Happy Birthday Ubuntu

I see from various news articles from yesterday that Ubuntu reached 5 years old yesterday. An honest and deep felt congratulations from a Red Hatter. Working on a release is hard work and any organization that reaches 5 years has gone through a lot of different pains. While I disagree on a couple of issues (proprietary drivers mostly .debs slightly) I will say you have accomplished things that I never thought would happen 6 years ago:

1. Made a Debian release easy to install. The power that Debian has in its .debs was quite a beast for a lot of new people. [I think I had 8 failed installs before I got one to complete before I went crazy... not to other people.. do not use install instructions from SuperExperts who like to tweak or know about every option]
   
2. I believe you helped Debian into becoming a faster release cycle (though its up to a lot of debate). I remember a lot of Debian people saying it was just impossible for that to happen due to the internal debate societies.. and your time-based made it possible for them to see how it could be done (in a smaller way).
3. Focused on a market (the new or naive user) that was under-served by many of the distributions making them compete stronger or know that was not an area they didn't want to go into.

That all said.. expect a lot of competition over the next 5 years :).