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Comment by mreiland | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I use Mint 17.2 inside VMWare and didn't have a single problem. Not sure what VMWare version you're using, but 'hands down' suggests other distros have a lot of problems, but I don't see them.

That would be because Mint is pretty much Ubuntu (it uses the Ubuntu archives and packages).

There is added UI customisation on top, but that's irrelevant to it working better or not as a VMware guest.

I'd still be interested what massive probs other distros have on e.g. VMWare?

Your wording there 'massive probs' is disingenuous. What I said was simply "works better", I never said anything about major problems. In fact, I specifically said the other distro's can be made to work just as well, but it takes more effort.

But to answer your question, I've found desktop performance to be better in Ubuntu for the same specs, many distro's don't play well with pause/unpause (it can cause time skew that messes with things like https certs), and things of that nature. Then of course there's the "easy install", although a few other distro's feature it as well.

Nothing that doesn't have fixes, but as someone who is more interested in getting the work done than tinkering with the linux install, I just go with Ubuntu.

It's a burdon to install VMWare Drivers into systems other than ubuntu, either you use open-vm-tools and loose some functionality or you try to compile vmware tools by yourself, which is really hard on anything other than ubuntu.

However open-vm-tools are getting better and better every day. In the past I had lots of trouble with them and up to Fedora 18 you mostly needed to rely on the vmware native tooling. arch had the same. Currently the only thing which open-vm-tools is missing is the 'unity'-mode. However on Arch you need to rely on AUR to get the filesystem driver and the network driver, which is really aweful on Fedora you can't install these in a easy way aswell. Only ubuntu has it which is mainly caused since open-vm-tools-dkms is not 'free'.

It's been a couple of years but the last time I tried Fedora in VMWare the video only had 3 resolutions and the audio didn't work without a lot of googling and tweaking. Without installing guest tools an Ubuntu would have 6 or more resolutions to use with xrandr and audio worked out of the box.

>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.

Friends don't let friends use RPM.

I have not, perhaps I was being a bit hyperbolic but I think in general the sentiment is still mostly true.

If we're talking about Desktops running on VMWare, Fedora should give you what you need. Of course it's personal preference, so Ubuntu will work as well.

However, if you are using it as a server of sorts, you really shouldn't use either of those distros. Use CentOS or RHEL, or something purpose built for a long term stable server. Yes I"m aware of Ubuntu and Fedora server editions -- but both distros are focused on being jacks-of-all-trades instead of purpose built as a server only.

Clearly, saying Ubuntu works best on VMWare is a fallacy. Any Triple-A distro will work fine with minimal fuss.

Thank you for not being a jackass who starts preaching to me about what I should or should not be doing with absolutely no knowledge of my work or my use case.

I'm so glad you avoided doing that.

I'm not sure why you feel you need to be so disingenuous here - you're all over this thread arguing with everyone about Ubuntu being the best.

But I'll bite.

From your several posts, it's become clear you are running an Ubuntu guest as a desktop on top of VMWare. It seems rather silly to pay for a full VMware license to just run some desktops, not to mention hypervisors like VMware and Xen really aren't great at doing just desktop guests.

You make claims that Ubuntu works better "hands down" on VMware than any other distro - which is absurd. It's far more likely you either haven't tried, or did something wrong. The things you point to that are "better" on Ubuntu are virtually (or literally) the same things on other distros, or have zero bearing of whatever distro the guest is (pause and resume are features of the hypervisor, not your distro).

In any event, everything I previously said still holds true. If you need a server, use a server-focused distro.

You misunderstood me, but it looks like you're not the only one who did so I probably could have worded it better.

> If I get to choose I'll run arch linux, but inside vmware it's ubuntu hands down.

What I mean is the distro I reach for first is Arch Linux unless it has to run in vmware, then the choice for me is Ubuntu, hands down.

I was making no comment about it being the best vmware distro "hands down". The entire post was just a quick note that I choose to run Ubuntu for reasons other than the environment reasons cited by the poster I was responding to.

Having said that, this will be the last time I respond to you. You've obviously got some strange personal stake in what I consider to be a good linux distro and I have better things to do than argue with you about it.

> However, if you are using it as a server of sorts, you really shouldn't use either of those distros.

You are saying around 60% of sysadmins using Amazon instances are wrong. The odds are not in your favour :)

> You are saying around 60% of sysadmins using Amazon instances are wrong.

Yet, 100% of EC2 is built with RHEL/CentOS + Xen.[1][2]

Ubuntu was the default VM when they launched EC2, so most users naturally just used the default. But even in Amazon's eyes, when doing "serious" server work, reach for a purpose-built server distro -- not a jack-of-all-trades.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-ec2-cloud-is-made-up-of-...

[2] http://bleikertz.com/blog/amazon_ec2_underlying_architecture...

My experience with debian inside virtualbox on my local machine has been perfect. I've also had no issues with running it on vsphere, but I haven't tried with vmware workstation.

I tried virtualbox a while back and the reason I eventually moved back to vmware is because vbox requires you to hit some API's in order to run a vm detached, which I do for a few of my VM's. VMWare you can do it by setting a preference and closing the window.

It's not a big thing, but I was already established with vmware so I decided it wasn't worth the effort to work around it.

I've also read that vmware is more performant than virtualbox both in general and in terms of hardware accelerated gpu. All 3 of those just pushed me to staying with vmware.

However, I will say, I vastly preferred the UI for virtualbox. I've seen internet fights about it, but for me, virtualbox most definitely has the better UI.

> vbox requires you to hit some API's in order to run a vm detached

Not anymore. You can just launch the box without any GUI with one command line:

https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch07.html#vboxheadless

That's good to know, it always seemed strange that they didn't have a simple way of doing it.

assuming detached means without the window: you can also hold down the shift key when clicking the start button and it will run without opening the separate windows.

Setting up VirtualBox without a GUI is a royal pain!

All of the command line parameters are documented, but there are no complete examples of a typical setup. Not too many people bother with it either, so examples online in blog posts are only semi-useful.

I wound up setting one up on a different machine then working through the various commands required to get my config to match my example.

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