Forking is a good thing. It circumvents bureaucracy and encourages innovation.
So does everything worth having. That doesn't mean choice is bad.
The best distribution for a beginner is one that forces them to learn as much as possible about Linux, not one that allows them to know practically nothing about it. Ubuntu is fine for someone who wants something that just works, but for someone who is just starting and plans to work further with Linux, I would recommend something like Gentoo or Arch Linux, or perhaps a BSD.
No; perhaps you're thinking of Xubuntu? Ubuntu uses GNOME, which is definitely NOT minimalist or fast or efficient. It's bloated and loads a bunch of useless daemons you'll probably never need.
Windows is built to be as all-encompassing as possible; anything that the common user might want to do with Windows is pretty much possible with minimal hassle (or at least it is meant to be). I don't think there's an OS in existence whose sole purpose is to "be the most pretty."
Most of that stuff stems from the bundled Compiz, I believe. That's available on every major distribution, though I'm not sure how many bundle it like Ubuntu does.
Try Xubuntu. Or better yet, build an Arch install. You'll be impressed what old hardware can do.
None of that is specific to Ubuntu. You could accomplish most of that with pretty much any OS, including Windows or OS X. And Windows could do it fast, provided you did a bit of tweaking.
You can make a Beowulf cluster with any OS. You could probably even have different OSes on different computers in the cluster and still pull it off, provided the software knew what was going on.
Then why mention it?
There is something totally wrong with you. I never said that Ubuntu was better than the rest, in fact, I was just being more specific about my flavour of Linux. Everybody who uses Linux knows that you can turn any flavour of linux to have features of another. And mind you, my cluster uses Red Hat anyway. I have OpenSuse on my development machine at home. I was just presenting my arguement against those who say that Windows is the best, and that there is nothing else that anyone will wever want to use, or for that matter even Mac. THere were people here who just keep ranting about windows or mac being better, I am just trying to say that windows is nowhere near the competition. Mac and Linux are far ahead of Windows. My post was just to show what all windows can do, and in listing what I have been able to achieve on my linux installations easily, I mentioned how well it can be done on windows, and there is nothing in the list that says that windows can't do the same. And for that matter, I am not here to discuss how Ubuntu is better than Gentoo or Arch or anything, I believe that the distros are something that everybody has a different opinion on and according to the person's need he might have to use a different distro than the one I might wanna use. There is nothing that you can do with one distro that you can't on another. And no don't give me stuff like aptitude can't remove RPMs.
No matter what you say, having a tonne distros is still a bad thing. I mean, I know when I first made a switch, choosing from millions isn't really the thing that I wanted to do. And no, not every good thing has to be chosen from millions. Choice is good, as long as you don't have to download the installation CDs, and format your hardware everytime you try one. Atleast where I live, downloading a CD takes an hour or 2, thanks to the uber slow ISPs in India.
And when I talk about beginners, I talk about someone who actually wants to use the OS not someone who is on his way to become a computer geek. Give a geek any distro, any OS, and within two days it is not what you ever thought it could be like.
When I said minimalistic, my comparison was between windows and Ubuntu. Ubuntu is minimalistic because it does not enable compiz by default, it has a basic theme and everything. Whilst windows vista or 7 just eat on your resources. I am not really minimalist the way you are, and I respect your opinion in that sense but I prefer for my desktop to be be pretty and fast at the same time and even on old hardware.
Xubuntu gives me the creeps, I said I use all the old school stuff, but xubuntu is horrible imo. I know a lot of people who like it, and I respect their opinion, but I don't like something that basic, sure it is fast and everything, but GNOME looks decent and thats what I want. GNOME is pretty decent, looks better than windows XP and with beryl - compiz it is comparable to vista and is precisely faster than the windows versions. The WM in Xubuntu, I forgot the name since I don't use it much, is good for old hardware but not really pretty and I find the untidiness quite creepy.
You sure wanna say that again, windows Vista was totally about the looks and nothing else, all other features were totally not what I expect an efficient Operating System to be like, I don't know anyone who has them turned on anyway.
And since you mention this, what is this tweaking you talk of, I have done much and I believe I have done everything that's possible on windows to make it faster, still it refuses to be as fast as a server built on Linux.
I am not trying to be rude or anything, but I challenge you to make a diskless beowulf cluster on windows vista, that means no hard disks on the nodes. And along that, I want you to have NFS, RSH, SSH and along with that find me software that runs on it. Now prove me that this is faster than a Linux cluster of the same specifications and same hardware.
And while you are taking this challenge, look up beowulf clusters on wikipedia, and look at that part where it says that beowulf's are made on FOSS software. Good luck finding a FOSS version of windows.
And now I hope I got my point accross. I believe, there was something that you didn't like about Ubuntu, thats totally alright, but my point was not to prove that Ubuntu is better than the other linux distros, but that windows is the most horrible thing on earth and linux for that matter is much better in that sense.