I personally don’t use it anymore, and its parent company, Canonical, hasn’t had the best track record (It’s better than Microsoft at least). However, it’s by far the most popular consumer Linux distribution and a lot of people start out with it. It has introduced a lot of people to Linux and maybe even convinced many of them to switch from closed source operating systems. It was my first full time Linux distro.
Do you think it has a net positive or negative on the Linux scene, and would you personally ever use it?
Having grown up with Apple, I finally jumped ship to Kubuntu a few months ago, not knowing much beyond my need to escape the ever-intensifying evil of Apple + the general 'buntu reputation as popular & beginner-friendly.
I have been absolutely loving it, blown away by the user control & transparency, though it was certainly comforting to know there would be a bunch of polished gui tools to fall back on (+ popular, beginner-friendly forums).
That said, I’ve been more impressed with KDE than the base, and dissapointed to discover some of Canonical’s user-unfriendly decisions, so I’m already eyeing arch-based distros like Endeavour and Manjaro pretty hard.
All-told, I think that having a distro with training-wheels goes a long way toward increasing adoption, but it also seems like we might be getting to the point where the DE alone can bring enough polish to make other distributions more viable as entry points.
The one unrivaled benefit of 'buntu for beginners (in my mind at least) is a big friendly forum like askubuntu, where lots of new users over many years have made sure common initial questions are asked and answered, and there is a big base of support for new questions.