Well, while we may not be as dedicated to the fine arts of Linux as some people we could mention, we at Why Dont You use Linux and can appreciate its strengths.

Now, as we exist in the real world and dont (yet – donations always welcome) have the handheld ebook reader of our dreams (see http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/01/14/portable-pdfs/ for more information) we also read computer magazines (and a lot of them). If you took a snapshot of the world based on these over the last month or so, you could easily be fooled into thinking that there was but one Linux and its name is Ubuntu.

Now, dont misunderstand here: Kudos to ubuntu for its excellent packaging and an incredibly user friendly version of Linux that serious has the potential to gain a foot hold on the desktop. We like Ubuntu and here there is a machine that runs it, but there are more distros out there!

Ubuntu is, amongst the current versions of Linux (eg. SuSE, Mandriva, RedHat etc.,) probably the easiest to get, easiest to install and easiest to get up and running with – but that is where the fun ends. It has problems with how much it tries to hold your hand, software installation can be awkward and is often counter intuitive – woe betide people used to other distros coming to Ubuntu.

Critically, and this may well be the key as to why it is talked about so much, Ubuntu has a fantastic marketing thing going on. I dont know if its driven by the company itself or just people who are happy with the product. If you dont want the hassle (and it can be a major hassle – take note Novell) of downloading and burning your own installation CD/DVDs Ubuntu will send you disks for free. And to put the icing on the cake if you want one, they will encourage you to take 10 (that is ten of each an install CD and a liveCD) and give them to your friends.

Great.

This is a brilliant strategy and seems to be working. Everyone we know who has ever expressed an interest in anything non-MS on their desktop has a CD now and even some die-hard Windowers have Ubuntu dual boot machines now. Truly we live in a brave new world.

However, and this is big, Ubuntu is not the only distro – and probably not the best.

Despite this, the latest round up of magazines we have here in the office all have more articles dedicated to Ubuntu than any other non-windows OS. There countless articles on how to get things done on Ubuntu. Normally we think it is good when articles look at other operating systems than windows but the coverage linux gets is often haphazard at best. To “waste” all those column inches on what is effectively a non-standard way of doing things seems madness.

Take this months PCW. The unix section is two pages dedicated to nothing but installing new software in Ubuntu. Great you think. This is the biggest hurdle Ubuntu suffers from. However there is no advice on configuring the packages or really getting into “apt-get” which would be of use to almost all the other distros as well. It is simply a walkthrough of how to use the package manager to access the Ubuntu repositories.

Fantastic for Ubuntu users – of no value at all to any one else. Madness.