Ubuntero.org   Showcasing the Ubuntu community

I’m guessing that most people reading this blog will already have developed their own answer to this question (or at least to the broader question “Why Linux?”), but as a continued introduction to this blog and to us, I think it’s worthwhile to discuss.

I started using Linux in 2003 at the recommendation of a math professor in college. (Hi, Walt!) I’d been something of a computer enthusiast up to that point, and worked in the computer lab on campus. Walt recommended I use Mandrake as it was, by his estimation, the easiest to install and to use.¹ I had no problems with Mandrake at all: easy to set up, reasonably intuitive (though of course I had questions), and the KDE interface was quite attractive.

After a year of learning and using it, a few things were apparent to me: RPM (or at least Mandrake’s use of it) was unmanageable; burning four CDs for each version was a pain; I wanted something flexible that would update its available software.

I switched from there to Gentoo in mid-2004. What attracted me to it was a powerful and stable package manager and the idea of having everything be compiled from source exactly the way I decide. After two days, my system was up and running. I learned a lot about Linux and my computer while using Gentoo, and it was well worth the experience. I even cut my teeth in C on it.

However, the same customizability that drew me to Gentoo was what made me eager to try something else. Compiling everything from source meant that when I wanted to upgrade to a new version of OpenOffice.org, I had to let it run overnight. Or when I decided to switch my music collection from MP3 to FLAC, it took my computer over a day to recompile all my software to support it.

By mid-2005, I was frustrated with the time it took me to maintain a Gentoo system and was looking for something else. I’d heard about this “Ubuntu” distribution, based on Debian (which still held an elitist and overwhelming air for me) and I tried it out. I had some bizarre problem with ReiserFS, so I couldn’t install Hoary.

I switched to Arch Linux on the recommendation of a friend. Arch ended up being a combination of both worlds: package-based software repositories, a robust but simple package manager, and rolling releases (so I was always up-to-date). The problem with that, however, was that there was much more focus on day-to-day maintenance so it was hard to know when an upgrade would be trivial or significant. It also had a pretty small community, so progress was sometimes slow.

With the release of Breezy gaining a lot of press², I decided to try Ubuntu again. This time, I was sold. Rock solid installation, great mission, and a reliable timeline. I’ve shared my opinion with friends and family, and a dozen or so have switched to it.

Since then, I haven’t looked back. I find that Ubuntu has the right idea in terms of distribution (and that’s important because that’s what Ubuntu is), has the best community³, and continually gets better. It has its faults, and I could go into those separately, but overall I genuinely think it’s the best GNU/Linux distribution.

1. A friend at the time recommended I use Debian and, in retrospect, that was a very nice thing for him to say. ↩
2. Ubuntu also had become serious about embracing Python, which I had started using. ↩
3. This is saying a lot: I have always had pretty good community support on every distribution. Ubuntu’s is definitely a step up, however; I think it’s because it attracts so many community-oriented people. ↩