bearophile wrote:
grauzone:
Why does everyone think "Ubuntu" when talking about Linux?
I am ignorant about this topic, but I think the answers to your questions are:
1) Because it's one of the very few distros that seem designed by people that
care a bit about ergonomics, usability studies, user interfaces, etc.
Forget about this. Look at GNOME and what happened to it because of that
usability crap. Not to say that usability is a bad thing, but they just
don't get it right. Look at the file open dialog in GNOME/GTK, and see
how frustrating it is.
I'm not expecting anything from Linux GUIs anymore. Seriously, Linux on
the desktop sucks. God, does it suck!
2) Because in it things seems to mostly work. It's able to recognize most of my
hardware. I have tried few other distros with worse results.
It's not like Ubuntu has additional drivers in the kernel. Maybe it's
slightly better at hardware detection than other distros (I don't know),
but with some _work_, any other distro should work equally well.
You don't like "work"? Linux is not for you, even Ubuntu won't be able
to safe you. Actually, Ubuntu discourages you to find out how the system
_really_ works, and how things are actually done. What do you do if the
automatisms of Ubuntu crap up? Reinstall the system?
3) Because it's famous. And the more famous you are, the more famous you get.
Having a single famous linux distro is very good, because more people will try
it, find its bugs, fix the bugs and improve the user interfaces, compile things
for it, give server space for it for the updates, and so on.
Because it's "Linux for Windows users". That's not a bad thing per se,
but I fear it will degrade into something that shares both disadvantages
of Windows and Linux.
It might be that I'm not really in the position to criticize Ubuntu,
because it's been a long time since I last tried it. (Yeah, with real
arguments this post would be actually worthwhile.) I can just say, that
even though I'd like to have a good desktop, and although I'm someone
who switched from Windows to Linux only some years ago, I never could
get used to GNOME or Ubuntu. Even though they're supposed to be better
at the desktop.
Then again, Ubuntu is derived from the glorious, superior Debian. I'm
sure Ubuntu is still better than crap like Red Hat. xD
Bye,
bearophile
