7 ms·

Ubuntu Is a Canonical Product

51 points by pabs3 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
brucethemoose2 4y ago
I get why its so, but Ubuntu being the "default" linux distro is annoying when you aren't running Ubuntu. I run into little things like hardcoded Ubuntu paths in apps, or running into some unfixable bug in a cloud instance because the Ubuntu packages are so old.
- reacharavindh 4y ago
  This is like the “IE is the default browser”, or “I have tested it in Chrome which is what majority uses anyway” arguments that have proven to falter over time anyway. Linux is better off avoiding such “default” choices. It’s not like it is cohesively built like MacOS anyway. We might as well enjoy the fragmentation.
  - sbuk 4y ago
    "Linux is better off avoiding such “default” choices" - and this is what holds Linux (the desktop OS) back. Why do people choose Windows or macOS over Linux time and again? Sensible out-of-the-box defaults. They can fire up a new PC and they are off to the races. The same cannot be said for the majority of Linux distros, except perhaps for the *buntu family.
    - taskforcegemini 4y ago
      > Why do people choose Windows or macOS over Linux time and again? that's not how this works. They choose apple and get macOS or they choose pc and get windows with it.
      - sbuk 4y ago
        I'll rephrase then, why do devices preinstalled with Linux continually fail in the mass market?
    - reacharavindh 4y ago
      Oh I am with you on sensible defaults and cohesive OS. But, Linux is too open(for good) that a single player can take control of a massive set of openly developed feature set like that. Canonical certainly cannot be that one... selling something as "hey it's free and open, come use it! , and contribute more features to it.. " then turning around and forcing snaps on them, Amazon ads, and shit like that makes them not worthy IMO. Apple is a commercial entity that purely has the intention of making profit and as a customer you can atleast guess where their incentives are(but can only blindly trust). They also dont benefit from the massive coomunity of developers developing features for them. Airdrop, Continuity thing, display management are stuff they had to pay tons of money to engineers working in house to develop. Hence, they get to dictate the terms. Linux desktop by virtue of being developed by open community doesnt get that commericial dictator. Unless, some company threw their weight behind a custom linux distrbution, and developed a feature set similar to what Apple does on top of base Linux system. But, such commercial entity cannot label themselves as the "free & open" desktop operating system like Canonical does. I see System76 doing something with their own Rust based Desktop thing. If they can bring that cohesion, they get some game.
      - sbuk 4y ago
        Everything you say makes complete sense if I look at it through the lens of someone that unflinchingly adheres to the FLOSS ethos, on that we're never going to agree. My view is that the end user is the most important part of the whole stack. To a certain extent, Apple gets this - yes, the salesbro's in corporations do drive direction to some extent, but they have yet to do anything that is really end-user hostile. Microsoft, also to a less extent do this too. FLOSS claims to benefit end users, but I always question this; to me it seems to benefit developers and those that want to 'stick it to the man' more than anything else. Now I will openly admit to oversimplifying and generalising here, and I'm sure my stance could be easily disproven (see another comment in this thread), but to me the is issue in the article seems to be fundamentally that OSS desktop projects cater to a minority. Servers are something else entirely - I'm an older UNIX beard, so I stick with the BSDs - not a fan of the GNU tool chain. Here, I'm very definitely in the minority.
    - hibbelig 4y ago
      > They can fire up a new PC and they are off to the races. I, personally, would have to spend quite a bit of time tweaking my Karabiner Elements and Hammerspoon configurations before I'm off to the races. Until then, I'm off to a crawl... Can I put the config in git and just clone it on a new machine? Yes. But I can do that on a Linux installation, too.
      - sbuk 4y ago
        With respect, you are the minority - and a vanishingly small one at that. I'm talking about typical end users. The *buntu family should be appealing, but Linux folks disparage because reasons. For folks like you, there's Fedora or Debian.
  - esskay 4y ago
    Not so sure it can be compared to IE. For one thing IE was 'there' on your desktop. You'd have to actively choose to install Ubuntu over another distro in most cases. IE was based around gatekeeping your choices. The same can't be said of Ubuntu. It's not the 'default' Linux, its just the one that a majority choose to download and install, because most other distros dont give a damn about user experience or decent documentation. You only have to look at the sites for Slackware, Debian and Gentoo to feel like you've been ported back to the 90s - very offputting to anyone researching which OS to pick.
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  >I run into little things like hardcoded Ubuntu paths in apps what are you referring to? do you mean packages shipped on your distro are broken because the maintainers didn't change the paths or do you mean that pre-compiled binaries don't work? because, I mean, the whole point of open source is that you can personally get your hands dirty and change the stuff. if you use binaries instead of compiling then that's what you get unfortunately
  - brucethemoose2 4y ago
    Well, as a recent example, PyTorch 2.0 installed with PyPi (not the version from the Arch repo) had a hardcoded path to some specific CUDA library that I had to find in the PyTorch source to work around.
bonzini 4y ago
CentOS Linux vs. CentOS Stream was not about RHEL not making enough money to Red Hat. Red Hats knew perfectly well that something like Alma or Rocky would pop up and is doing nothing (quite the opposite in fact) to stop them.
- bubblethink 4y ago
  It was indirectly about money in that CentOS was negative money. RH got nothing back for the time/money it was investing in CentOS. Of course, why they acquired CentOS in the first place is equally puzzling as this outcome was predictable even back then.
  - antihero 4y ago
    I reckon it’s mindshare - if you give people CentOS for personal and SME use, then those ops people will drive the choice of RHEL in larger companies.
  - johannes1234321 4y ago
    Well, they get back that people stay in the RHEL universe isntead of Ubuntu etc. How that all plays out in the long term is of course hard to predict.
  - bonzini 4y ago
    All Red Hat products layered on top of RHEL have an upstream distribution that used to be layered on CentOS (RDO for OpenShift, OKD for OpenShift, oVirt for RHV). CentOS was acquihired because it had serious sustainability issues and releases had sometimes been delayed by many months over RHEL. Red Hat couldn't base those upstream projects on a distro that could stop producing releases any time. It was a platform, it didn't have to bring money just like the people who manage a kubernetes cluster don't bring money (the money is brought by those that write the software that runs on said cluster). The problem is that, after a few years, those same products could not afford even the 6-month delay until changes went from RHEL to CentOS. It would basically be a waterfall model, with a huge fixed delay in the critical path before things could be developed and tested. Hence the "left shift" that is CentOS Stream, where OKD and friends can develop on the next minor release of RHEL instead of the last one. Personally over the past year I have migrated a few CentOS 7 machines to CentOS Stream 9 and found it very stable. But if people want to use Alma, Red Hat won't complain.
alanfranz 4y ago
Canonical gets a lot of rants nowadays (some with good reason, e.g. snap), but there’s an upside to the product as well: it’s managed as a desktop distro product from a user’s perspective. I’ve been running a couple of Fedora versions as desktops on fully supported hardware and, oh my, they were quite bad in terms of stability (bluetooth not working, video calls breaking), speed, and general UX when compared with Ubuntu. Sure, distro X, _when properly tuned_, will be better than Ubuntu. But a lot of users, even power users, are in Linux to do their job, which is NOT tuning linux distros. Ubuntu OOB experience right now is still the best for a Linux imho (pop os actually, but it’s an ubuntu spinoff). I tried Debian about 1y ago and its desktop defaults were very cheap, requiring a lot of work as a user. Open to changing my mind. But please, let’a discuss a default experience, not a ton-of-tuning-patches-installs experience .
- ungamedplayer 4y ago
  I hear this often, but it confuses me, reasons listed below: > Fedora versions as desktops on fully supported hardware Is there a list somewhere, as I have not seen this. (Seriously). > oh my, they were quite bad in terms of stability (bluetooth not working, Fedora has a practiced behavior of fixes getting upstream first before shipping, (rising tide lifts all boats). If bluetooth was broken for fedora, it likely would be broken across multiple distribution, and the ubuntus would have had to do something that wasn't upstream. If ubuntu ship patches different than upstream, then it just come down to a timing issue of when your specific hardware has been fixed. I can talk more about the other points you mentioned, They seem more anecdotal than provable (Which is fine, perception is 9/10ths of the law).
  - alanfranz 4y ago
    About Fedora: the company where I work has about 150-200 engineers, and the default suggested Linux is Fedora. A lot of rants and similar issues are shared in support channels. These don’t happen with Ubuntu, at least not with the same rate. hardware is usually some Lenovo Thinkpad (X and P series) that work with RH. Now that you tell me, it seems that Fedora has no official compatibility list. But Ubuntu has it. Isn’t that a Fedora problem? > Fedora has a practiced behavior of fixes getting upstream first before shipping, (rising tide lifts all boats). If bluetooth was broken for fedora, it likely would be broken across multiple distribution, and the ubuntus would have had to do something that wasn't upstream. That's exactly what I mean about Ubuntu being a desktop-oriented _product_. In that instance, it was a kernel problem. Ubuntu clearly has this idea of testing for desktop features, and probably not releasing (or patching) something if it's a problem for desktop users. Fedora just pushed the new kernel through, and probably helped fixing the issue within the kernel. But it's not a great end-user experience. Btw, of course this is an opinion. I don’t have hard long-term, wide-population data on the subject.
r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
"Canonical is unlikely to be that interested in the views of people who have little or no chance of giving them money, people like us." A university in one of the richest countries in the world, the academics employed by it, and the students who attend have little or no chance of giving them money? Of course you do. You just don't want to.
- throwway1922 4y ago
  Do I assume you never worked in academia? It is not that any employee can just purchase things in academia (at least in 3 different countries I worked at). Most money and purchasing power, approvals go to official-administrators (even if Professors take efforts to apply and receive grants). Spending is highly regulated. There were times I was denied buying RHEL telling me to use a 'free linux'. There is a wide belief (among official-administrators) Linux is free so paying for it is the employee wasting money. To even encourage Dell's linux server offerings I once purchased a few preinstalled RHEL devices but was later asked why not use free ones (or the windows dell offerings as they were strangely cheaper - thanks to bloatware). At the same if you say you need to buy a windows server or zoom license this will be approved as these people know that it is not free. Their society is conditioned in this way. In the rare case if this was approved, usually there are external auditors that analyse spent money and come back at you for not using free linux. Ideally Canonical and RedHat (via IBM) goes to these administrators (or meetings in Ministry of Education) and advise them that making software is $$.
  - r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
    I have worked in academia and I am aware of the restrictions on purchasing. But as an individual you can purchase software for yourself. You can encourage your students to purchase software. You can even make it a requirement of a course, in the same way as buying a textbook is. I have never come across that is more reluctant to actually pay for the tools to do their job than devs. Hell we've even built a quasi religious cult in foss that revolves around not paying. Yes yes I know the "free" In foss is supposed to be free as in freedom, but in practice it ain't, it's all about free as in beer. See the gp and the offence taken at actually being asked to pay for the foundational tool they use to do their job.
ta1243 4y ago
I'd love to pay for Ubuntu, but they don't make it easy. If I start an AWS windows, rhel or suse EC2 I pay far more than with ubuntu. I'm not sure if the Ubuntu AMI has any "software" charge, but RHEL on a t3.large is 14.32c/hour in US-East-2, Ubuntu is 8.32c/hour.
octotoad 4y ago
I wonder how much of Mark Shuttleworth's personal funding is still at play in keeping Canonical alive. A quick web search returns articles claiming the company has been profitable since 2018 and that an IPO may be in the works. I can understand how something like Red Hat has managed to survive over the past twenty years, given the name it has built for itself in the "enterprise" Linux world (for better or worse), but Canonical continuing to operate off the back of Ubuntu has always baffled me.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  Ubuntu has been the most popular Linux distribution for nearly 20 years. Are you surprised that translates in support contracts in the enterprise world? It isn’t to me. People keep using what they are familiar with on their servers. Plus it’s one of the default option at most hosting provider.
  - jabl 4y ago
    To an extent, I actually am. Redhat became successful because they went after and conquered the "replace expensive proprietary unix risc server with x86+Linux but still want a support contract for CYA reasons and that's how we do it in the enterprise world". Ubuntu is wildly popular on desktops and in the cloud (and largely for good reasons, all the phone-home and marketing etc. aside, it's a solid and polished distro), but I expect a vanishingly small fraction of Ubuntu users actually pay a dime to Canonical. Now Canonical has been trying to monetize Ubuntu in various ways over the years, some better and some worse, but I do hope they succeed so that Ubuntu is long term sustainable.
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      Bingo. There is no AIX or HP-UX in the wild anymore, at least not outside of niche or legacy deployments, because RHEL ate it up. Every enterprise I've ever been at required official licenses and official escalation and support SLAs. By offering enterprise support and reasonable response times they became the de facto winner of the Unix enterprise world. Ubuntu still reigns supreme for individual users, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to F500 companies.
neilv 4y ago
I like some of how Ubuntu is polished on the desktop, but I ended up moving 2 startups from Ubuntu to Debian Stable. Debian Stable had fewer regressions in security updates, Ubuntu really dropped the ball on one regression that would make some devices unbootable (Ubuntu strangely silent on the bricking, and I had to confirm it with a contact at another distro company), getting rid of Ubuntu's Snap changing things outside of APT control was a huge relief, and we don't have to worry as much about privacy&security problems of Debian phoning-home. The biggest headache with Debian was installing laptop workstations, due to WiFi usually needing firmware blobs. It required complicated instructions and contortions that made it a million times harder. But that's now solved: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/ https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-in... Also, especially for startups, there are often efficiencies to using Debian Stable for everything for which it can be used. For example, it's not the smallest base of a bespoke Docker container, but there are development and operations (personnel) efficiencies when containers, host servers, and workstations are all running the same thing. Fewer surprises in production, less time and complexity trying to support multiple environments, and you can rapidly debug some things more easily on bare metal on workstation when necessary.
- jraph 4y ago
  > The biggest headache with Debian was installing laptop workstations was that WiFi needing firmware blobs required complicated instructions and contortions that made it a million times harder. But that's now solved: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/ https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-in... And the official installer is going to provide the non-free firmware now (and non-free firmware will also be in a separate non-free-firmware section of the repositories so you won't need to enable the whole non-free section anymore) https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-12-Installer-Alpha-2 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-12-Installer-Alpha-2
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > Debian Stable had fewer regressions in security updates, Ubuntu really dropped the ball on one regression that would make some devices unbootable (Ubuntu strangely silent on the bricking, and I had to confirm it with a contact at another distro company), getting rid of Ubuntu's Snap changing things outside of APT control was a huge relief, and we don't have to worry as much about privacy&security problems of Debian phoning-home. Curiously, I've had regular Debian updates also mess up my install, to where it cannot boot: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/debian-and-grub-are-broken https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/debian-and-... That said, both Debian and Ubuntu have been passable in my experience, both on the desktop and for servers, basically the whole DEB group of distros including something like Linux Mint and others on the desktop as a daily driver. I might be an outlier, but they've generally let me get things done more quickly and easily when compared to something like CentOS, RHEL, Oracle Linux and so on (though Fedora on the desktop was generally pretty good). On RPM distros things tended to go wrong, everything from using Docker instead of Podman for Docker Swarm in some smaller projects not being entirely supported (even when Podman didn't have feature parity), some oddness when setting up K3s clusters because I didn't have resources for OpenShift or whatever, regular Docker networking failing and needing to add masquerading to firewall configuration, issues with SELinux not playing nicely with some software, kswapd utterly killing the CPU when the system is running low on swap and others. > Also, especially for startups, there are often efficiencies to using Debian Stable for everything for which it can be used. For example, it's not the smallest base of a bespoke Docker container, but there are development and operations (personnel) efficiencies when containers, host servers, and workstations are all running the same thing. Fewer surprises in production, less time and complexity trying to support multiple environments, and you can rapidly debug some things more easily on bare metal on workstation when necessary. I actually moved over my container images to Ubuntu as well, so that I can setup dev environments on the desktop directly the same way I would for a container (sometimes debugging inside of containers is a pain): https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/using-ubuntu-as-the-base-for-all-of-my-containers https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/using-ubuntu-as-the-base-fo... So now I'm basically running the setup you're describing (the same OS locally, on servers and also in containers) even if I've settled on Ubuntu LTS instead because of the longer EOL and it's been a great experience so far! That said, the whole snaps/Flatpak/AppImage situation could be a bit better.
bubblethink 4y ago
Ubuntu has immense goodwill and will have a warm place in everyone's hearts for a long time. I hope they don't squander it away with snaps or other stuff. It's a hard business though. Not sure how they keep it afloat forever.
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Yes, and it's a good thing. I want them to have a business model, because I want them to survive. Not every project can be as amazing as debian and run strong for so many years on volonteers alone.
- pabs3 4y ago
  Debian definitely isn't volunteers alone, lots of companies pay people to work on Debian.
low_tech_love 4y ago
About 15 years ago I moved from Ubuntu to Debian testing and it was probably one of the best feelings I ever had in my professional career. Bumps have happened buy I never looked back and probably never will. Kudos to them, but the bloat is too much for me.
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  Any 15-year-old justification should be looked at with a suitably tilted head.
- planede 4y ago
  I suggest to use Debian "unstable". I think the name "unstable" made a lot of disservice to it. The thing with testing is that security wise it's the worst of both unstable and stable. It does not get timely security fixes from upstream, nor from security backports to stable.
andrewstuart 4y ago
I’ve got no problem with the way canonical handles ubuntu at all. This post seems to imply them at canonical is some sort of evil overlord. If you don’t like the ads, go to a different distro - that’s the good thing about Linux, theres a distro to suit everyone.
teekert 4y ago
I love Ubuntu., It installs in minutes and then stays out of my way for years and years. I want them to make money so Ubuntu keeps existing. I think it's just impossible to run a company on full RMS mode. But let's hope they stay decent, perhaps cut down a bit on the snap pushing, whenever I think "wtf is wrong with Docker", someone installed the snap version. One thing I would like: Ubuntu Declarative Donkey, come on, get some inspiration from NixOS, make it simpler, it's time.
rlpb 4y ago
I work for Canonical (but I'm speaking for myself; I'm not authorised to speak for Canonical anyway). I've been around in Free Software since the nineties. At that time, it seemed very much a hobbyist effort and entirely outside the commercial world. I liked the idea of empowering users, but as much as I wanted the model to be successful, it was unclear if it was sustainable. There were plenty of naysayers. Back then there were a bunch of new companies trying to find a business model around Free Software. Many folded. Canonical is one of the few still standing. There's a huge bunch of work that's needed to maintain a distribution that people tend not to volunteer for, but that still needs doing. Having a functional business model allows this work to get done. So yes, of course Ubuntu is a commercial product. The commercial side is needed to fund the free side. How this is done is a delicate balance, but how Canonical has negotiated this seems to be OK because it's one of the few still left standing. Better that than nothing at all. Debian is a bit of an exception, but it doesn't properly work as a counterexample because a number of Debian Developers are employed by Canonical whose work also goes into Debian, and the non-DDs at Canonical working on Ubuntu also send a firehose of patches to Debian. I wouldn't claim that Debian couldn't stand on its without this contribution, but equally one can't really discount it either. Speculation that Ubuntu will move what it has provided for free to a paywall or a subscription wall seems unhelpful to me, given that this has never actually happened in its history. The speculation seems to arise, and Canonical/Ubuntu is getting this current flak, for having dared to provide more.
- noobermin 4y ago
  Look, I am sympathetic to Canonical, and a lot of those on the other side of the debate do feel a but scummy. They do strike a certain impression of people who just want something for free, like a cartoonish stereotype of a freeloader. That said, I do feel like a lot of the pushback that Canonical got would have been avoided if they just didn't try to advertise in terminal output, as benign as it was in my opinion. I don't know what the right answer is. Clearly some sort of balance has worked for both Red Hat (although that is shifting) and Canonical, it's just a question of whether pulling too hard into things people feel is scummy will stand the test of time.
  - 4y ago
imtemplain 4y ago
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ramboldio 4y ago
I would be glad to wire Canonical some money, iff Canonical would offer a subscription that would relief me from some of the remaining pain of running Ubuntu. Most importantly that would be running a VM for MS Office, Adobe and Autodesk without all the friction of having a complete desktop inside another window, managing shared folders etc etc. I'm already paying VMWare $80/yr for a shitty experience and would be glad to switch. Alternativley, just charge for premium support for individuals that actually helps out. I'm not a financial advisor, but is running ads and bothering people with all this snap BS really the best strategy they can came up with?
botanical 4y ago
And I love Ubuntu for that. Everything just works and I never have problems with it. No one wants to struggle when using an OS, and OSes always have some type of glitch.
fs111 4y ago
I am sorry, but is this a surprise to anyone? I don't want to sound snarky but wasn't that always clear to everyone?
- pxc 4y ago
  I'm under the impression that many people genuinely believe or have believed that Ubuntu is a community project to the same degree as other corporation-adjacent Linux distros like Fedora or openSUSE. And it kinda was 15 years ago! But it is not, today.
Zurrrrr 4y ago
Ubuntu is the Windows of Linux. If you're a more technical user, no reason to run it since you can have something leaner and more fine-tuned and customized to you're needed. But if you're not a technical user, it's probably perfect as it gets less in the way from whatever spreadsheet or document or web work you have to do. The compromise is of course the bloat and all the stuff running under the surface to make all that work. Different distros for different use cases.
- timbit42 4y ago
  Ubuntu stopped focusing on being the premiere desktop experience when the dropped Unity for Gnome 3. Linux Mint has surpassed Ubuntu and become a better desktop Linux.
pabe 4y ago
<3 Ubuntu desktop & server. Slick, consistent UX. Smooth upgrades. Didn't have an issue for years. Tried Manjaro but that has shown to create considerably more work than Ubuntu.

51 points by pabs3 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

I get why its so, but Ubuntu being the "default" linux distro is annoying when you aren't running Ubuntu. I run into little things like hardcoded Ubuntu paths in apps, or running into some unfixable bug in a cloud instance because the Ubuntu packages are so old.

reacharavindh 4y ago
This is like the “IE is the default browser”, or “I have tested it in Chrome which is what majority uses anyway” arguments that have proven to falter over time anyway. Linux is better off avoiding such “default” choices. It’s not like it is cohesively built like MacOS anyway. We might as well enjoy the fragmentation.
- sbuk 4y ago
  "Linux is better off avoiding such “default” choices" - and this is what holds Linux (the desktop OS) back. Why do people choose Windows or macOS over Linux time and again? Sensible out-of-the-box defaults. They can fire up a new PC and they are off to the races. The same cannot be said for the majority of Linux distros, except perhaps for the *buntu family.
  - taskforcegemini 4y ago
    > Why do people choose Windows or macOS over Linux time and again? that's not how this works. They choose apple and get macOS or they choose pc and get windows with it.
    - sbuk 4y ago
      I'll rephrase then, why do devices preinstalled with Linux continually fail in the mass market?
  - reacharavindh 4y ago
    Oh I am with you on sensible defaults and cohesive OS. But, Linux is too open(for good) that a single player can take control of a massive set of openly developed feature set like that. Canonical certainly cannot be that one... selling something as "hey it's free and open, come use it! , and contribute more features to it.. " then turning around and forcing snaps on them, Amazon ads, and shit like that makes them not worthy IMO. Apple is a commercial entity that purely has the intention of making profit and as a customer you can atleast guess where their incentives are(but can only blindly trust). They also dont benefit from the massive coomunity of developers developing features for them. Airdrop, Continuity thing, display management are stuff they had to pay tons of money to engineers working in house to develop. Hence, they get to dictate the terms. Linux desktop by virtue of being developed by open community doesnt get that commericial dictator. Unless, some company threw their weight behind a custom linux distrbution, and developed a feature set similar to what Apple does on top of base Linux system. But, such commercial entity cannot label themselves as the "free & open" desktop operating system like Canonical does. I see System76 doing something with their own Rust based Desktop thing. If they can bring that cohesion, they get some game.
    - sbuk 4y ago
      Everything you say makes complete sense if I look at it through the lens of someone that unflinchingly adheres to the FLOSS ethos, on that we're never going to agree. My view is that the end user is the most important part of the whole stack. To a certain extent, Apple gets this - yes, the salesbro's in corporations do drive direction to some extent, but they have yet to do anything that is really end-user hostile. Microsoft, also to a less extent do this too. FLOSS claims to benefit end users, but I always question this; to me it seems to benefit developers and those that want to 'stick it to the man' more than anything else. Now I will openly admit to oversimplifying and generalising here, and I'm sure my stance could be easily disproven (see another comment in this thread), but to me the is issue in the article seems to be fundamentally that OSS desktop projects cater to a minority. Servers are something else entirely - I'm an older UNIX beard, so I stick with the BSDs - not a fan of the GNU tool chain. Here, I'm very definitely in the minority.
  - hibbelig 4y ago
    > They can fire up a new PC and they are off to the races. I, personally, would have to spend quite a bit of time tweaking my Karabiner Elements and Hammerspoon configurations before I'm off to the races. Until then, I'm off to a crawl... Can I put the config in git and just clone it on a new machine? Yes. But I can do that on a Linux installation, too.
    - sbuk 4y ago
      With respect, you are the minority - and a vanishingly small one at that. I'm talking about typical end users. The *buntu family should be appealing, but Linux folks disparage because reasons. For folks like you, there's Fedora or Debian.
- esskay 4y ago
  Not so sure it can be compared to IE. For one thing IE was 'there' on your desktop. You'd have to actively choose to install Ubuntu over another distro in most cases. IE was based around gatekeeping your choices. The same can't be said of Ubuntu. It's not the 'default' Linux, its just the one that a majority choose to download and install, because most other distros dont give a damn about user experience or decent documentation. You only have to look at the sites for Slackware, Debian and Gentoo to feel like you've been ported back to the 90s - very offputting to anyone researching which OS to pick.
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
>I run into little things like hardcoded Ubuntu paths in apps what are you referring to? do you mean packages shipped on your distro are broken because the maintainers didn't change the paths or do you mean that pre-compiled binaries don't work? because, I mean, the whole point of open source is that you can personally get your hands dirty and change the stuff. if you use binaries instead of compiling then that's what you get unfortunately
- brucethemoose2 4y ago
  Well, as a recent example, PyTorch 2.0 installed with PyPi (not the version from the Arch repo) had a hardcoded path to some specific CUDA library that I had to find in the PyTorch source to work around.

bonzini 4y ago

CentOS Linux vs. CentOS Stream was not about RHEL not making enough money to Red Hat. Red Hats knew perfectly well that something like Alma or Rocky would pop up and is doing nothing (quite the opposite in fact) to stop them.

bubblethink 4y ago
It was indirectly about money in that CentOS was negative money. RH got nothing back for the time/money it was investing in CentOS. Of course, why they acquired CentOS in the first place is equally puzzling as this outcome was predictable even back then.
- antihero 4y ago
  I reckon it’s mindshare - if you give people CentOS for personal and SME use, then those ops people will drive the choice of RHEL in larger companies.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  Well, they get back that people stay in the RHEL universe isntead of Ubuntu etc. How that all plays out in the long term is of course hard to predict.
- bonzini 4y ago
  All Red Hat products layered on top of RHEL have an upstream distribution that used to be layered on CentOS (RDO for OpenShift, OKD for OpenShift, oVirt for RHV). CentOS was acquihired because it had serious sustainability issues and releases had sometimes been delayed by many months over RHEL. Red Hat couldn't base those upstream projects on a distro that could stop producing releases any time. It was a platform, it didn't have to bring money just like the people who manage a kubernetes cluster don't bring money (the money is brought by those that write the software that runs on said cluster). The problem is that, after a few years, those same products could not afford even the 6-month delay until changes went from RHEL to CentOS. It would basically be a waterfall model, with a huge fixed delay in the critical path before things could be developed and tested. Hence the "left shift" that is CentOS Stream, where OKD and friends can develop on the next minor release of RHEL instead of the last one. Personally over the past year I have migrated a few CentOS 7 machines to CentOS Stream 9 and found it very stable. But if people want to use Alma, Red Hat won't complain.

alanfranz 4y ago

Canonical gets a lot of rants nowadays (some with good reason, e.g. snap), but there’s an upside to the product as well: it’s managed as a desktop distro product from a user’s perspective. I’ve been running a couple of Fedora versions as desktops on fully supported hardware and, oh my, they were quite bad in terms of stability (bluetooth not working, video calls breaking), speed, and general UX when compared with Ubuntu. Sure, distro X, _when properly tuned_, will be better than Ubuntu. But a lot of users, even power users, are in Linux to do their job, which is NOT tuning linux distros. Ubuntu OOB experience right now is still the best for a Linux imho (pop os actually, but it’s an ubuntu spinoff). I tried Debian about 1y ago and its desktop defaults were very cheap, requiring a lot of work as a user. Open to changing my mind. But please, let’a discuss a default experience, not a ton-of-tuning-patches-installs experience .

ungamedplayer 4y ago
I hear this often, but it confuses me, reasons listed below: > Fedora versions as desktops on fully supported hardware Is there a list somewhere, as I have not seen this. (Seriously). > oh my, they were quite bad in terms of stability (bluetooth not working, Fedora has a practiced behavior of fixes getting upstream first before shipping, (rising tide lifts all boats). If bluetooth was broken for fedora, it likely would be broken across multiple distribution, and the ubuntus would have had to do something that wasn't upstream. If ubuntu ship patches different than upstream, then it just come down to a timing issue of when your specific hardware has been fixed. I can talk more about the other points you mentioned, They seem more anecdotal than provable (Which is fine, perception is 9/10ths of the law).
- alanfranz 4y ago
  About Fedora: the company where I work has about 150-200 engineers, and the default suggested Linux is Fedora. A lot of rants and similar issues are shared in support channels. These don’t happen with Ubuntu, at least not with the same rate. hardware is usually some Lenovo Thinkpad (X and P series) that work with RH. Now that you tell me, it seems that Fedora has no official compatibility list. But Ubuntu has it. Isn’t that a Fedora problem? > Fedora has a practiced behavior of fixes getting upstream first before shipping, (rising tide lifts all boats). If bluetooth was broken for fedora, it likely would be broken across multiple distribution, and the ubuntus would have had to do something that wasn't upstream. That's exactly what I mean about Ubuntu being a desktop-oriented _product_. In that instance, it was a kernel problem. Ubuntu clearly has this idea of testing for desktop features, and probably not releasing (or patching) something if it's a problem for desktop users. Fedora just pushed the new kernel through, and probably helped fixing the issue within the kernel. But it's not a great end-user experience. Btw, of course this is an opinion. I don’t have hard long-term, wide-population data on the subject.

r_hoods_ghost 4y ago

"Canonical is unlikely to be that interested in the views of people who have little or no chance of giving them money, people like us." A university in one of the richest countries in the world, the academics employed by it, and the students who attend have little or no chance of giving them money? Of course you do. You just don't want to.

throwway1922 4y ago
Do I assume you never worked in academia? It is not that any employee can just purchase things in academia (at least in 3 different countries I worked at). Most money and purchasing power, approvals go to official-administrators (even if Professors take efforts to apply and receive grants). Spending is highly regulated. There were times I was denied buying RHEL telling me to use a 'free linux'. There is a wide belief (among official-administrators) Linux is free so paying for it is the employee wasting money. To even encourage Dell's linux server offerings I once purchased a few preinstalled RHEL devices but was later asked why not use free ones (or the windows dell offerings as they were strangely cheaper - thanks to bloatware). At the same if you say you need to buy a windows server or zoom license this will be approved as these people know that it is not free. Their society is conditioned in this way. In the rare case if this was approved, usually there are external auditors that analyse spent money and come back at you for not using free linux. Ideally Canonical and RedHat (via IBM) goes to these administrators (or meetings in Ministry of Education) and advise them that making software is $$.
- r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
  I have worked in academia and I am aware of the restrictions on purchasing. But as an individual you can purchase software for yourself. You can encourage your students to purchase software. You can even make it a requirement of a course, in the same way as buying a textbook is. I have never come across that is more reluctant to actually pay for the tools to do their job than devs. Hell we've even built a quasi religious cult in foss that revolves around not paying. Yes yes I know the "free" In foss is supposed to be free as in freedom, but in practice it ain't, it's all about free as in beer. See the gp and the offence taken at actually being asked to pay for the foundational tool they use to do their job.

ta1243 4y ago

I'd love to pay for Ubuntu, but they don't make it easy. If I start an AWS windows, rhel or suse EC2 I pay far more than with ubuntu. I'm not sure if the Ubuntu AMI has any "software" charge, but RHEL on a t3.large is 14.32c/hour in US-East-2, Ubuntu is 8.32c/hour.

octotoad 4y ago

I wonder how much of Mark Shuttleworth's personal funding is still at play in keeping Canonical alive. A quick web search returns articles claiming the company has been profitable since 2018 and that an IPO may be in the works. I can understand how something like Red Hat has managed to survive over the past twenty years, given the name it has built for itself in the "enterprise" Linux world (for better or worse), but Canonical continuing to operate off the back of Ubuntu has always baffled me.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago
Ubuntu has been the most popular Linux distribution for nearly 20 years. Are you surprised that translates in support contracts in the enterprise world? It isn’t to me. People keep using what they are familiar with on their servers. Plus it’s one of the default option at most hosting provider.
- jabl 4y ago
  To an extent, I actually am. Redhat became successful because they went after and conquered the "replace expensive proprietary unix risc server with x86+Linux but still want a support contract for CYA reasons and that's how we do it in the enterprise world". Ubuntu is wildly popular on desktops and in the cloud (and largely for good reasons, all the phone-home and marketing etc. aside, it's a solid and polished distro), but I expect a vanishingly small fraction of Ubuntu users actually pay a dime to Canonical. Now Canonical has been trying to monetize Ubuntu in various ways over the years, some better and some worse, but I do hope they succeed so that Ubuntu is long term sustainable.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    Bingo. There is no AIX or HP-UX in the wild anymore, at least not outside of niche or legacy deployments, because RHEL ate it up. Every enterprise I've ever been at required official licenses and official escalation and support SLAs. By offering enterprise support and reasonable response times they became the de facto winner of the Unix enterprise world. Ubuntu still reigns supreme for individual users, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to F500 companies.

neilv 4y ago

I like some of how Ubuntu is polished on the desktop, but I ended up moving 2 startups from Ubuntu to Debian Stable. Debian Stable had fewer regressions in security updates, Ubuntu really dropped the ball on one regression that would make some devices unbootable (Ubuntu strangely silent on the bricking, and I had to confirm it with a contact at another distro company), getting rid of Ubuntu's Snap changing things outside of APT control was a huge relief, and we don't have to worry as much about privacy&security problems of Debian phoning-home. The biggest headache with Debian was installing laptop workstations, due to WiFi usually needing firmware blobs. It required complicated instructions and contortions that made it a million times harder. But that's now solved: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/ https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-in... Also, especially for startups, there are often efficiencies to using Debian Stable for everything for which it can be used. For example, it's not the smallest base of a bespoke Docker container, but there are development and operations (personnel) efficiencies when containers, host servers, and workstations are all running the same thing. Fewer surprises in production, less time and complexity trying to support multiple environments, and you can rapidly debug some things more easily on bare metal on workstation when necessary.

jraph 4y ago
> The biggest headache with Debian was installing laptop workstations was that WiFi needing firmware blobs required complicated instructions and contortions that made it a million times harder. But that's now solved: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/ https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-in... And the official installer is going to provide the non-free firmware now (and non-free firmware will also be in a separate non-free-firmware section of the repositories so you won't need to enable the whole non-free section anymore) https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-12-Installer-Alpha-2 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-12-Installer-Alpha-2
KronisLV 4y ago
> Debian Stable had fewer regressions in security updates, Ubuntu really dropped the ball on one regression that would make some devices unbootable (Ubuntu strangely silent on the bricking, and I had to confirm it with a contact at another distro company), getting rid of Ubuntu's Snap changing things outside of APT control was a huge relief, and we don't have to worry as much about privacy&security problems of Debian phoning-home. Curiously, I've had regular Debian updates also mess up my install, to where it cannot boot: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/debian-and-grub-are-broken https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/debian-and-... That said, both Debian and Ubuntu have been passable in my experience, both on the desktop and for servers, basically the whole DEB group of distros including something like Linux Mint and others on the desktop as a daily driver. I might be an outlier, but they've generally let me get things done more quickly and easily when compared to something like CentOS, RHEL, Oracle Linux and so on (though Fedora on the desktop was generally pretty good). On RPM distros things tended to go wrong, everything from using Docker instead of Podman for Docker Swarm in some smaller projects not being entirely supported (even when Podman didn't have feature parity), some oddness when setting up K3s clusters because I didn't have resources for OpenShift or whatever, regular Docker networking failing and needing to add masquerading to firewall configuration, issues with SELinux not playing nicely with some software, kswapd utterly killing the CPU when the system is running low on swap and others. > Also, especially for startups, there are often efficiencies to using Debian Stable for everything for which it can be used. For example, it's not the smallest base of a bespoke Docker container, but there are development and operations (personnel) efficiencies when containers, host servers, and workstations are all running the same thing. Fewer surprises in production, less time and complexity trying to support multiple environments, and you can rapidly debug some things more easily on bare metal on workstation when necessary. I actually moved over my container images to Ubuntu as well, so that I can setup dev environments on the desktop directly the same way I would for a container (sometimes debugging inside of containers is a pain): https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/using-ubuntu-as-the-base-for-all-of-my-containers https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/using-ubuntu-as-the-base-fo... So now I'm basically running the setup you're describing (the same OS locally, on servers and also in containers) even if I've settled on Ubuntu LTS instead because of the longer EOL and it's been a great experience so far! That said, the whole snaps/Flatpak/AppImage situation could be a bit better.

bubblethink 4y ago

Ubuntu has immense goodwill and will have a warm place in everyone's hearts for a long time. I hope they don't squander it away with snaps or other stuff. It's a hard business though. Not sure how they keep it afloat forever.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

Yes, and it's a good thing. I want them to have a business model, because I want them to survive. Not every project can be as amazing as debian and run strong for so many years on volonteers alone.

pabs3 4y ago
Debian definitely isn't volunteers alone, lots of companies pay people to work on Debian.

low_tech_love 4y ago

About 15 years ago I moved from Ubuntu to Debian testing and it was probably one of the best feelings I ever had in my professional career. Bumps have happened buy I never looked back and probably never will. Kudos to them, but the bloat is too much for me.

KyeRussell 4y ago
Any 15-year-old justification should be looked at with a suitably tilted head.
planede 4y ago
I suggest to use Debian "unstable". I think the name "unstable" made a lot of disservice to it. The thing with testing is that security wise it's the worst of both unstable and stable. It does not get timely security fixes from upstream, nor from security backports to stable.

andrewstuart 4y ago

I’ve got no problem with the way canonical handles ubuntu at all. This post seems to imply them at canonical is some sort of evil overlord. If you don’t like the ads, go to a different distro - that’s the good thing about Linux, theres a distro to suit everyone.

teekert 4y ago

I love Ubuntu., It installs in minutes and then stays out of my way for years and years. I want them to make money so Ubuntu keeps existing. I think it's just impossible to run a company on full RMS mode. But let's hope they stay decent, perhaps cut down a bit on the snap pushing, whenever I think "wtf is wrong with Docker", someone installed the snap version. One thing I would like: Ubuntu Declarative Donkey, come on, get some inspiration from NixOS, make it simpler, it's time.

rlpb 4y ago

I work for Canonical (but I'm speaking for myself; I'm not authorised to speak for Canonical anyway). I've been around in Free Software since the nineties. At that time, it seemed very much a hobbyist effort and entirely outside the commercial world. I liked the idea of empowering users, but as much as I wanted the model to be successful, it was unclear if it was sustainable. There were plenty of naysayers. Back then there were a bunch of new companies trying to find a business model around Free Software. Many folded. Canonical is one of the few still standing. There's a huge bunch of work that's needed to maintain a distribution that people tend not to volunteer for, but that still needs doing. Having a functional business model allows this work to get done. So yes, of course Ubuntu is a commercial product. The commercial side is needed to fund the free side. How this is done is a delicate balance, but how Canonical has negotiated this seems to be OK because it's one of the few still left standing. Better that than nothing at all. Debian is a bit of an exception, but it doesn't properly work as a counterexample because a number of Debian Developers are employed by Canonical whose work also goes into Debian, and the non-DDs at Canonical working on Ubuntu also send a firehose of patches to Debian. I wouldn't claim that Debian couldn't stand on its without this contribution, but equally one can't really discount it either. Speculation that Ubuntu will move what it has provided for free to a paywall or a subscription wall seems unhelpful to me, given that this has never actually happened in its history. The speculation seems to arise, and Canonical/Ubuntu is getting this current flak, for having dared to provide more.

noobermin 4y ago
Look, I am sympathetic to Canonical, and a lot of those on the other side of the debate do feel a but scummy. They do strike a certain impression of people who just want something for free, like a cartoonish stereotype of a freeloader. That said, I do feel like a lot of the pushback that Canonical got would have been avoided if they just didn't try to advertise in terminal output, as benign as it was in my opinion. I don't know what the right answer is. Clearly some sort of balance has worked for both Red Hat (although that is shifting) and Canonical, it's just a question of whether pulling too hard into things people feel is scummy will stand the test of time.
- 4y ago

imtemplain 4y ago

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ramboldio 4y ago

I would be glad to wire Canonical some money, iff Canonical would offer a subscription that would relief me from some of the remaining pain of running Ubuntu. Most importantly that would be running a VM for MS Office, Adobe and Autodesk without all the friction of having a complete desktop inside another window, managing shared folders etc etc. I'm already paying VMWare $80/yr for a shitty experience and would be glad to switch. Alternativley, just charge for premium support for individuals that actually helps out. I'm not a financial advisor, but is running ads and bothering people with all this snap BS really the best strategy they can came up with?

botanical 4y ago

And I love Ubuntu for that. Everything just works and I never have problems with it. No one wants to struggle when using an OS, and OSes always have some type of glitch.

fs111 4y ago

I am sorry, but is this a surprise to anyone? I don't want to sound snarky but wasn't that always clear to everyone?

pxc 4y ago
I'm under the impression that many people genuinely believe or have believed that Ubuntu is a community project to the same degree as other corporation-adjacent Linux distros like Fedora or openSUSE. And it kinda was 15 years ago! But it is not, today.

Zurrrrr 4y ago

Ubuntu is the Windows of Linux. If you're a more technical user, no reason to run it since you can have something leaner and more fine-tuned and customized to you're needed. But if you're not a technical user, it's probably perfect as it gets less in the way from whatever spreadsheet or document or web work you have to do. The compromise is of course the bloat and all the stuff running under the surface to make all that work. Different distros for different use cases.

timbit42 4y ago
Ubuntu stopped focusing on being the premiere desktop experience when the dropped Unity for Gnome 3. Linux Mint has surpassed Ubuntu and become a better desktop Linux.

pabe 4y ago

<3 Ubuntu desktop & server. Slick, consistent UX. Smooth upgrades. Didn't have an issue for years. Tried Manjaro but that has shown to create considerably more work than Ubuntu.