I keep hearing Ubuntu described as merely a noob’s distro lately. However, Ubuntu has around 50% of the Linux desktop market share, give or take, but Linux as a whole has only gained a tenth of a percent or so since Ubuntu’s introduction. So either noobs adopted Ubuntu in such numbers that half of Linux veterans switched to Windows in protest, or there are quite a few veterans out there running Ubuntu, but who apparently don’t think it’s cool to admit it.

Well, it’s about time people either come clean or switch already. I’ll start the ball rolling. My name is Karl (Hi, Karl), and I’m a Linux veteran who runs Ubuntu. I switched from Windows 98 to Red Hat, then Mandrake, Suse, Linuxfromscratch, a customized Knoppix for a year when my laptop hard drive crashed and I couldn’t afford to replace it, then Gentoo for about 5 years, and have been running Ubuntu exclusively since Jaunty. I’ve maintained a custom set of conflicting kernel patches, I grep the source before asking on forums, have contributed patches and documentation for various projects here and there, have gone weeks at a time without any GUI at all, and once cross-compiled a bare bones installation for a 486 I had laying around, just to see if it could still be done (it could, and was quite usable without X).

I tell you this to put my Linux experience in context, and hopefully establish my credentials as a veteran. According to the buzz, Ubuntu is the last distro I should be comfortable running, but here I am. So why did I switch, and why did I stay?

When my wife ordered a Dell netbook preloaded with Ubuntu, I decided to create a Ubuntu partition on my laptop so I could advise her on “the Ubuntu way.” Right away I was impressed that my wireless interface “just worked,” and I discovered a number of other bits of UI polish that I didn’t know existed. Additionally, all the binary package dependency issues which pushed me to LFS then Gentoo in the first place were no longer a problem.

I also discovered that my wife wasn’t needing my advice. She bought an external optical drive and was watching DVDs without asking me more than what software she should use. The next time I was facing a major Gnome upgrade on my Gentoo desktop, I installed Ubuntu instead and never looked back.

Does Ubuntu get in the way of the “advanced” things I want to do? Not at all. I have cron jobs set up to do automatic backups. I get an email when one of the disks in my RAID is starting to look iffy. I have intrusion detection with rules updated daily from multiple sources. I have a rather intricate set of firewall rules, that only logs the important events. I recently set up my desktop as a full-fledged wireless router, complete with my own DNS, DHCP, and traffic shaping and prioritization. Ubuntu didn’t provide me with nice graphical widgets to set all that up, but they didn’t stand in my way either, and in many cases their documentation was quite helpful.

Does Ubuntu have its issues? Of course, but nothing I have felt the need to dwell on. When the buttons got moved to the left, I spent 30 seconds on google to fix it and moved on with my life. I’ve had a couple of upgrade issues which were just as quick to fix, then I hopped onto the forums or launchpad for a while to make sure others with the same issue but less experience were taken care of.

The Ubuntu community doesn’t seem to have a “divide” between noobs and veterans. For example, people like me who dealt with wifi on Linux before ndiswrapper even existed, but who are just learning hostapd, recognize the contributions of someone who just started using Linux a year ago, but has been working out the kinks in their hostapd setup the whole time. It is very easy to contribute at any level.

Note that I’m not disparaging any other distributions in order to build up Ubuntu. I don’t have to. Ubuntu stands on its own merits, and if something else fits your style better, more power to you. I can guarantee I won’t stick with Ubuntu forever, but I also guarantee it’s not a distro only a noob can love.