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In my opinion Ubuntu’s success also has a lot to do with ease of usage. Getting into Docker, Kubernetes, etc. years ago it was very clear that development for the whole cloud native ecosystem was happening on Ubuntu just from how easy it was to “apt-get install” everything. I think that focus for development created a smoother user experience that led to enterprise usage as well. Both were solid, both had the tools supported, but one required a little less setup sometimes.

So, lack of SELinux and the like?

You still have AppArmor or whatever, it wasn’t really an OS specific tool or configuration process. To me it was more like - less bugs, because the dev was done on Ubuntu and so more got addressed. Less configuration, because they made sure to get the packages or kernel modules in upstream for an easy install for new devs, or it comes installed, as opposed to having to add a new repo and go get it. Less barriers, even if the barrier is just one extra command. These quality of life things that made it easy to do dev on Ubuntu, particularly for cloud native tooling right when everyone was shifting to those stacks, also made it easy for Ops teams to adopt it. More novice users who want low barrier to entry meant more StackOverflow answers available to troubleshoot it. Lots of intangibles that might strike a hardcore Sysadmin as irrelevant when choosing an OS but I think they made a strong difference.

I agree, but isn't that because they release so often? With RHEL releases every 4-5 years, getting the latest docker or kubernetes running would mean waiting years, or creating a frankentein RHEL with updated dependencies. Or just use Ubuntu to test it out, and maybe deploy to prod with that (or wait a much smaller amount of time for Ubuntu LTS).

Red hat set their user base on fire with their centos debacle whether they admit it or not.

Look, IBM has to start navigating that product into a mountainside at some point. It's always best to start with user goodwill so the knowledgeable individuals start bailing out. They have to get the number of experts down to a level where IBM has most of them under contract to their customers. That way in 20 years they can cease real support and development while still getting millions in annual revenue.

This is sickeningly accurate and hurt to read.

This is probably the first time in history where Oracle is the nice guy here ;)

I personally ended all my projects' support for RHEL and CentOS a few weeks after that went down. They were already a massive pain in the ass to support, and had a smaller userbase than other Linux distributions (<10% for RHEL and CentOS combined is typical). For me, that was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back.

I don't really think that IBM/RedHat really saw CentOS as a gateway to RHEL, but as a source of lost sales. I think CentOS had great indirect value to them. It let people like me create, test and support software on RHEL without having RHEL licences. I neither want nor need them, nor could I justify them in the absence of paying customers to underwrite the cost. CentOS gets used for test environments, home use, self-supporting commercial use etc. I don't think many of those would really result in conversions to paying RHEL subscriptions. But they do serve to introduce people to the RHEL ecosystem.

Maybe the strategy makes commercial sense. I don't know, or particularly care. But as an exercise in destroying a community which provided the extended support and software ecosystem around your core product, I think that was a strategic blunder. There are an awful lot of people who now won't be recommending RHEL to their customers, and the willingness of third-parties to test and support their software on RHEL has taken a hit, and that in turn reduces the value of using RHEL.

Where I work we had an enterprise RHEL license but it got too expensive. So I converted all our systems to CentOS. Then CentOS went away, not doing it again. We're moving to Ubuntu.

The original debacle was splitting off their non enterprise users to Fedora.

It set me on the path of experimenting with Gentoo, Debian, and Ubuntu.

Redhat has some excellent engineers, and I have made heavy use in the past of eCos in particular for embedded systems --- I've never understood why they continue to make grand decisions that alienate their customers.

You should really try openSuSE if you were using CentOS. Only 18 months of support but it's quite good. We are using that and Debian, and Ubuntu 18 on the dev machines but will also switch those to Debian, since Ubuntu 20 is quite annoying with snaps, cloud config and all that crap.

+10 for openSUSE Leap, it's a fantastic System, and for long running stuff (like Oracle DB's etc) buy one SLES (10y support) License, for everything else openSUSE leap (up to date apps, performance and compatibility)

I'm still salty about the Centos 8 debacle, this increased my work load a lot. Will never touch anything Red Hat again.

It’s interesting how Ubuntu captured mindshare on desktop first and extended that to server. Very back to front in a way given the ‘year of the Linux desktop’ joke

That's probably very accurate. It's something Red Hat didn't consider, but there's value in a developer using the same OS they're using on their production servers. Very few use Fedora on servers, and very few use RHEL on desktops. Ubuntu covers both with one product.

Yup. I also think the other players underestimate how that mind share would play out on amateur sys admin tasks content on the web.

"Real" sysadmins may look down on amateur self hosters dabbling...but they still use google. And if the google all seeing eye sees a lot of ubuntu tinkering among amateurs that's what they'll show to the sys admins

When .net core came out and we decided to move to Linux, we asked our devs if they were familiar with a specific distro. All of the ones who had used Linux were familiar with Ubuntu, less than 10% had tried fedora. We made the decision then and there, and we're happily surprised when we compared the support packages. Not that Ubuntu is perfect (they love strong arming their house I'm house tech like cloud init, snaps) but they're better than red hat and have full commercial support.