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Ubuntu Turns 10
Scott James Remnant, now Technical Lead on ChromeOS, was a Debian developer before that. That's how he became involved from the beginning (becoming Developer Manager, and then serving on the Technical Board) on the little derivative distribution that Mark Shuttleworth decided to make of Debian Unstable, and for which the name Ubuntu was eventually chosen. On this date in 2004, Ubuntu 4.10 -- aka Warty Warthog, or just Warty -- was released, and Remnant has shared a detailed, nostalgic look back at the early days of the project that has (whatever else you think of it ) become one of the most influential in the world of open source and Free software. I was excited that Canonical sent out disks that I could pass around to friends and family that looked acceptably polished to them in a way that Sharpie-marked Knoppix CD-ROMs didn't, and that the polish extended to the installer, the desktop, and the included constellation of software, too.
No, it isn't "cool", it's "justified". Canonical ignored its userbase, decided to try and be Microsoft and make Ubuntu the Windows 8 of the Linux world, failed miserably, and now the distro is nearly irrelevant.
Sure, some people still use it here and there, but the fact is, Canonical had a real chance to usher in the year of the desktop for Linux, and they screwed it up.
I still don't understand why we would even need fast chips and premium OpenGL drivers just to run the desktop acceptably. Compositing some simple application bitmaps shouldn't require everything tuned up to the maximum. Windows is super smooth even on GMA950 and there's plenty of eye candy.
Unity did not arrive until 11.04 and I would say that the mass movement to Mint did not happen before 12.04.