Ubuntu
Website: http://www.ubuntu.com
Ubuntu is different from the commercial Linux offerings that preceded it because it doesn't divide its efforts between a high-quality commercial version and a free, 'community' version. The commercial and community teams collaborate to produce a single, high-quality release, which receives ongoing maintenance for a defined period. Both the release and ongoing updates are freely available to all users. In recent years, special emphasis has been placed on netbooks for lightweight, connected, mobile computing, and on the cloud as a new architecture for data centres. Ubuntu is a pioneer in both fields, with Ubuntu Netbook Edition and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud setting the standard for easy deployment and management. Ubuntu is hugely popular on Amazon's EC2 and Rackspace's Cloud, and is pre-installed on computers from Dell, Lenovo and other global vendors. Ubuntu still is and always will be free to use, share and develop. We hope it will bring a touch of light to your computing – and we hope that you'll join us in helping to build the next version too.
