In defense of Ubuntu

Thank you Jonathan Corbet.

I started my Unix days in 1988 with At&T Unix 386, AT&T 3B2 Unix, and Xenix 286/386.  I moved
on through SCO Unix and SCO Open Server... and eventually discovered Linux, BSDi and the
*BSDs.  I briefly flirted with Slackware '96.  And then discovered RedHat 4.2 and fell in
love.  I followed redhat through RH9 (with a brief sojourn involving Mandrake) and picked up
with Fedora without missing a beat.  Never cared for Debian much.  Oh, I tried it... and
always came away unimpressed.  I admit that this was partially due to being "used to" the
RedHat way.  I was biased, as are we all, by what I was used to.  Ubuntu, a Debian derived
distro, had a *lot* to prove.  But I did try it, one day, a few years ago.  It was an
evaluation.  One of many which I had conducted upon countless distro releases over the years.
Usually, at the end of the evaluation, I would long for Red Hat or Fedora, and move back.  But
with Ubuntu, I didn't see any hurry to move back.  Time passed.  I still did not see any hurry
to move back.  I finally *did* move back, for some reason that I can't quite remember... and I
found myself missing Ubuntu.  Oh, for about a year, I described myself in these forums as
"really a Redhat guy" who happened to like Ubuntu.  And then I decided that what I was really
doing was hiding in a closet.

Ubuntu elicits so much jealousy and hostility from fans of other distros, due to its perceived
popularity.

That popularity is real.  And the reason for it is no mystery.  Any distro could have done it.
Certainly most of the devs and maintainers of the well known distros have exhibited the
penchant for hard work necessary to achieve it.  What it really comes down to is priorities.
Ubuntu focuses on the user.  But that's not the important bit.  The important bit is that there
is no "but...".  You see, most other distros think that the user experience is the most
important thing in the world... except... this other thing... (license purity... making sure
we don't lift a finder to help the user watch movie formats we don't approve of, etc.) is even
more important.  Ubuntu doesn't do that.  They care about the user experience and they don't
let other things get in the way of that.

Of course, I've just painted Ubuntu as Linspire and Xandros, have I not?  Well, I guess I
have.  And that needs to be corrected, because it is an inaccurate depiction.  Whereas
Linspire and Xandros just dump the proprietary codecs and drivers into the system without
bothering the user's pretty little head with the details, Ubuntu attempts to make the user
*aware* of the issues.  And then they trust them to make an adult decision regarding how they
use their own hardware.  No doubt most users decide to go ahead and watch the DVD.  But a seed
has been planted.  The user has been made aware of an issue which they had likely never
considered before.

The bottom line is that fans of other distros would do well to get over the jealousy.  I share
a fondness with Red Hat for the saying 'A rising tide lifts all boats'.  Canonical and Ubuntu
have tapped a tide which, along with all the other waves made by the FOSS gestalt, is going to
lift us all.  It doesn't matter if you prefer Gentoo, or Mandriva, or Damn Small, or
Slackware, or CentOS, or Peanut, or Pardus, or Suse, or OpenWRT.

We will all ride the tide.

Be happy with your distro of choice.