7 reasons why Ubuntu is so successful

1) A good start: Ubuntu started with a strong background. It wasn’t “yet another” distribution, it was a distribution that had a vision and enough people and money behind it to support that vision.

2) Easy and straightforward installation: From the text-based installer of the first few versions, to the point&click installer of today, ubuntu always had a very straightforward and simple installation. Every step of the installer was explained in a short, yet clear manner that made it easy for everyone to follow the steps of the installation proccedure (almost) regardless of their experience with computers.

3) ShipIt: Sharing “official” CD’s with the Ubuntu logo increased the trust of users towards the distribution and made it much easier for users on slow connections to try it. People could now give away several CD’s to their friends and coworkers which made the general adoption of Linux much faster.

4) Synaptic: If you ask a first-time Ubuntu user to tell you what impressed them most, chances are that the answer will be “synaptic”. Indeed, this application brought APT much closer to the average user and made program installation in Linux a lot easier. Users didn’t have to search for RPMs or worry that they might needed to deal with dependancies, compile from source etc, synaptic solved everything using a very simple interface. When the first versions of Ubuntu came out, the only thing that could be compared to the flexibility and ease of use of APT and Synaptic was Fedora’s YUM, but unfortunately at that time Fedora didn’t have a good front-end for YUM (although Synaptic could be used with YUM, it was not nearly as easy to set up as synaptic and Ubuntu were).

5) Ubuntu forums/Community: The Ubuntu community was, and still is one of the most important factors that promote the growth of Ubuntu. The forums are very active and old users are very friendly and patient towards newcomers. Maybe it has to do with the philosophy of “Ubuntu”…

6) User promotion: Ubuntu is based heavily on the promotion it receives from it’s users. Nearly every person who uses Ubuntu today has beed advised to try it by someone else who had tried it before them and so on. This, combined with the strong influence of Ubuntu to the internet forums related to GNU/Linux, has led to a major increase in it’s adoption .

7) Fragmented competitors: When Ubuntu started it’s “march to glory” there were three “big” distributions, SuSE, Mandriva, and Fedora. Debian and Slackware were popular but were not very appealling to newbies (Debian still had a text based installer…). All of the “big three” were not at their best when Ubuntu came out and started gathering users. SuSE had recently been bought by Novell and was still undergoing internal reconstructions, Mandriva has in the middle of a severe financial crisis, and Fedora was just at FC2 which wasn’t nearly as easy as it now is. This “fragmentation” (or “decay of the distribution maket” if you like) helped many users make the decision to switch to Ubuntu.

There are definately many other reasons why Ubuntu managed to get to the top, and stay there, but making a complete analysis is not within the purposes of this post. Highlighting some of the points that made Ubuntu what it is today, is !

1 members found this post helpful.

Dunno why Synaptic is mentioned in that list because it's not copyright of Ubuntu..sure it helps it but the way it's presented people might think Synaptic was made by Ubuntu..
This is author -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfredo_Kojima

surely it is not....but your second statement correctly describes the actual situation behind it !

Your given link is deleted at wikipedia. If you must give credit to a developer then give it to all that contributed not just the one. Alfredo Kojima, Gustavo Niemeyer and Michael Vogt were all actually involved in Synaptic Package Manager. They developed it for mainly Debian based distros, but can also be used on distros that use APT with RPM packages. It is simply (not necesarily a simple program though) a GUI frontend for APT. Ubuntu chooses to build it into all of their distro's. And what is it to do with copyright of Ubuntu, there is no copyright software in native Ubuntu, and most Linux distro's. They are, like this package, protected by the GNU GPL, no copyright necessary.

I also saw somewhere that they are going to remove Synaptic from Ubuntu, and only have Ubuntu Software Center.

From the default install, yes. You'll still be able to install Synaptic if you like.

Yeah, I've been to a number of forums with this issue but I am not alone, as I see many from ATI/AMD and nVidia display cards with the same problem, and no satrisfactory answers from the Driver makers (they claim no support for Linux drivers)or the kernel maintainers, or distro maintainers. I've hacked my xorg.conf till I am blue in the face. See below the current one I have got working the best, but still no frequency above 60HZ. My Apple Mac drives the screens fine to 100HZ as does Windows 7 on the same hardware I dual-boot my Linux on. This is even on a single monitor, as you can see I have turned off Xinerama (for multimonitor). My reason for multimonitor is that I use a number of virtual aircraft simulators, I build and sell them as part of my business and I belong to a number of virtual aviation clubs in S.A. I run the SIMS both natively in Linux and Windows (FlightGear and X-Plane), and the Windows base Microsoft ones (FS9 and FSX) I run through Wine in Linux.

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "aticonfig Layout"
Screen 0 "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0" 0 0
Option "AIGLX" "on"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "glx"
Load "dri"
Load "GLCore"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "DontZap" "False"
Option "Xinerama" "off"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0"
Option "VendorName" "Dell Computer Corp."
Option "ModelName" "P1130"
Option "DPMS" "true"
Option "PreferredMode" "1280x1024"
Option "TargetRefresh" "100"
DisplaySize 364 291
HorizSync 30.0 - 130.0
VertRefresh 48.0 - 170.0
ModeLine "1280x1024" 191.4 1280 1379 1523 1760 1024 1026 1029 1087 -hsync +vsync
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
Driver "fglrx"
Option "VideoOverlay" "off"
Option "OpenGLOverlay" "off"
Option "TexturedVideo" "on"
Option "UseFastTLS" "1"
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "on"
Option "Textured2D" "on"
Option "BackingStore" "on"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0"
Device "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
Monitor "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 8
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 4
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 1
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
Option "RENDER" "Enable"
Option "DAMAGE" "Enable"
EndSection


Sorry don't understand this paragraph, nVidia drivers won't work with ATI/AMD GPU if I am reading your line properly.

Cheers

Please look up the definition of copyright. Even GPLed software is copyrighted, they can forbid you to use it if you doesn't respect their license. In fact, if you want to contribute to Ubuntu with developing software for Ubuntu you have to give the copyright to Canonical. So much about the freedom of Ubuntu.

Fortunately still available in 11.04 Natty Narwhal, both SPM and USC as default install.

Just remember if you know "*buntu" you only know "*Buntu".

If you know the CLI, you are better at all distros.
(I personally can't stand sudo.)

Fortunately, they haven't removed the CLI from Ubuntu yet. (Maybe in 12.04 )

But not anymore in 11.10.

Eeek! I can't believe they would do that at all!

Once more you are making reply before reading and understanding post meaning..of course others helped but point of my post was to point out Synaptic is not what Ubuntu should base their success stories upon since that list mentions Ubuntu-only stuff. Also link was alive when i posted it first time..oh well you can delete it or make someone else delete it but archive(based on google cache) and people who save that stuff will still have it..here is content that was there before someone recently deleted it even the warning was old.

Why is Ubuntu the most popular distro?

Neutrality Ubuntu is a self-sustaining non-profit organization. Canonical does offer commercial support, but they do not spent the 10 million that Mark put into the Ubuntu organization. Aspects and features that have a direct commercial advantage for Canonical are kept separate and are not included in the main distribution. What they add to Ubuntu is always opensource and competitors are free and encouraged to pick it up. (and often they do)

Transparency The complete proccess is open for everybody to participate. Not just packaging, but creating specs, brainstorming, discussions, etc. Everybody can follow and/or participate. If you think something is lacking and you have the skills to fix it, you can maintain that project in sync with everything else. And if it’s a big contribution; you will get free plane tickets to the live meetings, etc.

They polish the learning-curve, not the system The focus of Ubuntu is not a system your mother can use, but a system that teaches you how to set it up for your mother. The learning-curve of system administration in Ubuntu is much more thoughout than the actual GUI interfaces. This includes documentation, tweaks and intelligent defaults.

Their marketing targets casual users using opensource ideals They are the poster-child of free software. It’s not in your face radical extremist propaganda, but rather subtle honest compassion that they use to market it. Not in geek-speak, but in human language. Take a look at the ubuntu promise at the front page of ubuntu.com .. some friends (that are casual users) explain their love for Ubuntu as “it’s just a very sympathetic project”. Which is a much more emotional assessment compared to the “we are no longer suppressed by M$ nazi’s with their vendor locking and patent trolls”

They build the community first and then the project They chose a mature, almost gay hippy vibe. This keeps the zealots away. And because the adoption rate stays high; the majority of ubuntu users are always new users. The majority of people on the forums are always users with 1 to 3 years of experience. They are still eager to share their knowledge and haven’t become such geeks that they use xmonad or compile their own kernel. Again, this was all intentional.

They are loyal to upstream They don’t diverge from upstream too much. The choices of GNOME/KDE/Linus are all respected; they have a strong tendency not to want to change defaults. They also embrace new technology, even when it’s not ready yet, but needs the attention and bug reports. They want to be, in Marks’ words, “upstream’s rock”. They filter and triage the thousands of bug reports by ordinary users into actual useful bug reports that are then posted upstream. Some projects (debian) do complain that Ubuntu is not cooperating enough. Yet i’m quite sure, that drowning those excellent upstream developers with the noise that launchpad gets wouldn’t be very productive for anybody.

They don’t misuse their position in the Linux ecosystem They intentionally don’t make it easy to add binary repositories and they intentionally break binary compatibility with updates. Because given their position a lot of commercial vendors and hardware suppliers would prefer to just support Ubuntu with binary drivers and software; thereby hurting all the other distributions. This keeps the choice to NOT use Ubuntu alive, and that attitude should demand more respect from the rest of the opensource ecosystem than they are currently getting.

They are predictable They want to play the part of gate-keeper for the complete free software ecosystem. One of the ways to do this is too have regular scheduled released. They are already in sync with gnome and chances are high for KDE to also jump into ship with this schedule. More and more are we seeing other vendors (like Red Had and SUSE) pick the same technology and the same releases as Ubuntu does. And rather than acting all ‘you stole our thunder and our patches’ they are actually welcoming and encouraging the ‘competitors’ to do this. They are becoming the heart-beat of the free software world.

They compete with Microsoft and Apple, not other linux distro’s This tactical choice explains a lot of points above. Why they welcome integration, synchronization and cooperation with other distributions. How to prevent divide and conquer in the linux ecosystem. More linux users is good for everybody. Not everybody stays with Ubuntu, but the 99% of all new linux users of the last 3 years, have started with Ubuntu. That’s the key here. And they aren’t just users; they have become advocates for free software. Some will start using it professionally. This benefits Red Hat and SUSE just as much.