alt Hacker News15-20 years ago the joke was that Ubuntu is a Zulu word that, roughly translated, means "I don't know how to configure Debian". Ubuntu was one of the first distros that allowed one to easily download proprietary WLAN drivers without dealing with the terminal, ndiswrapper, or compiling half-broken OSS implementations; for this reason it caught fire with those who wanted to try Linux but were otherwise unwilling to engage in such shenanigans. I tried it on a laptop around this time and was quite impressed. This reputation for "it just works" has carried them ever since even though other distros now do largely the same thing ( cheap, obscure, or recently-released hardware excepted).
I took the lazy Mint route with my most recent machine since I wanted to use it for light gaming with minimal fuss. I'm going to redo it with Nix sometime soon because the value prop simply isn't there and I'd like to try a declaratively-configured distro.
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More like 20. If I remember it right, by 2007 the Debian community was angry discussing the installation team's decision to include non-free packages in the installation media, what ended the problem of needing a wired connection during the install.
> Ubuntu was one of the first distros that allowed one to easily download proprietary WLAN drivers without dealing with the terminal, ndiswrapper, or compiling half-broken OSS implementations
None of which was a good reason to use it on servers. Even if you were familiar with Ubuntu there is very little difference between an Ubuntu server and a Debian one.
They also sent out free distro CDs. That helped convince me this new fangled Linux thing might be legitimate.
Christ that was 2008.18 years ago. My Linux 'experiment' is old enough to vote
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I recently installed NixOS on my thinkpad z16. I set up a sandboxed pi agent to help me configure it and I think it works great. (I also read enough documentation to understand the nix language).
I hade some issues with the trackpad (worse issues that it not being an apple trackpad ie). I told the agent about the problem. It inspected the config, wrote some scripts for me to run outside the sandbox that listened to the trackpad while I used in as per some instructions, and then proceeded to add a few configuration lines that solved to problem. I was pretty impressed (though I think there were maybe 3 back-and-forths with scripts to run, tbh).