Yes, it made Ubuntu standout with its own home brewn DE.

They were heavily panned for that back then. My image of Ubuntu of that time is heavily associated with their Unity desktop which they latter dropped(only for it to spring up again).

I thought - - no-preserve root also needed to be added as an argument for self destruct to completely work.

That site has a wealth of stuff on emacs. Today I got to know the origin of emacs Ctrl and Meta keybindings and whatever occult means it takes to redo a thing in emacs.