Comment of the Day - December 8, 2005 - Why I choose Ubuntu

[And here they are:]

1. The desktop is really clean. No icons on it no "junk"

2. Really integrated with the gnome and debian system. (or kde and debian for kubuntu)

Instead of reinvinting the wheel they have tried to use existing gnome configuration tools and the debian system rather than comming up with new stuff. They have added a few extra tools but only where there was not a good one already in the gnome desktop. They prefer integrating there stuff directly into gnome and debian rather than having their own tools.

3. It's free and they don't make you feel guilty about not giving them money. When you give something out for free (with out making people feel guilty) people feel like they need to give something back hence a strong community or configuration improvements.

4. Focused on the desktop. Many distributions claim they are desktop focused but they tend to get things about 90-95% there before moving onto new things. Ubuntu seems to work on making things work slightly better (fixing things) with each itteration (on the desktop) rather than adding too many new things which fix some things and break others.



5. Smart simple collection of applications installed. Ubuntu has choosen the most popular applications and included them on the desktop. They've also picked one application per task rather than having many.

6. Uptodate stable systems. Ubuntu releases the latest applications with their release. This is quite important with gnome (and kde) since there are desktop improvements with each new release.

7. Gather feedback. Ubuntu allows you to submit your hardware data to their database letting them know what works and what doesn't. Therefore they can get more hardware to work with each release. Also they are quite responsive.

8. Strong leadership. While it's great that Mark ShuttleWorth has given a lot of money to support the Ubuntu project which has deffinately helped, I think his leadership has been even more useful. I think he is a good leader and knows how to keep the project on track and encourage participation. He seems to start out small then add things rather than take away things as some distros seem to do (ie redhat)

9. Encourages participation. Right from the start Ubuntu has worked on making it easy for people to contribute. Not only that many of those improvements find themselves included in some way in the next release.

10. Good support community (although I haven't had to use it that much so this hasn't been a big thing for me).



11. Excellent hardware support. (I'm sure mepis has this as well but I've had some problems)

12. Fits on one CD.

Well, that's the reasons I can think of at the top of my head. I know Mepis has some of these advantages (11 and 12 but not 1-9 in my experience) and also has some ubuntu does not: A better installer and automatically loads a lot of useful plugins and media codecs. Personally I don't care about the CD's being shipped since I download distributions but that probably helps as well. Just so you know I started off with KDE since I liked the desktop more but after using Ubuntu I happily switched to gnome. I don't know what Kubuntu is like.