Ubuntu celebrates its 12th birthday today — hurrah!

Yup, it’s twelve years to the day since Mark Shuttleworth sat down to tap out the first Ubuntu release announcement and herald in an era of “Linux for human beings”.

Explaining the proposition behind the Ubuntu 4.10 ‘Warty Warthog’, he wrote at the time:

“Ubuntu is a new Linux distribution that brings together the extraordinary breadth of Debian with a fast and easy install, regular releases (every six months), a tight selection of excellent packages installed by default and a commitment to security updates with 18 months of security and technical support for every release.”

While that ‘commitment’ to 18 months of security was cut in two in 2013, the rest of the blurb could just as easily apply to the most recent release, Ubuntu 16.10, as the first.

But back to Warty. The release offered a simple, fast and straightforward installation from a single CD. It shipped with GNOME 2.8, Firefox 0.9, Evolution 2.0 and OpenOffice.org 1.1.2.

Also Read: 5 Things We All Secretly Miss In Ubuntu

In a novel approach at the time, the Warty Warthog “worked hard to detect as much hardware as possible, simplifying the X install.”

As i’m sure you’re aware: Ubuntu was a game-changer from the get-go. In the 12 years since that release the project has grown in almost every area, ambition, scale, innovation and popularity. It has also grown in install image size, too ;).

So raise a glass to Ubuntu, its developers and its users.

‘How well do you know Ubuntu history? Pit your wily wits against our quantal quiz’

Pop quiz time — how well do you know Ubuntu history?

Find out by taking our Ubuntu 12th birthday quiz. It (rather predictably) has 12 questions and 12 correct answers. Questions are listed randomly and vary in their difficulty to create a truly maverick mix.

All you have to do is pit your wily wits against our quantal quiz.

There are no prizes on offer for the highest score (sorry!) so this is purely for fun. Even so: don’t cheat by Googling answers that you don’t know. If you do, not only do you concede that you don’t know much about Ubuntu, but you’ll forever smell like a Warty Warthog!

[iframe src=”http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/birthday-quiz” width=”100%” height=”3250″]

Here’s to another 12 years of Ubuntu!