Ubuntu and Linux

So to get the show started, I'm going to do a post along the lines of a comment I made on another blog earlier.

It seems that some people are thinking that because Ubuntu is the one that everyone talks about lately that it will become synonymous with Linux. They are taking offense to people posting comments or doing articles talking about or focusing on Ubuntu.

My response to this: I see the sky is falling again.

First some history. 10 years 3 months ago I installed my first Linux box. I came from a BSD work environment, and was going to go with that. This was before I became an admin. However a couple of friends recommended this thing called linux. At the time, my choices were Redhat, Slackware, and Debian. I went with Debian. Bounced around a few other choices, like Corel Linux (debian based) Progeny, and the like.

Back in the days I first got into it. Everyone was talking about Redhat. Redhat in business, Redhat on the personal computer, Redhat on the laptop. If someone said Linux, the first words or thoughts that came up was Redhat. And Redhat had a good marketing department behind it. I took a training class on Linux Administration from the great guys over at Linux Certified. In fact the guys there in California told me I was their first paid customer. With the class you got a free laptop. Their poison of choice for an os was Redhat. For a 2 day boot camp it worked really well... But again, it added to the whole REDHAT REDHAT REDHAT mind share. People were arguing that there was more to Linux than Redhat.

Some of the arguments made, because Redhat had such mind share and were a valid business, was that Redhat was the Microsoft of Linux. You had the Hatters and the Non-Hatters.

Flash forward today. Rehat, has split into 2 groups. Fedora, and Redhat. They are still popular on the server, and have lots of distros based off of them. Hello CentOS. You also have other vendors in the server game too. Novell's SUSE, and Ubuntu.

Ubuntu came out and was very new user (noob) friendly. It has built on Klaus Knopper's Knoppix live cd system (as I understand it Knoppix was the first, if not, at least one of the first). It's improved hardware support, and created a great user community to get help. It comes with your choice of Desktop Managers (KDE, Gnome, XFCE). The distro has taken quite a bit of the guess work out of setting up a system. Most things work, or you can get decent free advice fairly quickly, less than a Google search away.

Because of this, Ubuntu has become a bit of a name. It makes an option available to those stuck with Microsoft. The typical user, can't even work email consistently, and the people in the Linux Blogsphere (the ones complaining today) forget, most users don't have a clue on how to install an OS. Also remember people on a whole, do not like change. So which are they going to do? Are they going to take the geek route (the route I went; learn Unix, shell scripting, and then Linux. Climb up to it from there, and spend the next 10 years learning a system that isn't as ubiquitous as Microsoft Windows), or are they going to get something that will most likely work when they put it in their Optical Disk Drive (Like a Microsoft install CD)?

Remember kids, distros come and go. They rise to the majority of the mind share and sink back down again. Here it is, 10 years later, and I'm seeing people making a big deal on one Distro getting more mind share. Am I going to see this again in another 10 years? Sadly I think I will.