Why Ubuntu
Well i am now one more aggregated blogger on the Planet Ubuntu Users, so hi there everyone :) And as so, i thought i’d write something on why i use Ubuntu.
I first started using GNU/Linux around 3 and a half years ago (whoa is it been that long ?). At first i tried out some distros (Fedora, Slackware, Arch) and i ended up spending most of my time with Gentoo (with the occasional tryout of other distros). However, due to many little things on Gentoo and the big thing of having to compile everything i got tired of it and started looking for a “replacement”. And so i decided to try Ubuntu and i loved it.
One thing that is essential for me on a GNU/Linux distro is having a large collection of software ready to install. That’s why i gave up on Slackware. Gentoo has it, Arch kinda has it too, Debian and Ubuntu have it too. Even if you don’t find some weird or really new package on the official repositories, you’ll almost surely find a .deb that someone else already packaged. And i just love that. Some Windows lovers claim that “oh GNU/Linux is so hard to use because it’s so difficult to install software”. Oh really ? Well if you use weird and obscure distros that will almost probably be true, but if you stick with the more polished and mainstream distros (Fedora, Suse, Debian/Ubuntu, etc) that’s just doesn’t happen. I don’t have to go on the web and search for the software and download it and whatever. I just fire up Synaptic (i admit it, i’m a CLI junkie so i’d just aptitude install something) and search for whatever i want and voil??. There it is. I guess it’s impossible to make it easier.
Another thing that i love about Ubuntu is the way the distro was created. So Mark decided to create a new distro. What would he do, start from scratch ? Of course not. There were great distros to serve as the base for something easier to use. It would be just stupid to start everything from scratch. So he picked up a stable and well organized distro, with a strong community and with a strong package collection and went ahead. So what would they do now ? Create some new dialogs and control centers and utilities to manage everything in order to make it easier ? Of course not. There’s already so much stuff done, why would they create new ones ? It’s stupid to create utilities to manage and setup your printers and other hardware and the major desktop environments already created them (i’m thinking of Mandriva and Suse here). They picked up what already existed and just made it work. And when they couldn’t find one of those utilities on the DE’s they didn’t create new ones either (only BUM maybe, can’t really remember any other right now). They picked up what was already done too, like Synaptic, or the menu editor (which name i can’t remember) that was used when Gnome didn’t had a menu editor. They saved up a lot of time by not doing new things and instead used and polished the ones that already existed. Distros like Suse or Mandriva wasted so much time creating those things, that they ended up leaving other parts of the system a mess (ok, things probably changed a lot since the last time i touched those distros, so think of how things were some 3 years ago or something).
And of course, the big reason that brought me to Ubuntu was that i don’t really want to care much about maintaining my system. Back when i used Gentoo it wasn’t uncommon to have stuff to stop working after an update because they would decide to change something in the packages and only mention it on mailing lists and stuff like that. Normal users don’t want to wander around in mailing lists all the time to stay aware that some package is gonna behave strangely. They just want to update the damn thing and move on. And i became one of those users. I don’t care, i just want to use my computer.
