Ubuntu
Ubuntu is an impressively
polished distro
While not the first
distro designed for inexperienced Linux desktop users, Ubuntu has established
itself as one of the most well-known.
The distro features the
home-grown Unity desktop, one of the most polarising desktop environments in
the Linux ecosystem. But that's about the extent of the project's missteps. For
the most part, the distro remains incredibly polished and sophisticated for all
manner of users, but especially new converts.
Ubuntu has one of the
easiest installation mechanisms. It doesn't include proprietary codecs by
default, but you can include them during installation simply by clicking a
checkbox. This distro is released twice a year with regular Long Term Support
(LTS) releases that are supported for five years.
One of the most exciting
new features of version 14.10 is user-level container control. This allows for
greater security as users can run containers with superuser privileges. The
latest release also features support for OpenStack Juno, which is a feature
more relevant to experienced users than newbies.
Tools for browsing the
web, accessing emails, playing multimedia files and working with office
documents are available out of the box. The distro also boasts of one the
largest software repositories that you can easily mine for additional apps, and
Ubuntu Software Centre remains one of the best software management tools that
has inspired various clones.
Verdict: This is a sterling distro which is very polished and
sophisticated, and remains a great choice for those new to the world of Linux.
Rating: 9/10