Ubuntu's homepage doesn't mention Linux anywhere
I primarily use Red Hat/Fedora distributions of Linux; more than anything this is for historical/comfort reasons. Whilst omissions like AVI and MP3 playback are annoying - but perfectly understandable to my mind - at least I "know where the bodies are buried", and can get a new system quickly set up the way I want.
However, to avoid missing out, I usually have one of my spare machines running one of the other current major distros. In years gone by, that would have been Mandrake/Mandriva or SuSE, but these days, of course, it's Ubuntu that has the hype and the mindshare.
Looking to install Ubuntu's new 10.10 release onto a netbook, I searched for some online docs about burning the .iso onto a USB drive, as Fedora's livecd-iso-to-disk didn't seem to want to play with an Ubuntu .iso. However, it turned out that Ubuntu's docs don't acknowledge the existence of anything other than Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu. I guess I now know how the BSD people feel...
Anyway, this got me thinking: is Ubuntu trying to cover up the fact that it's based on Linux? I grabbed the list of the current top 10 Linux distributions from DistroWatch, added on a couple of the more corporate/enterprisey ones (Red Hat, CentOS and Novell/SuSE), and ran a very simple script to pull down their homepages and count how many times they mention "Linux". Here are results:
www.ubuntu.com : 0
fedoraproject.org : 1
linuxmint.com : 131
www.opensuse.org : 4
www.debian.org : 6
www.pclinuxos.com : 148
www.mandriva.com : 21
www.sabayonlinux.org : 27
www.archlinux.org : 54
lubuntu.net : 2
www.redhat.com : 4
www.centos.org : 6
www.novell.com/linux : 96
The numbers are distorted of course, especially for those that include "Linux" in their brand-name. Fedora and OpenSuSE don't score well, but at least they do both mention it prominently near the top of the page.
However, I finding it galling that in 30-odd kilobytes of HTML, Ubuntu can't find anywhere to mention the (literal) kernel that underlies their product. It's not mentioned on their "How can it be free?" page either - there's just a mention of open source in general (which also implies it's down to the efforts of corporations, and not individuals). It should also be noted that the two mentions of Linux on Lubuntu's home page are just feed links from external sites/blogs.
Maybe we should follow RMS's example and insist on referring to it as GNU/Linux/Ubuntu?
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