I remember being pleased when Ubuntu came out and I found it didn't ship with a mail server by default. It felt like someone was willing to make something that suited a home/laptop desktop rather than a fixed workstation. This extended to things like boot speed that for a while surpassed that of Fedora and other distros that hadn't been hand tweaked. Does anyone remember all the out of tree kernel patches Ubuntu carried that gave it a reputation of being more likely to work than other distros with your hardware?

Even things like its update applet were good steps forward. Of course in the intervening years a lot of Ubuntu's lead has been reduced. Other distros adopted methods of startup that are just as fast, the mainline kernel has absorbed lots of out of tree drivers, startup splash screens are common, media keys often work (thanks mjg59!) NTP is set by default, live CDs are defacto, multiple releases in common place...

Now I need is a distro that has a super cut down cloud image that is compatible with virtual machines. The more things change...