I hear lot of noise about Ubuntu distro. I tried the Live CD of Ubuntu and Kubuntu. But I did not find anything new in the distro.


In what way Ubuntu is better than Fedora, Suse, Knoppix etc. I guess there might be some subtle differences, but I don't think Ubuntu is a great distro and I feel Ubuntu is a marketing hype.

Do you feel the same?? Any experiences OR opinions about this?

_Sundar

Adding one more question :

Is it popular because Ubuntu CD's are shipped freely??

_Sundar

The beauty of this distro is under the hood. The hardware support, the package manager, support community etc everything will give not just other distros but also any windows a run for the money.

If you have used the live CD thn you have just scratched the surface. I don't think Ubuntu guys would have spent even a penny on marketing.

Abhishek,

I appreciate your response.

>The hardware support, the package manager, support community.
>

As a knoppix user I think it offers the best hardware support and it is far better than Ubuntu. If I am correct, the package manager of Ubuntu comes from Debian. So what is so unique about Ubuntu?

Regarding community support I really don't know about Ubuntu. But I feel It is good for other distros Fedora, Suse as well.

_Sundar

Hi,

Seeing your comments, and I mean "I did not find _anything new_" I could guess that isn't the first distro you've tried, and not finding anything new, not only in ubuntu but others distros, is normal, just because most of the distros are childs of others, ubuntu for instance is a child of debian, like knoppix, fedora of red hat, sabayon of gentoo, and so on...

Ubuntu made its fame by being easy to use, not that others distros wasn't easy to install/use/configure, example of that will be mandriva. However, {ed,k,x}ubuntu made several developments to bring a more friendly desktop systems to 'new users'. Don't you like using the cli? not a problem, we have this GUIs, Don't you like the ncurses installer? don't worry, we created a GUI for that too.

Of course, those are examples and aren't something 'new' if we talk about anaconda installer for instance.

Ubuntu, besides the friendly desktop, took that approach of 'get the newest versions of every package', for many users, this is atractive, it's like 'new' really means 'big improvement'.

Marketting did make its points too, based on things like:

- Easy to use
- Almost every hardware will be working 'out of the box'
- Latest packages always
- Quick improvements

All that made some kind of fame but not to everyone, just the people cannonical was after.....new users.

With fame came the spected...

new user: "I want to try linux, what distro should I use?"
user: "You could try ubuntu, is veeery easy"
new user: "I put a music CD and start to play automaticly! just like Windows!"

All that was good for new users, they recieve with open arms the distribution.

If you have worked with other distros, of course that you won't find too many things new in ubuntu, you'll say "nahh is like debian" "is like knoppix" etc..

But for new costumers, was, and still is, a very good choice to start.

I'm not a Ubuntu user, at least not since a long time, but you have to grant that the power ubuntu had came from its desktop friendly development. Not that I'm saying that ubuntu isn't for linux gurus, but it has strong points earned by catching new people




Regards

You are right Synaptic comes Debian. But Debian is more of a DIY type of distro and it may scare a lot of newbies. I am a Suse convert and I don't think I will ever go back to it again.

Repos of Ubuntu also deserves full marks.

After quite a bit of experimentation, I am now down to just Ubuntu and Fedora. As people's needs very, Ubuntu may not be for everyone but I think that it is still the one that has the largest potential user base. I think that its particular appeal lies in a combination of large software repositories, ease of configuration, stability, speed and its not being bleeding edge but still perfectly up-to-date.

It inherits about 23000 packages from Debian and an increasing number of third party software providers are making Ubuntu specific packages available. While it is still possible to compile your own packages, it is rarely ever needed anymore. In fact, the only time I have needed to compile anything under Gutsy was when a particular application in the repositories turned out to be buggy - and the two cases I can think of (Xemacs and SQL-editor) are both explicitly labeled as not officially supported. And there is something misleading as the Ubuntu cd is frequently compated with the full dvds of other distros. As someone pointed out, the Ubuntu cd is just scratching the surface. It wouldn't hurt if the cd came with more of the proprietary stuff, like PCLinux does, but then that's something that the larger distros simply can't afford on legal grounds.
It is also somewhat easier to configure than Debian (although Debian is hardly the beast that it used to be) and definitely a lot less challenging than, say, Slackware, Gentoo or FreeBSD. Or maybe I should say less time-consuming as "challenging" is only relative considering that those distros have good manuals readily available. As a developer, I really haven't got the time to wait for this or that app and libs to compile before I can get on with my work.
As for stability, I have never wound up with the sort of dependency mess that Suse or Mandriva will give you sooner or later unless you restrict yourself to the basic repositories.
It may not be the fastest around but neither is it the slowest. And the only time that I found other distros to be noticeably faster is when I rip out as many dependencies as possible - but that is something I always end up regretting because sooner or later I need them anyway.
And yes, you are right, Ubuntu is not really the distro to install if you are after all the latest. It is the reason that I also use Fedora. But as a rule it will catch up in a month or six, once the major bugs have been crushed so that may not be all that bad.

Ubuntu has a slick marketing team. Mark Shuttleworth has been called the Steve Jobs of the linux world. Ubuntu was what got me into linux about 2.5 years ago, and I will likely always have a fondness for ubuntu because of that. As others have said, the hardware detection is second to none, and the support community is great. There are 457,790 members on the ubuntu forums as of this writing, and the numbers just keep going up and up. Just check back in a month or so and see for yourself. Plus many support sites:
https://help.ubuntu.com/
http://doc.gwos.org/doku.php
If you want something easy to install and use, you can't beat ubuntu.
However, that ease of use comes with a performance penalty. I have installed both ubuntu and debian-testing on 3 different desktops plus a laptop. On each system there is no question that debian ran faster, and used fewer resources than ubuntu. Ubuntu is not slow, but debian is definitely faster.