Eighteen years ago Canonical, led by dot-com magnate-cum-space tourist Mark Shuttleworth, unleashed the first Ubuntu release. It was nothing short of revolutionary. Suddenly Linux was a thing for human beings. Networking worked out of the box, as did a glorious - albeit brown - Gnome 2 desktop. It was built on Debian and inherited that reputation of stability, but it wasn't Debian. It was something special.
A huge community rallied around Canonical, which promised that it would listen. A bespoke bug tracker named Launchpad was set up, and the first bug filed was “Microsoft has a majority market share". For many, Linux's golden age was about to begin, and there was a palpable sense that Bug #1 would soon be fixed.
Flash forward to today, and you'll see that not all of those dreams came true. Windows still rules the desktop (though MacOS and ChromeOS are swallowing that up). Casual desktop computing as a whole is becoming a niche hobby, because a great deal of our browsing and communication is now carried out by smartphones (some of which run Linux, but not 'real' Linux). Desktop Linux is alive and well, but the ecosystem is still not perfect. An abundance of desktop choices, together with numerous forks of popular distros, have led to complaints about fragmentation (from people that don't understand open source software and free will). And Canonical copped plenty of flack when it abandoned Unity and the Ubuntu Phone.
But it's not all bad. Companies have embraced Linux, in particular Valve. Its work on Proton has enabled some 5,000 Windows-only games to be played on Linux. And Ubuntu is still a hugely popular Linux distribution that's great for playing said games, wrangling vital documents, or managing your clouds.
This story is from the June 2022 edition of Linux Format.
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This story is from the June 2022 edition of Linux Format.
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