This year has been a huge step forward for Desktop Linux users. First, Fedora Core 5 was released and featured the new Gnome 2.14. Then SUSE 10.1 showed us how well applications could be integrated to make a desktop look great. Now it was time for Ubuntu to release their latest version: "Dapper Drake".

Since its first release, Ubuntu has been extraordinarily successful. A lot of users began to use it and very few went back to their old distribution. It also participated greatly in attracting new people to GNU/Linux. Of course a few things were said about Canonical Ltd. not having a viable business model, the distribution's success being only a consequence of a trend of the moment, and Ubuntu being a bad fork from the Debian project. But as releases went by, and the distribution simply getting better, it soon became clear to a lot of people: Ubuntu was the most popular distribution.