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Comment by bgorman | Hacker News Reader

Honestly the only Linux distros worth trying are Gentoo, Arch, Fedora and RHEL/Oracle/CentOS. With anything else you are just wasting your time with amateur hour attempts to cobble together a Windows/Mac OS competitor without a good understanding of how all the components fit together.

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Under no circumstance should anyone listen to this user nor should they run Gentoo or Arch on a production machine. I use Arch on my personal computer but for work I find Debian testing to be the perfect distro. Stability is a trait which matters.

I've been super happy with Gentoo in production for at least a decade. I don't see the issue? I have Gentoo on my desktop+laptop too. But, I also run loads of Debian server systems too. My worst upgrade experience has been Ubuntu systems

Does that mean, you compile updates elsewhere and load the binaries on production?

(Many) years ago I knew someone who was very happy running their business off Gentoo. "It took two weeks to "make world" with the ultimate optimization settings. "But it runs great!"

I never could bring myself to ask if they were ok with being down for 2 weeks if they needed to re-install. Say, in a case where they had an intrusion and didn't trust their backups...

There's no reason they'd have to be down for two weeks in that case. They could use a binary distribution to immediately get back into shape, and then switch over after compilation's finished, or they could compile without -OX and it'd take almost nothing, and then they'd be good to go.

Really, though, nowadays compiling everything, even compiling things for optimal performance, doesn't take that long. Your production machines shouldn't have web browsers, and without the C++ garbage behemoths on it, compilation takes like half an hour on most machines.

I'm not a Gentoo user, but it's kind of silly to act like it makes recovering substantially harder than any other distribution.

This was at a time when compiling just the kernel took 30 minutes, so YMMV. But obviously, I don't know. Just didn't seem to me like the choice is want to make for running a business. Again, ymmv...

I imagine anyone doing this seriously would have a spearate system for building binaries. Obviously if that system was compromised, you would not be in a great situation, but it should be much easire to lock that down.

Do you find debian testing to be stable enough compared to debian stable, for servers?

For similar reasons (stability), I always go for the current stable (although I've a couple machines on oldoldstable, because it takes a while to upgrade...).

fwiw, i run debian unstable in production for 6+ years, updating every few weeks, with 0 issues.

i would assume that testing should be rock solid.

I run Arch Linux for work even though we're a Debian shop, and it has a great many efficiency advantages. I think in hours they are more than worth the three hours of productivity loss it would take me to repair my machine in case something bad happens. Indeed, AUR and the extreme adaptability of Arch probably saves me 2-3 hours a week.

Meh.

I see a lot of people in IT who don't directly do systems-related work (think of QA people for example).

Without Ubuntu they'd be either running mac os or windows.

Ubuntu lowers the bar of linux-on-desktop accessibilty by a lot.

For a lot of people it's okay not to have a good understaning og how all the components fit together.

Agreed, but also: it's important to know that some of the "hardcore/tunable" distros don't provide a good understanding of how components fit together either.

I don't know how it is now, but many years ago it was a running joke that most Gentoo users hadn't the faintest idea of how anything worked, but felt "hardcore" because they could pass many command line flags to the build and felt they were "optimizing" their system -- actual gains were not demonstrably noticeable, but they "felt fast" -- and they had no understanding whatsoever of gcc flags for example. Experienced users had to patiently explain that no, you shouldn't pass that experimental flag to gcc or everything would break.

"Hardcore" Gentoo users believed that by "installing from source" they somehow magically ended up with a faster system. No empirical evidence, of course, just a heartfelt belief compiling source code was magical.

This kind of "hardcore" Gentoo users was very, very, very annoying. Users of Ubuntu were better off: they understood what they worked with regularly and didn't pretend to understand what they didn't need to understand.

I see similar issues from a lot of Arch users tbh. There seems to be a lot of posturing of being a more advanced user, when thats not always the case. I once saw someone confidently explain that their drive device was /dev/nvme instead of /dev/sda because its an arch thing.

I've tried one such "hardcore" distro once (Crux to be exact) and while it was fun for a while, I also wasted a lot of time. Nowadays, I just stick Ubuntu Flavor (am actually running Lubuntu right now) because everything works mostly out of the box. Yes, I know it has its own set of problems, but I have different priorities. I dont particularly care if I get labeled a noob for it.

I also do know a bit of super linux knowledgeable people who dont need to tweak their system and use ubuntu. Sure they used to run super tweaked systems but by now they use lts ubuntu, manually tweaking g their desktop gets old fast. (That said, they do tune the embedded file system they build on that distro and that they are responsible of.) Or developers that work on their interesting problem which is not tweaking a linux desktop.

What does Ubuntu offer over Fedora or Red Hat enterprise Linux?

I'm not saying everyone should run Gentoo, I'm just saying that there is a much more of a justification for Gentoo existing than Ubuntu.

Ubuntu just re-invents the wheel with a bunch of nonstandard stuff so Canonical can sell support see AppArmor, Snaps, Mir, Unity etc...

I just (last 2 weeks) switched from Gentoo to Ubuntu for my personal/home VMs (Linode!). The risk of crap breaking on a emerge world ... was just too high. I think the final straw wsa something related to python2/3 issues breaking emerge it's self. I rebooted it into safe mode, spun up a new Ubuntu image, and rsync'ed to /old_linode/ and then reinstalled bind9 and apache2 and etc. The thing I liked about having local compiles for everything is you could gdb any system binary. As a C programmer for many years, I like seeing real code.

Or, we've been using Linux for a long long time and have no time for compiling from scratch, and like it or not, Ubuntu is the best tested out there for the desktop/laptop. Fedora isn't bad either, mind you.

I'd never run Ubuntu on the server by choice, mind you, but servers are constrained by other considerations.

Since we're talking about compiling from scratch, I spend about a third of the time compiling since I've got Arch on my machine (albeit a fairly powerful Ryzen). The vast breadth of the AUR saves me a lot of time having to figure out how to compile version z of software x.

Care the back that claim up?

Sure, Ubuntu and Debian change the source code/setup of upstream packages, and generally add very little value compared to just using Gentoo/Arch/Red Hat based distros which actually use upstream components with much less touches and provide a more sane way to install your own packages, run docker container etc. In addition, Ubuntu does not do any real work pushing desktop linux forward.

Ubuntu focuses its efforts on ill-advised efforts like writing its own compositor (Mir) and Desktop environment (Unity).

Currently, most work to advance the Linux desktop is focused on a new project called Wayland (Used by Fedora for last few releases), yet Ubuntu has decided to double down on X11, a legacy project that clearly has no future and has issues like screen tearing that are basically impossible to fix.

Another tangible example related to developers: On Fedora/Arch you can run docker containers without requiring root due to Red Hat's work pushing podman forward, however you cannot do this on Ubuntu/debian because they lag behind upstream

I feel like I've gone back in time to 2013 reading your comment.

What was wrong with unity? Plenty of people preferred it.

Also Mir was ill-advised back in 2013 and was dropped in like 2017.

Wayland has been around as long and is only just becoming usable.

Or are you saying that Ubuntu should have funded Wayland development?

Any proof they're "doubling down" on Wayland?

If Ubuntu isn't pushing desktop Linux forward. Gentoo, Arch or Fedora sure ain't.

Also lol. Podman seems to be an alternative to docker. Why should I use that? Why isn't that ill-advised? Is it because Red Hat made it?

What's wrong with this?

https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/rootless/

Podman is a technical superior implementation to docker. No background daemon is required to run.

See details here: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/02/21/podman-and-bui...

I'm not sure what you mean by Ubuntu doubling down on Wayland. They have no plans to migrate to Wayland.

That article told me nothing useful.

Honestly it seems like a clone of docker selling the slight advantage of root less.

Which docker already does.

I don't understand why I should care that it's a Daemon. In fact that blog post says that they won't go into why it's bad. Just that they do things different.

In fact it seems like it's a "Not invented here" implementation from Red Hat.

Searching Hacker news there's not many posts on it. Seems like it'd be as silly as using Mir to run this in production.

Also on my doubling down, I misquoted you saying they're doubling down on X11.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence of this. I wasted time googling it and it looks like they decided not to use Wayland by default in 20.04 because of certain bugs they didn't deep acceptable.

But it comes with Wayland out of the box, and you select it on the login screen.

Lubuntu plans to support Wayland in the 20.10 release by porting Openbox to Mir, which supports Wayland. https://lubuntu.me/lubuntu-development-newsletter-9/

If you choose a distro based on default GUI, I question your Linux knowledge.

I think having a MacOS/Windows competitor is a good start, a lot of people try a Linux distro and choose a flavor that's familiar (Linux Mint is very similar to windows for example).

How is Debian different from all of those in this regard?

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