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.

Comments

before unbuntu

[asv108]

I was running Gentoo on my desktop and laptop to get the latest performance optimizations since most distros at the time were optimized for older processors. Ubuntu was really the first distro that was optimized out of the box for performance desktops. I don't miss debugging compilation issues with "emerge world".

The OS that wasn't

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, everybody hates Ubuntu these days, the only linux distro that had a chance gets hated into oblivion. Open source is anti success. They did everything to stop them from ever getting market share.

debian to be forked

[Anonymous Coward]

http://debianfork.org/

Re:Unity is rubbish. Systemd is rubbish

[Kjella]

Except they're not chasing the mainstream, they're chasing the hype wave of Apple/Google/Microsoft trying to be the "big next thing" instead of what is actually mainstream today with Win7/OS X. Instead of picking a market and staying on target to finish the job they still haven't finished on the office desktop from 1999 or the laptop from 2004 or smartphone from 2009 or tablet from 2014. And at this rate I don't think Ubuntu will stay in one place long enough to be relevant to anyone outside the ~1% of the desktop market Linux owns today.

Xubuntu

[tepples]

Then the gnome3/unity crap started

I used GNOME 2 during 11.04 when this Unity crap started getting included. Once GNOME 2 became "fallback" in 11.10, I put up with Unity for a month, but after that I did sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop and never looked back. The only drawback is that I can't think of what the f in Xfce is supposed to stand for after the decade-old migration from XForms to GTK+.

Companies Fail To Admit Thier Mistakes

[BrendaEM]

People are choosing other distributions for a reason, actually two.
Get rid of Unity and stop collecting search information, or fade into obscurity.

Re:Unity is rubbish. Systemd is rubbish

[MMC Monster]

Ubuntu 10.04 had a lot of problems, but that's because the software it was based on was not mature, and Ubuntu took to rolling their own UI rather than working with upstream. That being said, upstream Gnome was busy committing suicide, so it wasn't too bad for Ubuntu to look in another direction.

A lot of users (including myself) jumped soon after to Linux Mint with Cinnamon UI and that's why it's the top at distrowatch now.

Only time will tell if Linux Mint Cinnamon is going to self-destruct. I think the next step for them would be to partner with a hardware manufacturer such as System76.