I believe the overwhelming popularity of ubuntu derives from it's similarities to windows, and therefore adoption by windows refugees. A non-technical aspect o

I believe the overwhelming popularity of ubuntu derives from it's similarities to windows, and therefore adoption by windows refugees. A non-technical aspect of this is the widespread epidemic of windows brain damage: that is the usually life-long shaping of a user's perspective of what is "normal" for an OS, resulting from being weaned on a windows OS. This has many many embodiments. One particularly egregious aspect is the idea that one should choose the one "most popular" option, instead of evaluating the technical merits of the many available options. Thus, just use ubuntu. For servers especially, ubuntu is often inappropriate. For instance a GUI is not often desirable in a server only computer. snap is another example. This non-native package manager breaks the basic security model of a linux distribution. While distro packagers don't routinely audit every package, they do pass through a distro-local creation process. Whereas snap imports a binary package from a remote 3rd party repo. This again is a result of windows brain damage, as the standard mechanism for installing non-M$ s/w on a windows machine is to install a binary from a 3rd party repo. A diverse ecosystem is most healthy. In this light the recent years of corporate consolidation of the free software ecosystem are concerning in many ways...