Ubuntu was started in 2004 by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth and his company Canonical. The goal was a Debian-based system that was easy to install, shipped on a fixed schedule and stayed free of charge. The name comes from a Nguni word often translated as “humanity to others”. Every release has an alliterative animal codename, and since 5.10 the codenames have gone through the alphabet.
The fixed six-month cadence and the predictable LTS releases made Ubuntu a default choice for servers, cloud images and developer laptops. Canonical has tried ideas of its own over the years: the Unity desktop, the Mir display server, Upstart and phones running Ubuntu Touch. Most of these were later dropped in favour of shared upstream projects such as GNOME and systemd. Snap packages remain Canonical’s main point of difference. Today LTS releases get five years of free security updates, and Ubuntu Pro extends that to ten years or more.