A former student of mine noticed that my laptop looked different. Well, maybe not the laptop itself, but the user interface. She immediately inquired how I “did that” while she pointed at the screen of my Thinkpad. “Did what?” I replied. After some back and forth and a seemingly adequate explanation, she asked me, “So why do you use that (Ubuntu)?” I had to think a while before I could answer. I had been using Ubuntu exclusively for almost two years at that point and really hadn’t thought about that for a long time. “Because it’s better,” I replied. She nodded her head and said okay. She turned to walk away, but stopped. “If I want to do that, can you help me?” she asked. I said okay. She thanked me and walked away.

I started to think about my totally inadequate answer to her question, “Because it’s better.” Had she given me an answer like that in class, I would have asked, “How is it better?” So after a few minutes of thinking, I came up with the following reasons why I use Ubuntu.

First and foremost, Ubuntu (and Linux in general) is customizable.