“Stephen King once observed that the first review of his books
was important because later ones often borrowed its opinions. Who
did the first review of Ubuntu 8.04–better known as Hardy
Heron–is debatable, but something of the same consensus seems to
have hit tech journalists, with the majority proclaiming that the
release shows that GNU/Linux has finally producer a challenger to
Windows.“However, to the veteran user, such claims must seem
exaggerated, no matter how well meaning. Nor are they nearly as
interesting as Ubuntu’s effort to walk between the extremes of free
software purity and proprietary ease-of-use. This last effort is
one that all distributions must face sooner or later, but it is
particularly interesting in Ubuntu’s case because of its position
as the best-known (and almost certainly the most widely used)
distro…”