Why I Love Ubuntu...after 10 years!

what's going on good to see you internet so here's the thing it's time for a bit of a heart to heart about the state of the linux world here at the end of 2020 and i guess i want to frame this video by by saying that in no uncertain terms this is going to be a little bit of a puff piece i guess for ubuntu and if you're not on board for that that's fine you can go watch something else but i just want to i guess share with you my experience of using the linux desktop now for basically 10 years this channel has been around for 10 years now which is a bit scary uh and and there's been a lot of distributions come and go and also there are more than ever amazing linux distributions to choose from doesn't matter what your preference is whether you're an arch-based person fedora ubuntu debian there is just a myriad of quality open source operating systems to choose from nowadays and so today's video is just going to be sharing why i love ubuntu and some of the reasons thereof so let's jump into it and we'll see how much progress we can celebrate over the last 10 years or so [Music] okay so i realized that there are a lot of different uh linux distros out there and a lot of great reasons to hate ubuntu being a very strong word now i personally have also disagreed with some of the decisions that uh that canonical has made regarding the ubuntu desktop over the last 10 years or so however here's what i keep coming back to and this is really hard to argue with for me personally i have never been more productive and worked better than i have on the ubuntu desktop this includes windows 10 windows 7 windows 8 mac os in the billions of versions that have been since well in the last 10 years includes the transition from gnome to to unity and back to gnome 3 something about the way that the ubuntu desktop is put together just clicks with me for some reason and as i've gotten older and have had less and less time to tinker and tweak and change linux distros to suit the way that i work i really appreciate the distros that can just churn out a release release cycle after release cycle and give us quality now here's where the road got a little bit rough for me so quick history lesson back when i first started using linux my first foray into linux was with linux mint linux mint then evolved to trying out opensuse and a few of the other distributions that are around at the time including a brief foray into kde 4 with with mandriva and pc linux os but before long i found myself back with gnome 2 right as the switch was being made to unity now the first release that i remember uh blowing my mind a little bit in terms of polish and in terms of how just productive i felt on a linux desktop was ubuntu 10.04 there was something about the theming of that distribution there was something about the way that it uh that it made it was trying to make a big splash in the world of operating systems this it also launched the ubuntu one cloud syncing service look i was such a fan of ubuntu in this era that i made a fake commercial as an 18 year old that was just in love with the concept i go and i'll put a link to it it's pretty cringy now but i really really loved this project and then we had unity and unity was a was a big pill to swallow but it was an easier pill to swallow in my opinion anyway then the default gnome 3 that we were seeing on fedora and other distributions of the like around 2011 or so then in 2012 we had the precise pangolin which was ubuntu 12.04 now this was the release that uh that saw me hit my peak in terms of productivity on the linux desktop in terms of output of the amount of videos that i was doing i was studying at the time so i was working pretty hard in general but that ubuntu 12.04 screens fading out here 12.04 was the first release where i went you know what ubuntu's got something special here with the unity desktop and anybody who's been around that long will probably have something that they appreciated about ubuntu unity i still still pine for the heads-up display menu that allows you to tap the alt key on the keyboard and start typing and it would select uh it would search and give you the result from the different drop-down menus of whatever app you had open so if you needed to find macros in libreoffice hit that little button to start typing mac and it would come up with the the menu entry for macro mind-blowing stuff at the time so this is where also the relationship after this point started to get a bit rocky in that ubuntu was trying to find ways of monetizing their their desktop they had this project that they wanted to push forward and at this point cloud computing wasn't as big of a business as was as what it is today and the desktop was seen primarily as the as the push is the focus uh for canonical so they attempted to do some uh affiliate deals with amazon by including some search results in the dash which was like the application launcher at the time and they also had affiliate links for the amazon store itself as well as they had the ubuntu one cloud syncing service and a few other things that you could pay for to use now unfortunately many of these things were not only not used in the case of ubuntu one and they ended up sunsetting that a few years down the track but there were very big concerns about privacy and and all these sorts of things tied up with the amazon affiliate links and this is where ubuntu really started to fall out with uh some of its community now for me personally i didn't have a problem just installing it removing the stuff that i didn't want like the amazon lenses and the affiliate link in the unity launcher and just carry on with my day no questions asked and while there were some who are still a bit sore about the whole unity desktop transition from gnome to we also started to see the mate project emerge as a viable uh successor or continuation of gnome 2 and so there was a refuge for those for those people as well also around this time around 2013 or so linux mint started to develop their own cinnamon desktop and while i was curious about what cinnamon was doing i could not argue with how productive i was on ubuntu so this leads us to the lts release 14.04 the trustee tar for me this ubuntu release cemented my love for ubuntu as an operating system and as a desktop to use again one of my best reviews in my humble opinion went to ubuntu 1404 that year i felt like they had really hit their stride that unity desktop was ready to go mainstream all of the initial bugs and quirks had been ironed out and this was a really polished coherent well designed well thought out shell a really great place to get work done and that was what i ran on my desktop for like two straight years and it was kind of saw the end of my distro hopping era as as somebody in the early 20s and then as time went on i would of course bounce around to different distros as this channel evolves and some 350 something or 60 something videos later here we are running once again ubuntu now that's not to say that there are plenty of distributions that i love love love there are so many great quality linux distros out there now like i said at the top of the video pop os is is amazing doing amazing stuff right now elementary os very dear to my heart and i will be booting it up as soon as elementary os 6 pops out from development linux mint is doing its own thing and i love what the linux mint team do zoran os is a great place for newbies to start i mean heck fair and os that i just looked at is another amazing place to start that brings kde to the masses but uh here's the thing though arguably none of those projects would exist if it weren't for the hard work and dedication of the team at canonical who made ubuntu possible yes linux mint possibly might have their own debian edition that they can spin off and choose to run a solo for a little while and they could very easily do that but you could argue that very few of these other projects would exist were it not for the mainstream appeal that the ubuntu desktop brought about i'm a product of that era in that i came up when ubuntu was coming up and i've it's been really hard to shake ever since and uh and there's just something about and nowadays the reasons that i choose to run it over most things it's something about the way that they're theming something about it the colors pop the contrast is spot on the font rendering is amazing i can look at this desktop all day and not get fatigued which for some reason happens on a lot of distros these are very very small things these are not surface level decisions that you can just solve with a quick skin or whatever these are really well thought out design decisions and elementary os is another great example of a really well-designed desktop but because of the fact that i've been running the elementary 5.1 as opposed to the new develop the new version that's in development i feel like it's starting to get a little bit long in the tooth but the theming and the overall presentation of the ubuntu desktop now as it stands in ubuntu 20.10 is uh is really tight and i love it not only that the the performance of gnome shell is now completely on par with the fastest desktops out there on my hardware now i've got a pretty decent dell xps 15 from a year or two ago and it flies like the bt-rfs file system and 20 gig of ram and an nvidia blah blah it's got room to spare and no matter how much stuff i open on this thing it just flies and uh and that was not always the case with the gnome desktop based ubuntu distros so this is to tell a long story short now look i realize that one of the biggest controversies around the ubuntu desktop nowadays is snap packages and while i completely appreciate the fact that people want to see the whole process open source from from store to server to back end all of those things i get that at the same time i really love and appreciate what snap packages bring to the table because while flat pack is great their updates are huge and their updates come out and then we get platform days and they're just going on so flat packs are great but the performance benefits of flat packs and snaps are negligible now in my opinion especially past first launch app images are great but very decentralized i've got a whole other video that talks about the differences between these three universal package systems go check that out if you want but for me i freaking love the ability to just jump into the terminal and say snap install whatever and considering that my work as a full-time teacher is very reliant on the microsoft ecosystem the ability to get uh things like microsoft teams which we rely on and and other bits and pieces from the snapstore super simple super quick and easy is a huge plus i time is limited nowadays and i don't have time to be stuffing around looking for ways to compile different things and whatever so snaps are a massive convenience boost for me honestly it's like it's pain free compared to mac os and windows and all those things i get the latest open source software delivered right to my desktop with minimal update sizes and it's just it's butter it's it's what i would have dreamed of 10 years ago when we were starting this thing out anyway now i realize that there are a lot of things that we could complain about in the open source world but honestly as i look back over the 10 years that i have used the linux desktop and just the amount of sheer passion and joy and productivity and tinkering and all that good stuff that's come from it i honestly think we've come a long long way in 10 years and the stuff that we're seeing happen now on the desktop space is just so exciting compared to what it was 10 years ago when arguably ubuntu was one of the only usable mainstream consumer facing linux distributions out there i think we've got a lot to be grateful for and like i said there are so many great distros out there i'm not saying that you should go and run ubuntu because it's objectively the best one out there it's not but for me for my use and for what i appreciate doing there's something about it that keeps bringing me back and every time i do i am not faced with many regrets what i will say is that um the situation for me personally became a real tipping point with the gnome-based releases on ubuntu 20.4 20.04 up to that point in time there were always things that i didn't really like about it and performance was a bit sluggish but since 20.04 since the yeah towards the beginning of this year it's been amazing and i've really loved my time using it but i think it is fair to say the linux desktop landscape would not be the same were it not for the work that ubuntu has done and ladies and gents that's why i freaking love ubuntu so get out there choose the linux distro that you love and uh and show it some support this holiday season get in there and uh and just let the developers know how much you appreciate the work that they do because i think while we can all nitpick and complain as much as we like the end of the day we're getting a pretty freaking awesome product for free interpret that in as many ways as you want well thanks so much for watching ladies and gents let me know what was the thing that started you off on your linux journey in the comments below and uh yeah i'll see you all in the next one here's to 10 years [Music] clink [Music]

Channel: InfinitelyGalactic

Views: 30,813

Keywords: infinitelygalactic, technology, linux, open-source, free software, ubuntu, alternatives to windows, alternatives to macos, distro reviews, app reviews

Id: MafUcmCz-Os

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020