It was there in Debian (mostly) but it lacked that final bit of polish for the average user. Debian has always been very conservative as well (which is a good thing for some situations, but not necessarily for a desktop) and its documentation and guides on the terse side.

Ubuntu just clicked. It was, simply put, Linux for human beings. The user community at that time reflected this as well.

It's not just the free CDs that did it.

> But now they are abandoning Unity anyway, so it must not have been that important after all.

Unity filled a void left by the end-of-life of Gnome 2. Gnome Shell at that time was looking okay, but it had way too many bugs — and this is to be expected in a new product with new UI paradigms and libraries.

Unity was Canonical's attempt at providing a stable desktop environment that wasn't quite as revolutionary as Gnome Shell, and that could succeed Gnome 2 in stable releases of the distro. They pretty much succeeded there in my opinion. Today Gnome Shell likely is ready for mass use with all the early bugs ironed out (I hope), so Unity may not be needed as much now, but it did what it needed to do (and very well at that) for years.

I've heard this before, but I don't buy it. I have been using Linux for 20 years now; back in the day, and back when Ubuntu came out I was using it on my desktop (today, not so much) and I simply not believe this claim to be true. It's often repeated, but never with concrete specific examples on what was more polished and how it was more polished.

In fact I believe the opposite to be true. Back then I was using Debian on my desktop. I naturally tried Ubuntu and found out it was less polished because it contained more bugs.

Debian did none of these (at the time), it was a text installer which asked loads of questions I didn't really understand, and didn't install X or gnome or install wireless drivers by default.

Of course, I suspect the things you had to do to Debian to make Ubuntu wasn't very much -- just hide lots of installer options behind an 'advanced' option, and set a bigger set of default packages to install. But it was enough to help me get into Linux.

Sound and video playback worked out of the box for far more cases than with Debian. Networking just worked for far more network cards. X just worked the way you expected it to in many more cases. And while it certainly was buggier than Debian Stable, I don't recall it being buggier than Debian Unstable on which it was based.

Network drivers for anything other than an intel card. Still, to this day. They're not in Debian for philosophical reasons, but they're a pain-point to non-expert users.

(If someone wants cheap and simple nowadays, I recommend Chromebooks. But if they need free, as in I can re-use some of the flow of decommissioned machines from work, Ubuntu it is!)

The slogan was also taken seriously. If you asked in my local Ubuntu community (UbuntuUsers.de) there never was a RTFM or a google link. You got help, even if the question was asked already a hundred times that day. We combined that with writing the best linux documentation that exists to this day, but that's specific to the german Ubuntu community.

Also, the installation was easy, it had a good installer. It wasn't even necessary to burn a CD, you could get it shipped. Not everyone had DSL back then nor CD-burners (well, that's true today as well, but now we have USB-boot). That sure helped.

(I remember trying to move back to Debian. Apart from Xfce compared to Xubuntu looking like it's had a two-day session with the ugly stick, getting my wifi to work felt like I was being lectured by a small RMS on my shoulder.)

I do like Debian a whole lot, but for my purposes Ubuntu is functionally an acceptable Debian. (I use Debian on my personal server, Ubuntu on work servers and Xubuntu for my desktops.)

This is often repeated but never with any concrete and specific evidence.

Where's your concrete and specific evidence that nearly everybody else's subjective personal experience is somehow objectively 'wrong' and needs justifying?

Debian has bothered more in the decade or so since Ubuntu started. And, of course, fixes go upstream where applicable - Ubuntu deals with a lot less platforms than Debian has to account for - and Canonical employees work directly on Debian in a few areas.

But dude, I remember how much pain Breezy Badger wasn't compared to Debian at the time, in so many ways.

I came over to the linux side around 2007[1], and Debian was painful with network drivers and xorg configs, whereas ubuntu just gave you the binary blobs (like most distros) and worked on making X config less painful. Debian at the time was also exceptionally slow to bring in software, and that's improved in recent years. The user-friendly reputation of Ubuntu came well before 2010 when Unity came out - basically in its early days, Ubuntu gave you a distro with APT (= bye-bye, dependency hell) and also had friendly UX as its primary goal. Debian was about user-friendliness in terms of philosophy, not in terms of UX.

I now use Debian on my workstation, in the cloud, and on my home laptop. But I would never recommend it to anyone without making them aware of the Debian philosophy first, and it's a philosophy you have to buy into at least a little bit. All the other devs in my workplace are either on macs or ubuntu/unity.

[1] My very first linux experience was running ShowEQ, and dependency hell made me swear off linux for almost a decade... :)

This can't be emphasised enough. I was a Debian user before Ubuntu launched, and it really seemed like Debian was going to only ever remain an unsupported (by anyone else) niche in the face of Redhat.

Certain things just worked, like hardware. For a time, X worked on Ubuntu with my hardware and I had to jump through hoops to configure X with the hopes it would work on Debian. My touchpad and sound card just worked. Proprietary drivers were easier to install. Desktop packages came with sane defaults. There were helpful forums and IRC channels.

My non-tech friends managed to install it from CDs that came with magazines with almost no guidance.

Of course after you have everything setup properly, it is hard to distinguish between distros (other than ..say.. package manager), but those choices do not drive the vast majority of people.

But ... I've never understood this fixation with graphic installers, let alone why they are considered so important in assessing the quality of a distribution.

You install once, and it's fifteen minutes of your life. During installation you need to inform the installer your hostname, domain (maybe), IP address information (maybe), location and timezone, keyboard layout, and disk layout (most people pick the 'sort it out for me' option anyway) ... none of which really benefits from, let alone requires, a mouse.

After installation it's all about the maintenance, and that's where Debian shines. Install once, upgrade for the next decade or more. You can use a GUI for management, if you want, though I'm not convinced GUI distro / package management tools are better than the CLI.

Perversely colleagues and clients that have chosen to rely on Ubuntu typically end up having to do full re-installs every time a new LTS comes out, as the migration process often simply doesn't work for them.

I typically don't know what my 'domain' is (I've never known to this day what I should type in that box, and nothing I type ever seems to make any difference).

I've heard it said that the only intuitive interface is the nipple - after that, everything is learned. Tab (to move) and space or return (to select) is not that hard to get a handle on - and, really, if that's the limiting factor for a computer user that's got their hands on a Debian installation (from 8+ years ago when GUI install wasn't an option) and managed to convince their computer to boot from CDROM / floppy / ZIP disk etc ... they almost definitely have some bigger problems in their near future.

> The disk layout option is super-scary for beginners, and full of warnings.

Disk layout options are comparable in GUI and text-based installs. Ditto the warnings.

I note that in both (and it's always been in the text-based) there's been a 'pick an automatic layout' option. Again, if you're dual-booting, and don't know what you're doing, then a GUI isn't going to be the thing that saves you from snotting your Windows partition during this process.

> I typically don't know what my 'domain' is (I've never known to this day what I should type in that box, and nothing I type ever seems to make any difference).

Same question is posed in every GNU/Linux distro installation, text or GUI, and in every instance of either that I've seen, the option exists to ignore it. Again, the problem of a fqdn isn't a function of whether you're using a text based installer, or a GUI one.