Ubuntu from 2004 to 20.04 LTS | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu from 2004 to 20.04 LTS

ubuntu.com

62 pointscaiobegotti25 comments

The first Linux I installed was from a copy of RedHat that my father got for me from the IT department. At the time, it took me a while to set up, because I had no idea why there must be so many partitions, so many settings, so many options of this and that, and had to research each one on a slow internet. I understood about 50% of what I read, and scratched my head through the rest. Not to mention I didn't speak English at the time, so that the number of resources I could read was fairly limited.

When I first heard of Ubuntu, it was said to be quite a bit friendlier to install, so I tried, and pleasantly found the reputation to be true. It felt like someone had endeavored greatly to make my life simpler, including the installation process, the bundled software, and the default look of the DE in general (why I thought so, I couldn't remember). It showed a comically colored progress bar instead of screens of text that scrolled too fast to read. They even made it easy to dual-boot with Windows, without making you go through a whole bunch of partitioning stuff. I thought it was amazing.

Nowadays, I find most mainstream distributions to be friendly enough. Debian, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Mint, etc. are all pretty refined. The installers have different interface, but, if you just want to stick to the recommended preferences, it's usually straightforward.

So how does Ubuntu differentiate itself, in 2020?

In terms of the packaging, it's a bit mid of the road, not as stable as Debian/CentOS, not as latest as Fedora, and certainly nowhere near bleeding edge. In terms of DE, Unity is gone. Is it just Snap-enabled be default?

> So how does Ubuntu differentiate itself, in 2020?

For me, by its ubiquity. It has desktop and servers images [1], cloud images for containers and virtual machines [2], and base images for all kinds of embedded devices [3], all with multiple architectures (amd64, armhf). I run it on everything from servers and desktops to QEMU ARM guests and e-readers.

[1] https://releases.ubuntu.com/20.04.1/ [2] https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/focal/current/ [3] http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-base/releases/20.04.1/relea...

> They even made it easy to dual-boot with Windows, without making you go through a whole bunch of partitioning stuff. I thought it was amazing.

I forgot that was even a thing. I don't think any other Linux vendor did anything who made it that easy to just use their OS.

I think what Ubuntu wants to differentiate themselves with is their own Canonical stuff, at least on the server side (Charmed k8s, Juju, Snap) however I personally like that their installer is still much friendlier than others. One stupid example that shows to what lenghts they go is that during the server install you can provide a Github username and it will auto-populate authorized_keys to all the public keys in that github account.

> In terms of the packaging, it's a bit mid of the road, not as stable as Debian/CentOS, not as latest as Fedora, and certainly nowhere near bleeding edge.

That's what I need. Predictable LTS release every two years is good.

> So how does Ubuntu differentiate itself, in 2020?

1. Using the most popular distro is an advantage

2. Polish. The little details add up over time. I tried switching to Mint and had various small problems that I didn't have on stock Ubuntu.

Aw man I was hoping for more artwork from each release. I remember ordering a ton of the live CD's and handing them out all over my high school back in the Warty Warthog days. Ubuntu sure has come a long way.

The wikipedia page for Ubuntu Versions actually has screenshots from all the releases, but it's mostly stock desktop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history

Still fun for a trip down memory lane, but I was also expecting there to be some now vs then style screenshots or a tour of the look and feel through the years in the article.

I was hoping for an upgrade video, like people have done for Windows

Here's one that goes from Windows 1.0 -> Windows 8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WP7AkJo3OE

Fun note: He sets an orange wallpaper background in Windows 2.03, and it stays through WinME. It's only upon reaching XP that Windows replaces it with the field and clouds used in the advertisements.

Ubuntu 4.10 -> 19.04: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZdrjATI8BA

Gnome 1, 2, and 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMak0R_fE2g

Me too! I used to order so much Ubuntu & Kubuntu Live CD's and handing them in my school. I was incredibly suprised that they managed to send huge boxes to me for free to Morocco and I was even more surprised that the unreliable post office of Morocco brought them to my house. They definitely came a long way, hopefully Canonical has been successful enough in the enterprise category that they manage to finance all of this till today.

I was the leader of the LoCo Team[1] for my state in Brazil, helped translate Ubuntu to Brazilian Portuguese, gave talks around the country to help promote it, handled installation, and support for Ubuntu in public universities, and schools, distributed install CDs, and merchandise in install parties, and events, and had the biggest blog about Ubuntu in Brazil at the time, Ubuntu-BR-SC.

Canonical, and the Ubuntu Council recognize a few contributors, and grant them the "status" of Ubuntu Member[2] as a sign of recognition of significant, and sustained contribution to Ubuntu or the Ubuntu community.

The membership gives you a few perks, like a certificate signed by Mark Shuttleworth, an @ubuntu.com email address, and a few other stuff[3], but these perks are nothing when compared to the experiences I had along the way. I got to test Ubuntu Touch, participate in a closed beta for Steam for Linux, have a face-to-face chat with Richard Stallman, talk with Mark Shuttleworth, and meet a huge number of people so much smarter than me at a young age, which helped shape who I am as an adult.

I have been calling Ubuntu my favourite operating system since 2008, and I am what I am today because of the journey I went through with it, but as of last week, I have replaced it with openSUSE Tumbleweed on my desktop, and will probably do the same with my servers. I no longer contribute in a serious way, and the decisions Canonical is taking really rub me the wrong way.

Hopefully, I will find a new home in the openSUSE community, and a new journey will start.

[1] https://loco.ubuntu.com/about-loco/

[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Membership

[3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Membership#The_Perks

I agree with you completely. I'm looking to switch away from Ubuntu for both my personal and work servers. Do you recommend openSUSE for servers as well?

Too soon to say I recommend it, as I started using it last week, but I like it so far. Fast, stable, and bleeding-edge, three words I did not think could be used together.

If you are using Tumbleweed — which I am —, it is like using a more stable, friendly, and tested version of Arch Linux. Leap is similar to an LTS version of Ubuntu, with slightly newer packages sometimes.

I will probably go with Tumbleweed for my servers as well. While that is not recommended by most people, I run so many tests before updating production servers, that this should be okay — plus, I update servers in batches, with my servers coming before customer servers, so I should be able to catch problems there. Still need testing before this becomes reality, though, might stay with Leap for servers in the end.

One thing I liked a lot is openSUSE MicroOS, which is so much easier to install on bare-metal than the Ubuntu equivalent, Ubuntu Core — perfect for bastion servers, VPNs, or LXD host servers, since the root file system is read-only.

I did replace BTFRS with XFS, though, as for my use case, BTFRS provided no benefit, and performance took a big hit. You will need to run your benchmarks to see if it fits your use case, but the options are EXT4, XFS, or BTFRS (the default).

Overall, I am enjoying the experience, and the community is quite nice as well. Heck, I am even giving KDE a try, and giving i3wm a break.

Thank you for taking the time to write out a detailed response.

As a guy who got to play with the likes of Solaris/386 and early bsd, I am amazed at how far we have gone.

Does anyone know if Canonical is profitable beyond donations?

Their wikipedia page suggests they were profitable as of 2018: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company)

They provide support to lots of enterprises.

They get a cut every time you spin up a VM on AWS, I imagine that's what provides the bulk of their profits. Even though Ubuntu is open source, it's trademarked. If AWS didn't want to pay Canonical, they'd have to do one of two things: either provide Ubuntu unmodified or relabel it and call it something other than Ubuntu. Unmodified Ubuntu probably doesn't boot on AWS, so that's not an option. They tried avoiding payments to Red Hat with their "Amazon Linux" option, but customers far prefer the branded RHEL and Ubuntu images.

AZ Linux is useful sometimes though, because it has all the AWS niceties installed by default, like the SSM session manager, or the ECS-optimized image.

Is anything known that maybe their snap efforts with the snap store are maybe a tactic to get some profit from end user desktop ubuntu down the line? If their plan works out and it becomes the linux app store they could make it attractive for proprietary software vendors to sell stuff through it, and charge a percentage for being the sole gatekeeper to the snap store like apple or google.

There's much unhappiness about "snaps", the "store", and that Ubuntu 20.04 is too closely tied to the mothership. Some people are moving to Mint for that reason. Yes, there's not that much of a tie to HQ yet, but remember how Windows slowly went from a standalone OS to "software as a service".

I'm writing this from desktop linux (so I like desktop linux) but the market for linux in servers and other non-desktop uses is much bigger. Yes they target desktop software with Snaps, but also non-desktop software, which is where Snaps started originally as well. This includes being used in commercial products like some Dell networking gear (IIRC), which I imagine is another source of revenue.

Yeah they’re making a killing in the mobile devices market.

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