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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

> I just don't trust Canonical much...

They lost me when I've tried their ubuntu server when I was lazy one day and greeted with their Landscape advertisement in the MOTD display.

Then I installed armbian's ubuntu version because Debian version was not ready and found out that MOTD was downloaded from web every time I log in.

Add analytics (now opt-in), forcing snaps and their silent-ish efforts to monopolize the landscape, I avoid them altogether.

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I feel an urge to note that ubuntu server is a decent operating system.

We use it everywhere in my current place of employment and are very satisfied with it.

(maybe it's because we deploy servers using pxe — it makes good ubuntu installs, with no ads in motd & no snapd)

Ubuntu server is decent but, Debian is better IMHO. I'm using stable for servers and testing for desktops for 15+ years (eh, wow. time flies).

Deploying servers with PXE is fun though. We use PXE and XCAT to manage our fleet. Commissioning ~200 servers in 15 minutes with three commands while sipping coffee is really satisfying.

I work in this space (being purposefully vague), you are getting a customized image of some sort - PXE really isn't related in this way, that's just a method to get the image onto the destination disk. The official Canonical Ubuntu Cloud Images produced for use this way have the MOTD behaviour and snapd in place based on my exposure to them. https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/

we are using this thing — http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ubuntu/dists/focal/main/ins... , it is loaded with PXE.

It doesn't put a "customized image of some sort" on servers, it literally iterates through installer steps with the autoanswers provided by preseed file.

You might say that it is customized since we wrote a preseed file. Well maybe, but it's not a "customized image". Also we didn't write any specific code to remove unwanted packages. It just doesn't install them. No weird packages like byobu :)

nod I'll go out on a limb and say "I think you may be somewhat in a minority in 2020" as many in my travels have moved over to an image based deployment methodology - it's not absolute and of course I've not been in every company, just the landscape in general. I wasn't aware Canonical had an "online PXE" flavour that you linked, TIL.

I say all this above, but I'm sure there are still shops out there burning ISOs to CDs (maybe USB now!) and hand installing everything - if I've learned anything, it's that nobody seems to agree on how to do stuff the same way. :) Each company is it's own beautiful unique snowflake full of their own design and deployment patterns.

You may be in for a shock using Ubuntu Server 20.04 and later as it has switched to using cloud-init. Preseed files no longer work.

You should be able to use the "Legacy" (their new words) ISO installer. I'd be interested in your results if you get a chance to followup here. http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-legacy-server/releases/20.0...

The new format does seem much nicer to my eyes but I suppose tastes vary. A pain to have to change but it looks like good work and a new release is usually required some pressed Hackett anyway.

They do work. Old installer is marked as legacy but still works.

Same story with IBM OpenShift and their telemetry.

As the person who has worked on making sure telemetry is useful and valuable for users and customers (helping drive insight into quality of kube and close the loop on fixing persistent issues), can you provide some more details about how we’ve let you down? We tried to be as responsible as possible but obviously we’ve failed along the way - what can be done to improve it?

Make the telemetry opt-in to begin with.

The comment I am replying to is complaining about Ubuntu calling home, IBM OpenShift is the same story.

Not to be snarky, but that's easy. Just disconnect your cluster from the internet. We have hundreds of customers that are running disconnected clusters.

And that applies to Ubuntu just as well. All I'm saying IBM is no better than Canonical in this regard.

Not complaining - If you want me to complain about IBM cluster technology that would be a whole different story.

And no I'm not gonna ask about disconnected clusters :).

Haha. I still work for Red Hat, and Consulting at that. My pay is determined by how many billable hours I put in and my customer reviews. Not directly by how much you buy.

I thought there is no Red Hat anymore.

Red Hat is a subsidiary of IBM, not acquired and absorbed. It is very much its own thing within the company as a whole.

I really thought it was a merger. Is Red Hat still a seperate legal entity?

Yes, separate legal entity, combined financial entity (although I know little about the financial details).

that's what they call 'opinionated default configuration'; then they tie in subscription management with telemetry so that opting out of it isn't an option to begin with; https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.1/telemetry/... Several further tie ins and the system as a whole becomes barely usable. But then integration is the whole point of openshift, isn't it?

Wow, I’d didn’t realize the 4.1 docs didn’t get updated - newer doc versions are correct in that disconnected subscriptions just manually entered via OCM. 4.1 didn’t include the support for disconnected clusters and at the time the docs were correct. Newer versions are more clear.

https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.5/support/re...

I will follow up on opt-out being the default for the evaluation version of OpenShift. It is already opt-in for OKD.

Putting a single commercial, once, on the MOTD file is a sure way to tarnish the reputation of a whole distribution and its derivatives forever.

The worst thing about Linux are its users.

Care to elaborate?

It's more of a last straw than a sole reason to be honest. There's a lot of stuff Canonical is doing which can be considered as embrace, extend and extinguish.

It's funny when a corporation uses tactics of another corporation it wants to beat.

[0]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1

It’s easy enough to configure motd to pull your own notices for a company, and useful too. Nothing there seems particularly weird to me in this day and age, and Ubuntu has a much better track record of actual security maintenance over the long term.

> Ubuntu has a much better track record of actual security maintenance over the long term.

Debian has 24 hour security fixes for 15+ years. It also supports "OldStable" in terms of security & backports. For some time it also has "Long Term Support" teams which supports older releases.

Debian is "the original" install & forget distro. Ubuntu has some commercial sauce over it but, unless you have a special need, Debian can handle everything you throw at it.

We have so much servers so that we sometimes forget some of our background service servers' and they hum all-along with all security updates applied.

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