I’ll tell ya...I use Mepis, which has mostly Ubuntu underpinnings...and I installed Ubuntu for about a week as well at one time. I keep coming back to Mepis...has excellent compatibility with Ubuntu, but is, in my opinion, MUCH easier to use.
I’m hoping this is the future of Linux...one or two systems will emerge as a quasi-standard and lots of other systems will spring up based on it, but they will all be mostly compatible with one another. It might be Ubuntu, or it might be some other system, but as that happens, it will become easier for the average user to adopt Linux, because there will be a sort of standardization (I don’t want full standardization on a single system. Think of the advantage of having systems that are, or can be, custom tailored to fit a specific set of needs, yet, at the core level, are compatible with most other systems).
Think about it...Mepis, Mint, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, UCE, Ubuntu Lite, Linspire, and a bunch of others all running on a common core, and users all able to install software from a common repository; there’s a bunch of software out there for Ubuntu right now, and as a Mepis user, I enjoy the benefits of this wide availability and easy compatibility of software. Any package that says “dapper” in the name will run on my system, and there’s boatloads of it out there. Most of the time, anything that applies to Ubuntu also applies to Mepis, including updates, support, and everything else. That’s pretty cool.
At first, I was skeptical about Mepis switching to the Ubuntu core, but in retrospect, I think it was the smartest thing they could have done. Ubuntu now does Debian far better than Debian itself.
The future is the past, most distors today find their roots with RedHat, Slackware, Debian, Suse, or a hand full of the first real distros.
What we really need for compatability is some kind of RPM / Apt naming convention. Every Linux is reall compatable its differences in how some people package and name their packages the sometimes throw a monkey wrench in the works. There have been many times I find an RPM for an app (say something like Kompose) for Suse but not RedHat. If I install with a force option it goes in and works fine.
I think Dag was trying to do this but several of the repositories for major distors disapproved