I think many factors contribute to Ubuntu’s popularity. I think the biggest one is it’s debian pedigree.

Debian was a great distro in itself and had a massive community (still does) but was plagued by many flaws that were preventing it from gaining a widespread acceptance. The development cycle was really slow, the installer was not very user friendly or forgiving and the focus was more on building a good multi-purpose linux that could be tweaked for preference rather than on providing certain focused end user experience.

Ubuntu took the best parts of debian – it’s infrastructure, the apt package management, and most of it’s code base and created a very energetic, distro that was quick to addapt to the market, quick to utilize new technologies and focused on the end user experience. They started shipping the OS on live distros with a lovely graphical installer.

So you end up with a distro that is strongly branded, has a quick and structured 6 month development cycle (as opposed to debian’s “it’ll be ready when we say it’s ready” philosophy) and which is aiming to be “ready for the destkop”. And, it’s for the most part compatibile with debian which means Ubuntu can utilize the very rich debian repositories to easily backport applications for their system.

Add to this the great promotional hype, the dedicated community, the mysterious millionaire founding the project, and awesome philosophy behind it and you get a very compelling distro. :)

The main reason why so many people is promoting Ubuntu so hard is not that its the best distro but its the only distro with a clear focus and that is to fix bug nr 1 nammely Microsoft’s marketshare on the Operativesystem market.
Ubuntu have a strong community around the world with people that take an active interest in promoting there distribution I havent ever seenusers of Suse, Redhat or any other linux user doing that as strong as Ubuntu users do
Maybe its because the word Ubuntu is someting that many people support, the meaning of humanity
to quote Ubuntus own homepage:
“Ubuntu is an African word, which has been described as “too beautiful to translate into English”. The essence of Ubuntu is that “a person is a person through other people”. It describes humanity as “being-with-others” and prescribes what “being-with-others” should be all about. Ubuntu emphasises sharing, consensus, and togetherness. It’s a perfect concept for Free Software and open source. Here’s a great article that describes Ubuntu, which may help define it. Wikipedia also has a good definition.”
mayby this is why ubuntu is so popular, i can think of a lot of other distros that are as easy to use and maintain.

Debian’s Ubuntu’s foundation, is #2. #3 fits Gobuntu, an official version of Ubuntu, as well as gNewSense, which is an unofficial version of Ubuntu. Really though, as long as its preconfigured, I’d be most happy with anything with apt-get and good repos.

Ubuntu has a hell of a community, plenty of helpful folk on their forums for confused newbies (I know that much from my forays into linux territory – got answers to most things within an hour or two, everything else within a day)

For a while I’ve kinda thought that it would help the cause of linux vs Windows if one distro was sort of picked out as “the great Windows user converter distro” and given plenty of help to be made as easy and graphical and stable and supported as possible, it could then act like a gateway drug to the rest of linux for the people who were techies before but too used to Windows to get used to linux, and as a standard OS for the rest of the converts.

Basically because choice is good when you know what you’re doing, but for someone who’s just heard good things about linux in general it can be confusing to have too much choice (like Vista’s numerous methods of shutting down – just gets confusing after the 7th option because no-one knows the difference between sleep and standby)

So then new converts would all be working from the same base, more specialised support could be made available for it, the full works.

Ubuntu seems to have positioned itself into that niche :mrgreen good luck to ’em

You know – it’s possible. Dell is already shipping Ubuntu. If Lenovo starts doing it too, maybe other manufacturers will follow. You know – kind off a “all the cool kids are doing it” effect. :)

I already voted. Voted yesterday when i saw it on digg… I think it was digg.

Yep Ubuntu for me :) tho any distro is bettern no Linux. But regardless I would like to see Ubuntu become something like a standard for Comp manufacturers. While i believe choice is a good thing I definitely think the proliferation of Linux distros confuses non tech types who who wish to jump outta that microsoft boat. Ubuntu is nice simple and easy… great community support, and good hardware support (in my limited experience, haha). Overall i love it and have been promoting the hell out of it amongst my friends. The ones that convert have far less problems than they ever did with Windows.