntu as my primary desktop for about a decade and the regression issue is my biggest one, especially with three monitors. Fortunately it takes me far less time to go from non-booting desktop to something usable these days, but I think that can be chalked up to practice more than improvement. That said, for the most part it continues to run smoothly, provided I wait about a month or two after each release before upgrading. Otherwise, I remain a fan - including Unity.
- cyorir 12y ago
  I started using Ubuntu from 8.04 when Windows crashed on my first personal laptop. When I saw 11.10 Netbook Edition with Unity I viewed it as something which would be geared towards touchscreens with limited advantages otherwise. So after briefly trying desktop unity in 12.04 I switched my development machine to Fedora with Xfce and XMonad. Now I only use Ubuntu on the occasional virtual machine for testing, but I may try running it on my touch ultrabook some day.
davidw 12y ago
I was a Debian developer for a while, but gradually ran out of time for it, and eventually went with Ubuntu as my desktop and server OS. By and large, I'm very happy with it, although I wish they'd sink a bit more time into avoiding regressions than trying to create new things. I like the predictable release schedule, and the fact that it's a bit more focused than Debian. Yet, underneath it's still all (almost at least) free software that I can hack on if needs be. These days I use Xubuntu, with Xfce, because that's a bit more to my liking as a desktop: focus follows mouse is not something I care to do without.
- johnchristopher 12y ago
  May I ask what you are missing from Debian as a desktop ? I went from Ubuntu minimal to Debian (stable, nonetheless),tiling wm for me, gnome for friends and guests, and found Debian easier to maintain (for me and my friends whose computers I manage). I must say I feel Debian's desktop experience is really top notch and crosses all the check marks of what a desktop is supposed to do (for me at least) and so I don't really see what is gained from switching from Debian to Ubuntu regarding desktop features.
  - davidw 12y ago
    > May I ask what you are missing from Debian as a desktop ? When I switched, Debian was in the process of taking 3 years to go from woody to sarge. After that it would be another 5 before etch. I'm sure Debian makes a fine desktop these days. I could definitely see switching back at some point. I do like that there is someone who takes decisions Ubuntu; I think that streamlines things in some ways. Debian can get into pretty long and involved flames/discussions about things. Sometimes good comes of it, sometimes it just distracts people from putting out a good OS.
    - liotier 12y ago
      I went down the same path when Ubuntu's appearance suddenly made Debian look slow and outdated. Now I have been back on Debian for a few years and it just feels better - Debian has come a long way... I believe that Ubuntu's mere existence gave it a good jolt !
iamthebest 12y ago
"Linux for human beings" No thanks. I'll take the distro for power users. Seriously they did so many things to screw everything up.
johnchristopher 12y ago
I remember when I firs tried Ubuntu 10.4 [0] and forum acquaintances were teasing me about it because there were no MP3 support out of the box. `What distro doesn't include that ?`. Well, it certainly was way easier to install and run than the RedHat from those days (but the handbook was.. there actually was a handbook at least). [0] edited
latch 12y ago
There's gotta be a lot of OSX users like me who'd switch in a heartbeat given better laptop options. I know they're getting better, but it still isn't that close.
- NateDad 12y ago
  A lot of Canonicalers are getting the Dell XPS 15. It's practically a macbook clone. The main difference is the battery life - with the smaller battery it's like 3.5 hours, bigger battery is like 5 hours. But that's with a quad Core i7, and 16 GB of RAM. I'm super happy with mine. I think most of the difference in battery life is just software at this point... Apple definitely has some magic sauce in there.
  - latch 12y ago
    I've heard good things about the XPS. I travel a lot though. I prefer 13" and last time I looked, I found very little that supported 16GB. Also, again, with the traveling, battery life is huge. This might also sound lame, but I also hate the badges. I saw that the XPS 15 only has the single intel badge. I'd rather have 0...it really grates me the wrong way (not just on laptops, WTF do I want "Samsung" printed in white on the bottom of my TV?)
    - NateDad 12y ago
      You know it's just a sticker, right? :) I always take all stickers off my laptops. But, yes, I wish the XPS 13 had a 16GB option.
      - logn 12y ago
        They're also specially controlled stickers, some with holograms, meant to suggest that the hardware inside is legit. Kind of like new NBA hats. You can remove those too.
    - bpowell 12y ago
      I have the 13" XPS. The size and weight of it are really good for traveling. The battery life is not very good. I get maybe 3 hours on it in Linux. There might be some settings that need to be tweaked to get more life out of it. Also the WiFi on the device, even in Windows 8, sucks. The connection drops quite frequently and some AP it will not connect to. The computer is only a year old, so the new ones might be better now.
adamors 12y ago
"Linux for human beings" sounds like an oxymoron to me, after 5+ years of tinkering with Linux on the desktop. After years of Ubuntu (and Arch, Debian, Mint etc.) I'm not ashamed to say I'm really happy on OS X. Less customisation and more time to focus on actual work/leisure.
- monochr 12y ago
  I only wish more people did this and didn't force standardization on the rest of us who need customization.
- Dewie 12y ago
  Ubuntu is really user-friendly... until you are having any kind of non-trivial problem, which can happen to anyone if they are unlucky with their drivers, the sound doesn't work, etc.. Then you are relegated to copying command line gobbledygook from askubuntu into the terminal, being able to understand nothing about what it does. At least with those tedious "click on X, then on Y when that pops up"... you're able to understand the gist of what you're doing. I'm a programmer so I've become somewhat accustomed to working with the command line. But it's hardly a nice user interface for most people.
  - Argorak 12y ago
    That doesn't really sound like "enough".
    - Dewie 12y ago
      What do you mean by enough?
      - Argorak 12y ago
        I'm dead sure the beginning of your post read differently a while ago.
        Dewie 12y ago
bubblemachine3k 12y ago
I've had a play with Ubuntu on the Nexus 5. I don't think it's a daily driver for me yet, but I'm excited and they look like they are working hard to get there. Can't wait.
cobbliu 12y ago
I have transferred from Ubuntu to Mint recently.
maouida 12y ago
I tried to switch from Windows to Ubuntu multiple times but I go back to Windows each time. I have mainly 2 issues: - Upgrade to newer version always fails. I'm left with a broken OS at the end. - Although the UI has improved a lot since the early days of Ubuntu, I still don't like it. I know I can customize it but it always causes issues on some apps.
- Argorak 12y ago
  > - Upgrade to newer version always fails. I'm left with a broken OS at the end. I'm pretty sure that this is an issue of having a more sophisticated package management. OS X and Windows are basically huge software bundles that are dropped on a drive. They rarely change their internal structure gradually (Windows takes an odd middleground of basically keeping all patches around). It's a well understood process and easy to reason about: copy bunch of data A to location B, make sure it matches a checksum. Ship some parts in double in different versions, to support older versions. All the issues I ever had with that were with all the packages software I handbuilt on top of that. OSes fully built on packaging software from ground up, e.g. apt, rely on the assumption that the package tree is always problem-free and that you can migrate any custom evolution of that tree to a new standard version. While this works formidably for smaller changes (I just want to add a package), where the potential breakage is contained to a rather limited set of packages, possibly close to the leafs of the tree, this gets problematic if you want to change a package on the top of the tree. I think this gives a lot of power to the approach of immutable machines, combining both approaches: fine-grained dependency-tracking and resolution, while avoiding the evolutionary problems by always rebuilding the system from ground up on any change. FWIW: I love a proper package management. But I don't believe in its infallibility.
  - wtbob 12y ago
    > > Upgrade to newer version always fails. I'm left with a broken OS at the end. > I'm pretty sure that this is an issue of having a more sophisticated package management. I'm pretty sure that it's Ubuntu. My understanding is that Debian—from which Ubuntu is derived and which is also apt-based—is known for reliable upgrades. It's part of why I've standardised on Debian.
lmedinas 12y ago
I like Ubuntu, we use (LTS releases) at work and it's been very stable and easy to maintain. It's also by far the most popular Linux distro for a lot's of reasons. Although i rarely use it at home (switched to OSX) I still keep myself updated and try every release. Imho i feel they should get more in the "latest technologies" bandwagon like they did a few years before Unity (for those who remember Ubuntu pushed always the latest GNOME releases with the latest technologies developed by RedHat and get it right even before Fedora) and upstart in order to not cause more fragmentation on the Linux desktop. Let's take Unity example: First was desktop on top of GTK2 which looked and worked better than gnome-shell. Then the transition of GNOME3 started and now GNOME was able to get a ecosystem of applications that fit's on GNOME not Unity, so currently GNOME apps don't fit on Unity desktop and even gnome-shell perhaps it's more useful than Unity. Same for upstart: It started as an new modern init system but then systemd came out and become the standard in Linux (or at least it's trying to). Now Ubuntu is migrating to systemd because their init system never gained traction. Not to mention the manpower they invested and now they don't get any result out of it. I fear the same will happen with MIR since it will NOT become the standard on Linux like Wayland. For the future I hope Canonical don't pull the plug on Desktop and Server (which is also very popular) and give it's users the choice of using Wayland, GNOME, X11, systemd, XFCE, LXDE or other technologies instead of the "home made" technologies. Also let's hope for more bright 10 years ahead trying to get Linux Desktop in the right direction giving people a choice between Operating Systems.
weavie 12y ago
As someone who's current phone is more powerful than his laptop, I am really looking forward to seeing what Ubuntu Touch can deliver.
eloisant 12y ago
What I really loved in Ubuntu is that they were the first distribution that really considered itself an OS, not "a way to install Linux" and make choices about what it should include. All the other distributions started by asking whether you wanted KDE or Gnome, Abiword or OpenOffice, and ended up installing a bunch of software you may or may not want "just in case". Ubuntu made choices, if you didn't like it you could always change it later on or use a different distribution but you had a consistent OS to start with.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  It's strange. I have a hard time remembering why I liked Ubuntu right away. Maybe a blend of good enough looking, works out of the box mindset, which made a community grow rapidly and kicking a nice network effect where you would quickly find solution on their board/wikis. I was impressed later when they managed to bring new Window Management ideas without too much time or pain.
  - JonnieCache 12y ago
    I seem to remember they put a lot of early effort into getting almost all laptop wifi interfaces working out of the box, which was a massive deal at the time.
    - josteink 12y ago
      Heck, I still find that difficult if installing Debian on a laptop today. Ubuntu did so much things right, it's easy to forget all the pains it fixed.
  - ZeroGravitas 12y ago
    It was summed up for me at the time by the joke "Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning 'can't install Debian'". Their focus on getting stuff installed and working was a big deal then.
    - pessimizer 12y ago
danbee 12y ago
Ubuntu got popular during the 3 year period between Debian Woody and Sarge. I think many Debian users jumped ship because they got bored of waiting for a new release so a new distro that was basically Debian but up to date was welcome. The joke around that time was that Debian was either obsolete or unstable.
pjmlp 12y ago
Ubuntu LTS is the only GNU/Linux distribution that keeps me on Linux on one of my laptops (an Asus netbook). All the other distributions fail short of 100% laptop support out of the box. As I am no longer on my 20's with lots of time to spare, either it works out of the box, or it doesn't. I don't care about starting weekend projects that become week long projects just to get something working. Or just trying out distributions to see how they look like. My first distribution, Slackware 2.0, was a long time ago. Ubuntu is great and I do like Unity as desktop environment on my netbook.
- dhimes 12y ago
  Also Asus netbook + Ubuntu I've found unity is a bit heavy for my poor little netbook, and have found xfce a bit better for performance. I use Linux mint (which is based on Ubuntu) for my main dev machine. The only limitation I've had with it is video- it can't handle the goPro stuff very well.
  - higherpurpose 12y ago
    You might like Linux Lite for a netbook (based on 14.04 LTS): https://www.linuxliteos.com/linuxlite.html https://www.linuxliteos.com/linuxlite.html
    - dhimes 12y ago
      Looks good- thanks for that.
  - vivab0rg 12y ago
    Also ASUS netbook + Ubuntu LTS, flawless for years, to this day. Now it's mostly elementaryOS (also based off Ubuntu LTS) on every desktop/notebook, works just as well and it feels even lighter. I've been using every LTS release since the first ever, and I can't praise it enough. Keep up the good work!
    - forca 12y ago
      What do you think of Midori as a daily browser (assuming you didn't apt-get something else)? I think it's a decent browser, it's only drawback is it's single-threaded.
dijit 12y ago
So, before I knew what linux was (and was teased on various forums) I ordered some free CD's from Ubuntu. (I didn't have the internet at home). (eventually I got them; ubuntu 5.04 I think [Horny Hedgehog from memory]) When I received them I was pleased, everything worked.. well, not everything, but it sorta worked! I had a desktop environment and a command line and I felt a small sense of accomplishment because I'd navigated the strange menu's safely before anakonda or full-framebuffer installers Because of the peer pressure I learned about how to do my bits, and I carried on. Later in the year I found fedora, and Blue is a nicer colour than brown (I was young and fickle) but it was less user friendly, so I committed to learn that and get off the "Noob Friendly" Ubuntu OS. Many years later I got a small laptop for my mother, at this stage in my life I was "awoken" and I knew the power a machine could hold if it ran linux, so I put ubuntu on it- She's not the most technically apt lady in the world but was able to do most things with ease, and I put that down to having a "Good UX outside microsoft" (since most people who learn the microsoft way are generally committed to a mindset and anything outside of that is pushed away). A few issues with Flash, some performance hiccups on some websites that seemed to try and avoid supporting linux in strange ways (that I take for granted I know how to bypass) and eventually the machine gave up the ghost. I bought a new machine and put ubuntu on it (13.10 I think) and she was somewhat less than pleased, the UX had changed, she didn't know what was available anymore, nothing was organised in a way she understood.. and so I installed mint, she's now happy. So I'll say this for Ubuntu, they put linux in the hands of people who we should really be targetting, it allowed me access to linux acting as a base plate and later acting as a full blown system for someone who was not interested at all in computers. And they pushed a trend for that, so we should all be thankful.
- dijit 12y ago
  A follow on from this story and many moons after my "fickle" switch to Fedora/RHEL. At this point in my life I'd been involved in a half dozen large companies and used linux on enormous scale. I moved to a company that was using ubuntu LTS (10.04) (old at the time) in production, it was heavily invested and I expected that wouldn't change as Developers were very hesitant to change to debian (which is too old/doesn't make things easy enough) or centos/RHEL which suffers the same issues and has the added benefit of having SELinux (which I'm an advocate of understanding rather than disabling). I go through my daily security advisories and a local privilege escalation means all our virtual machines and virtual machine hosts are affected, luckily it's patched as 10.04 is still supported so I apt-get update;apt-get upgrade and send out an email saying the server will be down for 30 minutes while it receives patches. I was wrong, it was down for 6 hours. unfortunately someone upsteam caused that particular kernel update to rebuild all initramfs' on the machine, and had also named lvm2 to lvm, so now my drives wouldn't mount. On any kernel version/initramfs version normally you can drop to shell load the module, mount the drives and continue startup, but unfortunately that stopped a lot of things from loading such as the bonding we had in place on the nics. obviously I didn't know why it broke at the time and was attempting to get help from #ubuntu on freenode. the response was "Sometimes it's better not to know why it broke" that server was smoothly running CentOS before I left that company. So in my opinion support and enterprise is where it falls down.
sandaru1 12y ago
One of the main reasons Ubuntu got popular (compared to other distros) on Sri Lanka because they shipped free CDs. Lots of people in Sri Lanka didn't have Cable or DSL internet connections by that time. It was limited to a smaller area of the country - even when people had it, it was 512kbps. No one was going to bother download a huge distro DVD to try out a new OS. However, when you get a CD, you tend to try it out. The smooth installation process certainly helped a lot.
buckbova 12y ago
I've been trying various distros for 15 years now and pretty much stopped at Ubuntu. Every week I used to visit http://distrowatch.com/ http://distrowatch.com/ and look for a new distro to try. I liked Mint and #! too, but Ubuntu gave me the most consistent experience with the best repositories.
bufordsharkley 12y ago
I love, love Unity; I love keyboard shortcuts for getting things done quickly, and Unity's keyboard shortcuts are intuitive and cover just about everything. And the visual design is beautiful. ...I just know that if the average person could walk into their Best Buy and get a Windows laptop for $X and an Ubuntu version of that laptop for slightly less, we'd see Ubuntu everywhere. One can dream.
cowardlydragon 12y ago
Ubuntu has been going backwards for at least two years.... - Unity doesn't seem to improve, and just further fractures and balkanizes the linux desketop - They dropped the installation versions where I can do software RAID setup... all my desktops are RAID0 dual HDD and SSD OS/swap/boot. - Ubuntu desktops have been getting slower as I upgrade my hardware, not faster. OSX has maddening keyboard shortcuts, and Windows is committing suicide. With the excess cores, GPU power, huge disk space, virtualization, and other advancements, I should be able to seamlessly run several OSs at once. There is such amazing potential out there, but it is pretty clear that Canonical is now just putting minimal resources into Ubuntu. It still mystifies me that Google didn't make a seriously good desktop distribution on par with OSX to destroy the windows monopoly. Instead... ChromeOS?
- wanda 12y ago
  Google doesn't want the desktop to exist at all. The last thing a big advertising company wants is power users.
- aruggirello 12y ago
  You can still install Ubuntu on a RAID0 or 1 mdadm device (I did so on a couple SSDs). You just have to use the Ubuntu Server iso instead of the Desktop one, and follow a few more steps: http://www.ubuntulinuxguide.com/software-raid-ubuntu-14-04-setup-install-configure/ http://www.ubuntulinuxguide.com/software-raid-ubuntu-14-04-s...
unknownBits 12y ago
I'm on arch linux with kde. I tried ubuntu several times, but I can't stick with it. The installation is a breeze, but for the rest it's not that exiting. Btw, I consider myself as a human being too! Still, I am very happy with the existence of Ubuntu, helping millions of people moving away from Windows and OSX. This is a huge boost for the development of software for linux.
_navaneethan 12y ago
If Ubuntu is not avail now, then I have to go payment course for learning Windows Ubuntu is pure white box to learn. I am enjoying it from my college life where I just touched the computer initially, then immediately ubuntu was loaded.
- hackmiester 12y ago
  I love that it's becoming so common. I don't use Ubuntu personally but I think it is a great "first experience" with Linux.
era86 12y ago
I used Ubuntu in 2004 right when I started college as a comp-sci student. It was the only distro that worked with my laptop with very minimal effort. I also love the package management (though Brew on OSX is a close second). Great read, thanks for sharing!
_nedR 12y ago
As an Ubuntu user since 10.04, what I would really like to see is Ubuntu matching or beating Windows/OS X with regards to battery life. When I first installed 10.04, my ubuntu setup actually beat Windows Vista in battery life and stability. Then 10.10 came out with serious power regressions (related to kernel regressions, Unity, etc.) - which I still blame from killing my battery. Since then, Windows 7 and 8 have gotten more stable and better battery life while Ubuntu has struggled to keep up. With 14.04, Ubuntu is better (finally with basic support for NVIDIA PRIME)but has yet to catch up with Windows. Seriously, Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu devs, if you are reading:- Ubuntu is promoting global warming and creation of electronic waste with its current actions. Forget the features and fluff for now - Fix the battery issues and make sure things just work. Thank you Ubuntu for all the great work you guys have done for Linux over the last 10 years. Still love you.
- mattfrommars 12y ago
  Have you tried TLP out?
  - _nedR 12y ago
    No. I would like to, when I get the time (Also powertop -http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1404_powertop& http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_14... ) But thats the point. Lot of us depend on our computer for work and don't have the time to fiddle with lot of error-prone settings. This is why Linux users have been migrating to OS X for years. Deep down, we are all idealistic hackers who would love for FOSS, and open-source to win, and give the finger to big brother, but we also need to put food on our tables. Canonical lately has been chasing unicorns and leprechauns to find the Next Big Thing (never mind that they are late to mobile, tablet, and even unified interfaces). Canonical is right that mobile is the future. Mobile first of all includes laptops, tablets , phone. And the basic requirement for a successful mobile platform is battery life.
- apozem 12y ago
  Battery life is why I don't use Linux more. Even with monkeying around in the system, those Linux drivers suck up a lot of juice.
badloginagain 12y ago
I'm surprised they didn't bring up shuttering Ubuntu One cloud service.
KedarMhaswade 12y ago
I am still unhappy with wifi detection/configuration and problems with Compiz. But overall, I agree, Ubuntu is getting better.
bitwize 12y ago
I have an ambivalent relationship with Ubuntu. Personally, I hate Ubuntu but I'm glad it exists. It means a few more people who otherwise would have used Windows, don't. I keep coming back to Slackware because it's in a nice sweet spot where "stable", "just works", "lets me configure it just the way I want" and "doesn't bother me with needless distro-specific cruft" all intersect. So Ubuntu is definitely not for me. For the people it is for, it does a pretty good job.
Aloha 12y ago
I actually think Ubuntu has done wonders to enhance the usability of debian out of the box. We've come so far in 10 years, when I first used debian, I had to write an X config by hand, now thats all automatic, its so much easier to use. I stopped using Ubuntu even though I was an early adopter, and went back to debian, but the development downstream of debian has clearly from my point of view rolled back up hill.
tatterdemalion 12y ago
> Like it or not, Ubuntu or whatever your OS of choice is does have root access to your machine. Not literally of course, but it's effective access given that their code is running with root privileges on your machine and chances are you haven't reviewed it lately. You trust your distro to make sure that code is secure, stable, and acting in your best interests. Actually, I trust that of the millions of Ubuntu users, there is at least one person who would sound the alarm if Canonical had slipped spyware into their distribution (as, of course, people did about the absurd Amazon lens). Free software means trusting the public at large to audit the software rather than trusting the software's producer.
jamesfisher 12y ago
> By Canonical's estimates, Ubuntu has roughly 90 percent of the Linux market. Wat? Seriously? How is this measured?
bigbugbag 12y ago
This article overlook a few facts of history such as ubuntu actively trying to poach debian devs in an attempt to take over debian, or the fact that packages were out of date for 6 months and that the upgrade process from one version to the other often ended in a reinstall from scratch. Not to mention the numerous things that kept breaking (video drivers, pulseaudio and so on).

246 points by hpaavola 12y ago

For me the biggest thing about Ubuntu is that it does not feel like a distribution. It's an OS. They don't just pack others stuff inside one image and call it a day. Ubuntu does things in a way that they feel is the correct way. If there is a suitable OSS package for that, great. If not, then they make it. Fedora, Debian and others just gather what's there and ship it. AFAIK Elementary OS is the only other distro that works kinda like Ubuntu, but it looks like an OSX clone.

SunShiranui 12y ago
Elementary does look like OSX, but I wouldn't judge them negatively for that. I've been using the distro for a while and I'm quite happy with it.
- rkuykendall-com 12y ago
  As a mac user that gets nervous when Apple announces new OS X versions, I'm glad there are linux users out there keeping the principles that make OS X great alive. If OS X ever goes too iOS / iCloud for me to bare, I hope Elementary is waiting for me with the same attention to detail, stability, and ease of use that god me hooked on OS X.
  - t0mislav 12y ago
    Same thing here.

cyphax 12y ago

I was an Ubuntu user for a few years. I remember when they'd ship the CD's out for free. One of those things that made Ubuntu great. It was also really good at presenting a very usable Gnome 2.x desktop that was ready to use from the first boot, and I was a very happy user for a while, until they started shipping software a little bit too soon (PulseAudio for example; suddenly Ubuntu didn't have sound out-of-the-box anymore on my machine) and I've once been bitten in the behind by an update that made my video card unsupported all of a sudden, so that prevented X from starting... and then they replaced Gnome with Unity and I kind of stopped caring around that time so I went back to my previous distro. Hopefully for good. :) Congratulations to Mark for starting this otherwise great project! May it have many years ahead of it!

ooz 12y ago
Similar story. It started as a tidied up Debian fork. Then since about 12.04 LTS it turned into a tidied up Debian unstable fork with all the bugs in it. As a server only and LTS only user, I had no end of problems from there on with unstable kernels, duff and buggy packages, update roulette and terrible support. We're on Debian 7 now and it's rock solid, relatively bug free in comparison and the support is good. Just where I want it to be. The best outcome for me was that it caused Debian to rethink their release cycles a bit.
- icelancer 12y ago
  Totally agree. After 11.x, Ubuntu's "desktop" uses crashed for me and many I know.
kornakiewicz 12y ago
Remember those CDs! I was finishing my primary school that time and couldn't even download ISO (used dial-up modem, aproximately 1000 times slower than my current connection) or install, because looking for driver was painful), but Linux stayed in the back of my mind. Similary to you, now I don't care much what Canonical does.
enobrev 12y ago
I've had Ubuntu as my primary desktop for about a decade and the regression issue is my biggest one, especially with three monitors. Fortunately it takes me far less time to go from non-booting desktop to something usable these days, but I think that can be chalked up to practice more than improvement. That said, for the most part it continues to run smoothly, provided I wait about a month or two after each release before upgrading. Otherwise, I remain a fan - including Unity.
cyorir 12y ago
I started using Ubuntu from 8.04 when Windows crashed on my first personal laptop. When I saw 11.10 Netbook Edition with Unity I viewed it as something which would be geared towards touchscreens with limited advantages otherwise. So after briefly trying desktop unity in 12.04 I switched my development machine to Fedora with Xfce and XMonad. Now I only use Ubuntu on the occasional virtual machine for testing, but I may try running it on my touch ultrabook some day.

davidw 12y ago

I was a Debian developer for a while, but gradually ran out of time for it, and eventually went with Ubuntu as my desktop and server OS. By and large, I'm very happy with it, although I wish they'd sink a bit more time into avoiding regressions than trying to create new things. I like the predictable release schedule, and the fact that it's a bit more focused than Debian. Yet, underneath it's still all (almost at least) free software that I can hack on if needs be. These days I use Xubuntu, with Xfce, because that's a bit more to my liking as a desktop: focus follows mouse is not something I care to do without.

johnchristopher 12y ago
May I ask what you are missing from Debian as a desktop ? I went from Ubuntu minimal to Debian (stable, nonetheless),tiling wm for me, gnome for friends and guests, and found Debian easier to maintain (for me and my friends whose computers I manage). I must say I feel Debian's desktop experience is really top notch and crosses all the check marks of what a desktop is supposed to do (for me at least) and so I don't really see what is gained from switching from Debian to Ubuntu regarding desktop features.
- davidw 12y ago
  > May I ask what you are missing from Debian as a desktop ? When I switched, Debian was in the process of taking 3 years to go from woody to sarge. After that it would be another 5 before etch. I'm sure Debian makes a fine desktop these days. I could definitely see switching back at some point. I do like that there is someone who takes decisions Ubuntu; I think that streamlines things in some ways. Debian can get into pretty long and involved flames/discussions about things. Sometimes good comes of it, sometimes it just distracts people from putting out a good OS.
  - liotier 12y ago
    I went down the same path when Ubuntu's appearance suddenly made Debian look slow and outdated. Now I have been back on Debian for a few years and it just feels better - Debian has come a long way... I believe that Ubuntu's mere existence gave it a good jolt !

iamthebest 12y ago

"Linux for human beings" No thanks. I'll take the distro for power users. Seriously they did so many things to screw everything up.

johnchristopher 12y ago

I remember when I firs tried Ubuntu 10.4 [0] and forum acquaintances were teasing me about it because there were no MP3 support out of the box. `What distro doesn't include that ?`. Well, it certainly was way easier to install and run than the RedHat from those days (but the handbook was.. there actually was a handbook at least). [0] edited

latch 12y ago

There's gotta be a lot of OSX users like me who'd switch in a heartbeat given better laptop options. I know they're getting better, but it still isn't that close.

NateDad 12y ago
A lot of Canonicalers are getting the Dell XPS 15. It's practically a macbook clone. The main difference is the battery life - with the smaller battery it's like 3.5 hours, bigger battery is like 5 hours. But that's with a quad Core i7, and 16 GB of RAM. I'm super happy with mine. I think most of the difference in battery life is just software at this point... Apple definitely has some magic sauce in there.
- latch 12y ago
  I've heard good things about the XPS. I travel a lot though. I prefer 13" and last time I looked, I found very little that supported 16GB. Also, again, with the traveling, battery life is huge. This might also sound lame, but I also hate the badges. I saw that the XPS 15 only has the single intel badge. I'd rather have 0...it really grates me the wrong way (not just on laptops, WTF do I want "Samsung" printed in white on the bottom of my TV?)
  - NateDad 12y ago
    You know it's just a sticker, right? :) I always take all stickers off my laptops. But, yes, I wish the XPS 13 had a 16GB option.
    - logn 12y ago
      They're also specially controlled stickers, some with holograms, meant to suggest that the hardware inside is legit. Kind of like new NBA hats. You can remove those too.
  - bpowell 12y ago
    I have the 13" XPS. The size and weight of it are really good for traveling. The battery life is not very good. I get maybe 3 hours on it in Linux. There might be some settings that need to be tweaked to get more life out of it. Also the WiFi on the device, even in Windows 8, sucks. The connection drops quite frequently and some AP it will not connect to. The computer is only a year old, so the new ones might be better now.

adamors 12y ago

"Linux for human beings" sounds like an oxymoron to me, after 5+ years of tinkering with Linux on the desktop. After years of Ubuntu (and Arch, Debian, Mint etc.) I'm not ashamed to say I'm really happy on OS X. Less customisation and more time to focus on actual work/leisure.

monochr 12y ago
I only wish more people did this and didn't force standardization on the rest of us who need customization.
Dewie 12y ago
Ubuntu is really user-friendly... until you are having any kind of non-trivial problem, which can happen to anyone if they are unlucky with their drivers, the sound doesn't work, etc.. Then you are relegated to copying command line gobbledygook from askubuntu into the terminal, being able to understand nothing about what it does. At least with those tedious "click on X, then on Y when that pops up"... you're able to understand the gist of what you're doing. I'm a programmer so I've become somewhat accustomed to working with the command line. But it's hardly a nice user interface for most people.
- Argorak 12y ago
  That doesn't really sound like "enough".
  - Dewie 12y ago
    What do you mean by enough?
    - Argorak 12y ago
      I'm dead sure the beginning of your post read differently a while ago.
      - Dewie 12y ago

bubblemachine3k 12y ago

I've had a play with Ubuntu on the Nexus 5. I don't think it's a daily driver for me yet, but I'm excited and they look like they are working hard to get there. Can't wait.

cobbliu 12y ago

I have transferred from Ubuntu to Mint recently.

maouida 12y ago

I tried to switch from Windows to Ubuntu multiple times but I go back to Windows each time. I have mainly 2 issues: - Upgrade to newer version always fails. I'm left with a broken OS at the end. - Although the UI has improved a lot since the early days of Ubuntu, I still don't like it. I know I can customize it but it always causes issues on some apps.

Argorak 12y ago
> - Upgrade to newer version always fails. I'm left with a broken OS at the end. I'm pretty sure that this is an issue of having a more sophisticated package management. OS X and Windows are basically huge software bundles that are dropped on a drive. They rarely change their internal structure gradually (Windows takes an odd middleground of basically keeping all patches around). It's a well understood process and easy to reason about: copy bunch of data A to location B, make sure it matches a checksum. Ship some parts in double in different versions, to support older versions. All the issues I ever had with that were with all the packages software I handbuilt on top of that. OSes fully built on packaging software from ground up, e.g. apt, rely on the assumption that the package tree is always problem-free and that you can migrate any custom evolution of that tree to a new standard version. While this works formidably for smaller changes (I just want to add a package), where the potential breakage is contained to a rather limited set of packages, possibly close to the leafs of the tree, this gets problematic if you want to change a package on the top of the tree. I think this gives a lot of power to the approach of immutable machines, combining both approaches: fine-grained dependency-tracking and resolution, while avoiding the evolutionary problems by always rebuilding the system from ground up on any change. FWIW: I love a proper package management. But I don't believe in its infallibility.
- wtbob 12y ago
  > > Upgrade to newer version always fails. I'm left with a broken OS at the end. > I'm pretty sure that this is an issue of having a more sophisticated package management. I'm pretty sure that it's Ubuntu. My understanding is that Debian—from which Ubuntu is derived and which is also apt-based—is known for reliable upgrades. It's part of why I've standardised on Debian.

lmedinas 12y ago

I like Ubuntu, we use (LTS releases) at work and it's been very stable and easy to maintain. It's also by far the most popular Linux distro for a lot's of reasons. Although i rarely use it at home (switched to OSX) I still keep myself updated and try every release. Imho i feel they should get more in the "latest technologies" bandwagon like they did a few years before Unity (for those who remember Ubuntu pushed always the latest GNOME releases with the latest technologies developed by RedHat and get it right even before Fedora) and upstart in order to not cause more fragmentation on the Linux desktop. Let's take Unity example: First was desktop on top of GTK2 which looked and worked better than gnome-shell. Then the transition of GNOME3 started and now GNOME was able to get a ecosystem of applications that fit's on GNOME not Unity, so currently GNOME apps don't fit on Unity desktop and even gnome-shell perhaps it's more useful than Unity. Same for upstart: It started as an new modern init system but then systemd came out and become the standard in Linux (or at least it's trying to). Now Ubuntu is migrating to systemd because their init system never gained traction. Not to mention the manpower they invested and now they don't get any result out of it. I fear the same will happen with MIR since it will NOT become the standard on Linux like Wayland. For the future I hope Canonical don't pull the plug on Desktop and Server (which is also very popular) and give it's users the choice of using Wayland, GNOME, X11, systemd, XFCE, LXDE or other technologies instead of the "home made" technologies. Also let's hope for more bright 10 years ahead trying to get Linux Desktop in the right direction giving people a choice between Operating Systems.

weavie 12y ago

As someone who's current phone is more powerful than his laptop, I am really looking forward to seeing what Ubuntu Touch can deliver.

eloisant 12y ago

What I really loved in Ubuntu is that they were the first distribution that really considered itself an OS, not "a way to install Linux" and make choices about what it should include. All the other distributions started by asking whether you wanted KDE or Gnome, Abiword or OpenOffice, and ended up installing a bunch of software you may or may not want "just in case". Ubuntu made choices, if you didn't like it you could always change it later on or use a different distribution but you had a consistent OS to start with.

agumonkey 12y ago
It's strange. I have a hard time remembering why I liked Ubuntu right away. Maybe a blend of good enough looking, works out of the box mindset, which made a community grow rapidly and kicking a nice network effect where you would quickly find solution on their board/wikis. I was impressed later when they managed to bring new Window Management ideas without too much time or pain.
- JonnieCache 12y ago
  I seem to remember they put a lot of early effort into getting almost all laptop wifi interfaces working out of the box, which was a massive deal at the time.
  - josteink 12y ago
    Heck, I still find that difficult if installing Debian on a laptop today. Ubuntu did so much things right, it's easy to forget all the pains it fixed.
- ZeroGravitas 12y ago
  It was summed up for me at the time by the joke "Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning 'can't install Debian'". Their focus on getting stuff installed and working was a big deal then.
  - pessimizer 12y ago

danbee 12y ago

Ubuntu got popular during the 3 year period between Debian Woody and Sarge. I think many Debian users jumped ship because they got bored of waiting for a new release so a new distro that was basically Debian but up to date was welcome. The joke around that time was that Debian was either obsolete or unstable.

pjmlp 12y ago

Ubuntu LTS is the only GNU/Linux distribution that keeps me on Linux on one of my laptops (an Asus netbook). All the other distributions fail short of 100% laptop support out of the box. As I am no longer on my 20's with lots of time to spare, either it works out of the box, or it doesn't. I don't care about starting weekend projects that become week long projects just to get something working. Or just trying out distributions to see how they look like. My first distribution, Slackware 2.0, was a long time ago. Ubuntu is great and I do like Unity as desktop environment on my netbook.

dhimes 12y ago
Also Asus netbook + Ubuntu I've found unity is a bit heavy for my poor little netbook, and have found xfce a bit better for performance. I use Linux mint (which is based on Ubuntu) for my main dev machine. The only limitation I've had with it is video- it can't handle the goPro stuff very well.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  You might like Linux Lite for a netbook (based on 14.04 LTS): https://www.linuxliteos.com/linuxlite.html https://www.linuxliteos.com/linuxlite.html
  - dhimes 12y ago
    Looks good- thanks for that.
- vivab0rg 12y ago
  Also ASUS netbook + Ubuntu LTS, flawless for years, to this day. Now it's mostly elementaryOS (also based off Ubuntu LTS) on every desktop/notebook, works just as well and it feels even lighter. I've been using every LTS release since the first ever, and I can't praise it enough. Keep up the good work!
  - forca 12y ago
    What do you think of Midori as a daily browser (assuming you didn't apt-get something else)? I think it's a decent browser, it's only drawback is it's single-threaded.

dijit 12y ago

So, before I knew what linux was (and was teased on various forums) I ordered some free CD's from Ubuntu. (I didn't have the internet at home). (eventually I got them; ubuntu 5.04 I think [Horny Hedgehog from memory]) When I received them I was pleased, everything worked.. well, not everything, but it sorta worked! I had a desktop environment and a command line and I felt a small sense of accomplishment because I'd navigated the strange menu's safely before anakonda or full-framebuffer installers Because of the peer pressure I learned about how to do my bits, and I carried on. Later in the year I found fedora, and Blue is a nicer colour than brown (I was young and fickle) but it was less user friendly, so I committed to learn that and get off the "Noob Friendly" Ubuntu OS. Many years later I got a small laptop for my mother, at this stage in my life I was "awoken" and I knew the power a machine could hold if it ran linux, so I put ubuntu on it- She's not the most technically apt lady in the world but was able to do most things with ease, and I put that down to having a "Good UX outside microsoft" (since most people who learn the microsoft way are generally committed to a mindset and anything outside of that is pushed away). A few issues with Flash, some performance hiccups on some websites that seemed to try and avoid supporting linux in strange ways (that I take for granted I know how to bypass) and eventually the machine gave up the ghost. I bought a new machine and put ubuntu on it (13.10 I think) and she was somewhat less than pleased, the UX had changed, she didn't know what was available anymore, nothing was organised in a way she understood.. and so I installed mint, she's now happy. So I'll say this for Ubuntu, they put linux in the hands of people who we should really be targetting, it allowed me access to linux acting as a base plate and later acting as a full blown system for someone who was not interested at all in computers. And they pushed a trend for that, so we should all be thankful.

dijit 12y ago
A follow on from this story and many moons after my "fickle" switch to Fedora/RHEL. At this point in my life I'd been involved in a half dozen large companies and used linux on enormous scale. I moved to a company that was using ubuntu LTS (10.04) (old at the time) in production, it was heavily invested and I expected that wouldn't change as Developers were very hesitant to change to debian (which is too old/doesn't make things easy enough) or centos/RHEL which suffers the same issues and has the added benefit of having SELinux (which I'm an advocate of understanding rather than disabling). I go through my daily security advisories and a local privilege escalation means all our virtual machines and virtual machine hosts are affected, luckily it's patched as 10.04 is still supported so I apt-get update;apt-get upgrade and send out an email saying the server will be down for 30 minutes while it receives patches. I was wrong, it was down for 6 hours. unfortunately someone upsteam caused that particular kernel update to rebuild all initramfs' on the machine, and had also named lvm2 to lvm, so now my drives wouldn't mount. On any kernel version/initramfs version normally you can drop to shell load the module, mount the drives and continue startup, but unfortunately that stopped a lot of things from loading such as the bonding we had in place on the nics. obviously I didn't know why it broke at the time and was attempting to get help from #ubuntu on freenode. the response was "Sometimes it's better not to know why it broke" that server was smoothly running CentOS before I left that company. So in my opinion support and enterprise is where it falls down.

sandaru1 12y ago

One of the main reasons Ubuntu got popular (compared to other distros) on Sri Lanka because they shipped free CDs. Lots of people in Sri Lanka didn't have Cable or DSL internet connections by that time. It was limited to a smaller area of the country - even when people had it, it was 512kbps. No one was going to bother download a huge distro DVD to try out a new OS. However, when you get a CD, you tend to try it out. The smooth installation process certainly helped a lot.

buckbova 12y ago

I've been trying various distros for 15 years now and pretty much stopped at Ubuntu. Every week I used to visit http://distrowatch.com/ http://distrowatch.com/ and look for a new distro to try. I liked Mint and #! too, but Ubuntu gave me the most consistent experience with the best repositories.

bufordsharkley 12y ago

I love, love Unity; I love keyboard shortcuts for getting things done quickly, and Unity's keyboard shortcuts are intuitive and cover just about everything. And the visual design is beautiful. ...I just know that if the average person could walk into their Best Buy and get a Windows laptop for $X and an Ubuntu version of that laptop for slightly less, we'd see Ubuntu everywhere. One can dream.

cowardlydragon 12y ago

Ubuntu has been going backwards for at least two years.... - Unity doesn't seem to improve, and just further fractures and balkanizes the linux desketop - They dropped the installation versions where I can do software RAID setup... all my desktops are RAID0 dual HDD and SSD OS/swap/boot. - Ubuntu desktops have been getting slower as I upgrade my hardware, not faster. OSX has maddening keyboard shortcuts, and Windows is committing suicide. With the excess cores, GPU power, huge disk space, virtualization, and other advancements, I should be able to seamlessly run several OSs at once. There is such amazing potential out there, but it is pretty clear that Canonical is now just putting minimal resources into Ubuntu. It still mystifies me that Google didn't make a seriously good desktop distribution on par with OSX to destroy the windows monopoly. Instead... ChromeOS?

wanda 12y ago
Google doesn't want the desktop to exist at all. The last thing a big advertising company wants is power users.
aruggirello 12y ago
You can still install Ubuntu on a RAID0 or 1 mdadm device (I did so on a couple SSDs). You just have to use the Ubuntu Server iso instead of the Desktop one, and follow a few more steps: http://www.ubuntulinuxguide.com/software-raid-ubuntu-14-04-setup-install-configure/ http://www.ubuntulinuxguide.com/software-raid-ubuntu-14-04-s...

unknownBits 12y ago

I'm on arch linux with kde. I tried ubuntu several times, but I can't stick with it. The installation is a breeze, but for the rest it's not that exiting. Btw, I consider myself as a human being too! Still, I am very happy with the existence of Ubuntu, helping millions of people moving away from Windows and OSX. This is a huge boost for the development of software for linux.

_navaneethan 12y ago

If Ubuntu is not avail now, then I have to go payment course for learning Windows Ubuntu is pure white box to learn. I am enjoying it from my college life where I just touched the computer initially, then immediately ubuntu was loaded.

hackmiester 12y ago
I love that it's becoming so common. I don't use Ubuntu personally but I think it is a great "first experience" with Linux.

era86 12y ago

I used Ubuntu in 2004 right when I started college as a comp-sci student. It was the only distro that worked with my laptop with very minimal effort. I also love the package management (though Brew on OSX is a close second). Great read, thanks for sharing!

_nedR 12y ago

As an Ubuntu user since 10.04, what I would really like to see is Ubuntu matching or beating Windows/OS X with regards to battery life. When I first installed 10.04, my ubuntu setup actually beat Windows Vista in battery life and stability. Then 10.10 came out with serious power regressions (related to kernel regressions, Unity, etc.) - which I still blame from killing my battery. Since then, Windows 7 and 8 have gotten more stable and better battery life while Ubuntu has struggled to keep up. With 14.04, Ubuntu is better (finally with basic support for NVIDIA PRIME)but has yet to catch up with Windows. Seriously, Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu devs, if you are reading:- Ubuntu is promoting global warming and creation of electronic waste with its current actions. Forget the features and fluff for now - Fix the battery issues and make sure things just work. Thank you Ubuntu for all the great work you guys have done for Linux over the last 10 years. Still love you.

mattfrommars 12y ago
Have you tried TLP out?
- _nedR 12y ago
  No. I would like to, when I get the time (Also powertop -http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1404_powertop& http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_14... ) But thats the point. Lot of us depend on our computer for work and don't have the time to fiddle with lot of error-prone settings. This is why Linux users have been migrating to OS X for years. Deep down, we are all idealistic hackers who would love for FOSS, and open-source to win, and give the finger to big brother, but we also need to put food on our tables. Canonical lately has been chasing unicorns and leprechauns to find the Next Big Thing (never mind that they are late to mobile, tablet, and even unified interfaces). Canonical is right that mobile is the future. Mobile first of all includes laptops, tablets , phone. And the basic requirement for a successful mobile platform is battery life.
apozem 12y ago
Battery life is why I don't use Linux more. Even with monkeying around in the system, those Linux drivers suck up a lot of juice.

badloginagain 12y ago

I'm surprised they didn't bring up shuttering Ubuntu One cloud service.

KedarMhaswade 12y ago

I am still unhappy with wifi detection/configuration and problems with Compiz. But overall, I agree, Ubuntu is getting better.

bitwize 12y ago

I have an ambivalent relationship with Ubuntu. Personally, I hate Ubuntu but I'm glad it exists. It means a few more people who otherwise would have used Windows, don't. I keep coming back to Slackware because it's in a nice sweet spot where "stable", "just works", "lets me configure it just the way I want" and "doesn't bother me with needless distro-specific cruft" all intersect. So Ubuntu is definitely not for me. For the people it is for, it does a pretty good job.

Aloha 12y ago

I actually think Ubuntu has done wonders to enhance the usability of debian out of the box. We've come so far in 10 years, when I first used debian, I had to write an X config by hand, now thats all automatic, its so much easier to use. I stopped using Ubuntu even though I was an early adopter, and went back to debian, but the development downstream of debian has clearly from my point of view rolled back up hill.

tatterdemalion 12y ago

> Like it or not, Ubuntu or whatever your OS of choice is does have root access to your machine. Not literally of course, but it's effective access given that their code is running with root privileges on your machine and chances are you haven't reviewed it lately. You trust your distro to make sure that code is secure, stable, and acting in your best interests. Actually, I trust that of the millions of Ubuntu users, there is at least one person who would sound the alarm if Canonical had slipped spyware into their distribution (as, of course, people did about the absurd Amazon lens). Free software means trusting the public at large to audit the software rather than trusting the software's producer.

jamesfisher 12y ago

> By Canonical's estimates, Ubuntu has roughly 90 percent of the Linux market. Wat? Seriously? How is this measured?

bigbugbag 12y ago

This article overlook a few facts of history such as ubuntu actively trying to poach debian devs in an attempt to take over debian, or the fact that packages were out of date for 6 months and that the upgrade process from one version to the other often ended in a reinstall from scratch. Not to mention the numerous things that kept breaking (video drivers, pulseaudio and so on).