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I really hope we get a contender for the linux servers space. Maybe it will be Canonical, maybe not, but having Red Hat/CentOS everywhere (in new deployments at

by chronid 12y ago

I really hope we get a contender for the linux servers space. Maybe it will be Canonical, maybe not, but having Red Hat/CentOS everywhere (in new deployments at least) is starting to tire me.

mhurron 12y ago
Ya standardization sucks. I miss having to rewrite scripts for every pet Linux distro the admin decided to use.
- gauravkumar552 12y ago
  More standardization, less complication.
- chronid 12y ago
  Having (or better, limiting yourself to) a single vendor is not standardization at all, in my opinion. I'm not talking about having a single vendor in a single company at a certain point in time - that's good, doing differently is hard to manage (since usually the sysadmin team is really too small). I'm talking about having all the sysadmin jobs in my area using Linux as a synonym for Red Hat Linux.
  - mhurron 12y ago
    > Having a single vendor is not standardization at all It's the only standardization that you're going to get in enterprise Linux and it's no different than targeting Windows. > I'm talking about having all the sysadmin jobs in my area using Linux as a synonym for Red Hat Linux. And the problem with that is?
    - chronid 12y ago
      I hope that's not the only standardization we will get, since I don't really like vendor lock-ins (talking about Windows...) and I think we need something better than that. Silly me? I know. And still I don't like it. Maybe I am still too young. :)
pedrocr 12y ago
Isn't Ubuntu already dominant in cloud deployments?
- bsilvereagle 12y ago
  In personal and small projects, yes. But not necessarily for large, scaled, infrastructure.
  - dharma1 12y ago
    not sure which distro is dominant on scaled projects but Ubuntu gets plenty of use on large projects too - from the article: "Global enterprises including AT&T, Bharti, Bouygues Telecom, British Telecom, China Telecom, China Unicom, Cogent Communications, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Korea Telecom, NEC, NTT, Numergy, Orange France, Time Warner Cable, Turk Telecom, Verizon and Yandex, as well as leading web scale services such as Netflix, Instagram, Hipchat and Quora are all building next generation services on Ubuntu"
    - sixbrx 12y ago
      "Article" is one word for it, a more specific phrase would be "press release". It's hard to tell from these lists how seriously a lot of those companies are relying on Ubuntu. Obviously some are (HP for example). But I've seen my own employers listed in press releases where us implementors were wondering "do we really still use that stuff? Oh yeah I think there may be a box or two still running that from when we were testing the waters."
  - jcastro 12y ago
    I wouldn't call Netflix, Instagram, HP's entire public cloud, and Wikipedia "personal and small projects". Did you even read the article?
  - pedrocr 12y ago
    As far as I have seen it's actually dominant in general. The only stats I found[1] say it is totally dominant in EC2 deployments (55% of the total with second place with 24% being a generic "linux"). [1] http://thecloudmarket.com/stats http://thecloudmarket.com/stats
Spittie 12y ago
I'd say that the closest thing we have is Debian. With paid support, there is Oracle Linux and SLES (and obviously Ubuntu). RHEL/CentOS aren't popular for the lack of alternatives, but more because that's what most sysadmins are used to use.
stephenr 12y ago
How about something new. Forget this idea of a company that produces yet another fucking distro with just enough changes so its not 100% compatible with whatever it's forked from, and then charge for support. How about a company that simply sells support services for an existing, community owned distro like Debian. If it makes sense for that company to donate to the Debian project, and/or hire staff to contribute to Debian packages to improve them, thats great too.
- AceJohnny2 12y ago
  Huh, I thought I could easily list a dozen companies that will provide commercial support for Debian. In the early 2000s, HP had committed to supporting Debian, but I no longer see it listed on their Linux Support page. I know the european market has a healthy ecosystem of consultant companies that provide support for open source products.
  - stephenr 12y ago
    It's quite likely there are companies providing the type of thing Im talking about already - I haven't really looked. My point was more that this is the type of thing people/companies should be looking for in a Linux support contract, rather than another "services" company rolling it's own Linux distro so they can lock customers in with incompatibility.
pnathan 12y ago
Take a look at SuSE. They're ridiculously quiet, but I gather from their employees that they are pretty much lazer-focused on serving business needs and thus are doing well as a company.
- chronid 12y ago
  I will, thanks :)

by chronid 12y ago

I really hope we get a contender for the linux servers space. Maybe it will be Canonical, maybe not, but having Red Hat/CentOS everywhere (in new deployments at least) is starting to tire me.

mhurron 12y ago

Ya standardization sucks. I miss having to rewrite scripts for every pet Linux distro the admin decided to use.

gauravkumar552 12y ago
More standardization, less complication.
chronid 12y ago
Having (or better, limiting yourself to) a single vendor is not standardization at all, in my opinion. I'm not talking about having a single vendor in a single company at a certain point in time - that's good, doing differently is hard to manage (since usually the sysadmin team is really too small). I'm talking about having all the sysadmin jobs in my area using Linux as a synonym for Red Hat Linux.
- mhurron 12y ago
  > Having a single vendor is not standardization at all It's the only standardization that you're going to get in enterprise Linux and it's no different than targeting Windows. > I'm talking about having all the sysadmin jobs in my area using Linux as a synonym for Red Hat Linux. And the problem with that is?
  - chronid 12y ago
    I hope that's not the only standardization we will get, since I don't really like vendor lock-ins (talking about Windows...) and I think we need something better than that. Silly me? I know. And still I don't like it. Maybe I am still too young. :)

pedrocr 12y ago

Isn't Ubuntu already dominant in cloud deployments?

bsilvereagle 12y ago
In personal and small projects, yes. But not necessarily for large, scaled, infrastructure.
- dharma1 12y ago
  not sure which distro is dominant on scaled projects but Ubuntu gets plenty of use on large projects too - from the article: "Global enterprises including AT&T, Bharti, Bouygues Telecom, British Telecom, China Telecom, China Unicom, Cogent Communications, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Korea Telecom, NEC, NTT, Numergy, Orange France, Time Warner Cable, Turk Telecom, Verizon and Yandex, as well as leading web scale services such as Netflix, Instagram, Hipchat and Quora are all building next generation services on Ubuntu"
  - sixbrx 12y ago
    "Article" is one word for it, a more specific phrase would be "press release". It's hard to tell from these lists how seriously a lot of those companies are relying on Ubuntu. Obviously some are (HP for example). But I've seen my own employers listed in press releases where us implementors were wondering "do we really still use that stuff? Oh yeah I think there may be a box or two still running that from when we were testing the waters."
- jcastro 12y ago
  I wouldn't call Netflix, Instagram, HP's entire public cloud, and Wikipedia "personal and small projects". Did you even read the article?
- pedrocr 12y ago
  As far as I have seen it's actually dominant in general. The only stats I found[1] say it is totally dominant in EC2 deployments (55% of the total with second place with 24% being a generic "linux"). [1] http://thecloudmarket.com/stats http://thecloudmarket.com/stats

Spittie 12y ago

I'd say that the closest thing we have is Debian. With paid support, there is Oracle Linux and SLES (and obviously Ubuntu). RHEL/CentOS aren't popular for the lack of alternatives, but more because that's what most sysadmins are used to use.

stephenr 12y ago

How about something new. Forget this idea of a company that produces yet another fucking distro with just enough changes so its not 100% compatible with whatever it's forked from, and then charge for support. How about a company that simply sells support services for an existing, community owned distro like Debian. If it makes sense for that company to donate to the Debian project, and/or hire staff to contribute to Debian packages to improve them, thats great too.

AceJohnny2 12y ago
Huh, I thought I could easily list a dozen companies that will provide commercial support for Debian. In the early 2000s, HP had committed to supporting Debian, but I no longer see it listed on their Linux Support page. I know the european market has a healthy ecosystem of consultant companies that provide support for open source products.
- stephenr 12y ago
  It's quite likely there are companies providing the type of thing Im talking about already - I haven't really looked. My point was more that this is the type of thing people/companies should be looking for in a Linux support contract, rather than another "services" company rolling it's own Linux distro so they can lock customers in with incompatibility.

pnathan 12y ago

Take a look at SuSE. They're ridiculously quiet, but I gather from their employees that they are pretty much lazer-focused on serving business needs and thus are doing well as a company.

chronid 12y ago
I will, thanks :)