Back in the day in 2008, Linux was niché.

It had issues all the time, and finding solutions required searching online, manually. Time consuming, difficult process. Very un-beginner-friendly.

From the throve of all possible distros, one stood out. Ubuntu. Very popular. Askubuntu Forums (with coffee beans denoting ranks) was the place when, 9/10 times, the answer to your problem could be found.

So when your fedora friend cried trying to get his camera and sound working, you either found the solutions already, or asked for them and got them. Usually the former.

That was the biggest advantage of Ubuntu. Big community and wealth of troubleshooting knowledge already available. And it had the opinion of a beginner friendly system. Which made the community grow and created a large market/userbase for help threads/tutorials.

Add to that, that people are creatures of habit and 'voila - you have a lot of people sticking to Ubuntu just because they never got so pissed at them that they would change their distro.

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kamranjon 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Is Debian still considered beginner un-friendly or had it improved in that respect?

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mewse-hn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think it's improved, but I installed Debian on a laptop recently and the fresh system came up without wifi, which was bewildering because it connected to wifi during the install process. Took me a bunch of troubleshooting to find a rfkill setting buried in the system.

AI: you probably turned on airplane mode

me: I definitely didn't

So I love debian but it's still rough around the edges and I'm not sure I'd recommend non-technical people dive in.

	▲	da_chicken 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This has been my exact Debian experience since I tried it on Debian 3.1. On every system at least one of network, sound, display, or power management just wouldn't work out of the box even if they did in the installer. I ended up on Mint because I consistently found that Debian was willing to compromise their philosophy for the live distro installer, but they would never warn you that you were about to reboot into an air gapped system.

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roryirvine 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's much better these days.

The old installer (boot-floppies) was legendarily prickly at the time Ubuntu was introduced, but it's long since been replaced by the much friendlier debian-installer. And the default install images now include non-free firmware by default, so modern wifi, bluetooth, and graphics hardware are fully supported.

To be honest, Debian now tends to be fairly vanilla and boring and it's actually Ubuntu that often ends up being a bit weirder. For example, consider how they treat the Snap packaging system for consumer software, or the rust rewrite of coreutils. Debian provides both as supported options (of course it does, Debian supports pretty much everything!), but Ubuntu pushes them to all users by default.