Have told this story many times but it’s due to the nostalgia of an era that seems long gone.

One day after a lectureship at unit there was some hackathon with people demoing computers with Linux. I got to see the compiz cube thing and my jaw dropped. They gave my friends and me one of these pictured, an Ubuntu 5.10 CD (I still have it somewhere in pristine state) so thanks to Ubuntu is how I got into Linux.

I wholeheartedly agree with everything that OP has said. You could feel the ubuntu everywhere, from the logo, the color scheme, visual theme, wallpaper and icons (and the ‘simplicity’ and cleverness of Gnome 2) all the way up to how the help pages were phrased and of course their motto, “Linux for human beings”.

It felt cozy. It make me feel like my computer was indeed mine. At that point I didn’t even knew using a computer could be felt like that. It’s been 20 years, some 4 years after that I moved on to use Gentoo, but I still remember and miss that old Ubuntu feeling.

So that’s why I have bittersweet thoughts about Ubuntu: on one hand, as with many people, it was my gateway into Linux and thus it changed the way I use and interact with computers forever; on other hand, it was really sad to see what it has become.