Fill me in, Linux fans. What is the Ubuntu project doing that has catapulted its popularity so far ahead of older Linux projects?
Wow, >>5, I had the same problem, and found the same solution. Coincidence?
>>4, regarding a huge free software database, I don't see how that's unique to Ubuntu. FreeBSD (which PC-BSD is based on) has two, one for pre-built binaries ("packages") and one for source code for building your own ("ports") and both are pretty easy to use; installing a package takes just one shell command.
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports.html
And Mac OS X has Fink for binaries and DarwinPorts for source code. Both are fairly simple CLI apps, and there are GUI apps for Fink as well.
http://fink.sourceforge.net/
http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/
So a great software database is a nice feature, but it's hardly unique to any one given system.
I will concede that getting a wireless card and USB media to work out-of-the-box is nice, though. I have to set up both by hand. It turns out the wireless card I got is unsupported by any OSS drivers, but fortunately there's a FreeBSD program which can put a wrapper around Windows drivers and make them usable by FreeBSD… So maybe FreeBSD is even letting me use this card where Linux wouldn't, after all. And mounting USB media requires tail-ing a log file to see what dev it's noticing the device on, then mount_msdosfs-ing it; not too difficult once you figure out what you need to do, but still far from user friendly.
I'd like to hear more from Ubuntu users. For one, I dare someone to justify the whole MP3 fiasco -- hardly seems like "sane defaults" to me. =P
Install one of two programs, EasyUbuntu or Automatix and your MP3, video, flash, etc problems should be gone.
As to why the MP3 support is not default? Well, MP3 is a proprietary format. :(
>>7
Also, while this may have an easy fix, it turns off a lot of people. They get pissed when they figure out why they cant play MP3s and damn Linux to hell when all they needed to dowas install one program.
I will also vouch for the great community. I swear, I've seen some of the most retarded questions asked, but all the vet ubuntu users are just so eager to help you anyways. They must pop boners everytime they see a new user convert to linux... or at least dual-boot.
>>6
MP3 is proprietary/evil, and DeCSS etc. are illegal in the USA. To avoid legal trouble, the company backing ubuntu has decided not to include those by default.
Also, linux has ndiswrapper (Lets you use Windows wlan drivers).
Also, it's a huge software DB is not exclusive to ubuntu, but it's usable even for knowledge-slightly-above-average users who didn't touch Linux before. And the repository is huge. Like 20000 packages (Library and support/i18n packages included, obviosly, but that's still a lot of apps).
But whatever works, I guess. Unless "what works" is MS windows, of course ;)
The real reason Ubuntu is popular is:
It sucks marginally less than other Linux distros.
It still has a long way to go, though. For instance, most users really do not care if MP3 is propietary, they expect their OS vendor to deal with that, and let them play their damn songs.