I was an Ubuntu user for a few years. I remember when they'd ship the CD's out for free. One of those things that made Ubuntu great. It was also really good at presenting a very usable Gnome 2.x desktop that was ready to use from the first boot, and I was a very happy user for a while, until they started shipping software a little bit too soon (PulseAudio for example; suddenly Ubuntu didn't have sound out-of-the-box anymore on my machine) and I've once been bitten in the behind by an update that made my video card unsupported all of a sudden, so that prevented X from starting... and then they replaced Gnome with Unity and I kind of stopped caring around that time so I went back to my previous distro. Hopefully for good. :)
Congratulations to Mark for starting this otherwise great project! May it have many years ahead of it!
Similar story. It started as a tidied up Debian fork. Then since about 12.04 LTS it turned into a tidied up Debian unstable fork with all the bugs in it. As a server only and LTS only user, I had no end of problems from there on with unstable kernels, duff and buggy packages, update roulette and terrible support.
We're on Debian 7 now and it's rock solid, relatively bug free in comparison and the support is good. Just where I want it to be.
The best outcome for me was that it caused Debian to rethink their release cycles a bit.
Yup, the free CDs is what I remember as the first thing about Ubuntu - and the fact that it worked out of the box.
There is a fun story as well:
We were in college (in India) at the time and my friend went ahead and ordered 100 CD's or so (they actually encouraged it at the time for distribution). The package arrived at the local Post Office after a few weeks and he was asked to go collect it, which seemed strange. Anyways, he went and to his wonder was told to pay import duty on it by the customs! He argued for a while saying it was educational material and that it was being shipped for free - to no avail. He finally gave up and asked them to keep it for themselves and walked out.
In the end, they chased after him before he left the premises and gave it to him - no import duty, nothing.
Nothing has changed. Indian Customs vies for most corrupt in the world. They also have crazy high duty on electronics. Many software companies in India have offices that are "bonded warehouses", meaning that the computers have not had the duty paid on them and cannot legally be removed from the premise.
Normally when something is in a bonded warehouse it's a storage-only situation. Looking online I can't find anything about indian special cases where this works differently, just the ordinary "store goods here until you sell them, and pay the duty then".
It's not just indian customs - a friend of mine has had similar stories with Canadian Customs and free software. Customs exists to get money out of its citizens, I've had trouble with American Customs too.
Every update was a lesson in frustration. So I thought either I'm stying on LTS or I use another distribution.
Right now I am using Debian stable for my "it has to run" systems (the ones my gf is using too) and tried Arch on the other systems.
So far I am pretty much sold on Arch linux (my Linux knowledge got better too) - but I still don't know if I'm just using Debian stable for things like my HTPC.
I've had Ubuntu as my primary desktop for about a decade and the regression issue is my biggest one, especially with three monitors. Fortunately it takes me far less time to go from non-booting desktop to something usable these days, but I think that can be chalked up to practice more than improvement. That said, for the most part it continues to run smoothly, provided I wait about a month or two after each release before upgrading. Otherwise, I remain a fan - including Unity.
I started using Ubuntu from 8.04 when Windows crashed on my first personal laptop. When I saw 11.10 Netbook Edition with Unity I viewed it as something which would be geared towards touchscreens with limited advantages otherwise. So after briefly trying desktop unity in 12.04 I switched my development machine to Fedora with Xfce and XMonad. Now I only use Ubuntu on the occasional virtual machine for testing, but I may try running it on my touch ultrabook some day.
Remember those CDs! I was finishing my primary school that time and couldn't even download ISO (used dial-up modem, aproximately 1000 times slower than my current connection) or install, because looking for driver was painful), but Linux stayed in the back of my mind. Similary to you, now I don't care much what Canonical does.
Congratulations to Mark for starting this otherwise great project! May it have many years ahead of it!