Ubuntu is indeed responsible for the huge growth of Linux home-users due its simplicity of out-of-the-box use. As a brief retrospective, the emerging (in past) Linux distributions were always known to their difficulty on setting up the propper drivers and essential software. If you were installing on a laptop, things turned out to be a nightmare. At this point, only IT people used Linux because home-users were scared away (I think it coincided with the ugly GTK 1.x interfaces – under Gnome).
Ubuntu emerged to aid home-users and be more user-friendly, having and startup installation that would recognize and install all your drivers and give you a starting setup of the most common used tools like e-mail clients, IM clients, web browser and an office suite.
Things started well, I myself preferred installing an Ubuntu distribution rather than spending hours (or weeks) configuring a Gentoo workstation as I’m a developer and need a working station to start developing quickly.
The first releases worked well, the weight of the loaded modules was rather unnoticeable and the OS was running lean but as time passed Ubuntu went further down in those facilitations and the module-shard grew exponentially.
One of the biggest complains about Windows among power-users is that you have to spend good time removing unwanted software and you keep lots of unwanted drivers in the suburbs of your OS and Ubuntu is going each day further this approach.
The result
Ubuntu has become each day heavier and it’s starting to lose stability. Some friends are switching back to their Debian 5 installs or falling back to other distributions. Others predicted that (or are masochists) and never left out their Gentoo installs.
Pros & Cons of the Windows-like behavior
PROS
It’s indeed a good thing to having an OS working out-of-the-box and for home-users it’s a must-have solution. This behavior is good as it introduced Linux to a whole new set of users and it still worthy if this user is going to use the installation to home use or office use. The easy operation makes intuitive use of the tools, the menus are well-placed and update routine is just piece of cake.
CONS
Weight has considerably risen since new versions of the distribution (and bundled software) came out thus making the environment unstable and a little untrustworthy for heavy users (like developers and sysadmins). As most power users kept their old installs and did not adhere to Ubuntu, the support forums are maintained mostly by regular/home users and the solutions are either noneffective or poorly explained. The contrast of this last item is well seen in comparison with Gentoo Wiki Documentation. The Ubuntu Lauchpad (a Bugzilla-like) is a good way to find little more trustworthy information.
Conclusion
Ubuntu shouldn’t be crucified or left away. It serves well the purpose which it was built for of serving home-users but it’s each day leaving power users (the ones that adhered) behind even those who used to tune up Ubuntu for performance gain. I think that an online on-demand driver recognition, download and install would be less costly (but it would demand that basic hardware was already properly detected and installed) or an after-install cleanup would just reduce the damages.
