Ubuntu: Desktop Linux's Success Story

Johhny writes "What is it about Ubuntu that has enabled it to grow so much? This distribution has clearly built on Debian's success but it has more than a few other things going for it. Ubuntu has become one of the most popular versions of desktop Linux despite its many differences from some of the other popular versions out there, including its scheduled releases and its counterpart, Kubuntu. The article takes a look at this distribution and tries to find out how Ubuntu defied the odds. This article generated a really informative comments page at OSnews."

Comments

Is it a success?

[ninjeratu]

Not trying to troll here, but is it really such a success? Compared to what? And based on what?
Is it successful because of the number of downloads or ordered CDs? We all know that is not a very reliable measure of success. The number of searches on Google? The number of positive articles submitted on the web? Doesn't say anything about actual usage, as we all know.

For most companies support is important. You can't afford to have a desktop no one can fix if something goes wrong. Which is why Xandros could be attractive to companies, or maybe Fedora/Red Hat/SuSE. Ubunto might be solid as a rock and work out-of-the-box, but I doubt companies would use it unless you have people that can support in in-house, or from a company (that you've actually heard of before). Which is basically why people use Windows. It "works" and you can easily get support if something goes wrong. And you've got Office. (Again something most people think is exclusive to Windows).

As for users .. For most users "Linux" is just like "Windows", just more isoteric (read: difficult) .. but free. (Free is not always a good thing, remember that. Free means crappy and unsupported to some.) The distro names have no meaning to them, just like the difference between "Windows XP" and "Windows 2000" might be lost to them (except that they might know XP is newer than 2000, and newer means better .. right?). What is important to most is that they can read their mail, surf the web, write documents and play an occational game (raise your hand if you've heard of someone that don't like Linux because "games don't work").

What it all boils down to is .. this "success story" seem an awful lot like preaching to the already converted. It's "successful" to a limited community. Just like Gentoo was "successful" a while back (and still is, except that no one's talking about it anymore). Next year something else will be "successful". And people will still use Windows .. :\

(K)Ubunto is a nice distro. No need to hype it.