I’ve spent the past two days down in Mountain View. Yesterday I spent some time at the Ubuntu Developer Summit meeting with the great guys from the Ubuntu Mozilla-team to see about integrating Songbird into Ubuntu (ideally Jaunty, but we’ll see).

I’ve finally had a chance to run my Ubuntu PC from Dell. I can see why the systems aren’t quite ready for all users. But I’ve got to tell you, folks. It’s clear to me that Ubuntu will be able to serve a large segment of the consumer population. In fact, Ubuntu is better than Windows in at least five areas. Here they are.

Most people like it, many others don’t, the fact is that Ubuntu is the king of Linux distributions right now - and for some very good reasons. Below I will attempt to identify those reasons that made Ubuntu the most popular distribution and explain why its success was “inevitable”.

The final release of Ubuntu's Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.4) has finally arrived. Wondering what's in store? We've got seven reasons for Ubuntu users to make the leap to Lucid.

I spent June 26 at Dell's headquarters in Austin, Texas, meeting key members of Dell's Linux team. We spent an hour discussing the broad Linux market; Dell's current Ubuntu strategy; and the PC giant's early reaction to Moblin (Mobile Linux).

With Ubuntu, Canonical has had notable success in convincing people to switch from other platforms, but potential Ubuntu users are still running into trouble in several areas.

1: Ubuntu users aren't used to the change - I'm getting pretty sick and tired of the Ubuntu users out there that revert to saying that all changes that canonical has made to Ubuntu for 10.04 are bad "because Ubuntu users aren't used to them".

As Ubuntu popularity grows, more and more students are recognizing the added features and potential savings offered by an Ubuntu laptop. Netbooks and laptops are the students solution to computing because of obvious portability reasons.

I grew up with Microsoft operating systems. I’ve been through MS-DOS 5.0, Win 3.1, Windows 95, 98, Millenium Edition, NT 4.0, 2000, and XP. Notice how I stopped there. After over a decade of Windows, I decided to give Ubuntu a try and now have no reason to install Vista. Here are nine reasons why I chose Ubuntu: