What I really loved in Ubuntu is that they were the first distribution that really considered itself an OS, not "a way to install Linux" and make choices about what it should include.
All the other distributions started by asking whether you wanted KDE or Gnome, Abiword or OpenOffice, and ended up installing a bunch of software you may or may not want "just in case". Ubuntu made choices, if you didn't like it you could always change it later on or use a different distribution but you had a consistent OS to start with.
What was always worse was that the choices never came with any explanation. I remember a while back trying some flavour of Linux or other, and during installation it asked (paraphrased):
"Use Nautilus or Thunar?"
I imagine the story behind this is that half the Linux devs preferred the first, and half preferred the second, and so instead of the distribution having the balls to choose one, they forced they choice onto the user.
For the average user however, the choice read as:
"Open Mystery Box 'A', or Mystery Box 'B'? Warning: opening the wrong box will mean that many of the things you try to do simply won't work!"
Choice here is very bad: it makes the user feel powerless, yet simultaneously assigns blame to the user in the event that things go wrong.
You may be forgetting the past of Linux distros. While Ubuntu's first version was 4.10, Distributions like Linux-Mandrake (released in July 1998) had a similar goal. They made their choices clear on what software to install and even added their own configuration applications.
Linux Mandrake started this way but didn't have the balls to stick with their choices (KDE) and quickly included the usual "do you want KDE or Gnome?" in their setup.
Just because they were afraid to restrict their market share by excluded people who liked Gnome.
It's strange. I have a hard time remembering why I liked Ubuntu right away. Maybe a blend of good enough looking, works out of the box mindset, which made a community grow rapidly and kicking a nice network effect where you would quickly find solution on their board/wikis.
I was impressed later when they managed to bring new Window Management ideas without too much time or pain.
It's strange. I have a hard time remembering why I liked Ubuntu right away. ... works out of the box mindset
Ubuntu was literally the first Linux distro I have ever used where everything on my PC worked out of the box.
Installing Windows (of that age, XP) on the same PC would result in spending a day or weekend hunting and installing drivers for obscure things here and there, but in Ubuntu everything just worked.
I had never seen anything like that before (on PCs at least), and that made a solid impression which still makes it my default, despite a interest and curiosity trying in other distros like Elementary or NixOS.
I believe Knoppix was the first to formalize the debian live cd concept—I don't think they did the major work for supporting hardware and supporting installation from the live cd.
I seem to remember they put a lot of early effort into getting almost all laptop wifi interfaces working out of the box, which was a massive deal at the time.
Warty Warthog happened to match my ideal environment out-of-the-box. With Fedora, Suse I'd have to to install my preferred apps, configure Gnome the way I like, with Warty it was all already there. Also it had modern kernel with lots of stuff in it. For me specifically it was SATA support and PPTP encryption stuff.
Yeah, it is interesting reading these comments from young people. Maybe they first tried linux in the early 2000 and that's why they only remember Ubuntu.
Distributions like Linux-Mandrake, Corel Linux, Connectiva strived to make Linux a "user friendly" experience, well back before Ubuntu came to the light.
The reason why Ubuntu was a game changer was mainly because it was backed by Mark Shuttleworth, a millionary that was willing to pour a lot of money on his own Linux distribution.
I know Mandrake Linux, and I used it for some time as my main distribution. Like Ubuntu they were striving for a user-friendly distribution, but they never got the the level of consistency Ubuntu had.
Why? Because they chose KDE at the beginning, but they didn't stick with their choice and did what every other distribution did: let users choose between KDE and Gnome. And spent time to have all their tools look "kinda OK" in both desktops with cross Qt-Gtk themes, and Gnome users got a not so great experience but they kept shouting that Gnome users were just as important to them as KDE users, etc.
So in short they thought of themselves a "Linux distribution", a way to install Linux and related software. On the other hand, Ubuntu considers itself an OS, and upstream software is just a way for them to achieve the degree of quality they want.
You see that also when Ubuntu releases Unity: they want their OS to work this way, while Mandrake always focused on (1) the installer and (2) the control panel where you configure stuff, thinking "the desktop is Gnome/KDE's job, let's just ship what they make".
There was other reasons why Ubuntu worked better than Mandrake: one is that they used the superior dpkg while Mandrake was using RPM. (RPM got better recently, but back in the day it was a huge pain). Honestly I felt for many years that a user-friendly distribution based on dpkg would bring the best of both worlds, and that's what Ubuntu was.
Also Ubuntu arrived as the right time, when it was possible to have a fully plug-and-play distribution if your hardware is standard enough. I don't think they could have achieve that in the 90's.
And of course marketing. Ubuntu have been very good at marketing, and that's a good thing.
or RHEL Workstation, SUSE, etc... but point kind of stands since Ubuntu was, for some reason or the other, highly visible. Maybe those free CDs had something to do with it.
Tried a bunch of Linux distributions: Caldera, Slackware, Redhat, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, ....
Then came Corel and I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Clean, smooth, effortless install; everything working right out of the box; all the necessary applications; professional look and feel.
Microsoft must have had its eyes on the situation as they immediately bought into Corel. The next thing you knew, Corel was history.
Ubuntu is not nearly as pleasant an experience as Corel was back then, but it just does a lot of the basic stuff right, even though it does leave a lot to be desired in terms of polish, privacy concerns, look-and-feel, usability, openness, etc.
Hopefully, Canonical attends to these issues or someone else takes the helm in improving things.
At first ubuntu pretended to offer freedom of choice then silently dropped this. Not being able to choose by myself and being unable to remove a component of the ubuntu package I had no use for is one of the reason why I removed ubuntu from the dozen computers I'm sysadmin for.
All the other distributions started by asking whether you wanted KDE or Gnome, Abiword or OpenOffice, and ended up installing a bunch of software you may or may not want "just in case". Ubuntu made choices, if you didn't like it you could always change it later on or use a different distribution but you had a consistent OS to start with.