15 ms·

Ubuntu continues to rule the cloud

188 points by reddotX 11y ago

geoffroy 11y ago
I'm not an expert about Linux server-side distros. I'm using Ubuntu Server, I haven't seen any cons for now. Any hint ?
- nailer 11y ago
  Ubuntu 14.04 was one of the last distros to use upstart, which is pretty close to dead. As .service files become normal in the RHEL & Fedora/Debian world, and 14.04 LTS long life cycle runs, upstart is going to look increasingly out of date.
- fidget 11y ago
  Atm (assuming LTS) you'll have to use upstart, which sucks. Terrible selinux support also.
  - vacri 11y ago
    Is there an init system which doesn't suck?
    - nilved 11y ago
      Yep: http://core.suckless.org/sinit http://core.suckless.org/sinit
      - wtbob 11y ago
        Well, it certainly sucks less Seriously though, I've found that most things from the suckless guys are pretty great. st is a perfect terminal; surf would be perfect if it had an ad blocker.
        digi_owl 11y ago
        It almost seems as if they are recreating Acme (plan9 editor).
        nilved 11y ago
        Why would a web browser need an ad blocker? Do that in your HTTP proxy or DNS server. I recommend Polipo or Privoxy as I've had success integrating them with EasyList.
        wtbob 11y ago
        > Why would a web browser need an ad blocker? Do that in your HTTP proxy or DNS server. In order to be able to perform URL-level blocking without a proxy; and in order to be able to perform context-sensitive blocking and CSS blocking at all.
  - rlpb 11y ago
    > Terrible selinux support also. Ubuntu focuses on AppArmor instead.
    - fidget 11y ago
      Sure. I just prefer selinux (along with most of the MAC using world), so this is a negative for me.
      - philtar 11y ago
        > so this is a negative for me. Exactly. For you. This isn't a con of the actual system.
- michel-slm 11y ago
  Five year support might be too short for some people. If so there's Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its community rebuilds like CentOS), and SUSE Enterprise Linux. A paid RHEL subscription will even give you security updates for point releases, in case your needs preclude from upgrading even to backwards compatible versions (e.g. You can use RHEL 6.4 even now, instead of 6.6 or 7.0)
  - baldfat 11y ago
    I seriously believe that Ubuntu is not the best decision. SUSE and Redhat have much better support and services. More people know Ubuntu and is why they use it.
    - snuxoll 11y ago
      Seconded, the support lifetime of Ubuntu makes it woefully inadequate for use in an enterprise environment. I get that the hip startup scene wants the latest and greatest, but I work in the medical industry and rock-solid stability and availability are more important than anything else - we still have a couple Windows Server 2003 R2 and Windows XP systems that we haven't finished decommissioning yet, along with a couple SQL Server 2005 installations. When we made our first major Linux deployment this year there's no way I would have picked anything but RHEL/CentOS, we have critical services running on these systems that will be in use for a long time, and playing the upgrade dance in 5 years even (shorter than it sounds) is not an appealing thought.
      - pnathan 11y ago
        This is something not to be neglected: having a patched and backported LTS is not negligible in the enterprise.
      - slgeorge 11y ago
        Honestly, Ubuntu doesn't even try to focus on your type of usage you've defined. Given your companies pattern of doing its first deployment of Linux this year, and needing a very long support cycle - I think it's fair to say that you're looking for the equivalent of a traditional UNIX. Slow moving, with lots of stability and strong guarantees on backward compatibility. Red Hat and SUSE focus on that type of "enterprise computing" - they've grown on doing 'UNIX replacement'. Ubuntu is aimed more at the (as you put it) "hip start-up scene" or at least the area in the technical spectrum that is about new technologies, concepts such as continuous deployment and cloud computing. The funny thing is most enterprises have a bit of both those types of computing. Some slow-moving "eggs in one basket" services, but also the need for fast-moving innovative areas. So there's room for more than just one sort of distribution.
- lucaspiller 11y ago
  One issue I've found is support for old releases. Ubuntu only has a 5 year support life cycle, where as CentOS / RHEL have a 10 year support life cycle. For most people this isn't an issue, but in the enterprise it definitely is. I recently had to move a bunch of Ruby 1.8 applications (where it didn't make financial sense to upgrade them) to new servers. They wouldn't even run on Ubuntu 10.04, where as CentOS 5.5 is still receiving security updates.
  - pmontra 11y ago
    But Ruby 1.8 is EOL. I also got some customers running Rails 3.0 with 1.8.7. I told them they have to rely on good luck not to be hacked and they also made the financial decision not to upgrade so they are running an unsupported language version on maybe an unsupported OS (can't remember which OS they're using).
    - krunaldo 11y ago
      Assuming they are using RHEL/CentOS 6. You can get supported ruby 1.9.3 on RHEL6 or CentOS6 https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/ruby193/ https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/ruby193/ or https://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/SCL https://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/SCL Unless they are unwilling to upgrade their rails and using the ruby version as an excuse :) Best of luck to you!
      - darkr 11y ago
        Software Collections aren't "supported" in the same fashion that core RedHat packages are (i.e timely security fixes, backported if needs be, for the lifetime of the OS release). From the ruby193 SCL page you linked to: "Community Project: Maintained by upstream communities of developers. The software is cared for, but the developers make no commitments to update the repositories in a timely manner."
        krunaldo 11y ago
        Yeah, if they are in CentOS land it will be a bit touch and go (as usual). But if you have a redhat subscription they are fully supported. I should have pointed that out in my first comment though, thanks for bringing it up :) "All Red Hat Software Collections components are fully supported under Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription terms of service. Components are functionally complete and intended for production use. " [0] [0] <https://access.redhat.com/products/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/Developer/#rhscl=&dev-page=5> https://access.redhat.com/products/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/...
- beagle3 11y ago
  If you have an unattended server, there's an open bug since 12.04 that hasn't yet been fixed, that might make it get stuck in grub, forcing you to connect a keyboard to make it start. (Yes, it bit me with embedded hardware stored in a closet on a pole 20 feet high in the air) http://serverfault.com/questions/243343/headless-ubuntu-server-machine-sometimes-stuck-at-grub-menu http://serverfault.com/questions/243343/headless-ubuntu-serv... The fix is in 12.04-proposed, but was never released, never applied to 14.04 and 15.04 last time I checked. Which is quite ridiculous, IMHO. (Can't find the Launchpad entry right now)
  - barosl 11y ago
    I second that this is pretty annoying. The problem is that Ubuntu's grub.cfg is configured to wait forever until the user manually chooses a new boot option if the last booting failed. However, sometimes a temporary error can happen during the booting process, and this will make the server hang after the next reboot. This is probably not what server users want. In addition, I think this behavior is not ideal for desktop users either, because (1) spurious errors can also happen in desktop and in that case waiting a few seconds is better than waiting indefinitely, and (2) it is not uncommon to use Wake-on-LAN nowadays. But I'm not sure this problem is unique to Ubuntu, as Ubuntu shares much of its codebase with Debian. Does anybody know this is also problematic in other distributions?
    - jhasse 11y ago
      It looks like this will be fixed in 15.10: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ubuntu-15.10-grub-fixed http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ubuntu-15...
    - beagle3 11y ago
      When I checked (in 2013), Ubuntu had this problem, and Debian did not. Ubuntu shares a lot with debian, but grub configuration is one thing that Ubuntu appear to be doing on their own.
  - mdeslaur 11y ago
    That bug was fixed in all releases last july. This was the bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1443735 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1443735
- _yy 11y ago
  Debian is more conservative with changes - if you want your systems to be rock-solid, go with Debian. The downside is that it's so stable that packages are usually outdated, but in many cases there are more recent backports which you can cherry-pick. In my experience, Debian's security team responds to new CVEs faster than Ubuntu's, but this is purely subjective.
  - kristopolous 11y ago
    Also the users are a bit more, um accurate, in their answers; so if you run into problems, you may be in better hands if you reach out ( so long as people in help places aren't being hostile twats ).
    - jokr004 11y ago
      Absolutely, I've found the debian community to be one of the best out there as far as support goes.
      - ris 11y ago
        I've found them to be a highly mixed bag in IRC.
MarionG 11y ago
Debian still dominates the web server market, but Ubuntu is catching up there too: http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux/all/all http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux/all/all
- davidgerard 11y ago
  We use Ubuntu because our cloud provider supports it and doesn't support Debian (though we could probably hassle them into doing so if we really wanted to push it).
  - wtbob 11y ago
    A cloud provider who supports Ubuntu and not Debian almost certainly doesn't know what he's doing; I'd consider it a warning sign, although not an outright disqualifier.
    - davidgerard 11y ago
      Your cloudiness may vary. This was the place we used to have a lot of hosted boxes with, they treat VMs much like they used to treat the hosted boxes. We are in fact leaving them by the end of 2014, er the end of 2015, er some time in 2016. (It turns out disentangling years of encrusted dependencies is complicated.) But in practice, Ubuntu is a perfectly good version of Debian for our purposes, so we'll probably stick with it. The devs also like it on their desktops so feel happier targeting the same thing on the server.
    - r3bl 11y ago
      Could you explain why you think so?
      - photosinensis 11y ago
        If you support Ubuntu, it's trivial to extend that to Debian. Ubuntu is still very tightly pinned to Debian.
codewithcheese 11y ago
A big reason why it dominates the cloud is tons of web developers use Ubuntu as their desktop Linux of choice. It's really very convenient to develop and deploy on the same OS. I don't think its accurate to say "The desktop is a nice add-on, but it's not Canonical's focus nor should it be."
- vacri 11y ago
  > The desktop is a nice add-on, but it's not Canonical's focus nor should it be. Given that one of Canonical's main projects is it's own desktop system that works the same on desktop and mobile, that statement just simply isn't true.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Even more so given that Ubuntu started as a desktop Linux distro.
- mreiland 11y ago
  I run Ubuntu locally because it tends to work better as a vmware guest. You can get other distro's to work with the quality of ubuntu, but not without a lot more hassle. If I get to choose I'll run arch linux, but inside vmware it's ubuntu hands down.
  - zxcvcxz 11y ago
    >but not without a lot more hassle. Have you tried the latest versions of Fedora? The only thing I needed to do on Fedora was install video codecs and flash, which weren't automatically installed as they are in Ubuntu.
    - mreiland 11y ago
      I have not, perhaps I was being a bit hyperbolic but I think in general the sentiment is still mostly true.
brillenfux 11y ago
I will never forget how the handled the Oracle Java license change debacle. No matter what they are saying now that was a terrible show of ignorance. They might be a solid choice in the future but as of yet I haven't seen ANY reason to use anything else but Debian or CentOS. And cloud deployments will abandon Ubuntu for something smaller soon enough.
Zigurd 11y ago
There's also Android development driving use of Ubuntu as a desktop OS for developers. I do a enough embedded work that I need to build Android-based embedded systems for some projects. Increasingly, mobile software projects need to be "full stack," too, with purpose built servers for app projects.
wtbob 11y ago
It's funny how choice of distro can be so revealing. For example, when I see RedHat, it's pretty obvious that the software is from or the person works for a Big Enterprise, with Big Serious Enterprisey Stuff, and doesn't really care about open source, let alone free software (as an aside, that's kinda sad: RedHat was the first distro I used, and I loved it for years longer than I should have). Or when I see Debian, I know that the system or person actually is serious, is likely to have a good operations and sysadmin mindset and will probably Just Work™. Or when I see Gentoo, I see a kindred, albeit younger, soul. When I see 'FROM ubuntu' in a Dockerfile, my heart sinks: it's likely written in JavaScript or Ruby; it likely Greenspuns heavily. For just about any server load, vanilla Debian is going to be a superior choice: better-engineered, smaller and lighter-weight. As far as I can see, there is almost never a good reason to use Ubuntu; it's just that in the eyes of so many folks it is Linux. Oh well, at least it's not OS X.
- favadi 11y ago
  There is, Ubuntu is like Debian with 5 years supported.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Or when I see Debian, I know that the system or person actually is serious, is likely to have a good operations and sysadmin mindset and will probably Just Work™. No, that's Slackware.
- arturhoo 11y ago
  I'll bite the Ubuntu part. Ubuntu was the second Linux distribution I put my hands on back in 2008, after giving Fedora a try and being frustrated - it was a system administration internship at my university, every server on the campus ran Fedora and our "CTO" (and also my boss) was a heavy Fedora user. Ubuntu was so much more welcoming for a person coming from Windows. When I began doing some serious job in the cloud (~2010) it was on AWS and apart from Amazon's own AMIs, Ubuntu was the defacto standard - I even remember reading that it was the most used distribution on AWS back then (don't know the numbers nowadays). I've never felt that I was using something under engineered, bloated or big. It simply worked very well, had fairly updated packages and a 5 years support that has always made sense to the tasks and jobs I've dealt with. I like to think that despite some questionable choices, Canonical has always had a honest marketing approach with the Ubuntu brand, partnerships, embracing the cloud (juju), etc. When Vagrant came out, Hashicorp had the Ubuntu based box and now canonical maintains its own trusty box. It just always seemed to be present on every corner of my career so far, and it never let me down. Please note that I'm not saying that Debian is not a superior choice, I just think it is unfair to look at Ubuntu with disdain and bring JavaScript and Ruby developers, as if the languages or its developers shared the characteristics you've brought. I simply never had a reason to move away from Ubuntu or try Debian.
geggam 11y ago
When interviewing candidates and you correlate the "only Ubuntu" folks to skill sets it becomes obvious that anyone can use Ubuntu. Even in the cloud. The lowest threshold to entry to the cloud obviously should be the most common.
jafingi 11y ago
I'm sticking with CentOS / RHEL on my cloud servers. Have tried Ubuntu Server, but liking CentOS more. Also, 5 years LTS is just not enough for production environments IMO.
dijit 11y ago
So, before I knew what linux was (and was teased on various forums) I ordered some free CD's from Ubuntu. (I didn't have the internet at home). (eventually I got them; ubuntu 5.04 I think [Horny Hedgehog from memory]) When I received them I was pleased, everything worked.. well, not everything, but it sorta worked! I had a desktop environment and a command line and I felt a small sense of accomplishment because I'd navigated the strange menu's safely before anakonda or full-framebuffer installers... Because of the peer pressure I learned about how to do my bits, and I carried on. Later in the year I found fedora, and Blue is a nicer colour than brown (I was young and fickle) but it was less user friendly, so I committed to learn that and get off the "Noob Friendly" Ubuntu OS. Many years later I got a small laptop for my mother, at this stage in my life I was "awoken" and I knew the power a machine could hold if it ran linux, so I put ubuntu on it- She's not the most technically apt lady in the world but was able to do most things with ease, and I put that down to having a "Good UX outside microsoft" (since most people who learn the microsoft way are generally committed to a mindset and anything outside of that is pushed away). A few issues with Flash, some performance hiccups on some websites that seemed to try and avoid supporting linux in strange ways (that I take for granted I know how to bypass) and eventually the machine gave up the ghost. I bought a new machine and put ubuntu on it (13.10 I think) and she was somewhat less than pleased, the UX had changed, she didn't know what was available anymore, nothing was organised in a way she understood.. and so I installed mint, she's now happy. So I'll say this for Ubuntu, they put linux in the hands of people who we should really be targetting, it allowed me access to linux acting as a base plate and later acting as a full blown system for someone who was not interested at all in computers. And they pushed a trend for that, so we should all be thankful.
- dijit 11y ago
  A follow on from this story and many moons after my "fickle" switch to Fedora/RHEL. At this point in my life I'd been involved in a half dozen large companies and used linux on enormous scale. I moved to a company that was using ubuntu LTS (10.04) (old at the time) in production, it was heavily invested and I expected that wouldn't change as Developers were very hesitant to change to debian (which is too old/doesn't make things easy enough) or centos/RHEL which suffers the same issues and has the added benefit of having SELinux (which I'm an advocate of understanding rather than disabling). I go through my daily security advisories and a local privilege escalation means all our virtual machines and virtual machine hosts are affected, luckily it's patched as 10.04 is still supported so I apt-get update;apt-get upgrade and send out an email saying the server will be down for 30 minutes while it receives patches. I was wrong, it was down for 6 hours. unfortunately someone upsteam caused that particular kernel update to rebuild all initramfs' on the machine, and had also named lvm2 to lvm, so now my drives wouldn't mount. On any kernel version/initramfs version.. Normally you can drop to shell load the module, mount the drives and continue startup, but unfortunately that stopped a lot of things from loading such as the bonding we had in place on the nics. obviously I didn't know why it broke at the time and was attempting to get help from #ubuntu on freenode. the response was: "Sometimes it's better not to know why it broke" that server was smoothly running CentOS that same day, and I managed to get all the Ubuntu VM's back up and working.. and changing apt-get with a shell script which simply echoes "don't do that". So in my opinion support and enterprise is where it falls down.
hharnisch 11y ago
With containerization growing in popularity I suspect this will change. Ubuntu based images are huge and include more features than needed to run basic web servers.
- dopamean 11y ago
  Last I checked there was a very pared down version of Ubuntu. I've used it for running VMs that didn't need a gui or anything like that.
  - hharnisch 11y ago
    Could you share a link to docker hub? I'd love to check that out.
jerrac 11y ago
Other comments have touched on most of the reasons why Ubuntu is a good choice, or why it would be a bad choice in some situations. For me, it was the OS I was used to. And, as I've had to deploy a few CentOS and OES servers as well, I much prefer how Ubuntu/Debian configures things. Apache, PHP, networking, cron, etc. All much easier to configure and harden on Ubuntu than on CentOS. Only thing I've found CentOS does better is starting and stopping iptables, and that's solved with a quick apt-get install iptables-persistent. Most of this opinion comes from writing Ansible roles that work on both Debian and RedHat systems. Ubuntu was always easy to get right. CentOS always had some weird thing that required an annoying amount of work to work around. (Like it doesn't run Postfix smtpd in a chroot while Ubuntu does. Meaning I had to have different Postfix settings in master.cf on CentOS than I do on Debian.)
- antod 11y ago
  I tend to agree with all that. My first Linux was Redhat 5.1 (not RHEL), but I ended up switching to Debian Slink and OpenBSD for whatever reason. Since then I just personally find Redhat based distros a bit wierd or clunky (based on lack of familiarity), and prefer to stick with the Debian/Ubuntu side of the fence. Reason to prefer Ubuntu LTS over Debian Stable: fixed 5yr support period instead of a variable period. Reason to prefer Debian Stable over Ubuntu LTS: all packages in repo are in the same security patching regime. With Ubuntu you have to be a bit careful using packages from Universe or Metaverse.
  - jerrac 11y ago
    I did not know Debian didn't have fixed lifetimes for Stable. Though they do have some form of LTS. [0] I do find it odd that the Debian Security team doesn't manage it. Part of my RedHat dislike is unfamiliarity. But when I sit down and think about why I prefer how Ubuntu does something vs. how CentOS does something, I usually find Ubuntu methods make more sense. For example, how the default apache mods are enabled. Ubuntu has the mods-enabled directory. CentOS has the LoadModule lines and mod config in httpd.conf. So to disable an unneeded module, you have to find the LoadModule lines, remove them, and the find all the various default config that is now broken. In Ubuntu, you just remove the symlinks in mods-enabled. [0] https://wiki.debian.org/LTS https://wiki.debian.org/LTS
dogma1138 11y ago
Why is this surprising? it was and for the most is the only Linux distro that provides actual LTS releases with 5 years support guaranteed for free. Sure you can buy RHEL, SUSE and some other commercial releases but it costs money, other things like Debian Stable are very new initiatives and only provide support between stable releases 6-18 months. Ubuntu guarantees security updates for the OS and common components like Apache other's don't. If you are an organization that's very important especially if you need to comply with various regulations e.g. PCI-DSS. Ubuntu is also one of only few distro's that is supported across all Cloud providers, it was the 1st distro to be supported on Azure and many of the smaller cloud providers start with Ubuntu or use Ubuntu as the core of their in-house linux guest. Amazon's AMI might have been able to topple Ubuntu with their Amazon Linux but as it is not available for download and you cannot run it outside of AWS it will never reach any true leadership position, if you can't have it in house for development you will choose something else and the 1st rule of dev op's is deploy what you develop on.... In a few years CoreOS might get a big enough market share but currently CoreOS is too complicated and it locks you into using containers which is an overkill for most cloud deployments these days unless you are huge enterprise. If you are running a small web portal on a 1-5 servers Docker and other containers will just get in the way.
toddan 11y ago
I dont get why cannonical dont invest in development experience. forget the ubuntu mobile bullshit it wont grab the market anyway. But there are tons of developers out there that use ubunut. They have a great opportunity to create a complete IDE to cloud platform much like visual studio and azure, but with open source tools and a great linux system.

188 points by reddotX 11y ago

geoffroy 11y ago

I'm not an expert about Linux server-side distros. I'm using Ubuntu Server, I haven't seen any cons for now. Any hint ?

nailer 11y ago
Ubuntu 14.04 was one of the last distros to use upstart, which is pretty close to dead. As .service files become normal in the RHEL & Fedora/Debian world, and 14.04 LTS long life cycle runs, upstart is going to look increasingly out of date.
fidget 11y ago
Atm (assuming LTS) you'll have to use upstart, which sucks. Terrible selinux support also.
- vacri 11y ago
  Is there an init system which doesn't suck?
  - nilved 11y ago
    Yep: http://core.suckless.org/sinit http://core.suckless.org/sinit
    - wtbob 11y ago
      Well, it certainly sucks less Seriously though, I've found that most things from the suckless guys are pretty great. st is a perfect terminal; surf would be perfect if it had an ad blocker.
      - digi_owl 11y ago
        It almost seems as if they are recreating Acme (plan9 editor).
      - nilved 11y ago
        Why would a web browser need an ad blocker? Do that in your HTTP proxy or DNS server. I recommend Polipo or Privoxy as I've had success integrating them with EasyList.
        wtbob 11y ago
        > Why would a web browser need an ad blocker? Do that in your HTTP proxy or DNS server. In order to be able to perform URL-level blocking without a proxy; and in order to be able to perform context-sensitive blocking and CSS blocking at all.
- rlpb 11y ago
  > Terrible selinux support also. Ubuntu focuses on AppArmor instead.
  - fidget 11y ago
    Sure. I just prefer selinux (along with most of the MAC using world), so this is a negative for me.
    - philtar 11y ago
      > so this is a negative for me. Exactly. For you. This isn't a con of the actual system.
michel-slm 11y ago
Five year support might be too short for some people. If so there's Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its community rebuilds like CentOS), and SUSE Enterprise Linux. A paid RHEL subscription will even give you security updates for point releases, in case your needs preclude from upgrading even to backwards compatible versions (e.g. You can use RHEL 6.4 even now, instead of 6.6 or 7.0)
- baldfat 11y ago
  I seriously believe that Ubuntu is not the best decision. SUSE and Redhat have much better support and services. More people know Ubuntu and is why they use it.
  - snuxoll 11y ago
    Seconded, the support lifetime of Ubuntu makes it woefully inadequate for use in an enterprise environment. I get that the hip startup scene wants the latest and greatest, but I work in the medical industry and rock-solid stability and availability are more important than anything else - we still have a couple Windows Server 2003 R2 and Windows XP systems that we haven't finished decommissioning yet, along with a couple SQL Server 2005 installations. When we made our first major Linux deployment this year there's no way I would have picked anything but RHEL/CentOS, we have critical services running on these systems that will be in use for a long time, and playing the upgrade dance in 5 years even (shorter than it sounds) is not an appealing thought.
    - pnathan 11y ago
      This is something not to be neglected: having a patched and backported LTS is not negligible in the enterprise.
    - slgeorge 11y ago
      Honestly, Ubuntu doesn't even try to focus on your type of usage you've defined. Given your companies pattern of doing its first deployment of Linux this year, and needing a very long support cycle - I think it's fair to say that you're looking for the equivalent of a traditional UNIX. Slow moving, with lots of stability and strong guarantees on backward compatibility. Red Hat and SUSE focus on that type of "enterprise computing" - they've grown on doing 'UNIX replacement'. Ubuntu is aimed more at the (as you put it) "hip start-up scene" or at least the area in the technical spectrum that is about new technologies, concepts such as continuous deployment and cloud computing. The funny thing is most enterprises have a bit of both those types of computing. Some slow-moving "eggs in one basket" services, but also the need for fast-moving innovative areas. So there's room for more than just one sort of distribution.
lucaspiller 11y ago
One issue I've found is support for old releases. Ubuntu only has a 5 year support life cycle, where as CentOS / RHEL have a 10 year support life cycle. For most people this isn't an issue, but in the enterprise it definitely is. I recently had to move a bunch of Ruby 1.8 applications (where it didn't make financial sense to upgrade them) to new servers. They wouldn't even run on Ubuntu 10.04, where as CentOS 5.5 is still receiving security updates.
- pmontra 11y ago
  But Ruby 1.8 is EOL. I also got some customers running Rails 3.0 with 1.8.7. I told them they have to rely on good luck not to be hacked and they also made the financial decision not to upgrade so they are running an unsupported language version on maybe an unsupported OS (can't remember which OS they're using).
  - krunaldo 11y ago
    Assuming they are using RHEL/CentOS 6. You can get supported ruby 1.9.3 on RHEL6 or CentOS6 https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/ruby193/ https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/ruby193/ or https://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/SCL https://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/SCL Unless they are unwilling to upgrade their rails and using the ruby version as an excuse :) Best of luck to you!
    - darkr 11y ago
      Software Collections aren't "supported" in the same fashion that core RedHat packages are (i.e timely security fixes, backported if needs be, for the lifetime of the OS release). From the ruby193 SCL page you linked to: "Community Project: Maintained by upstream communities of developers. The software is cared for, but the developers make no commitments to update the repositories in a timely manner."
      - krunaldo 11y ago
        Yeah, if they are in CentOS land it will be a bit touch and go (as usual). But if you have a redhat subscription they are fully supported. I should have pointed that out in my first comment though, thanks for bringing it up :) "All Red Hat Software Collections components are fully supported under Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription terms of service. Components are functionally complete and intended for production use. " [0] [0] <https://access.redhat.com/products/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/Developer/#rhscl=&dev-page=5> https://access.redhat.com/products/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/...
beagle3 11y ago
If you have an unattended server, there's an open bug since 12.04 that hasn't yet been fixed, that might make it get stuck in grub, forcing you to connect a keyboard to make it start. (Yes, it bit me with embedded hardware stored in a closet on a pole 20 feet high in the air) http://serverfault.com/questions/243343/headless-ubuntu-server-machine-sometimes-stuck-at-grub-menu http://serverfault.com/questions/243343/headless-ubuntu-serv... The fix is in 12.04-proposed, but was never released, never applied to 14.04 and 15.04 last time I checked. Which is quite ridiculous, IMHO. (Can't find the Launchpad entry right now)
- barosl 11y ago
  I second that this is pretty annoying. The problem is that Ubuntu's grub.cfg is configured to wait forever until the user manually chooses a new boot option if the last booting failed. However, sometimes a temporary error can happen during the booting process, and this will make the server hang after the next reboot. This is probably not what server users want. In addition, I think this behavior is not ideal for desktop users either, because (1) spurious errors can also happen in desktop and in that case waiting a few seconds is better than waiting indefinitely, and (2) it is not uncommon to use Wake-on-LAN nowadays. But I'm not sure this problem is unique to Ubuntu, as Ubuntu shares much of its codebase with Debian. Does anybody know this is also problematic in other distributions?
  - jhasse 11y ago
    It looks like this will be fixed in 15.10: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ubuntu-15.10-grub-fixed http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ubuntu-15...
  - beagle3 11y ago
    When I checked (in 2013), Ubuntu had this problem, and Debian did not. Ubuntu shares a lot with debian, but grub configuration is one thing that Ubuntu appear to be doing on their own.
- mdeslaur 11y ago
  That bug was fixed in all releases last july. This was the bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1443735 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1443735
_yy 11y ago
Debian is more conservative with changes - if you want your systems to be rock-solid, go with Debian. The downside is that it's so stable that packages are usually outdated, but in many cases there are more recent backports which you can cherry-pick. In my experience, Debian's security team responds to new CVEs faster than Ubuntu's, but this is purely subjective.
- kristopolous 11y ago
  Also the users are a bit more, um accurate, in their answers; so if you run into problems, you may be in better hands if you reach out ( so long as people in help places aren't being hostile twats ).
  - jokr004 11y ago
    Absolutely, I've found the debian community to be one of the best out there as far as support goes.
    - ris 11y ago
      I've found them to be a highly mixed bag in IRC.

MarionG 11y ago

Debian still dominates the web server market, but Ubuntu is catching up there too: http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux/all/all http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux/all/all

davidgerard 11y ago
We use Ubuntu because our cloud provider supports it and doesn't support Debian (though we could probably hassle them into doing so if we really wanted to push it).
- wtbob 11y ago
  A cloud provider who supports Ubuntu and not Debian almost certainly doesn't know what he's doing; I'd consider it a warning sign, although not an outright disqualifier.
  - davidgerard 11y ago
    Your cloudiness may vary. This was the place we used to have a lot of hosted boxes with, they treat VMs much like they used to treat the hosted boxes. We are in fact leaving them by the end of 2014, er the end of 2015, er some time in 2016. (It turns out disentangling years of encrusted dependencies is complicated.) But in practice, Ubuntu is a perfectly good version of Debian for our purposes, so we'll probably stick with it. The devs also like it on their desktops so feel happier targeting the same thing on the server.
  - r3bl 11y ago
    Could you explain why you think so?
    - photosinensis 11y ago
      If you support Ubuntu, it's trivial to extend that to Debian. Ubuntu is still very tightly pinned to Debian.

codewithcheese 11y ago

A big reason why it dominates the cloud is tons of web developers use Ubuntu as their desktop Linux of choice. It's really very convenient to develop and deploy on the same OS. I don't think its accurate to say "The desktop is a nice add-on, but it's not Canonical's focus nor should it be."

vacri 11y ago
> The desktop is a nice add-on, but it's not Canonical's focus nor should it be. Given that one of Canonical's main projects is it's own desktop system that works the same on desktop and mobile, that statement just simply isn't true.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Even more so given that Ubuntu started as a desktop Linux distro.
mreiland 11y ago
I run Ubuntu locally because it tends to work better as a vmware guest. You can get other distro's to work with the quality of ubuntu, but not without a lot more hassle. If I get to choose I'll run arch linux, but inside vmware it's ubuntu hands down.
- zxcvcxz 11y ago
  >but not without a lot more hassle. Have you tried the latest versions of Fedora? The only thing I needed to do on Fedora was install video codecs and flash, which weren't automatically installed as they are in Ubuntu.
  - mreiland 11y ago
    I have not, perhaps I was being a bit hyperbolic but I think in general the sentiment is still mostly true.

brillenfux 11y ago

I will never forget how the handled the Oracle Java license change debacle. No matter what they are saying now that was a terrible show of ignorance. They might be a solid choice in the future but as of yet I haven't seen ANY reason to use anything else but Debian or CentOS. And cloud deployments will abandon Ubuntu for something smaller soon enough.

Zigurd 11y ago

There's also Android development driving use of Ubuntu as a desktop OS for developers. I do a enough embedded work that I need to build Android-based embedded systems for some projects. Increasingly, mobile software projects need to be "full stack," too, with purpose built servers for app projects.

wtbob 11y ago

It's funny how choice of distro can be so revealing. For example, when I see RedHat, it's pretty obvious that the software is from or the person works for a Big Enterprise, with Big Serious Enterprisey Stuff, and doesn't really care about open source, let alone free software (as an aside, that's kinda sad: RedHat was the first distro I used, and I loved it for years longer than I should have). Or when I see Debian, I know that the system or person actually is serious, is likely to have a good operations and sysadmin mindset and will probably Just Work™. Or when I see Gentoo, I see a kindred, albeit younger, soul. When I see 'FROM ubuntu' in a Dockerfile, my heart sinks: it's likely written in JavaScript or Ruby; it likely Greenspuns heavily. For just about any server load, vanilla Debian is going to be a superior choice: better-engineered, smaller and lighter-weight. As far as I can see, there is almost never a good reason to use Ubuntu; it's just that in the eyes of so many folks it is Linux. Oh well, at least it's not OS X.

favadi 11y ago
There is, Ubuntu is like Debian with 5 years supported.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Or when I see Debian, I know that the system or person actually is serious, is likely to have a good operations and sysadmin mindset and will probably Just Work™. No, that's Slackware.
arturhoo 11y ago
I'll bite the Ubuntu part. Ubuntu was the second Linux distribution I put my hands on back in 2008, after giving Fedora a try and being frustrated - it was a system administration internship at my university, every server on the campus ran Fedora and our "CTO" (and also my boss) was a heavy Fedora user. Ubuntu was so much more welcoming for a person coming from Windows. When I began doing some serious job in the cloud (~2010) it was on AWS and apart from Amazon's own AMIs, Ubuntu was the defacto standard - I even remember reading that it was the most used distribution on AWS back then (don't know the numbers nowadays). I've never felt that I was using something under engineered, bloated or big. It simply worked very well, had fairly updated packages and a 5 years support that has always made sense to the tasks and jobs I've dealt with. I like to think that despite some questionable choices, Canonical has always had a honest marketing approach with the Ubuntu brand, partnerships, embracing the cloud (juju), etc. When Vagrant came out, Hashicorp had the Ubuntu based box and now canonical maintains its own trusty box. It just always seemed to be present on every corner of my career so far, and it never let me down. Please note that I'm not saying that Debian is not a superior choice, I just think it is unfair to look at Ubuntu with disdain and bring JavaScript and Ruby developers, as if the languages or its developers shared the characteristics you've brought. I simply never had a reason to move away from Ubuntu or try Debian.

geggam 11y ago

When interviewing candidates and you correlate the "only Ubuntu" folks to skill sets it becomes obvious that anyone can use Ubuntu. Even in the cloud. The lowest threshold to entry to the cloud obviously should be the most common.

jafingi 11y ago

I'm sticking with CentOS / RHEL on my cloud servers. Have tried Ubuntu Server, but liking CentOS more. Also, 5 years LTS is just not enough for production environments IMO.

dijit 11y ago

So, before I knew what linux was (and was teased on various forums) I ordered some free CD's from Ubuntu. (I didn't have the internet at home). (eventually I got them; ubuntu 5.04 I think [Horny Hedgehog from memory]) When I received them I was pleased, everything worked.. well, not everything, but it sorta worked! I had a desktop environment and a command line and I felt a small sense of accomplishment because I'd navigated the strange menu's safely before anakonda or full-framebuffer installers... Because of the peer pressure I learned about how to do my bits, and I carried on. Later in the year I found fedora, and Blue is a nicer colour than brown (I was young and fickle) but it was less user friendly, so I committed to learn that and get off the "Noob Friendly" Ubuntu OS. Many years later I got a small laptop for my mother, at this stage in my life I was "awoken" and I knew the power a machine could hold if it ran linux, so I put ubuntu on it- She's not the most technically apt lady in the world but was able to do most things with ease, and I put that down to having a "Good UX outside microsoft" (since most people who learn the microsoft way are generally committed to a mindset and anything outside of that is pushed away). A few issues with Flash, some performance hiccups on some websites that seemed to try and avoid supporting linux in strange ways (that I take for granted I know how to bypass) and eventually the machine gave up the ghost. I bought a new machine and put ubuntu on it (13.10 I think) and she was somewhat less than pleased, the UX had changed, she didn't know what was available anymore, nothing was organised in a way she understood.. and so I installed mint, she's now happy. So I'll say this for Ubuntu, they put linux in the hands of people who we should really be targetting, it allowed me access to linux acting as a base plate and later acting as a full blown system for someone who was not interested at all in computers. And they pushed a trend for that, so we should all be thankful.

dijit 11y ago
A follow on from this story and many moons after my "fickle" switch to Fedora/RHEL. At this point in my life I'd been involved in a half dozen large companies and used linux on enormous scale. I moved to a company that was using ubuntu LTS (10.04) (old at the time) in production, it was heavily invested and I expected that wouldn't change as Developers were very hesitant to change to debian (which is too old/doesn't make things easy enough) or centos/RHEL which suffers the same issues and has the added benefit of having SELinux (which I'm an advocate of understanding rather than disabling). I go through my daily security advisories and a local privilege escalation means all our virtual machines and virtual machine hosts are affected, luckily it's patched as 10.04 is still supported so I apt-get update;apt-get upgrade and send out an email saying the server will be down for 30 minutes while it receives patches. I was wrong, it was down for 6 hours. unfortunately someone upsteam caused that particular kernel update to rebuild all initramfs' on the machine, and had also named lvm2 to lvm, so now my drives wouldn't mount. On any kernel version/initramfs version.. Normally you can drop to shell load the module, mount the drives and continue startup, but unfortunately that stopped a lot of things from loading such as the bonding we had in place on the nics. obviously I didn't know why it broke at the time and was attempting to get help from #ubuntu on freenode. the response was: "Sometimes it's better not to know why it broke" that server was smoothly running CentOS that same day, and I managed to get all the Ubuntu VM's back up and working.. and changing apt-get with a shell script which simply echoes "don't do that". So in my opinion support and enterprise is where it falls down.

hharnisch 11y ago

With containerization growing in popularity I suspect this will change. Ubuntu based images are huge and include more features than needed to run basic web servers.

dopamean 11y ago
Last I checked there was a very pared down version of Ubuntu. I've used it for running VMs that didn't need a gui or anything like that.
- hharnisch 11y ago
  Could you share a link to docker hub? I'd love to check that out.

jerrac 11y ago

Other comments have touched on most of the reasons why Ubuntu is a good choice, or why it would be a bad choice in some situations. For me, it was the OS I was used to. And, as I've had to deploy a few CentOS and OES servers as well, I much prefer how Ubuntu/Debian configures things. Apache, PHP, networking, cron, etc. All much easier to configure and harden on Ubuntu than on CentOS. Only thing I've found CentOS does better is starting and stopping iptables, and that's solved with a quick apt-get install iptables-persistent. Most of this opinion comes from writing Ansible roles that work on both Debian and RedHat systems. Ubuntu was always easy to get right. CentOS always had some weird thing that required an annoying amount of work to work around. (Like it doesn't run Postfix smtpd in a chroot while Ubuntu does. Meaning I had to have different Postfix settings in master.cf on CentOS than I do on Debian.)

antod 11y ago
I tend to agree with all that. My first Linux was Redhat 5.1 (not RHEL), but I ended up switching to Debian Slink and OpenBSD for whatever reason. Since then I just personally find Redhat based distros a bit wierd or clunky (based on lack of familiarity), and prefer to stick with the Debian/Ubuntu side of the fence. Reason to prefer Ubuntu LTS over Debian Stable: fixed 5yr support period instead of a variable period. Reason to prefer Debian Stable over Ubuntu LTS: all packages in repo are in the same security patching regime. With Ubuntu you have to be a bit careful using packages from Universe or Metaverse.
- jerrac 11y ago
  I did not know Debian didn't have fixed lifetimes for Stable. Though they do have some form of LTS. [0] I do find it odd that the Debian Security team doesn't manage it. Part of my RedHat dislike is unfamiliarity. But when I sit down and think about why I prefer how Ubuntu does something vs. how CentOS does something, I usually find Ubuntu methods make more sense. For example, how the default apache mods are enabled. Ubuntu has the mods-enabled directory. CentOS has the LoadModule lines and mod config in httpd.conf. So to disable an unneeded module, you have to find the LoadModule lines, remove them, and the find all the various default config that is now broken. In Ubuntu, you just remove the symlinks in mods-enabled. [0] https://wiki.debian.org/LTS https://wiki.debian.org/LTS

dogma1138 11y ago

Why is this surprising? it was and for the most is the only Linux distro that provides actual LTS releases with 5 years support guaranteed for free. Sure you can buy RHEL, SUSE and some other commercial releases but it costs money, other things like Debian Stable are very new initiatives and only provide support between stable releases 6-18 months. Ubuntu guarantees security updates for the OS and common components like Apache other's don't. If you are an organization that's very important especially if you need to comply with various regulations e.g. PCI-DSS. Ubuntu is also one of only few distro's that is supported across all Cloud providers, it was the 1st distro to be supported on Azure and many of the smaller cloud providers start with Ubuntu or use Ubuntu as the core of their in-house linux guest. Amazon's AMI might have been able to topple Ubuntu with their Amazon Linux but as it is not available for download and you cannot run it outside of AWS it will never reach any true leadership position, if you can't have it in house for development you will choose something else and the 1st rule of dev op's is deploy what you develop on.... In a few years CoreOS might get a big enough market share but currently CoreOS is too complicated and it locks you into using containers which is an overkill for most cloud deployments these days unless you are huge enterprise. If you are running a small web portal on a 1-5 servers Docker and other containers will just get in the way.

toddan 11y ago

I dont get why cannonical dont invest in development experience. forget the ubuntu mobile bullshit it wont grab the market anyway. But there are tons of developers out there that use ubunut. They have a great opportunity to create a complete IDE to cloud platform much like visual studio and azure, but with open source tools and a great linux system.

​Ubuntu continues to rule the cloud

​Ubuntu continues to rule the cloud

Ubuntu continues to rule the cloud

Ubuntu continues to rule the cloud