Ubuntu

Ubuntu came, saw, and conquered -- in Linux terms, that is. And not monetarily, a fact that would lead to all the subsequent bad decisions, after the "How do we monetise this?" question had reared its ugly head and wouldn't leave the room. It was released in 2004 and used Gnome 2.6 as its desktop environment. 

Based on Debian, Ubuntu was amazing. Straightforward to install with a curated selection of software rather than just everything thrown in. It stood the biggest chance of making whatever year the year of Linux on the desktop was supposed to be. They took some criticism for handing out CDs of their free operating  system in a nice cardboard wallet without mentioning Linux at all. But I understand the rationale. Linux had -- and still has (entirely unjustifiably in my opinion) -- a reputation for being geeky, difficult, not for ordinary users. And too many well-meaning Linux channels are too ready to heave an understanding sigh and go along with this, which is just fine and dandy for Microsoft. They don't want an informed population who demand the right to install and use an OS of their choice on their computers. I'll address these issues in future posts. 

Ubuntu back then certainly stood out, though I also remember Mepis as being easy to use and PCLinuxOS, but Ubuntu gained huge popularity and its creator had been to space. Fancy. Then came Unity and HUD. If memory serves, they also had a cloud storage facility like Dropbox, which they later abandoned due to cost. I can't quite remember the chronology, but they later abandoned Unity and went back to Gnome, but not before they'd cheesed off the Linux community with an unannounced kick-back arrangement with Amazon. I, too, have opinions about Amazon, sufficiently strong to stop me shopping there, but that's a subject for another post. Ubuntu then introduced and pushed Snaps and forbade their official community flavours -- Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Mate, et al -- from also shipping Flatpak. Other distros had caught up -- though, to be fair, quite a few were Ubuntu-based. But Ubuntu had fallen from its position of golden grace, and never got it back. And they probably don't care, having given up on the desktop as a revenue stream.  

A slight digression here on conjugating companies. Apparently, it should be singular, "The BBC is denying..."; "Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu..." But it feels odd to me, especially when using a pronoun. "The BBC has denied something or other. It stated that..." All this is by way of my explaining using the plural conjugation. Anyway, back to our tale of Ubuntu's tumble from the heights of Linux favour.

Arguably, a lot of the criticism of Ubuntu is a bit over-blown. Canonical is/are a corporation and therefore their raison d'etre is to make money. Any good they do or did is entirely incidental, and they did a lot of good in accelerating the usability of Linux on the desktop. To be clear, Ubuntu is still a good recommendation for new users; it's just that now there are so many alternatives -- Linux Mint, Fedora, MX Linux, Pop! OS (another story in the making) -- that don't come with the problematic baggage, even though said baggage can be rectified in a matter of minutes. Flatpak is easily installed; Snaps removed; Amazon purged. 

All this is, in many ways, too much knowledge and information. Why should you care? If you want to give Linux a go and someone offers to install Ubuntu for you, go for it. It often is -- and has historically been -- a newbie's first foray. And you're more than likely to have a good experience. There's certainly lots of support.