My desktop has been Linux since I installed Slackware off of downloaded 3.5 inch disks in the early/mid 1990s.

He is correct about the availability of the development environment - back then the home user had to use Linux (or BSD) to get a Unix-type environment. Since MacOS has a NeXTSTEP core, this is no longer necessary.

I go to a lot of Android meetings and presentations, sometimes hosted by Google. Most of the people are using Macs, I'm kind of the odd man out with my System76 laptop running Ubuntu. It may be a generational thing, I'm in my 40's, many of the people there are in their 20's.

What is the most popular Linux OS for desktops/laptops/netbooks? I don't trust self-reported statistics, so my best source is the sixth (according to Alexa) most popular site on the Internet( http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOpera... ). It's logs show that Ubuntu is the #1 Linux desktop, and Fedora is the #2 Linux desktop. Fedora only has about a 17% advantage over Linux desktop #3, SUSE, but Ubuntu has a huge lead over Fedora and all the other Linux desktop distros combined. There are over 100 Ubuntu desktop installs for every Fedora install.

So on some level, you're stuck with Ubuntu if you want a user-friendly Linux distro. When Ubuntu came out, they were very innovative in some areas, especially ease of use. I don't know how many times in the past prior to Ubuntu that I've had to manually set my X-Windows configurations so as to get X working, this is now gone. Only seven years back, Red Hat wasn't even using package handlers like yum in an official sense. Ubuntu helped push things forward in an area that had been ignored for a long time.

On the other hand, as I said, you're kind of stuck with Ubuntu. Canonical is not that friendly with its upstreams, it makes forks which are probably unnecessary and then doesn't even really maintain them well. Ubuntu's bug reporting system has gone way downhill - reported bugs tend to just sit in the launchpad queue until some Canonical administrator closes it after a few months due to lack of interest - "upgrade to the new version". Ubuntu's latest version not only has the "close window" button on the top left (as opposed to the more common top right) of the screen, they now modified the code so as that you can not change it to the right. So in a way it's becoming more like MacOS with an inability to tweak the system.

Also - Ubuntu comes out with a new version every six months. I just upgraded to 14.04, the April 2014 release. The python library to deal with RDF in python is rdflib. On Ubuntu 14.04 the package is python-rdflib. They use rdflib version 2.4.2, which was released in May 2009. We're now up to rdflib 4.1.2, and Ubuntu is shipping with this version of the library which is five years old. This goes back to the theme of Ubuntu being disconnected from its upstreams. I have been doing spreadsheets in Gnumeric and those have broken in several places with my recent system upgrade, one bug of which I reported which is still sitting in the queue.

A few months ago I got fed up with Ubuntu and installed Debian on one of my disk partitions thinking I might switch over. Debian did not recognize my network card, nor did it recognize my wireless network card. This is the kind of problem I had with Linux 20 years ago - it is often why I would choose FreeBSD for a machine install over Linux back then.

I understand how this is open source and I can do work to fix my own problems in a variety of ways. I do this though, and have done this - from sending bug reports, to sending patches and updated packages based off those packages. When distros have good relationships with their upstreams, and a decent bug tracking system, this process works well. Nowadays, Ubuntu overwhelmingly dominates the Linux distro market but many of its processes are broken in terms of an open source ecosystem. They seem to be more focused on an integrated desktop/mobile user environment than anything else at the moment. Yet in many ways they're the only game in town since they seem to at least be able to recognize network and wifi cards without difficulty.