Ubuntu special sauce?

Sorry, what the hell is it about Ubuntu again? A couple of months ago we (Mandriva) announced a European tie-up with HP to have MDV supported and shipped on several HP machines across their range. Resultant coverage in the press, geek press, blogosphere? Zip. Ubuntu announce a similar tie-up two months later, and everyone goes nuts about it? Thanks for the credit, guys! Sheesh. Rant off.

Comments

Adriano wrote on 2005-04-21 14:53:
Well, that's thanks to a good marketing dept, I guess. That and the excellent rep ubuntu has as a result of things like its name, the pledge they did to the community, the pubblicity angle they play in everything, and of course, the free cds sent everywhere. Even if Ubuntu is not the best distro (I've tried Hoary and Warty, and didn't like their use of sudo and the way their grub doesn't detect fuck apart from ubuntu), it's very well marketed. Maybe Mandriva has something to learn from them? Like playing well the community card again?
tymark wrote on 2005-04-23 09:43:
Ubuntu is a new distro and MDV had been around some time when they made they deal w/HP. As with any newer distro, there will be a lot of buzz around it and what it does for the first year or two. It's just people getting all hyped up because it's "new and shiny".