I have a very simple question :
why do you like Ubuntu ????

I've seen many people talking about it for a while now
I haven't had the chance to use it ... but I'll download it this weekend and give it a try ....

ok.... I'm waiting for you guys to convence me !!!!

I can tell you the default color scheme is not a selling point ... dirt brown, bleah!

Distro preference is highly personal. For me, both Mandrake (as it was back then) and Fedora (FC2) were both associated with minor annoyances which I lacked the technical savvy to fix. Ubuntu worked just the way I wanted.

Whatever anyone else says, YMMV.

Ubuntu seems to be the most polished distro out there at this time. The ability and ease of installing packages via apt-get is another selling point. Plus, Dapper which will present itself next month will be supported for three years. The Ubuntu team is really trying to make this distro work and they have done a great job with it.

Use to run Fedora, Mandrake, and Suse but those distros are more painful considering the installation of packages.

I like Ubuntu because to me it is what Debian isn't yet:
Laptop ready out of the box.

ok this is great !!!!
thanx guys for the fast response
waiting for the others to give their opinion

The thing I like most about Ubuntu is the community that was built around that distro. In terms of technology, I think there are better distros out there, but nothing beats a good community rallying around a distro. In the good old days of Mandrake Linux, many newbies and pros were using it which made getting help so easy and the distro became very innovative beause of the feedback from the community. Ubuntu is in the same position at the moment and whilst I am not a fan of this distro, I admire the efforts put in by the creator, developers and community in making Linux accessible to the masses.

come on guys !!!
what are the main features you like in Ubontu ????
what is it that you don't like ????

as mentioned, why someone likes something is very personal and subject to vary greatly from person to person. the best answer i can give you is to try it out! but you said you will be doing that this weekend so that isnt a suitable answer.

i used ubuntu once last year about a month after it first came out and was VERY impressed.
i dont use ubuntu anymore so i dont know the state that it is at now, but here are afew points from what i can remember, from the first version:

pros:
- very good hardware detection and autoconfiguration (ie video, mouse, keyboard, sound, NIC).. like no other distro iv seen
- very easy to use and configure

cons:
- the simplicity of adminstration might limit the ability for customization

sorry thats all i got! but definetly give it a shot. id say the best beginner distro.

Hmm, if you *really* wanted it you'd use it...

When I (10 years with Windows, 8 years as a professional programmer, had a look at SUSE at an earlier stage but disliked its fancy KDE desktop) looked at Ubuntu the first time, I thought, that's it!
Everything's neat and in place, and I can play around with the internet, have all the multimedia stuff, databases, and sophisticated development environments.

I also like the way Ubuntu's founder, Shuttleworth, is managing this distribution. There are visions, milestones, and plans.

There's great support with all those Wikis and Howtos, three hardware sets got recognized completely so far, and I'm really thinking Ubuntu's a Linux milestone!

After all, this is the best operation system / distribution I'd ever had on my hard disks, and I'm proud and enchanted to use it!

Thanks

Likes:
- everything worked (but I already said that)
- Synaptic is a nice install manager
- the Ubuntu forums/wikis are helpful for support issues

Dislikes (minor niggles really)
- default color scheme sux (but easily fixed, and I already said that too)
- Recent Documents works inconsistently (this is I think a GNOME problem rather than Ubuntu problem, and a fix of sorts has been documented)
- automounting of USB drives inconsistent
- webcam installation was tricky
- Firefox version from repositories is still 1.0.x (but a fix to 1.5.x is documented)
- 64-bit version was problematic for a newbie like me (probably no more so than other distros), so I stuck to the 32-bit version

None of these was a major annoyance, unlike the problems I encountered with other distros.

Everything just works. It is easy to install programs using apt, and has access to about 16000 packages to install. Ubuntu is based on Debian, but tends to have newer packages, etc. Everything that can be done on Debian can be done on Ubuntu.

Someone mentioned about configuration: It is still possible to configure everything manually, and the graphical tools don't really limit what can be changed.

The default colour scheme tends to grow on you after a while

--Ian

You mean in a literal organic sense?

I just mean that I didn't like it at first, but after a while I think it looks good.

--Ian

I installed Ubuntu on my laptop for travel because it detects and configures all of the hardware correctly without my needing to spend hours editing configs, patching and recompiling kernels, and being Debian based apt is a great tool for keeping the system current.

Being a truck driver, what time I have to stop at a truckstop and get online via the wifi hotspots is limited and I don't want to spend it tinkering with the system, I just need it to work.

The newest Firefox is easily installed on the system using a simple script available online and listed in another post on this forum.

I was using Slackware on the laptop for a while but there is just too much involved with getting the video card properly recognized and configured as well as some other hardware issues I just didn't want to spend time fooling with. It even takes a kernel recompile to get the stupid battery monitor to work. When I installed Ubuntu, everything including all of the laptop's function keys worked. Hibernate even works which no other distro I've tried has been able to do correctly.

There are some minor issues with Breezy that I hope will be corrected in the next release, but no show stoppers or time wasters. Dma has to be configured manually for your cdrom drive, but it just takes a very quick edit to uncomment a couple of lines of a config file, and ipv6 is enabled by default which slows down internet connection, again fixed with a quick edit.

Another downside is the menu doesn't show all installed apps and you need to install Debian menu and menu-xdg to be able to see them all, but that's a simple apt-get no so biggie.

All in all, it's a good distro with very little tinkering needed to get a fully functional system where all the hardware works the way it's supposed to work.

Also, I like Gnome and Ubuntu's Gnome is well put together.

ok guys ....
does Ubuntu support Multimedia by default ??? or do I have to install the packages manually ???