There’s no doubt that Ubuntu has transformed the Linux landscape since its introduction six years ago. It has modified a few key technologies to ensure generally demanding tasks under Linux, simpler for even early computer users. Although, Ubuntu was a debian-based distro, it is a popular framework for several other distros.
Although you can take a basic Ubuntu source code and make it into almost anything, derivatives are quite popular because they eliminate the need for custom configurations. The huge number of distros testifies to that!