> That's what set them apart, people wanted mp3 codecs and Nvidia drivers.

Oh, it was far, far more than that. For example, wifi support was still extremely immature when the first ubuntu releases came out and a lot of people made out-of-tree drivers to support the various wifi chips that were on the market. Out-of-tree drivers were not included in any distro but Ubuntu, and installing them on a distro like Fedora was a major pain, my laptop of the time depended on one of those drivers, the original developer probably got tired of the process of mainlining a driver and abandoned it and I had to modify the source code to adapt it to whatever API refactoring happened at the time on the kernel version used by Fedora to get it running. Running a roller like arch while depending on this stuff? ah, nonono.

By out-of-tree I don't necessarily mean proprietary driver, there were a lot of open source drivers that weren't mainlined, it was kind of a wild west.

It was also the first major distro to feature a Live CD installer. Sure, you could theoretically install LiveCD distros like Knoppix, but it wasn't recommended - and the desktop and assortment of apps lacked polish compared to what Ubuntu preselected.

It gave you a fresh debian system with recent packages without the breakages that happened routinely in sid (Ubuntu came out in an era where debian had major struggles with stable releases. These days it has gotten a lot better and I use debian stable now. Flatpak and containers also solved one of the pain points of LTS.)

As a long time linux user who started with slackware and the pain of configuring xfree86, the pains of winmodems and other hardware troubles of the past, I've come to appreciate polish and when Ubuntu came out I really liked it. The more the years come by, the less I want to fuss with my system. Ubuntu had a level of polish that was absolutely unmatched. These days, the differences between distros have massively shrank and I do not find Ubuntu any more convenient than regular debian and even arch isn't that harsh to use (though, after experiencing some package updates causing breakages I don't want to fuss with anything rolling anymore), but when Ubuntu came out, it was a revelation.

And the revelation lasted for quite a while, it didnt stop at the original release, because when Gnome 3 came out, it was incredibly barebones and painful to use (they didn't even want a menu entry to reboot your computer. Seriously. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/06/howto... "The developers argue that users should generally suspend their computers instead of shutting down." I mean, what the eff? ),

while Unity introduced really innovative features that I still miss to this day, like the global menu that allowed you to use functions from any GTK software by typing words on your keyboard, showing all entries that matched. It was a very efficient way to navigate software, more than moving the mouse and hunting for entries trying to find the right submenu.

Using Ubuntu when Ubuntu introduced Unity meant avoiding the worst time period of Linux desktops. It was also the era of KDE 4 which should have been named "SIGSEGV 4.0" a full featured desktop that showed constant segmentation fault dialogs.

Ubuntu didn't become popular for no reason. It was a really sad state of affair.

I don't like Ubuntu anymore. Since they dropped Unity they completely abandoned any contribution to the linux desktop as a whole, while snaps are flatpak but much worse (the more you install, the slower your boot, and apps launch much slower than on flatpak) and with a proprietary backend. I see it now as a me-too distro that does everything worse. But I have fond memories of it. Debian stable + flatpak + podman is giving me the experience I seek in a desktop these days : no fuss, the OS has all the packages I need, if I need something more recent I can use a pet container or flatpak, the polish is good enough (and, unfortunately, other distros don't really improve enough there to justify their existence), I don't have to /think/ about my system for the duration of the stable release, only when the time comes for the next full-upgrade, the modern installer sets up a sane desktop out of the box and now they even include firmware by default. It's the zen I need.