Why is Ubuntu not as popular on here?

[jayd512]

I'm not a *buntu user myself, but I have to give some big CHEERS to techieMoe on this. He stated everything beautifully! First, why on earth would you run as root on a daily basis? That pretty much cancels out any type of security measures one could hope to have. Secondly, how can it be all that restrictive considering that whatever you need that doesn't come installed by default, you can get with nothing more than a few simple keystrokes?
All that aside, I think the *buntu family is making great strides towards becoming a very popular, very easy-to-use distro for newbies and gurus alike.

[daark.child]

I have stated before that I think Ubuntu is pretty much over hyped and there is nothing unique about it. That said, I don't believe its restrictive at all. Like any other distro, if you don't like the way its configured by default, you can change it to suite your needs and if you are a developer there are lots of tools readily available in the Ubuntu repos.

[Oxygen]

I understand why there's these people that insist that Ubuntu is for people that shouldn't be using Linux. The sort of people that complain it takes all the fun out of computing by being easy, like being easy to use is a BAD thing?

All Ubuntu has done is come along and give everybody a good hard slap, slapped Fedora, it slapped Suse and it slapped Mandrake. Then it said THIS is how you make an easy to use Linux distribution and there it was.

Linux isn't some unique sort of badge for internet awesomeness... this isn't fight club. It's not a sort of 'well I compiled my own kernel so I'm awesome' club for the elite of people overcompensating for having a small... hard drive. It's for whoever wants to use it, and I promote people using Ubuntu. There's no restriction - that's a dumbfounded comment... it's just slightly tighter security which CAN be undone if needed - which it never will.

[kveldulf980]

I understand why there's these people that insist that Ubuntu is for people that shouldn't be using Linux. The sort of people that complain it takes all the fun out of computing by being easy, like being easy to use is a BAD thing?

All Ubuntu has done is come along and give everybody a good hard slap, slapped Fedora, it slapped Suse and it slapped Mandrake. Then it said THIS is how you make an easy to use Linux distribution and there it was.

Linux isn't some unique sort of badge for internet awesomeness... this isn't fight club. It's not a sort of 'well I compiled my own kernel so I'm awesome' club for the elite of people overcompensating for having a small... hard drive. It's for whoever wants to use it, and I promote people using Ubuntu. There's no restriction - that's a dumbfounded comment... it's just slightly tighter security which CAN be undone if needed - which it never will.

VERY well put. I don't use Ubuntu because I'm a dork who gains something from the experience of doing more esoteric tasks; however, not everyone, in fact almost no one, in the real world has that same feeling, nor do they have to, and Ubuntu is great for them, great for introducing a mass of people to Linux and free alternatives that otherwise might never have got the same glimpse. Now only if edevelopers would realize this, just because a program is friendly doesn't mean I can't hack it around or build it from scratch, etc., it simply means I don't HAVE to.

Again, well put, I hate when someone judges a distro like Ubuntu against a distro like Gentoo, using the same standards or criteria, it's simply impractical and any conclusions that are derived in this manner are specious at best. They are both spectacular distros (there are quite a few great ones) but they are spectacular for their own reasons in their own niches.

My 2 cents.