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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.
Linux advocates say they want Linux to take over the desktop and become more supported and accepted, but anytime some distro gets even close to breaking into the mainstream, they all turn against it.
Discuss
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
In my case, Ubuntu was very close and 10.04 was working great for some very non-technical people who wanted to check facebook and gmail and write the occasional paper.
Then the gnome3/unity crap started....
Now they are very happy with Mint and the MATE desktop.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Between Unity and Mir, it's considered cool to Bash Ubuntu these days, but even their most stalwart detractors have to admit they raised the bar for desktop Linux from the first day of their release. There's a reason it's become both a popular distro and a popular base for derivatives.
Thank you, Ubuntu, and Happy Birthday.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
Why do people always forget about kubuntu? Its Ubuntu the way it should be, minus the amazon spyware and unity crap and with best desktop environment around.
If Ubuntu had focused on making a good distro and left the political correctness stuff out it might've gotten less hate.
Actually, plenty of mainstream companies support Linux. You may have heard of some of them: IBM, Mathworks, Autodesk?
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Ubuntu changed everything we've come to expect about free, general-purpose operating systems.
People don't give Launchpad enough credit: for the first time, we have an integrated build/test/deploy process for the whole operating system. It takes the solid Debian root and adds a layer of modern quality assurance that we've never seen before. There's still a ways to go, and I'm sure people will complain about one or other package being broken, but the fact is that Ubuntu raised the bar of what we've come to expect.
Slashdotters and others also love to complain about one particular package or another. Obviously, the desktop environment (or just the shell) is the first thing that most people see. But it's also a small project in the larger scope of Ubuntu. Don't like Unity or GNOME 3 or KDE or Xfce or LXDE or Enlightenment? You have lots of options. Don't like systemd? Well, Ubuntu devoted a lot of time and effort to Upstart, but made the mature decision to abide by Debian's decision to go with systemd (for now). Don't like either? Yeah, well, life these days must be truly hell for poor little you.
And now, Ubuntu may do for mobile what it did for the desktop. In 10 years, I hope we can celebrate the existence of truly free devices, onto which we can install any package we want -- including alternative UIs for those who will undoubtedly not like Unity.