Five years of Ubuntu

Whoa, what a time. It seems like yesterday that the first release of Ubuntu (4.10, “Warty Warthog”) escaped into the wild. There was quite some buzz about that first release of the ‘Desktop Debian’ and I remember being very sceptical. Similar projects – Corel Linux OS, Lindows/Linspire – never lived up to the expectations and were quickly forgotten. But Ubuntu promised to be different. Ubuntu promised to be about Community and Participation, about End-Users and The Desktop.  No closed-door development like with Redhat Linux or SuSE Linux, no, a real community distribution. Five years late, Ubuntu has lived up to that probmise.

Yeah, right. It’s still not perfect. Yeah, Bug#1 is still open. And yeah, there are still a lot of lose ends to be tied up and some warts to be removed. Ubuntu is getting there. We are getting there.

As I wrote last year; 2008 was the Year of the Linux Desktop. And this was – to a big part – thanks to Ubuntu (and therefore Debian).

What an amazing five years. And what amazing times to come.

Here is to another five years!