Ubuntu was my first distro—here’s why we went our separate ways
Ubuntu was my first distro—here’s why we went our separate ways
https://www.howtogeek.com/ubuntu-was-my-first-distroheres-why-we-went-our-separate-ways/
Publish Date: 2026-03-29 11:18:00
Source Domain: www.howtogeek.com
Summary
- I found Ubuntu very exciting in the early days, but I quickly grew disillusioned with the distro’s design choices.
- Canonical’s explorations away from the desktop toward phones and TVs felt misguided.
- The design of the Ubuntu desktop still feels like a bit of an afterthought. Canonical now places more emphasis on its snap package format, the Snap Store, and other related technologies.
I once used Ubuntu and followed its development with extreme excitement, like a kid whose favorite console and game are both available for free. Now, at best, I feel ambivalence. What happened along the way?
It all started around 2008 …
I don’t remember exactly how I first stumbled across Ubuntu back in high school, but it was at a time when I was discovering free and open source software in general: apps like Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, AbiWord, and OpenOffice. This was software that anyone could own, regardless of if they had the money or a “good” PC.
My brother and I shared the desktop PC we had at the time, so I couldn’t risk breaking it by installing a Linux distro with zero knowledge of what I was doing. It was also almost my only lifeline to a social life. So I instead played around with Linux on a years-old laptop with the one version of Ubuntu that would run on it: Xubuntu. But without working drivers for the dial-up modem, there were limits to what I could do.
Here’s a look at what Xubuntu looked like at that time.
It was the following year, as a first-year student in college, that I made the complete…
