fair to say it has been worked on much longer than 20 years, but it is a good time to recognize its role in getting people on to the linux ecosystem.
despite running off of a cd and memory, a live ubuntu 10 experience felt faster on my p4 old box than the windows xp installed on a scsi drive. despite the challenges with certain hardware support (broadcom wifi on 12.04; nvidia hybrid mode on laptops especially around 14.04 era), it was a relatively safe environment to learn about the linux internals at my own pace.
from academia to work, i continue to see it being a default choice for linux environments, and for a good reason. happy birthday!