1. Beginning
Ubuntu means 'humanity towards others' in Xhosa and Zulu language. Mark Shuttleworth contributed lot of efforts to the development of Debian. He came with an idea of developing user friendly, feature rich Linux desktop distribution. He self-funded the early stage of company.
2. First
Mark Shuttleworth sold his company, Thawte to VeriSign for half a billion dollars in 1999. He used the money to fund development of Ubuntu. The first public version of Ubuntu 4.10 was released in October, 2004. It was called Warty Warthog.
3. Growth
The word spread very quickly amongst open source community. People started testing Ubuntu. The OS got very positive reviews for the early development stage version of the OS. Distrowatch website, which used to rank open source softwares, ranked Ubuntu on the first rank in the list of open source Linux distributions.
4. Flavours
Ubuntu started using different desktop environments, Xubuntu (XFCE), Kubuntu (KDE) and Lubuntu (LXDE) gained popularity in no time. Plenty of official, non official flavors of Ubuntu were produced after that. Like, Ubuntu Kylin, Edubuntu, Mythubuntu etc.
5. On Top
Ubuntu had no real rival back then. It didn't take much time for Ubuntu to become most popular desktop Linux distribution. It was the best option for newbie Linux users, and even those who were planning to migrate from Windows.
6. Mint
In 2011, Linux Mint gained popularity amongst users. Mint offered more customization options than Ubuntu and it had rich user interface as compared to Ubuntu. This is when Ubuntu found it's real competitor.
7. Unity
Unity desktop interface was considered as major reason for the failure of Ubuntu. This custom build desktop user interface was the reason behind the success of GNOME 2.8 but, according to Ubuntu criticizers, Unity was poorly designed and it seemed unfinished.
8. Privacy
More polished and usable version of Unity was introduced in Ubuntu 12.04. But in in Ubuntu 12.10, the shopping lens was added. And Ubuntu again became the attack of criticizers due to user privacy invasion.
9. Mobility
Last few years, Canonical has moved it's focus from desktop distribution development to mobile platforms. Company released Ubuntu Touch last year. Ubuntu Touch also works on Android devices. Company is working with some manufacturers in development of devices running Ubuntu Touch out of the box.
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