Comment by myztic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by myztic | Hacker News Reader

(This is completely Off-Topic but it's been bothering me for such a long time now and I never got sufficient answers)

Why am I seeing Ubuntu on Screens of developers, experts, et cetera in Cover Stories such as these, most of the time with the 100% plain Ubuntu Desktop with all the craziness that comes with it? It feels like this is the case 90% of the time. Two more (recent) examples I can remember:

1) Fyodor (Guy behind nmap) running plain Ubuntu on a Notebook while giving a speech at a conference

2) Developers at Honda (Video was an Asimo promotional video) running plain Ubuntu

Since in my personal opinion Ubuntu is not the technically superior choice in these cases (though that can be debated), it can not simply be explained with it being backed by a company, there being support you can buy for the system if you need it.

What motivates technically extremely skilled people to use "Plain Ubuntu" instead of one of the many alternatives?

I really don't understand, please enlighten me!

(I actually think it's worth "spending" some Karma on this if I for once get a satisfying answer)

Most of these people have passed the stage of caring about the desktop itself. I would say they are simply interested in a bash shell that sits on a reliable, well maintained, stable distro with good community knowledge.

When you spend all your time at a prompt you don't really care about unity vs cinnamon vs anything else.

Debian is stable and has fantastic package management, and Ubuntu builds on that with a vibrant community and wide support. For these users, Ubuntu 'just works' and lets them get on with what they want to do. It's about as simple as that.

curious what myztic would recommend as well? ubuntu may not be 'ideal' but it works and installs a lot easier than arguably any other linux distro. i have no problem using debian/arch/etc but if you are just trying to get up and going ubuntu seems to always be the easiest.

I personally use xubuntu. What myztic meant was using "plain ubuntu" instead of alternatives like xubuntu, lubuntu or kubuntu.

Xubuntu is medium light for me and is fast. Previously I had only fluxbox on Kubuntu for the KDE apps which was extremely fast but with bugs in fluxbox I switched.

Nope, I really meant Ubuntu compared to other Operating systems / Distributions.

See also my other comment, I changed my opinion on that.

What I originally thought about were systems like NixOS (for serious development), or something more minimalistic that offers greater control like Slackware, a *BSD (Jails, byhyve, dtrace(!)), or even just Debian (less flashy, more stable and robust).

I actually have thought about it some more and gave Ubuntu a spin and now I am 100% with you. Might seem a little weird, this "sudden" change of heart, but yes, you are right.

If I am honest, I spend 90% of my time in a terminal, browser or editor (which is also in a terminal), so give me a system that allows me to easily install my most beloved programs via command line and handy binary packages, a system that is reasonably stable, runs on most hardware, and that has a big community and a lot of documentation, sounds like a good deal actually.

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