Welcome to The Drive, a weekly column looking at some wacky, interesting, cool, and pivotal things within the tech space! Curated by PC Hardware Lead Editor Richard Edmonds through almost two decades covering the sector.

Wow, it has been two decades already, Ubuntu? Regardless of how you pronounce the name, Ubuntu has been a staple of the Linux community for almost as long. It's the most popular Linux distro, running on desktop PCs and servers, as well as almost everything in between. It all started as a small community-maintained Linux distro and has since grown into the behemoth it is today. With the release of 24.10, the developers threw in numerous callbacks to earlier operating system releases, which has been nothing but nostalgic.

Ubuntu (Linux) has been vital for the digital age

Many, many, many devices run some form of Ubuntu

Ubuntu and its underlying technologies, Debian and Linux, power many enterprise machines, particularly cloud-based services. Canonical is the British company behind Ubuntu, founded by Debian developer Mark Shuttleworth. Since 2004, the company and the wider Ubuntu community have developed, shaped, and shared the Linux-based OS. Linux is even older at 33 and started as a small side project by renowned Linus Torvalds. Today, Linux (and Ubuntu) powers the majority of cloud computing and is frequently found in data centers and on general server infrastructure.

Pick an instance on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud and you'll likely find Ubuntu.

It hasn't always been a raving success. Unity was Canonical's take on a GUI package to replace its dependency on GNOME. This didn't win the hearts and minds of the community and was shuttered -- though you can still find an open-source fork available today. Snap is a similar technology to Flatpak and is easier for developers to package apps and for users to install and update them. Canonical continues to be at the forefront of Linux development, pushing through new features and ideas to help the OS continue to grow and entice people to switch.

From the initial release of "Warty Warthog" to the latest "Oracular Oriole", Ubuntu has positively impacted education, computing, and the open-source community. Linux has had a reputation for being inaccessible to anyone who didn't want to learn some command-line interface (CLI). You still have to learn a few commands here and there for when things go wrong in Ubuntu, but it's notably improved compared to 10 and especially 20 years ago. Compared to many other Linux-based options, Ubuntu has generally been viewed as the easiest distro with better hardware support.

There are even different flavors of Ubuntu, one packing a different desktop experience. If you're not a fan of the primary Ubuntu UX, give Xubuntu, Kubuntu, or Lubuntu a try.

There's still plenty of room for Ubuntu to grow

This is the year for Linux

Image: @orbitelambda

Okay, 2024 and probably 2025 won't be when Linux miraculously grows 10% in desktop market share. Where the OS is making strides is with artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) hardware. Advancements such as Proton from Valve for gaming have certainly helped make Linux more accessible to a wider audience but the OS is still seen as an open-source "alternative" to Windows and macOS instead of a viable first pick. I've also written about how the general public doesn't care for the OS that runs on their smartphone or laptop PC.

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4 reasons why it doesn't matter it's still not the year of Linux on desktop

We likely won't see a year of Linux on desktop and that's okay.

As developing nations continue to get more people online with open-source technologies, Ubuntu and other similar software will play vital roles. Because of its free and community-supported nature, the OS and its offerings are attractive for educational institutions, as well as those who simply wish to try something new without any strings attached. I recall the first time I used Ubuntu (and Linux, for that matter). It was on an old Tiny Computers desktop -- one of those British-made beige boxes. Windows XP was still on the menu back then but I was tempted by Linux and wanted to try something different.

I couldn't get the OS to work on my system so I visited the official community forum. Someone from America took it upon themselves to burn a copy to CD and ship it across the pond, running me through some troubleshooting, and low and behold it worked. The rest is history so to speak. Ubuntu isn't simply an OS. It's not like Windows where it's marketed as a product. It feels corny to write, but Ubuntu is a movement. It's an experience that you wouldn't understand without trying the OS for yourself and exchanging free ideas with other like-minded people who use Linux.