Why DO you use Ubuntu?


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In the spirit of the "Why don't you use Ubuntu?" thread, let's have one for all the Ubuntu users to state their reasons for using the distro, what led them to try, maybe what didn't work for them about other distros, etc.

Perhaps we can compare reasons between the two threads and maybe even learn something.

Personally, I've been tinkering with Linux for about 5 years now, and have tried just about every distro under the sun. Historically I'd had the most luck with Slackware, as its slow-and-steady mentality (development-wise, I mean) led it to be a very stable and no-nonsense OS that cooperated better with my hardware than any others. For various reasons, though, I always wound up going back to Windows.

I discovered Ubuntu when Warty Warthog was the distro-du-jour and gave it a try. I was impressed by the emphasis on simplicity and (dare I say it?) Mac-like interface philosophy. However, like so many other distros, it didn't like my laptop very much. AMD64 + ATI graphics + Broadcom WLAN card + WXGA resolution + a number of other things tripped it up the way they tripped up every distro. Of course I'm sure part of that was me being a noob, but hey, c'est la vie.

I followed Ubuntu through its various incarnations and finally installed it full-time on another PC, my test PC, when Edgy came out. Xubuntu Feisty went onto my laptop in a dual-boot configuration with XP, which made it much less stressful to play with it because there was no longer the "all-or-nothing" stakes of "learn this or reformat." Finally, I threw Gutsy on my laptop just the other day and was absolutely floored with how well it worked.

Which brings me to my main point, and the point of the thread: the reason I use Ubuntu. It's a Linux distro that actually works with my hardware with minimal effort, and has the pointless, stupid, but highly attractive eye-candy features that I've been fighting with for so long (stupid ATI mobility card). Compiz Fusion works like a dream, my sound works, my screen resolution is correct (without even needing to configure it - it recognized 1280x800 right out of the box), it sees my USB mouse and just plain starts working with it, and it has a very nice way of acquiring and installing/uninstalling software.

I want to learn Linux. I want to be a guru. I want to know the difference between /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin, /usr/opt, /opt, /opt/bin, /etc/local, /usr/local/sbin/opt/etc/var/oh/my/god/this/is/a/lot/of/slashes, and what they're all for. I want to know the tricks to installing hardware and making stuff work. But I get frustrated very, very easily. The reason I love my Mac is that I can experiment with UNIX, but if anything goes sour there I still have an easy and functional interface to fall back on with the Finder. Ubuntu Gutsy now gives me something similar with Linux. I feel safe knowing that everything works out of the box, and I can experiment more freely knowing that the functionality of my system is no longer at stake (as in, I better make this work or else I'll never have $FEATURE).

The only thing I still have to iron out is wireless functionality. It seems to see my card, but I can't join any networks. If that's the only thing I have to make work, though, that's okay by me.

So...there you have it. Why do you Ubuntu?

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I chose (X)Ubuntu for my wife's dual-boot experiment because it has a reputation for being designed for inexperienced Linuxers. I, personally, am a Red Hat/Fedora guy, but this gives me a chance to try something new and see what the "Ubuntu" hype is about. It does seem that they added in many GUI "control panel" type of apps to make settings that most experienced *nixers would do by editing a text file, so I guess that point-n-clickers would feel more comfortable with *buntu than many other distros.

*buntu also automatically prompted me to enable "nonfree" repositories for her nVidia card, another convenience for newbies who may not know that nVidia uses proprietary drivers that cannot be freely redistributed.

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I agree. I like the idea behind "free uber alles," but sometimes it just isn't practical, and having to jump through hoops to do something that's just about bog-standard nowadays (like, say, playing back MP3s, only the most popular digital-audio format on the freaking planet) isn't cool. I like the idea of "prompt, alert the user to potential legal pitfalls, but have a nice, big friendly "OK/Cancel" pair ripe for the clicking and let everything be automagic if they click OK.

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Well, I found it 'just works'. We have got all our home's computers on Ubuntu now and it just works on all of them. I admit one is a Dell laptop bought with Ubuntu installed on it but I upgraded that to Gutsy and all is great with it too. :yes:

It is a good distro to start with and maybe, if you don't want to spend much time learning how Linux works, a good one to stay with. There is a lot of online support available. I solved all the problems I couldn't solve myself by visiting Ubuntu forums and documentation sites. (Y)

And, you can get free Ubuntu stickers to replace the Windows ones on your machines. :cool:

:D
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I ran it, never used it - then updated from 7.04 to 7.10 and it failed halfway, causing it to become completely unusable. I have tried about 4 different distros and none I have liked. Linux is simply not for me - we don't get on well at all.

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Are you using a laptop or a desktop, Max? If it's a laptop, I feel your pain. 7.10 worked for me, but I'm not surprised you're having Linux problems on a laptop system.

One of my wishlist items, and one to which I might treat myself when I finish my undergraduate studies at Illinois Tech, is a laptop from System76. Not necessarily because I'll never run Windows on it - I may well wind up having to - but because that way I'm guaranteed to get a laptop with Linux-friendly hardware.

If you're on a desktop, well, I'd try booting into Windows, running something like Aida32, and asking on a forum if there's any hardware there that's known to be finicky.

Just in case you wanted to give it another go. And you might want to just repartition and reformat the whole drive, rather than trying an upgrade install. When in doubt, do a clean setup.

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I've gone through Redhat 6.1 then Redhat 9, Mandrake 9 and fedora 1 to fedora 4, but I was really disappointed at them as setting things up was too time consuming for an average user like me. But I loved the fact that each version of them was far more easy to install then Windows, so I was never intending to give up.

But I hated the dependency problems... they should die. And considering the slow internet connection this was the ONLY problem held me back from adopting Linux fully. Imagine looking and downloading packages using a 4Kbps internet connection *shudders*. And there was no other way I could have get them.

But Ubuntu solved that problem for me and thats why I love it. I didn't had to search through hundreds of websites to get all the packages to get a simple application to work. Just click and go!

And Also Ship it was another thing helped me to take the decision. We don't have the opportunity to get many distros to try. But with Ship it Latest versions of Ubuntu was easily available to me.

And now I'm fully a Linux user for 2 years, I still have a Windows setup though, for my Sister and for Playing games. But for everything else(Internet, Development etc) I use Linux. Ubuntu let me do many things easily and it don't stop me from doing advanced stuffs. So I win both the ways. Why should not I use it?

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Well after being very put off by Fedora and rpms, I came across Debian and told myself I'd never look back and I havent. After a bit I found out about Ubuntu and because it was based on Debian I figured why not give it a go? It was more bleeding edge which I wanted so it seemed a good choice. It was easy to use (especially coming mostly from a Windows background) everything seemed to work how it should. And when it didn't work, they had a great user community to help me out (actually I usually found help here in Neowin but shh..). I've tried a bunch of others and really liked them but since my Ubuntu works just fine, I've never switched. It would be too much hassle for me to configure everything and make it all work the way it does now. That is not to say Ubuntu is a bad distro and I'd love to ditch it. Quite the opposite. I enjoy having it on my computer. But if I could switch without any problems and configuring or tweaking I would for a while just for something new. Alas, I'll have to stick to virtual installs.

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Ubuntu is actually the only linux system I've every tried, I liked it, and now it is my main OS. Everything works, so I see no reason to experiment with other distros. I also fail to see what any other distro could possible offer me. In every distro I could get the program I want, so when everything is basically the same, why switch? Linux is linux, so in the end, you can do everything on every distro you want.

Another really big advantage of Ubuntu is the user community. There is tonnes of information in the forums. If I have a problem I often search simple for 'lunix + problem', but the Ubuntu forums are always high in the ranks, and have good answers.

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I've used Gentoo, Slackware, Suse, Fedora, Mandrake, and probably another one or two, and ubuntu is by far the easiest to maintain. Apt-get is excellent, and for a guy like me who is still interested in using linux but isn't interested in waiting for compiling (gentoo), lots of internet searching for dependencies(slackware), or rpm dependency hell (everything else...), it works great. Its not the fastest, and its not the most stable out there, but it has the best combination of features for me. And its not windows, another big plus.

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I like, and use Ubuntu, but then again i don't really see many reasons to pick a specific distro over any other. Most of them are just so similar it seems kinda of silly. If Ubuntu disappeared tomorrow I'd just load OpenSuse, and be just as happy.

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  • 5 weeks later...

Thinking of dual booting or running vmware with Ubuntu.

Currently Vista is on my box, as I do a lot of gaming. Trying to see what I would gain putting ubuntu on my system. Not sure how beneficial it would be for everday use (besides gaming) , like suring net, email, videos, etc. Might just be something I toy with til I can find a real reason to spend more time in Ubuntu over Vista.

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Ubuntu was fun to get 'into' Linux, since OpenSuse and Mandrake (yea long time ago) didn't do the trick =p

But shortly after I switched to Fedora and Debian's running on my server. I like the name better. And I like to use Linux instead of Windows since I never wanna switch to Vista. Maybe to Win Seven, but seeing how MS is going now with WLM and everything, it's just fugly everywhere. I hate it lol. So I was looking for alternatives. And ended up with Ubuntu.

But since I still play games, I can't use it as my main OS. Stupid mainstream marketing ><;

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I was using Ubuntu for a while, everything worked flawlessly, then I wanted to watch some trailers, firefox was crashing... ****ed me off, booted to Windows, didn't booted back...

But when I was using it, it was mainly to learn stuff, because Linux is a great way to learn how OS works (currently I'm studying Operating systems...)

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I tried Ubuntu in version 5.04 or so but throw it away because I was in the need of windows. But now I ran Ubuntu only on my PC because it's easy to maintain and use when you only have little time for maintance.

First reason for Ubuntu was that it is based on Debian which was my personal favourite

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compiz fusion...clearly... plus heard lots of "ooo its sooo good blah blah"

now its just there in a dual boot. barely use it... more into vista... simply way more convenient and runs perfectly on my pc..albiet not as fast as ubuntu. ubuntu has a lot of problems running with my monitor (i got it working with a LOT of xorg.conf editing... when i say a lot i mean like modelines, resolution...what not!)

now i just love using office 2007 on my vista.. the open office in ubuntu doesnt cut it for me.. unless i can find a way to run office 2007 on linux using wine or crossover in a noob friendly fashion

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After finally being put off of Vista by it deactivating itself just because of a driver update I went looking for something that wasn't a pain to use or had the many, many, many problems of Vista as well. Naturally I tried out Linux. After trying out many different distros I eventually read a review of Ubuntu and how Dell was putting it on some of their systems. I installed it and found it to be the most "ready for prime time" distro of Linux out there and stuck with it ever since and I have no regrets either.

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compiz fusion...clearly... plus heard lots of "ooo its sooo good blah blah"

now its just there in a dual boot. barely use it... more into vista... simply way more convenient and runs perfectly on my pc..albiet not as fast as ubuntu. ubuntu has a lot of problems running with my monitor (i got it working with a LOT of xorg.conf editing... when i say a lot i mean like modelines, resolution...what not!)

now i just love using office 2007 on my vista.. the open office in ubuntu doesnt cut it for me.. unless i can find a way to run office 2007 on linux using wine or crossover in a noob friendly fashion

Office 2007 is pretty much the sole reason I ever boot into XP. What's weird is I write my essays in open office, just with standard formatting. Save it as a .doc and do the finishing touches/formatting/spell checking etc on Word 2007. I can't wait for wine to be able to run it :D

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