One of the things that I love about Ubuntu is it offers a wide choice of packages. Ranging from basic administration utilities (apt-get, yum,adduser, atop,cpuid) to Networking (apache2, 6tunnel, bind, xchat) and Games (nethack, ppracer, crack-attack).
The official software repository of the latest release of Ubuntu (Edgy Eft) has at least 20,231 packages, the number doesn’t include 3rd party repositories that offer restricted open source software such as lame, faad and libdvdcss.
Previously, I’ve use SUSE as my main distro. SUSE is slightly better than my first distro of choice, Mandrake/Mandriva (which was plague with rpm dependencies and stale packages), but it has certain limitation at that time mainly because it is still considered a comercial distribution and keeping up to date with the latest version of SUSE was a pain.
I’m not saying that SuSE is a lousy GNU/Linux distro, but it just doesn’t fit me well enough, and I found that SuSE lacks some packages that Mandrake/Mandriva offers.
I use SuSE until a friend recommend me to use Ubuntu as it is based on Debian GNU/Linux. Upon trying out Ubuntu, I found that it is an easy GNU/Linux distribution to use for me, an average desktop users.
apt-get does wonders in installing softwares from the internet and performing software and security updates. Moreover, Ubuntu has a predictable release cycle that I could really depend on.
I know some people would argue that shorter release cycle might degrade distro quality but I’m one of those people that like to keep up to date with the latest software release and technology (I’m pretty sure i’m not alone in this).
To summarise it, some of the things I love about Ubuntu is because it has a wide range of software choices, a predictable release cycle and a relatively up to date software releases. What about you? What is your favorite GNU/Linux distro?
Tags: ubuntu, debian, linux, suse, open source, distro
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