Why Ubuntu? And the answer is, why not.
Updated: January 23, 2026
Every few weeks, this question comes up (via email), usually after I publish a negative review of yet another of my bittersweet Linux endeavors, which almost always revolve around Ubuntu and its derivatives, or, more specifically, Kubuntu, my distro of choice. These articles prompt my readers to challenge my choice of software. In parallel, the readers also usually recommend I try a different distro or two, which could hopefully resolve my angst and my usage problems.
The recurrence of this phenomenon prompted me to write this piece. I want to explain my rationale into why Ubuntu is the best desktop choice (and it is), why other distros aren’t as optimal, and why Linux is in a bad state, regardless of what you select. Hopefully, this will settle the debate. Or perhaps make you write me even more, with yet more suggestions, so you push through my stubbornness. Well, let us commence.
The Plasma desktop, my favorite cladding for the Ubuntu family.
Survivorship bias
Statistics is usually counterintuitive. I see this on a daily basis, including the Linux circles. Quite often, you have Linux folks justifying various design (development) decisions with things like: people like our choice of whatever, and/or most users are happy with things they are. What such statements miss is that they only cover people who are invested in the system, or choose to respond, and ignores the vast majority of people who don’t use Linux at all. Thus, for instance, whatever Linux does, it’s automatically not the case for 95-99% of desktop users.
This relates to Ubuntu very clearly. Ubuntu is the most popular desktop distro. Choose whatever metric you like, it has at least an order of magnitude more users than any other Tux flavor. Therefore, all other things being equal, there ought to be an order of magnitude more problems in Ubuntu than any other distro reported online. A lack of reported problems isn’t an indicator of anything! I’m not quite what the sweet magical number of bugs ought to be, but I am quite sure that Ubuntu’s visibility plays a large part in the equation.
A good (if somewhat unrelated) recent example that I can think of relates to Wayland adoption (with KDE). As of June 2025, the blog post mentions that approximately 73% of Plasma 6 users with telemetry turned on were running Wayland, while this number both for Plasma 5 and 6 stands at 60%. This sounds like a nice state of affairs, and you would wrongly assume that this is a useful "sway the masses" metric. We need to give credit to the KDE team for being willing to publish these numbers, but now, here’s my interpretation.