Since the time Linus Torvalds developed the Linux kernel back in nineteen nineties, Linux world developed in to various fragments resulting thousands of flavors to choose from. This created freedom for users who are interested in choosing different software for their purpose and eventually created the community movement called FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). Although some of the companies who made free Linux distributions for end-users and servers later converted in to businesses who sell Linux, the remaining distributors kept their philosophy straight and did not start selling “open source” software. Anyways, Debian distribution is one of the most respected flavours of Linux which is popular for its stability. Therefore, Debian was widely used for servers and did not reach the Linux newbies in great scale.

But when Canonical Inc. started looking at offering a world class, feature rich Linux distribution for free based on core open source values, they picked Debian as the primary distribution that they would like to use as the foundation of their distribution. I have no idea how they came up with the word “Ubuntu” for their distribution name but it has a nice meaning which goes beyond software development.

Ubuntu has become the most popular Linux distribution among the new adopters and general users. This is widely due to the feature richness of the distribution and the increased usability. Ubuntu includes thousands of freely available software with an easy-to-use package management system so, even non-techies can use Ubuntu for productivity purposes. Ubuntu offers two versions as the desktop and server versions. Currently Ubuntu owns the top rank in most of the Linux forms and polls. Again, Ubuntu has become the top ranker for the most downloaded distribution in many download sites.

Although Ubuntu official release comes with Gnome desktop environment, there are few versions available with other desktop environments and window managers: Kubuntu – Ubuntu with KDE, Edubuntu – Ubuntu for young human beings, Xubuntu – Ubuntu with Xfce desktop environment and Gobuntu – Ubuntu which strictly provides only free software. The end users can choose any suitable Ubuntu version from the above distributions.