14 DAY TRIAL // Linuxquestions.org announced that Ubuntu has been chosen by their readers as the best Linux distribution of the year. The community site ran a poll in which of the 2504 total votes, 488 (19.05%) went to Ubuntu Linux. Next in line were Slackware, Suse and ironically, Debian, with 477, 330 and 265 votes respectively.
If a few years ago Red Hat would have certainly topped the poll, this time RHEL only got 34 votes (1.36%) and Fedora 235 (9.38%). Far into the distance, holding the last place is Novell Linux Desktop with 6 votes.
Even though it's very young (less than two years old), Ubuntu managed to gather an impressive following. In November 2005, Ubuntu Linux 5.10 was named Editor's Choice for small businesses by ZDNet UK and Best Debian Derivative Distribution in a ceremony at the Linux World Expo in Germany. In October, it was awarded the Reader's Choice Award by Linux Journal and the Reader Award at the UK Linux & Open Source Awards dinner.
The Ubuntu team puts its success down to regular and predictable releases and usability out-of-the-box. Although businesses may be reluctant to use this distribution due to lack of support comparable to larger vendors' like Red Hat or Novell, this poll shows that it has already convinced the home user.