Today is Ubuntu's 20th Anniversary

I'm sure lots of people have lots of thoughts on them, but personally I'd like to give a shout out to Canonical. At least from my perspective in the early days of DigitalOcean the few interactions I did have with them were super positive, they seemed to really want us to win. I'll always have a soft spot Ubuntu and as far as community stewards go, on average Mark Shuttleworth has been good. Thanks Ubuntu Community! Thanks Mark! Thanks Canonical!

To me Ubuntu is what Mandrake never became.

I miss Mandrake, after Slackware, it was my first distro!

I learned linux proper because I ordered a mandrake CD in the mail. I saw a friends Slackware and I presumed it was just a "cooler windows" or something, so I ordered Mandrake, installed it, was like uh oh..oooh shit... this isn't windows at all...!!! But I couldn't figure out how to go back to NTFS so I just learned linux instead ha. Doubt I'd be here today if it was not for Mandrake (and basically hand rolling a modem driver).

Ubuntu was leaps ahead of Mandrake at least in installation friendliness, which, let's face it - is often the biggest hurdle getting people interested. The installer wasn't bad, but kinda threw you to the wolves wrt partitioning and such. As a novice, I had no idea what this meant.

Ubuntu came along and made it easy. A live bootable image to play with and see work, and an installer that just let you click through and let it do the dirty work without me having to know what I was doing. That went a long way, and IIRC was the first of its kind to take this approach.

I'd honestly still be using it today if not for snaps. I generally don't like tinkering and optimizing, much preferring to just get something working quickly and out of my way.

I don't recall Mandrake being particularly difficult, although it's been a long time and I don't remember much details, but it was my first Linux distro back in the day. From what I recall, the installation was very similar to Ubuntu(?) I guess my memory of things must be wrong.

Might be interesting to get a hold of an old Mandrake install CD and try in QEMU.

I do remember I had some problems upgrading Mandrake: after the upgrade I just got gibberish on the screen – some X problems I guess, but I didn't have the skill to debug it at the time. I just reinstalled with FreeBSD (which I had tried before Mandrake, but I couldn't get "xfree86 -configure" to work – the second time I had learned enough from Mandrake to make that work) and didn't look much at Linux for a long time after that.

Came across this. Better than many others, but still a little technical for a newbie IMO.

https://youtu.be/GvFelGwZBcc

Looking at release dates for Mandrake, FreeBSD, and Ubuntu, I think I must have used Mandrake 9.x, or maybe 8.x. I found a video of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBpRuXjHTw8 – in a quick watch-though, it seems roughly similar to what I remember of early Ubuntu (actually, in a quick check it seems that very early Ubuntu only had a text installer?)

I think Linux is inherently a bit tricky/hard for a newbie, because unlike Windows or macOS it can't just assume it's going to be the only OS. Installing e.g. Windows isn't necessarily newbie-friendly either – it's just that most people never have to do that.

You can install Gnome Software with one command if you don't like snaps. That's a negligible amount of tinkering for the average Linux user.

You also need to add PPAs to get the non-snap versions of certain applications, like Firefox, since Ubuntu's deb package for it just installs the snap.

This wasn't true the last time I messed with it. I used synaptic to install packages, and many would just install the snap version anyways. Has that changed?