$ cat /etc/lsb-release

Ubuntu: The OG Linux.

Twenty years on, it is still the distro that put a Linux desktop in front of people who had never compiled anything in their lives — and still the one they stay on.

Read the caseGet started
first release
2004
release cadence
6 months
LTS support
12 years
based on
Debian

$ whoami --origin

Why Ubuntu is the OG

In 2004 desktop Linux was a thing you earned. Debian was magnificent and unhurried, Slackware asked you to mean it, and installing a graphical environment could eat a weekend. Ubuntu took Debian's unstable branch, froze it on a six-month rhythm, chose sensible defaults and — famously — mailed pressed CDs, free, to anyone anywhere in the world.

That last part matters more than any technical decision. Ubuntu treated distribution as a human problem rather than a bandwidth problem, and in doing so it handed Linux to students, to classrooms, and to countries where a 700MB download was not casually possible.

The name is a Nguni word about shared humanity — roughly, I am what I am because of who we all are. For once the branding was not a stretch. Two decades of bug reports, wiki edits, translations and forum answers built something no single company could have shipped.

Other distros are faster, leaner, more bleeding-edge, more philosophically pure. Plenty are excellent. But when a hardware vendor certifies one Linux, when a tutorial assumes one distro, when a newcomer types "how do I install Linux" — the answer has been the same for twenty years.

  • Debian, made approachable

    Ubuntu did not invent the package manager or the kernel. It took Debian's rigour and gave it a date on the calendar, a default desktop and an installer your uncle could finish.

  • The gateway distro

    Ask any Linux user how they started. An overwhelming number say Ubuntu — a live CD, a dual boot, a laptop that was too slow for its shipped OS.

  • Boring on purpose

    It stopped being exciting years ago, which is the highest compliment an operating system can receive. It boots, it updates, it gets out of the way.

$ git log --oneline --since=2004

Twenty years of adjectives and animals

Every release is numbered YY.MM — the year and month it shipped — and nicknamed with an alliterative adjective-and-animal pair that marches through the alphabet. Warty Warthog, Dapper Drake, Jammy Jellyfish. It is a versioning scheme with a sense of humour, and it has never once slipped into self-seriousness.

  1. 4.10

    Warty Warthog

    October 2004

    The first release. Shipped free CDs worldwide, by post, to anyone who asked — which is how a generation met Linux at all.

  2. 6.06

    Dapper Drake

    June 2006LTS

    The first Long Term Support release, and the one that slipped its date to get it right. The LTS habit starts here.

  3. 10.04

    Lucid Lynx

    April 2010LTS

    The last of the classic brown-and-orange era before the new light theme. Still spoken about with unreasonable fondness.

  4. 12.04

    Precise Pangolin

    April 2012LTS

    Unity matured, the launcher stuck, and the five-year LTS support window became the default expectation.

  5. 16.04

    Xenial Xerus

    April 2016LTS

    Snap packages arrive alongside deb. The server side quietly becomes the backbone of an enormous amount of the internet.

  6. 18.04

    Bionic Beaver

    April 2018LTS

    The return to GNOME, done carefully. Proof that a distro can change its mind without losing its users.

  7. 22.04

    Jammy Jellyfish

    April 2022LTS

    Wayland by default on supported hardware, and a desktop that finally felt boring in the best possible way.

  8. 24.04

    Noble Numbat

    April 2024LTS

    Twelve years of support available, a rebuilt installer, and two decades of momentum behind it.

# The alphabet has wrapped around more than once. When it ran out at Zesty Zapus, it simply started again at Artful Aardvark — because of course it did.

$ systemctl status ubuntu

What keeps it on top

Not benchmarks. Four unglamorous things that compound over twenty years into a lead nobody has closed.

  • $ man community

    The community

    Ask a question about Ubuntu and someone answered it in 2009, 2016 and last Tuesday. That depth is the real feature.

    • Ask Ubuntu: hundreds of thousands of answered questions
    • Ubuntu Forums, Discourse and local LoCo teams
    • Help wiki pages maintained by volunteers for twenty years

  • $ cat /etc/os-release

    LTS you can plan around

    A new release every six months, a Long Term Support release every two years, on a calendar you can actually diary.

    • Five years of standard security maintenance
    • Extendable to ten or twelve years on LTS
    • Predictable April and October cadence since 2004

  • $ apt install everything

    Software support

    When a vendor ships one Linux build, it is a .deb for Ubuntu. Being the default target is its own kind of power.

    • Tens of thousands of packages via apt and the Debian lineage
    • Snap, Flatpak and AppImage all supported
    • First-class target for Docker, CUDA, Steam and the JetBrains suite

  • $ lspci -k

    Hardware that just works

    Wi-Fi on boot, the trackpad gestures, the second monitor, the printer. Unglamorous, and the entire ballgame.

    • Certified laptops and desktops from Dell, Lenovo and HP
    • Proprietary driver management built into the installer
    • Hardware Enablement stacks keep LTS current on new silicon
~/opinions — bash

$ sudo apt purge windows

FUCK WINDOWS!!!

No forced reboots mid-sentence. No ads in the start menu. No telemetry you cannot switch off, no account requirement to use the computer you paid for, no search box that phones home about your local files.

> Removed 1 proprietary package. Freed approximately 30 GB and an unquantifiable amount of goodwill.

$

$ ./install.sh

Get started

A USB stick and twenty minutes. Live mode lets you run the whole desktop from the stick before anything touches your drive, so the worst case is that you reboot and nothing has changed.

Stop reading about it. Go and install it.

Everything on this page is one download away from being your actual desktop. It costs nothing, it always has, and the community that answers your first question is already waiting.

Visit ubuntu.com