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.

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.

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.