Ubuntu is guilty of many of us not having a life outside of Linux… so…Happy Birthday!
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Despite the bad rep they have within the Linux community, they sure make Linux visible to a big audience.
So, Happy birthday UBUNTU!!!
EDIT: Also, this forum and our websites are running on Ubuntu 
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LOL, I’m 20
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It has opened the doors to many different endeavors 
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Ubuntu released me from struggling with Debian back in the day - I think my first ‘regular’ system was 5.06 (2 months late!) - and I stuck with them until they dropped Unity - that left me hopping again until I found EnOS! For a long time their forum was the closest to what we have here, and they have done a lot of good things they got a bad rap for - and then they came up with snaps 
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Congrats to Ubuntu.
My Linux-journey started with Ubuntu 6.06 - which came on a CD a friend gave me.
The CD came for free with a computer magazine.
I don’t think that magazine still exists. Ubuntu does.
I didn’t know anything about FOSS or LinuxGnu in those days, so the reason I installed it, wasn’t in any way philosophical. I think I was mostly curious how something that was not Windows (Vista in those days) would work, and if I would still be able to do all the things that I wanted to do with my computer.
Part of Ubuntu 6.06’s charm, to me, was, that things didn’t always work straight away.
My brain likes to solve puzzles, and the fact that I could not rely on my Windows-skills and knowledge made the challenge even more fun.
Only later I discovered the philosophy and ideas behind FOSS and the community that came with it.
Those ideas and the community made me stay. They are awesome.
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It was 2006 when I became a Windows professional. In my company at that time, someone had brought me to linux. I started with UBUNTU Gnome 2. I had no idea at that time that there was something else besides Windows2000 and XP. So started my journey into the Linux universe.
In this case I have to be very grateful to UBUNTU. Today I am glad that I can cope with Arch-based systems.
By the way, I haven’t used Windows since 2009
So Happy Birthday UBUNTU 
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The second Linux disto I used (had a live cd sent to me unfortunately lost to time) and used for quite a while in it’s different flavours til I got bored with it.
Happy Birthday Ubuntu
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Used it for like 10 years, it was a streamlined os, there were repos for everything.
Unity is still my favorite DE, I miss the hud mostly, when you could find menu entries of (almost) any running program with the super key search. I couldn’t find that kind of functionality anywhere since.
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Well - it is a fairly good bet it does. The only one I know of currently that has disks is Linux Magazine - and they have 2 at a time. But, the most likely source (just guessing) was Linux Format, as they had disks back then, usually with more than 1 distro on, but often Ubuntu. The mag still exists (I read it regularly still) but the disks are no more. BTW - Linux Format is UK in origin, but has links to Maximum PC on this side of the pond (they often share authors).
Both are available digitally, which is how I still get them
Happy Birthday Ubuntu! You were my first Linux OS from a Linux Magazine CD. Switch to Arch as my main driver around 2010 or there shortly after. Arch is still my main driver but have and still play with all the other Linux OS today. I still use Ubuntu on my server but would never use it as a desktop.
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Not sure if these were available in my country in those days.
I did some sleuthing and I rather believe it may have been PCM[1]; my friend and I often read that magazine together and discussed the articles we read. (And blew up an electronic typewriter after we had successfully turned it into a printer - those were the days 
.)
(The wiki article is out of date: PCM stopped in 2022.)
Happy birthday Ubuntu, you taught me how to run in the Linux universe, the first steps were bearable thanks to the GUI, but then thanks to my ATI graphics card I was faced with a problem that I couldn’t solve, unfortunately no reinstallation helped. After that, a few years would pass before I tried a Linux distribution again.
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Strange that, almost 75% of the help posts I covered for the Ubuntu forums back in the day were how to get your ATI card going Once it WAS going, it was far less trouble than nVidia!
Of course IO had fun getting ATI to work on TAMU as well (Texas A&M Uni distro) - think I had to research and enter chip timings and all to do that then! Ubuntu was MUCH easier…
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That was back in 2007 when I bought a notebook with Windows Vista and installed Ubuntu on it. Times were different, my English was terrible and I couldn’t find anything useful in German that could help me.
Alas - my German was probably not up to the task either! No online translations I can recall either… 
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Yes, I have to say the offerings on the internet have improved 
Nowadays you can learn a lot online, translate etc.
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ZX Spectrum - writing and de-bugging a long BASIC program - now that’s a killer. No food, sleep or drink until it’s done… incredible patience waiting anything up to 20 minutes per side loading/writing via cassette tape.
Amiga 500 - a bit of a mistake (should have gone for the Atari ST me thinks) but will never forget Pacman with stereo BANGING soundtrack, and again special props to Sensible Brothers for Cannon Fodder.
After that, Playstation stopped me having a life. Stopped me sleeping, playing Wipeout 2097 until dawn…
Playstation II with Gran Turismo came next - again, trying to pass those Licences eats into sleeping time and some of the longer races were frankly ridiculous.
A budget HP Pavilion Desktop with Windows Vista came next (core2duo E4400, no graphics - and adding graphics overstretched the PSU so that the 300GB HDD started clacking badly)…
Vista was Glassy and Shiny and oooooh so pretty for the first hour or two. The blue screen wasn’t quite as pretty (I kept it going for nearly 3 months - playing Crysis 2).
- Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon /Gnome2
- 3 days to get internet connected (Wifi wouldn’t work, had to buy a 20m cable to connect to a router in the hallway outside an apartment 4 doors down).
So I was on at Gutsy Gibbon, and jumped off at Intrepid Ibex - wow, looks like hardly anything at all. Linux Mint was good for another 5-6 years after that I think.
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