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Comment by 4ad | Hacker News Reader

> It was there in Debian (mostly) but it lacked that final bit of polish for the average user.

I've heard this before, but I don't buy it. I have been using Linux for 20 years now; back in the day, and back when Ubuntu came out I was using it on my desktop (today, not so much) and I simply not believe this claim to be true. It's often repeated, but never with concrete specific examples on what was more polished and how it was more polished.

In fact I believe the opposite to be true. Back then I was using Debian on my desktop. I naturally tried Ubuntu and found out it was less polished because it contained more bugs.

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I found the standard "put the disk in, press 'yes,yes,yes' " with Ubuntu got me into a X server, with nice Gnome configuration, with a working Network.

Debian did none of these (at the time), it was a text installer which asked loads of questions I didn't really understand, and didn't install X or gnome or install wireless drivers by default.

Of course, I suspect the things you had to do to Debian to make Ubuntu wasn't very much -- just hide lots of installer options behind an 'advanced' option, and set a bigger set of default packages to install. But it was enough to help me get into Linux.

concrete specific examples on what was more polished and how it was more polished.

Sound and video playback worked out of the box for far more cases than with Debian. Networking just worked for far more network cards. X just worked the way you expected it to in many more cases. And while it certainly was buggier than Debian Stable, I don't recall it being buggier than Debian Unstable on which it was based.

> never with concrete specific examples on what was more polished and how it was more polished.

Network drivers for anything other than an intel card. Still, to this day. They're not in Debian for philosophical reasons, but they're a pain-point to non-expert users.

Not just those, Nvidia drivers!

Ubuntu was the first distro I was able to successfully deploy to non-tech members of my family, friends, and clients. For people who just wanted to browse the web, watch videos, etc and already had old hardware lying around, it was (and is) perfect.

(If someone wants cheap and simple nowadays, I recommend Chromebooks. But if they need free, as in I can re-use some of the flow of decommissioned machines from work, Ubuntu it is!)

Another aspect was the community surrounding Ubuntu. If you asked a really 'dumb' newbie question on the Debian mailing lists chance are you'd get a lot of condescension and RTFMs and probably not so many useful answers. Ask the same question on the Ubuntu forums and the chances where much better that you'd get a clear simple answer that actually solved the problem you where having.

ubuntu-restricted-extras was one of the packages that was a deal-breaker for me, that solved a common pain point at the time.

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