We celebrate a decade of the distro by looking back at Ubuntu with its movers and shakers.
Ten years ago this month, a seemingly unassuming distro nicknamed Warty Warthog emerged in the Linux landscape and set in motion a cultural landslide that would see Linux rise from the shadows of the archetypal operating systems and become, in 2014, a household name. Since October 2004, Warty Warthog has evolved through numerous forms into Utopic Unicorn, the latest version of Ubuntu.
A catalyst for change, Ubuntu has achieved a great deal in its first fabulous decade. It pioneered the idea of a Linux operating system that just worked straight out of the box, without the need to manually troubleshoot and configure your hardware. It popularised the graphical interface that we use for most of our distro installations today, making them more accessible and easier to use, as well as the long-term support releases that many of us rely on for our main computers. It sharply divided opinion by having an opinion on the future of desktop and mobile operating systems, predicting convergence and boldly taking a hand in preparing the way.
Two forces are driving Ubuntu forward that, together, have found a degree of success in getting Linux into the public eye that very few other distributions have achieved: Canonical’s leadership and the Ubuntu community.
The relationship between the two is an exemplary model of how open source companies can collaborate with their end-users in order to reliably deliver exactly what they want. Ubuntu contributors knows that they are heard by the Canonical team leaders, and the development process is incredibly democratic while still being rigid enough to adhere to Ubuntu’s strict release schedule and LTS commitments. It’s a delicate balance and Canonical struck it cleanly, producing quality Linux distros twice a year.
Today we look back at ten years of Ubuntu and celebrate the achievements of the developers and contributors who made it real for us – and look to the future, to see where we’re going.
Ubuntu the first
Warty Warthog was released on 20 October 2004 to a much different Linux world than today
It’s February 2004 and it’s a very different world from what we know today. Windows XP is the latest desktop from Microsoft. Apple hardware is still running on PowerPC. BlackBerrys and PDAs dominate the smartphone market and x64 chips are just about making their way to market. Linux is barely in the zeitgeist outside of developer circles, but this is soon about to change.
“I was one of the first people Mark Shuttleworth called back then,” said Martin Pitt, software engineer, who was there at the start of what would be a major revolution for the Linux desktop. “He sent me an email explaining his idea about doing a Debian-based Linux project with a regular release cycle that was also user-friendly.”
This was the beginning of the development of Ubuntu 4.10, code-named Warty Warthog, and of Canonical itself. At the time, Linux desktops were very different. There were no graphical installers, there was no proliferation of user-friendly distros and very little push for ‘normal’ people to start using Linux.
“Canonical and Ubuntu offi cially started in April of 2004,” elaborates Jane Silber, Canonical CEO. “[Mark] pulled a group of about ten people together with this vision of creating Ubuntu… I met him a couple months later in July and just immediately believed in the vision of Ubuntu and Canonical.”
Jane later joined as the COO of the company and, after several months of development, the very first Ubuntu was released on 20 October 2004. The release was a bit slow catching on though, explains Martin:
“To be honest it was still pretty much by developers for developers, so the immediate coverage was quite low. I prodded some famous German computer news magazines and [at] first they said, ‘Yeah it’s just another distro – why should we report about this?’”
Development up until the fi rst beta had been somewhat secret and while the fi rst release may have ‘only’ scored a few thousand users, its name started to grow throughout the Linux and open source community.
“I was in my local Linux User group in Hampshire and one of my friends knew that I was quite into Debian,” Alan Pope, applications project manager, recalls. “He mentioned this thing, this new thing that was being developed by some crazy South African. I’d never heard of it as I wasn’t on any Debian mailing list and I wasn’t really involved with the Debian community or anything. But it looked quite nice and I installed it. That was late 2004 and that’s pretty much it – I’ve used it solidly ever since.”
While a small release at the time, 4.10’s legacy is massive. It was relatively easy to install, had a desktop from the start that was preconfigured and would automatically mount flash storage. These elements have since been expanded upon greatly. The developers were proud of their work and it wasn’t long before 5.04 was in development. The next two years were very important for Ubuntu and would establish it as a household name among users and developers alike.
The early years
The meteoric rise of Ubuntu in the late Noughties caused a small revolution in the Linux desktop space
During the next couple of years a few things began to happen. Kubuntu 5.04 was released during the next cycle and is still being released today as one of the major Ubuntu spins. More features were being added by the release and, slowly but surely, Ubuntu was gaining popularity.
“It’s a bit hard to say as it’s always been an exponential growth,” Martin tells us when we ask him which release really gave Ubuntu a foothold in the desktop Linux market. “But if I have to pick one it would be our first LTS, 6.06 Dapper Drake. That was explicitly announced for LongTermSupport and we’d made particular efforts in stabilising it. It was also the first version with a graphical installer and thus made it a lot easier to do.”
Version 6.06 is so far the only Ubuntu to be released outside of the months of April and October, gaining the .06 suffix after it was released on 1 June after a delay of almost two months. Support lasted for three years on desktop and fi ve years on server, a practice that has since been stopped on LTS releases with both desktop and server versions now getting five years of support.
With the popularity came a fledgling community of users and developers. Alan has been part of this community from the start, answering people’s problems on Launchpad during the free time he had with his jobs, and describestoustheevolutionof thecommunity.
“Back at the beginning, the active contributors were people who were bootstrapping things like getting IRC channels and mailing lists set up. This was all done by people with specific expertise, such as people who sat on IRC all day creating the Ubuntu IRC channels. You had people who were familiar with Mailman and they were setting up mailing lists, and people who knew about forum software would set up a forum. In the early days it was some what unstructured – but that was great, because we needed all of those things and it was very much a self-motivating, self-driving thing. Someone decided ‘we should have a forum’ and they created one, and it became insanely popular, so once we got over that bump of creating this initial infrastructure and bits and pieces to get the project started, more people were able to contribute. It was then that contributions from the community started to take the more typical approach of doing translations, bug reporting, triage, submitting patches and producing documentation. That’s the bread and butter contributions people do.”
The community has continued to grow and has now become a very important part of Canonical, as Jane toldus:
“The open source community and nature of Ubuntu, and cooperation between community and company, was one of the things I thought was just really unique and interesting about Canonical. I continue to think that’s one of the places we’ve done really special work and continue to lead the field.”
Since then, the community has worked on a number of Ubuntu projects. They’ve created manuals in PDF forms, translated them into different languages and started a better support site, which they named AskUbuntu (http://askubuntu.com).
Over the next couple of years, the community continued to grow and Ubuntu established itself as possibly one of these biggest Linux distros around, and certainly the most popular distro on desktop. In 2010, the grand vision of a unified desktop began with the release of Unity.
“I first saw something that looked very much like it at one of the Ubuntu Developer Summits when the design team were going over what the new shell might look like.” Alan recalls. “I started using it fairly early on. It was a rocky road for about a year, year and a half. I like it, I enjoy using it.”
But not everyone in the community agreed with Alan. “There were some very vocal people who decided this was not for them, they didn’t like it and that’s fine.” Alan continued.
“I think in some ways that it has been blown out of proportion slightly and what a lot of people don’t recognise is that Ubuntu ships by default on a lot of hardware around the world and Unity is the default desktop. I have no way of knowing if those people immediately go home and remove it and put KDE or Xfce on, and – to be frank – I don’t really care.”
Indeed, as Alan pointed out to us, there are a whole host of different desktops available in Ubuntu, in both the repositories and in the various alternate spins. Unity is at the heart of Ubuntu’s design philosophy as it goes forward, though, moving towards a more unified future across all devices.
Now and into the future
How the future and the face of Ubuntu is being shaped right now by Unity and mobile
Right now, Ubuntu’s focus is split between the desktop and the upcoming Ubuntu phones. Richard Collins, Ubuntu mobile product manager, has been working on the touch OS since he joined Canonical three years ago:
“The idea always came up about what would be the impetus, how would it work, etcetera. It really came from Ubuntu for Android and when we used that product to talk to many mobile manufacturers and mobile operators. The relationships were there and it was a reasonably rational development to start thinking about how Ubuntu as a code base would effectively be unique, in the sense that it could truly operate as a single code base across different form factors.
“It’s where the industry was going anyway because you have touch-based laptops and big screens, so the evolution had already started to take place – it just required a strategic push to say ‘Right, we’re going to be doing the phone as a fully-fl edged serious commercial product.’”
Not forgetting the community, Canonical got them very involved in development early on.
“One of the things we wanted to do was get the community involved with the phone, so it wasn’t just us producing the phone and putting it out there. We wanted to get people involved. So we started this core apps project, and core apps are the typical applications you need on a phone like a clock or calendar. Then we’ve got some slightly more esoteric things that you might think are a bit out of place on a phone, like a terminal and a fi le manager. We have a weather app and a few others as well. All of those apps are developed by people in the community.
“These core apps specifically are done in collaboration with the Canonical design team, so the design team say ‘this is what we think a clock app should look like’ and they provide that design to us.
“We [looked] for people in the community who [wanted] to contribute an app to Ubuntu and sure enough we found a bunch of people who were willing to do so, and they created some of the apps that are going to ship on the many, many phones released over the course of the next year or so. That, for me, is brilliant. They’ll be able to go to the store and buy a phone and their owncode is running on that phone.”
“It’s been massive,” Richard confirms the community’s involvement. “The community is embracing everything that we [have done] and announced so fantastically well. A set of applications that are preinstalled on the phone have come from the community and there are hundredsmore [that] people can download from the application store.”
Richard also told us of some unspecified future announcements regarding the phone and an established roadmap for its development. What seems clear, though, is that the present and future of Canonical and Ubuntu owes a lot to the active community members who helped it grow. Jane refl ected on this when we asked her about working with an open source company:
“I think we’ve been able to strike a balance between the company and incorporating the community input, work and enthusiasm quite well. It’s not always a smooth road – [there are] rocky bits as there are in any relationship or any company. I think it’s one of themost interesting bits about Ubuntu as a distro we continue even as we move into the phone and tablet world, and cloud on the server side. I think we continue to maintain a level of transparency and participation that’s unique.”