Well, earlier today, I was invited to a service that has generated much discussion and controversy over the past few days. That would be Ubuntu One.

Getting an invite is pretty easy, all you have to do is sign up on the waiting list, and in my case, wait a few days. A LaunchPad account is a prerequisite. So, many of you might ask why is this so much better than any service such as DropBox.

The answer to that is, it’s not. It is certainly a decent service, for free or for a decent price, but besides Ubuntu brand-name fanboyism I see no reason to use this service.

Ubuntu One is a program that you install on your computer that sits in your taskbar and creates a folder in your home directory called Ubuntu One. In this folder, there is the My Files and Shared With Me folder. These are your gateways to the Ubuntu One world. Simply dragging a file into the My Files folder will upload it to Ubuntu One, and it will show up on any other computers you organized along with the Ubuntu One homepage at ubuntuone.com. This is fairly convenient, but has many shortfalls.

Let me start with the positives. Ubuntu One is not only well supported (as it is developed by Canonical), it is also lightweight. It seems to take up few or no resources, and you can start it up when you need it. There is a 2gb limit, which is not bad for casual filestorage (though it has serious limitations for backup use), and you can update to 10GB for $10 a month.

Now, we can start with the cons. One con is it has is the fact that it is Ubuntu only. The installation process, from the specialized PPAs to the actual client, are all only available for Ubuntu. I had to bring out my netbook, as I use Fedora on the desktop. This is also an immense shortfall when you want to synchronize accross platforms. In my house, I have a mix of Linux and one Mac computer, this would not be useful to exchange files accross machines. A comparable service, DropBox, supports Windows, Mac, and many Linux distributions.

Also, the Ubuntu One team gives you 10 GB for fr $10 per month, while Dropbox gives you 50 GB for $9.99 a month. Also, the interface is not as clean as Dropbox.

Furthermore, as one blogger pointed out, One is not open sourced or released with any open license, and this seems to be a slap in the face to the Ubuntu name, trademark, and community. It is basically using the established, open Ubuntu name to promote a service that has little or nothing to do with Ubuntu itself (besides being the sole operating system it can run on).

The speeds are fine, but I did not put it to any heavy tests, and it is convenient to have one account for both Launchpad and One, but that is not too big of a plus.

Overall, I think that users looking for this kind of storage solution should go with Dropbox, as it has many more features than One. If you are loyal to the Ubuntu brand name, and you must, go with Ubuntu One.