Ubuntu at 20

A decade on from celebrating a decade of Ubuntu, Neil Mohr wonders where all the time has gone.

So, that Ubuntu logo with the three dots – it’s people holding hands, from the original Warty login.

CREDIT: Wikimedia/Ubuntu

Without Ubuntu, the current Linux landscape would be unrecognisable. Back in October 2004, the first 4.10 (2004.10) release of Ubuntu, with its intriguing Warty Warthog code name, leapt from obscurity to being one of the most downloaded Linux distributions of the year. And that’s in spite of it sporting a less-than-attractive brown wallpaper. Perhaps the motto of “Linux for Human Beings” might have been on to something – radical departures such as enabling user accounts to make system-wide admin changes flew in the face of the classic novice-baffling Linux behaviour of the time. Being backed by an actual for-profit organisation was another departure, rather than the rag-tag hacking teams or lone coders that had preceded it, with those successes coming more by accident than by design. It seemed Ubuntu was set up for success from the start. The vision came from Mark Shuttleworth, a Debian developer who benefited from the dotcom bubble, which turned him into a multi-millionaire and happy philanthropist. His passion to give back to the open source community that had helped establish him, helped establish Ubuntu – a Zulu word meaning humanity to others – a Linux distro made for humans.

He was clearly on to something, as this human-first approach created the most popular distro of all time, which went on to directly spawn more respins than anything before or since, alongside possibly more controversies than any other project has experienced, too! Fun times for all. So, after 20 years of gently shifting-hue backgrounds, let’s look at how Ubuntu has developed over the decades, the controversies that exploded with that and the players behind it.

Slack and snacks

Cape Town, South Africa, early ’90s. A young student is sitting late at night in the University of Cape Town’s computer lab, a pile of snacks on his right and a pile of Slackware install floppies on his left. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s about to become a major force in the Linux open source world; he’s also going to be in big trouble, as he needs to reinstall Windows on the PC before the labs reopens, too. That student was Mark Shuttleworth, and like so many before and since, free access to open source changed his life completely.

Shuttleworth didn’t have his own PC, so the only way to try Linux was on university equipment. He got involved in a project to hook up the university to the internet and started using Debian. Realising Apache wasn’t available, he became a Debian developer, maintaining the first Apache package. By the mid-’90s Shuttleworth had graduated with a degree in finance and information systems and established his company, Thawte, in the security and verification sector, built on Debian, Apache and MySQL. It was very successful and was bought by Verisign in 1999 for US$575 million ( just over US$1 billion in today’s money).

So, what’s a 27-year-old multi-millionaire supposed to do with all his time and money? Other than pay to be the first South African in space… Luckily for the world, Shuttleworth has a strong philanthropic streak. He’d already established the Shuttleworth Foundation and told us in LXF71, “I kind of need to get rid of everything that I’ve acquired. I’m quite keen to do that in my lifetime.” (You can read part of the interview on p.42.)

If you want a specific desktop build or have a dedicated use for Ubuntu, there’s quite possibly a flavour already available.

SPINS, SPINS AND MORE SPINS!

Why reinvent the wheel when you can just respin it? It’s testament to the success and appeal of Ubuntu just how many respins have been created over the years. According to the Linux Distribution Timeline project (https://distroware.gitlab.io), almost 90 distros – many now unmaintained – have been spun out from Ubuntu. Some can be as straightforward as running an alternative desktop environment, others are themed, such as Hannah Montana Linux, or dedicated to a specific task, such as Ubuntu Studio, while a number offer a completely redeveloped experience, such as Linux Mint.

There are two distinct spins of Ubuntu: there are classic Ubuntu flavour spins, then everything else. Flavours (https://ubuntu.com/desktop/flavours) are official spins of Ubuntu. These are supported within the Ubuntu community and backed by its infrastructure for builds and deliveries. Kubuntu was the first – this packaged the KDE desktop and associated apps for Ubuntu, rather than Gnome – and it laid the ground for how these flavours are handled, along with their relationship to Canonical and the main Ubuntu project. Other spins, such as Linux Mint, while they might take and use the Ubuntu base repositories, have to build and maintain their own releases and support services such as websites, forums and funding.

SPINS, SPINS AND MORE SPINS!

As a then Debian developer and with a desire to help the open source community that had helped him, Shuttleworth devised the idea of putting a team together that really understood Debian, with a focus on bringing it to the world to benefit millions of people. This became the vision of Ubuntu. Shuttleworth had considered trying to steer Debian as Project Leader but he rejected that as being unworkable and instead took what he knew would be the first of many controversial choices of founding Ubuntu from several projects. But Shuttleworth wasn’t afraid of controversy – a whole founding point of the Ubuntu project was the ability to steer it in the direction he wanted it to go.

On 19th October 2004, the first Ubuntu 4.10 ISO was released. You can still download the build from http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/4.10/ – there’s even a build for PowerPC. Even back in 2004, it was a struggle to keep the file size to a single CD, which is less than 640MB. Shuttleworth said, “That’s a tremendous narrowing. We’ve sacrificed a tremendous amount to do that. If you care passionately about everything that’s not on that disc, we’re not much help to you.” Keep in mind that a decade later, the 14.04 LTS 32-bit desktop build stood at 1GB – so required a DVD – and a decade after that, the 24.04 LTS build is over 5GB, outgrowing a single-sided DVD image.

When Linux Format got its hands on Warty Warthog – the name came from a joke on a Sydney ferry trip about it being a rough first release – the standout was the ease and speed of installation. At the time, most distros came with a complex installer that asked you all about partitioning, then presented you with a list of packages that you had to choose from, either individually or in groups, and then spent ages installing them. Ubuntu basically asked, “Where do you want me to put it?” and then got on with it, at speed. As there were no choices to make, there wasn’t the lengthy process of installing individual packages from RPM or DEB files on the disc; Ubuntu simply unpacked an archive into your root partition. This meant you could be using it less than 20 minutes after booting the CD.

For the first few releases, the live and install CDs were separate; it wasn’t until PCLinuxOS showed that it was possible to combine the two into one that Ubuntu CDs became even easier to use, and you could try out the distro while it was installing.

The first bug posted for Ubuntu, called Bug #1, was from Mark Shuttleworth and stated, “Microsoft has a majority market share” (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1), with a large part of this being that PCs were sold with Windows pre-installed. Shuttleworth closed Bug #1 in 2013, citing a much wider range of devices running Android and that cloud computing had flipped the situation on its head, forcing Microsoft to support all operating systems. But you try buying a desktop PC without Windows pre-installed…

Another controversial departure was Ubuntu’s lack of software choice. The distro contained exactly one of each main type of program: one desktop, one browser, one mailer and so on. The user was not offered options and were simply presented with a working system that could be changed later. Having a single set of defaults meant they could concentrate on making the initial experience as good as possible, which meant that Ubuntu quickly became the Linux for non-geeks.

The original BQ Ubuntu Phone gained some fans.

CONVERGENCE CATASTROPHE

You can’t blame a company for dreaming big. Back in July 2013, Ubuntu announced a fresh crowdfunded phone on Indiegogo, with a target of an eye-watering $32 million in 30 days. Many thought Ubuntu wouldn’t achieve this target, and it didn’t, but the $12.8 million it did hit was the highest achieved by such a crowdfunded project at that point. That phone, the Ubuntu Edge, never saw the light of day, but the attention and response the project generated must make it one of the most successful failures of all time.

On the back of the publicity, Ubuntu pushed ahead with its open source phone OS. By May 2015, the first two Ubuntu Phones running Ubuntu Touch had landed. First was the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition and then the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition (see reviews LXF197). It wasn’t until February 2016 that the first tablet launched, with the Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition (see review LXF212).

Shuttleworth’s original hope was to gain traction in emerging marketplaces where Ubuntu was more widely used, such as India or China. But the lack of software ecosystem meant, despite being fast, stable and having regular updates, it couldn’t compete with low-cost Android, which had just released v5 on the back of the Nexus 6, and popularity king iOS, with the iPhone 6. With both devices and ecosystems backed by two of the richest corporations in history.