Why Ubuntu is popular

Well, I've spent some time with quite a few distroes myself. Ranging from Mandriva to Gentoo. Ubunut is actually one of my favorites. Easy, reasonably fast and above all else newbie friendly.

I don't actually care which Linux distro people choose as long as they make the choice based upon what they like or enjoy. Not based on the «choice» that it was preinstalled when they bought the computer.

I dnt understand why so many in the Linux community is hostile agains ubuntu?! Ubuntu is a great ambassador for Linux and also provides a good introductory system for switchers from M$.

All you old Linux geeks may continue to play with your Slackware-installation while the great Linux-community grows every day.

I think the community at large is rather found of Ubuntu. I do not dislike Ubuntu. However I think it does not deserve all the attention. They live on other distribution's work, and does not develop anything new.

Currently I use openSUSE 10.2 because it does KDE much better than KUbuntu. It is also the only distribution that offered me out-of-the-box support for most hardware.

Compare openSUSE/SLED and Ubuntu's work and you will find that Novell does much more innovative and actual work for Linux than Canonical.

Some people hate anything that's popular, and now the "plague" has infected the linux people.

I don't think that Ubuntu is more easy to use than openSUSE or Mandriva.

I would recomend Mandriva to newbie.

KUbuntu 7.04 now offers better hardware support that openSUSE 10.2 does. So I will be switching back to KUbuntu!! Oh, the irony…

I don’t want to wait till the end of Summer , I want it now. Who with me?

I would say Ubuntu DOES live up to it's hype, as long as you understand what that hype is about and why.

Ubuntu is unique among major distros in that it's the *primary* distro of a corporate effort, yet it's free. I've played with and loved Fedora Core 6, it was considerably more powerful, flexible and faster than Ubuntu Edgy but every once in a while an auto-update did something stupid. Didn't take long to sort out a fix for ME but for an "Aunt Millie" type user? No way. The Fedora series really is a permanent bleeding-edge beta-test program for RHEL.

OpenSuse is more stable than Fedora but the repository support stank and I had to abandon that. Novell puts no effort into making sure OpenSuse repos are up and stable because their primary product is Suse. So it's out of the running.

And so on!

In stark contrast, Canonical puts ALL their effort into Ubuntu. Do they always get it right? Nope. Edgy was a mess early on but to their credit, by 1st quarter '07 they'd gotten it wrestled under control and Feisty is a dream. I ran that starting with the 4th alpha release and it was more solid even then than several "production" distros I've tried. The earliest reports on Gutsy alpha 2 are very positive as well.

So why Ubuntu? They've made a major effort on hardware compatibility, clean wifi and an effort not to break it once in the field. Repository support is excellent. It all adds up to something "Aunt Millie" can run forever with no handholding EXCEPT of course for the initial install and tuning. That still needs a geek, esp. where laptops and/or multimedia support is involved.

A BIG improvement due in Gutsy is a GUI-based video setting utility for multi-monitor setups. No more tweaking the hell out of xorg.conf :). Fedora has that already and Ubuntu needs it bad.

Jim