My love of Linux began many years ago when a cousin of mine brought down a copy of Debian for me. Later that year, he sent me a package for Christmas that had several network cards, a 5 port hub, and a book on Linux. Since then, I’ve been doing all I can do learn of this great OS. I’ve been on a search across the spectrum to find the easiest, yet the most flexible distribution. That search led me across (in order) Debian (no X11), Red Hat (pre-Fedora), Mandrake (pre-Mandriva), Lindows (pre-Linspire), Debian (Woody - this time I had more packages with a full X server), Fedora, and finally K/Ubuntu.
There were some shorter experiments in there too. I gave Gentoo a try twice. The first time, I was not able to get the system installed. I tried again about a year later, and I was able to get a system installed this time, but I wasn’t happy with the portage system. I know that sounds like blasphemy to those that swear by Gentoo, but it just wasn’t for me.
I eventually settled on K/Ubuntu for my preferred distro. I like it because I don’t have to go all over creation to get certain things working correctly (e.g., Intel wireless drivers), but I still have the power through APT to control exactly what’s installed on my system. Add to that the 18,000+ packages available in the various Ubuntu repositories, and I have everything I need.
Up to this point, it has been hard to give back to the community that I have gotten so much from. Sure, I filed or commented-on the occasional bug report, but I was never able to give back anything tangible. But then I realized one of the things that probably is very hard for Canonical (the corporate presence behind Ubuntu) is shelling out money for download bandwidth. If you think about the thousands, possible millions, of people that download Ubuntu with each release, that could be a significant chunk of change to support.
So, I’ve decided that this time when downloading the latest install ISO, I would use the Bit Torrent method, and I would make sure to leave my Torrent client open to upload at least 150% of what I downloaded. This act is something any user can do to help Canonical defray the cost of providing what I think is the best mix of power with easy-of-use features in a Linux-based OS. In fact, I came home tonight and found that I’d already uploaded 170%, and I’ve decided to just leave my client uploading for at least a few more days to make sure there are enough seeds for those that still want to get ISOs in this manner.