7 reasons why Ubuntu is so successful

1) A good start: Ubuntu started with a strong background. It wasn’t
“yet another” distribution, it was a distribution that had a vision and
enough people and money behind it to support that vision.

2) Easy and straightforward installation: From the text-based
installer of the first few versions, to the point&click installer
of today, ubuntu always had a very straightforward and simple
installation. Every step of the installer was explained in a short, yet
clear manner that made it easy for everyone to follow the steps of the
installation proccedure (almost) regardless of their experience with
computers.

3) ShipIt: Sharing “official” CD’s with the Ubuntu logo increased
the trust of users towards the distribution and made it much easier for
users on slow connections to try it. People could now give away several
CD’s to their friends and coworkers which made the general adoption of
Linux much faster.

4) Synaptic: If you ask a first-time Ubuntu user to tell you what
impressed them most, chances are that the answer will be “synaptic”.
Indeed, this application brought APT much closer to the average user
and made program installation in Linux a lot easier. Users didn’t have
to search for RPMs or worry that they might needed to deal with
dependancies, compile from source etc, synaptic solved everything using
a very simple interface. When the first versions of Ubuntu came out,
the only thing that could be compared to the flexibility and ease of
use of APT and Synaptic was Fedora’s YUM, but unfortunately at that
time Fedora didn’t have a good front-end for YUM (although Synaptic
could be used with YUM, it was not nearly as easy to set up as synaptic
and Ubuntu were).

5) Ubuntu forums/Community: The Ubuntu community was, and still is
one of the most important factors that promote the growth of Ubuntu.
The forums are very active and old users are very friendly and patient
towards newcomers. Maybe it has to do with the philosophy of “Ubuntu”…

6) User promotion: Ubuntu is based heavily on the promotion it
receives from it’s users. Nearly every person who uses Ubuntu today has
beed advised to try it by someone else who had tried it before them and
so on. This, combined with the strong influence of Ubuntu to the
internet forums related to GNU/Linux, has led to a major increase in
it’s adoption .

7) Fragmented competitors: When Ubuntu started it’s “march to glory”
there were three “big” distributions, SuSE, Mandriva, and Fedora.
Debian and Slackware were popular but were not very appealling to
newbies (Debian still had a text based installer…). All of the “big
three” were not at their best when Ubuntu came out and started
gathering users. SuSE had recently been bought by Novell and was still
undergoing internal reconstructions, Mandriva has in the middle of a
severe financial crisis, and Fedora was just at FC2 which wasn’t nearly
as easy as it now is. This “fragmentation” (or “decay of the
distribution maket” if you like) helped many users make the decision to
switch to Ubuntu.

fuente: linux4coffee

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