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Ask HN: Why do you use Ubuntu?

1 points by flanked-evergl ↗ HN
I think Ubuntu is one of the worst quality distros that exists. They try to do everything in their own way, and usually seem to put very little effort into "their own" way, and seem to lack understanding of why things were done in another way by other distros, resulting in something which is really painful to use.

I use Ubuntu because I need intune, and M$ seems to have recognized like for like and decided that if they limit support to one the worst quality Linux distro then they can keep market share for longer as people will have a conception of Linux as something low quality and poorly built which mirror's Microsoft's own products.

Just some specific problems:

- I have never had a release update work on Ubuntu

- Ubuntu used poorly wrapped SysV init scripts as their backing for Systemd units for years, resulting in silent failures when the SysV init script errored out, as the errors were not properly recongized by systemd because whoever wrapped the SysV init scripts did not know what they were doing.

- I have rarely used something via snapd without having some problems. Most recently was with a colleague who used snapd to install docker but the result was a docker installation which did not read the docker config file from their home directory.

Fedora is better in almost every way. Fedora is not more difficult to use, it goes wrong a lot less often.

So why do people still use Ubuntu?

10 comments

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bytestrix
umm i think that people are using Ubuntu because of stability and community, and also people get used to of that now even if they try to use some other os they wont be comfortable, there are alooot of different better OS but for those people ubuntu is like their favorite food , I use arch BTW
krpovmu
Because my company has a contract with Micro$lop, and they have a bunch of malware that only works on that piece-of-junk Ubuntu
fsuts
Businesses are roughly split into only two camps Ubuntu or redhat as they have established business support. So lots of software and drivers and hardware will be tested against Ubuntu, as it’s free

Ubuntu is also seen as the user friendly first entry into Linux and people who use a Debian based distribution are likely to stay with Debian derivatives rather than re-learn things on the red hat stream.

Seeing how low Linux desktop market share is, I don’t think it matters to the Linux community which is used, more important that market share increases

runjake
I don't. Ubuntu forcing snap and other non-standard junk on server was the last straw. I've moved to Debian for servers and Fedora (usually KDE) and Omarchy for desktops. Fedora seems much higher quality than Ubuntu these days and faster! dnf seems comparatively slow compared to apt, but that's the least of my worries.
d3Xt3r
> dnf seems comparatively slow compared to apt

Are you talking about dnf4 or 5? Because IME, dnf5 is pretty much on par, if not better, in terms of speed. Although the first time you run dnf it might seem a bit slow, because it builds a metadata cache from scratch.

Also see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUcWi4OUJPc

runjake
I’m not sure which version. My impressions may be outdated. I’ll take a look at the video. Thank you!
ValtteriL
I use it at work for ubiquity.

Every new member with Linux experience at least feels familiar with it, and therefore can get to speed faster and with confidence. When we build containers to be used or built on by other teams, Ubuntu as the base minimizes the friction and support needed for the same reason.

There are Arch/Fedora/etc users too, but Ubuntu is the common denominator. I think it is good enough.

At home I started with Debian and after a few missteps have always come back to it.

samud
I use arch btw!
Sha1rholder
Simply because Ubuntu uses apt.

1. TrueNAS and PVE are based on Debian (apt); 2. the OS images provided by major Chinese cloud vendors like Aliyun and Tencent Cloud that use dnf (like Rocky Linux and Fedora) are MUCH older than Debian and Ubuntu.

I simply want my environment to be more consistent and scripts more reusable.