Why I love Ubuntu

[Gtaylor]

To go along with the Why I hate Ubuntu thread, here's the Why I love Ubunbut thread. I'll start:

• It runs. Very well
• I had used Debian for a long time on servers previously and now I can run a rock solid derivative on my own personal machines with the same reliability.
• The community is great and it's so easy to get involved with development.
• It obviously has great potential.

[NateC]

Why I like Ubuntu:

- User Friendly
- Gnome by default
- Based on Debian (my second favourite distro, Ubuntu being #1)
- Good community
- Large Repositories
- Comes with mostly all the packages I need
- Fast
- Easy to customize
- Detected all my hardware with minimal work in the terminal
- Fast, and simple installer
- Fits on one CD
- Has a lot of potential

[desdinova]

For me

ONE DAY ONLY to replace a Suse server (home use) and get a usable desktop as well.

Excellent range of repositories and software.

Good communication with developers

[manicka]

For me

ONE DAY ONLY to replace a Suse server (home use) and get a usable desktop as well.

Excellent range of repositories and software.

Good communication with developers

Exact same scenario for me, Just love Ubunutu

[poofyhairguy]

All of those tasty Debian packages!!!

(my motto- "installing programs from source is the devil.")

Nice brown themes!!

Lack of buggy GUI tools!!!

And you guys and gals, the community.

[gil-galad]

Gnome and gnome. A focused desktop that comes with an almost perfect selection of default apps.

[sonny]

I love Ubuntu cuz:

It's fast; (I tried Xandros; that is a really slow distro).
Ease of use.
Looks great.
The name and the meaning of it.
And last but not least: The community.

[scourge]

This seems like a good thread to post my first message in.

A few months ago when Hoary wasn't yet finished I downloaded the Warty LiveCD, tried it and liked it immediately. So I decided to get rid of my Mandrake 10.1 Community and install Ubuntu. It installed nicely, but when I booted the OS for the first time it failed to start X, nagging about my graphics card or something (it's GF 6600GT). I tried to mess with XFree86.conf but Warty didn't accept my beloved su command and told me to use sudo. That was it for me, I thought: if I'm already having problems it's not worth it getting it to work.

I was trying a lot of distros back then to find the perfect Linux, so I constantly kept an eye on the new releases. So when Hoary came out I thought I'd give Ubuntu another try, and damn, that time it did work and I haven't been looking for a new distro after that. I've also grown to like sudo now, and I don't want to go back to using su.

Ubuntu is the first distro I have used that isn't RPM-based and KDE-based. I always wanted to try Debian because I knew the package management was superior to RPM, but when I looked at Debian.org I saw that the last stable version was years old (a huge turn-off to an average user like me). The reason I doubted Gnome is because years ago I had tried both Gnome and KDE in Red Hat 6, and Gnome just sucked back then. Well, not anymore, Gnome has made some excellent progress.

Apt-get is the #1 reason why I love Ubuntu, along the fact that the distro fits on one cd. I have a 100Mbit Internet connection so it's obvious that I like to install even the huge apps directly from the online repositories instead of messing with cds. No more dependency hells; I remember having to install 10 or so RPMs just to get one frickin' application working. Sure, apt-get/dpkg has dependencies too, but they are almost always handled automatically.

[kvidell]

Why do I like it.. hmm..
Not because of gnome... no, I don't even use it...
Not because of synaptic... I don't even use it.. (I use aptitude and apt-get)
I don't even like it on desktops... and it's been failing me as a laptop distro (IPv6 breaks Cisco Aironet wireless cards)...
I donno. It's just nice. It's a clean distrobution that does a lot of things right and just simply works.
I'm going to have to recompile my kernel on the laptop to get wifi to work... but that's not really a big deal to me at all...

Ubuntu is what I thought Debian was going to be when I first started using it. Not to say there's anything wrong with Debian... I used it religiously for a very long time and probably still would if I had a desktop computer right now (Alas, I have only my laptops and a server... Both laptops are Ubuntu and the server is Fedora C3)...

I think I just like how simple it was to install and I like it's clean and refined apt repos more than Debians hay-wire ones. (They were haywire in my opinion, I donno. Too much uncertainty).
And I even say that with the knowledge that I for a long time used Breezy. I felt that was more stable than Debian had been getting.

I'll probably revisit Debian at the next major release but for now... Ubuntu for my laptops and... well... I don't know what I'll use on desktops.
Not ubuntu though, tried that, didn't work hehehe.

- Kev

[tristan]

* As per desdinova, I was able to get a fully functional box within a day, after completely frying my previous MDK10.1 box (and that took me weeks to get just right). Fast easy install, perfect hardware detection.

* Slick, fast and polished gnome interface. "Gnome done right".

* Easily configurable and upgradeable (apt-get is a joy after rpm).

* Excellent community. Probably the best I've yet encountered. Hardly any whingers, lots of constructive discussions and help.

* Let's not forget the ubuntuguide, probably the best and most important linux help document ever written.

* I love the spirit of altruism which Mark Shuttleworth has instilled into ubuntu. Using it doesn't make me feel like a cog in someone's business plan.