Huge red flag. What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way? Making a Debian distro for first year uni students?
I'm not sure you remember what the Linux landscape looked like when Ubuntu was first released, but it was a pretty huge deal at the time. So much more hardware and software (esp. media playback) worked out of the box than any other distro at the time. USB and wireless networking just worked. The desktop they provided was was really nice and well configured as well with most defaults working the way most people expecting them to. Plus the pretty amazing fact that they would send you an install CD, for free, basically anywhere in the world. Back when downloading 700 MB over the internet was an impossibility for most people, this was a seriously huge deal for getting Linux into the hands of people. You could take that free CD, pop it into almost any computers, just accept all the defaults and be pretty sure to have a working Linux desktop at the end. At the time, that was a huge accomplishment.
We can all have opinions about the choices Canonical has made over the years and what they have become, but let's not pretend that they weren't one of the biggest and most significant drivers of Linux on the desktop back in the day.
Same experience as fedora, arch, and every other gnome based distro. They had a good installer (ubiquity?) and a permissive policy with proprietary software and codecs. They had a dedicated installer for proprietary drivers (jockey?) and a huge repository (universe) with packages, drivers and codecs that other distros like fedora and debian deemed more ideologically or legally questionable.
That's what set them apart, people wanted mp3 codecs and Nvidia drivers.
And they had consistent branding, with nice identitary themes, color, wallpapers. Something community based projects always failed to achieve.
As someone at the time who didn’t know anything about Linux and had dialup internet, it was extremely handy to be able to pop in a disk and get running like I was used to with other OSes
That is not what they said, the desktop was plain GNOME and that experience was the same as any other distro running plain GNOME.
What set them apart was the installer and the rest of their post.
It was polished GNOME. They were but of the jokes at the time for the color theme chosen, but it had polish that plain GNOME didn't.
That is valid even today; just the choice of default font is huge. Ubuntu font vs Cantarell? They are not even in the same league.
But sure, here's the comparison.
Ubuntu 4.10: https://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=664&image=ubuntu_histo...
Fedora Core 3: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Fedora_C...
Besides a slightly less clunky selection for theming, the game changer was the installer and the willingness to chuck the Free Software purity, back when the FSF was at the height of its influence and the terrible that was setting up Linux made it inaccessible to even CompSci students, let alone the general public.
The delivery of Live CDs (I believe initially they still had a Live/Install split like other contemporary distros) was _huge_ also in places where broadband was too slow to make downloading the ISOs practical if you weren't 100% committed since before even starting, and it reached many countries, in South America it'd for sure be a huge pain to download ISOs.
All these actions to make Linux more accessible were a pretty big deal.
That's a matter of preference. Regardless, the Humanity theme is much closer to what standard GNOME looked like back then. Which goes against the original point that they were especially polished.
> Besides a slightly less clunky selection for theming, the game changer was the installer and the willingness to chuck the Free Software purity, back when the FSF was at the height of its influence and the terrible that was setting up Linux made it inaccessible to even CompSci students, let alone the general public.
What is with this weird, warped memory that is so common these days? First of all, many distros eschewed "Free Software purity": SuSE, Mandrake/Mandriva, Linspire, etc; and they definitely did it better than the early versions of Ubuntu. Ubuntu didn't get known for being "easy to install" until 2+ years after its release when jockey was reworked in 6.10/7.04. As to difficulty to install? The Anaconda, SuSE and Drak installers offered much the same experience as the standard debian installer that early versions of Ubuntu used, but with GUIs. And it took two minutes of googling "nvidia fedora core" to find RPMForge then click the "add to repos" link to add the necessary drivers to the single of the aforementioned distros that didn't offer it.
But sure, let's just do another direct comparison.
Here's the Ubuntu 4.10 install:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLX3vJgLdrw
Here's the installer for Fedora Core 1, which came out a year and a half before the first version of Ubuntu (even with the fact that this person chose to manually partition their disks, it's pretty streamlined):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6c3prrIhzI
If you honestly believe the Ubuntu install is easier or more friendly than the Fedora one, you're delusional.
And for further comparison:
Mandrake 10.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTnKhruF9kc
Linspire 5.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_lL4HE5a0o
Yeah, you're right. They're much more difficult than Ubuntu to install (especially for "CompSci students").
In addition, their stance on Free Software went way too far when they started developing in their own bubble and refusing to upstream any of their patches. At the time they were mocked for their ugly brown color, for their overly opinionated stances and for holding back advancements in Linux. AIGLX's ( developed by Fedora+the Free Software community and the eventual GL extension to Xorg) development was delayed by the fight with Ubuntu/XGL, who just wanted something pretty now to show off. Same goes for all the constant fights they start [and always lose] to do things "their way": systemd vs upstart, flatpaks vs snap, mir vs wayland, GNOME vs ubiquity, etc, etc etc.
Their reputation has always been that they use the Linux community to do all the dirty work for them, and give nothing back. At least, for people actually involved in the community.
> The delivery of Live CDs (I believe initially they still had a Live/Install split like other contemporary distros) was _huge_ also in places where broadband was too slow to make downloading the ISOs practical if you weren't 100% committed since before even starting, and it reached many countries, in South America it'd for sure be a huge pain to download ISOs.
There you go. This is why they were popular. In a time when many people were still on slower broadband or Dial-Up (or had to pay 3-10usd to order a disc); having a millionaire cover the cost of sending it to you was a big deal. Ubuntu 4.10-6.10 didn't get popular for being pretty, or easy to use, or having a great out-of-the-box experience; they did despite those things because it was super easy to get 5 discs and hand them out to your friends who knew nothing about Linux. They then worked on making the out-of-box experience better for themselves (and only themselves) while leeching off the established distros who did work with the community. Red Hat/Fedora is the big one, but Mandrake/Mandriva, SuSE, etc were also big contributors. Hell, it was common for Microsoft to contribute more to the Linux upstream than Canonical did.
> All these actions to make Linux more accessible were a pretty big deal.
The one action. Making discs easy to get and distribute to people unaware.
I grew up in a modest family, small village (3k people), 14k modem, and yet every (all the two of them) newsstand had at least two biweekly Linux magazines. They cost something like 5€ (or whatever currency we had at the time) and they always had either 2 linux installer cd or one installer and one cd with some cool software to try.
And they had serious quality articles too. I still remember one where they described in detail how they built a DIY magnetic tunneling microscope and used it to recover some data from an hard drive.
By the time Ubuntu free cds came out I already had a big collection of Linux installers, none of them downloaded on my own.
Agreed about the rest. They've always been poisonous towards upstreams and probably contributed to set back the famous year of the Linux Desktop by diluting the efforts in dead-end projects instead of working with upstream towards a common goal.
So, to clarify: when Ubuntu came out in the US, the only truly accessible methods to get access to Linux were to live in a city large enough to have big box tech stores with hobbyist/DIY sections or to order online. And to have some reason to want to try it. The US was much more entrenched in a monoculture/duopoly from the early Mac and DOS days; while Europeans were still happily hacking about on Amigas, Commodores/Ataris, BeBoxen, etc.
As to why Ubuntu took over, over there? I can only hazard that the gains they benefited from near ubiquity and eventual ease of use just osmotically permeated across the pond. But you're correct, I think the free discs probably had less of an influence.
What they really did well and made them known very well is they would ship you cdrom for free while for other distros you either had to buy them from a store, download it or buy a linux computer paper magazine that came with cdrom install of a different distro every month.
That was a big deal when very few people had access to fast internet connections.
That entrance to the market and that initial leg up was also the height of accomplishment for Canonical.
They were weaker in the technology aspect and, ultimately, they were a privately-owned corporation, so space for community participation was limited, which made them lose the mystique by year two or three.
As they tried to find ways to monetize, as a nicely packaged desktop OS in live CDs wasn't the way to go, they tried to get into vertical integration and more infrastructure-centric developments, that again, weren't their forte. As this went on, they went more noticeably corporate, making them lose further appeal and goodwill.
Oh, it was far, far more than that. For example, wifi support was still extremely immature when the first ubuntu releases came out and a lot of people made out-of-tree drivers to support the various wifi chips that were on the market. Out-of-tree drivers were not included in any distro but Ubuntu, and installing them on a distro like Fedora was a major pain, my laptop of the time depended on one of those drivers, the original developer probably got tired of the process of mainlining a driver and abandoned it and I had to modify the source code to adapt it to whatever API refactoring happened at the time on the kernel version used by Fedora to get it running. Running a roller like arch while depending on this stuff? ah, nonono.
By out-of-tree I don't necessarily mean proprietary driver, there were a lot of open source drivers that weren't mainlined, it was kind of a wild west.
It was also the first major distro to feature a Live CD installer. Sure, you could theoretically install LiveCD distros like Knoppix, but it wasn't recommended - and the desktop and assortment of apps lacked polish compared to what Ubuntu preselected.
It gave you a fresh debian system with recent packages without the breakages that happened routinely in sid (Ubuntu came out in an era where debian had major struggles with stable releases. These days it has gotten a lot better and I use debian stable now. Flatpak and containers also solved one of the pain points of LTS.)
As a long time linux user who started with slackware and the pain of configuring xfree86, the pains of winmodems and other hardware troubles of the past, I've come to appreciate polish and when Ubuntu came out I really liked it. The more the years come by, the less I want to fuss with my system. Ubuntu had a level of polish that was absolutely unmatched. These days, the differences between distros have massively shrank and I do not find Ubuntu any more convenient than regular debian and even arch isn't that harsh to use (though, after experiencing some package updates causing breakages I don't want to fuss with anything rolling anymore), but when Ubuntu came out, it was a revelation.
And the revelation lasted for quite a while, it didnt stop at the original release, because when Gnome 3 came out, it was incredibly barebones and painful to use (they didn't even want a menu entry to reboot your computer. Seriously. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/06/howto... "The developers argue that users should generally suspend their computers instead of shutting down." I mean, what the eff? ),
while Unity introduced really innovative features that I still miss to this day, like the global menu that allowed you to use functions from any GTK software by typing words on your keyboard, showing all entries that matched. It was a very efficient way to navigate software, more than moving the mouse and hunting for entries trying to find the right submenu.
Using Ubuntu when Ubuntu introduced Unity meant avoiding the worst time period of Linux desktops. It was also the era of KDE 4 which should have been named "SIGSEGV 4.0" a full featured desktop that showed constant segmentation fault dialogs.
Ubuntu didn't become popular for no reason. It was a really sad state of affair.
I don't like Ubuntu anymore. Since they dropped Unity they completely abandoned any contribution to the linux desktop as a whole, while snaps are flatpak but much worse (the more you install, the slower your boot, and apps launch much slower than on flatpak) and with a proprietary backend. I see it now as a me-too distro that does everything worse. But I have fond memories of it. Debian stable + flatpak + podman is giving me the experience I seek in a desktop these days : no fuss, the OS has all the packages I need, if I need something more recent I can use a pet container or flatpak, the polish is good enough (and, unfortunately, other distros don't really improve enough there to justify their existence), I don't have to /think/ about my system for the duration of the stable release, only when the time comes for the next full-upgrade, the modern installer sets up a sane desktop out of the box and now they even include firmware by default. It's the zen I need.
This really shows your disconnect with reality. Arch is nowhere close to as 'easy' for a beginner as Ubuntu is. Canonical and Ubuntu have established themselves as one of the most user and beginner friendly Linux distros out there.
Arch ain't it.
SuSE and other mainstream distros worked "out-of-the box" just as well, or better, than the early Ubuntu versions. Fedora, Debian, etc didn't not work because they couldn't, but they were trying to make a point about free software and what that meant, so they took a strict stance on included licensed code. It was 2 minutes of adding RPMForge to your repos to fix, however.
The early versions of Ubuntu weren't popular because they were easier, they were popular because they followed the AOL model and would send you an install disc for free. They leaned into making the install process easier much later (around the 6-7 versions).
> The desktop they provided was was really nice and well configured as well with most defaults working the way most people expecting them to.
Again, it was bog standard GNOME with the Humanity theme. The experience and "defaults" were about equivalent to Fedora, until they started forcing in their own customizations (ads, their sidebar, macOS style titlebars/menus, etc).
> Plus the pretty amazing fact that they would send you an install CD, for free, basically anywhere in the world. Back when downloading 700 MB over the internet was an impossibility for most people, this was a seriously huge deal for getting Linux into the hands of people.
Sure, there you go. The one real reason they were popular and the one real accomplishment. No doubt.
Too bad it came at the expense of them not upstreaming any of their work, taking overly opinionated stances that rarely panned out and created temporary schisms in multiple communities (GNOME, systemd, Wayland, Debian, Flatpak, etc) over their collective ego until their personal projects inevitably fail, setting each back considerably each time.
Of course this wasn't a technical innovation, it was just an exercise in pragmatic legal risk-taking.
SuSE, Mandrake and other distributions were shipping proprietary software in their base installs in 2003-ish; four years before Ubuntu did.
There's no doubt that Fedora and Debian's hard stance on Free Software turned people away. However, even if they did include them, Ubuntu would still be where it is today. Because their popularity mostly came from the millions of CDs they shipped to people for free.
Fedora (or Mandriva, Xandros, Linspire, etc) would be the most popular distro today, if Shuttleworth did the same for them (and just included jockey on the Fedora discs, with the RPMForge repos pre-installed). But then his ego wouldn't have been stroked and he couldn't be in charge, despite the outcome being far greater for the Linux community overall.
Regardless, let's pretend your point is accurate. The bigger point is they didn't do anything new or better than anyone. And, in fact, were a net negative for many communities/efforts.
It helps if you read the entire post, not your own little cherrypicked context.
From a technical users' perspective, super easy...if you already knew what to do, or what to search for to figure out what to do.
The point was that with Ubuntu, you didn't even need to do that, so non-technical users could use it without hassle, and this was the entire point of Ubuntu.
The point was, other popular distros were doing that 4+ years before Ubuntu was. Fedora and Debian were just about the only major Linux distros that didn't include them. Just like how other distros had better installers, better themes/user experiences, etc than Ubuntu:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37068058
Also, if you had the "technical skill" to even know to download Fedora, I find it baffling that you didn't have the skill to type "nvidia drivers fedora" into Google. People were doing the same thing for Windows for a decade+ at that time.
Sure, Ubuntu eventually became nice-looking and easy to install. But they didn't innovate those things in anyway. Instead, they became so off the backs of a bunch of other communities doing real hard work and contributing nothing themselves.
This was a pretty big deal at the time before broadband was easily available.
Canonical was also focused on user friendliness more than any other distro. Which was also important for desktop Linux’s growth.
I must be missing something, but TBH I’m finding it hard to remember any major technical contributions from Canonical.
They’ve also had a pretty disturbing history of NIH syndrome, wasting years of effort on alternatives to what the rest of the Linux community is going forward with before deciding to abandon their alternative.
Parallelized service start on desktop boot and other similar desktop boot optimizations come to mind.
But yeah, mostly it's the remaining 80% work of polish (in the sense of the adage of the remaining 20% actually being 80%) needed to make a Free Software system usable by the masses. Lots of work and lots of value but this doesn't involve significant technical advances, just hard work by smart people who truly understand the whole stack technically but are also able to see from the perspective of ordinary users.
Canonical also pioneered Launchpad and Bazaar. Today they are eclipsed by GitHub and git, but at the time they led in Free Software distributed development tooling. Early GitHub was apparently modelled on Launchpad for example. There's a really interesting retrospective that explains a lot of what you see of Canonical and community and contributions here: https://www.jelmer.uk/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html
Oh, and container technology. You'll need to look into the details of that to understand exactly what Canonical did and didn't contribute, but Canonical's contribution was significant.
> NIH
If you look into the specifics most of the things commonly cited as Canonical NIH predate or at least were already in progress at the time of the alternative.
Disclosure: I work for Canonical but wasn't involved in the work cited above.
What could be worse than a small joke from 20 years ago?
Take that as you will, but there’s probably not been much change since that small joke from 20 years ago.
I feel like we may be approaching a generational gap in 'brand' equity.
Credited for creating the most painful interview process.