What's with Ubuntu's popularity?


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It seems like Ubuntu is THE distro to use these days, but what's so special about it? I have both Ubuntu 7.10 and Fedora 8 virtualised and it seems like fedora has everything ubuntu does, and more, and it looks better, and it's no harder to use, so why is everyone flocking toward ubuntu?

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I feel more comfortable with it knowing theres a lot of money behind it.

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No clue. I tried all the distros like fedora, ubuntu, mandriva and i find them all bloated, i prefer gentoo or arch.

Most linux installs are only as bloated as the person installing is lazy, try only selecting the packages you need :p

Centos does come to mind as genuinely bloated, there's no easy way of installing without downloading a whole DVD or multiple CDs. Debian being the opposite with an awesome netinstall disc.

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I think it's because of the advertising ubuntu has done. I think it gave away CD's for free at one point.

You can still order free CDs.

I think it is partly because of corporate sponsorship but also because it is a good distro. The Debian base is the best and most stable and they have some really good features. Like, for example, just being able to turn compiz-fusion on and off. No other distro has that.

Since it tries to inherit Debian's major release cycle it is also quite stable. The downside is that you don't always get on the cutting edge of new software and I found myself building a lot of new software from source, but to some users maybe this doesn't matter.

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As a RedHatter for 5+ years, the time to use Ubuntu came to me as an epiphany. (cue flashback music and fade video)

It happened when I was installing on my newly purchased computer. Fully story in my Neowin Blog, but it summarizes like this:

* I had experience with (x)ubuntu on my wife's machine, and it was surprisingly automatic

* Installing Fedora on my PC required me to do too many steps to install my nVidia, Java and Flash, messing with repositories

* Although I was familiar and comfortable with Fedora (and Red Hat), I wondered why I was going through these steps manually, when all I wanted to do was
use
Linux.

In the end, every Linux can run the same packages from one distro to another, and you get to pick out only what you want. So the deal-breaker for me was which one made it easy.

...

Centos does come to mind as genuinely bloated, there's no easy way of installing without downloading a whole DVD or multiple CDs. Debian being the opposite with an awesome netinstall disc.

Those two examples are opposite ends of an install philosophy. Netinstall has bare minimum and requires a network connection to get what you want. The CentOS set includes everything on the CDs/DVD. You bring that to any PC and you can get what you want installed without a network connection. It is complete.

As you said earlier in your post, "bloat" is only what you choose to install.

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It's because ubuntu makes it more noob friendly and things are very much simplified with it. Ubuntu is straight to the point simple and easy to use and has everything one needs to run it and enjoy linux. from my personal experience fedora/red hat still had a lot of common linux knowledge needed to operate and set it up to be friendly and simple unlike ubuntu.

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Not knowing Linux, I was impressed by the way it's positioned in the market, and was reassured by the LTS release.

When I tried the free CD on my laptop it just installed and ran (unlike Vista, that wouldn't install without adding a RAID driver from a USB stick).

Maybe other distros are just as good, but if Ubuntu works for me, why spend time trying others?

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I think Ubuntu's 6-mo release cycle is also a big deal. The distro is advancing much faster than damn near anything else out there, and it has Mark Shuttleworth's "vision" guiding it. They have plans and resources to make those plans happen. Landscape was just released, for instance, and I really hope I'll get to work with it someday. Yeah, it frequently doesn't have exactly the latest and greatest package versions, but you know that in 6-mo or less, a new generation will release and you'll be caught up again. So you're never really all that behind anyway, and that's not so bad. Between the huge established community and all Canonical has accomplished, both in technical advancement and business relationships (like Dell), Ubuntu is certainly a distro that has a lot going for it.

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The thing I've always liked about Ubuntu was that its really had an excellent vision of providing Linux to the masses and making it easy to use without making it Windows.

The Ubuntu community is also very helpful. Their primary support forum is very well moderated and organized in my opinion, and there is a wealth of knowledge on how to use the operating system there and on the Internet.

Last is the fact that they release often (6m) and when they do, its on one CD not 4, or a DVD. I can usually get Ubuntu off bittorrent in a few minutes, burn it to a CD or load the ISO into VMWare and I'm on my way. Fedora and other distros is usually a sit around for hours waiting for the download to finish process and then install. As a result it also installs much faster.

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The thing I've always liked about Ubuntu was that its really had an excellent vision of providing Linux to the masses and making it easy to use without making it Windows.

The Ubuntu community is also very helpful. Their primary support forum is very well moderated and organized in my opinion, and there is a wealth of knowledge on how to use the operating system there and on the Internet.

Last is the fact that they release often (6m) and when they do, its on one CD not 4, or a DVD. I can usually get Ubuntu off bittorrent in a few minutes, burn it to a CD or load the ISO into VMWare and I'm on my way. Fedora and other distros is usually a sit around for hours waiting for the download to finish process and then install. As a result it also installs much faster.

The other "mainstream" distros, such as Fedora/RH and SUSE are just too bloated imo. They release at a slower pace than Ubuntu (about every year I guess) and when they do, it's always 4-5 cds or on dvd. Not that there's anything wrong with that if that's what you 're into. But I don't find it necessary really. I don't feel that a slimmer distro like Ubuntu is really lacking anything vs those others. 4-5 cds of data and ..for what? Install from one Ubuntu cd and you're running in 15 minutes and it already has most anything you're going to be using on Fedora or SUSE, and anything not installed can be quickly and easily. There also seems to be WAY more software packages avaiable in the debian/ubuntu repositories than is available on the rpm-based environments.

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I think most people use Ubuntu because it has up to date packages otherwise its just Debian using the unstable repository.

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The other "mainstream" distros, such as Fedora/RH and SUSE are just too bloated imo. They release at a slower pace than Ubuntu (about every year I guess) and when they do, it's always 4-5 cds or on dvd. Not that there's anything wrong with that if that's what you 're into. But I don't find it necessary really. I don't feel that a slimmer distro like Ubuntu is really lacking anything vs those others. 4-5 cds of data and ..for what? Install from one Ubuntu cd and you're running in 15 minutes and it already has most anything you're going to be using on Fedora or SUSE, and anything not installed can be quickly and easily. There also seems to be WAY more software packages avaiable in the debian/ubuntu repositories than is available on the rpm-based environments.

Not sure about SUSE, but Fedora releases approx twice a year, like Ubuntu. And the number of CDs is just a matter of presentation. A Fedora set is the same as Ubuntu + Kubuntu + Xubuntu + more server type options like sendmail.

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Last is the fact that they release often (6m) and when they do, its on one CD not 4, or a DVD. I can usually get Ubuntu off bittorrent in a few minutes, burn it to a CD or load the ISO into VMWare and I'm on my way. Fedora and other distros is usually a sit around for hours waiting for the download to finish process and then install. As a result it also installs much faster.

Also about the install process: a LiveCD that includes an installer is the way to go. Load the LiveCD, make sure everything works fine, then open the installer icon on the desktop and let it install. Both Fedora Core and openSuSE require separate discs for install and Live.

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^I'm pretty sure I have a openSuSE Live CD that can be installed.

And as for ubuntu's popularity, it is the only Distro where my WLAN works out of the box, thanks to the restricted drivers app :)

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It's the name. Ubuntu sounds so much cooler than Fedora. It's got to be it!!

--

I like the fact they give cd's for free, and it's an overall good OS too :).

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I think it's because of the advertising ubuntu has done. I think it gave away CD's for free at one point.

Yeah, they're giving them all the time, if you give them to the people, they are somehow feel "more secure".

It's advertised with big forum community

And it has some stuff like having sudo as default and stuff like that, what makes noobs more welcome.

And restricted drivers app - most of the amateurs as I was don't know anything about drivers in linux - if it works out of the box - it's my distro :)

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