Our slowly growing Unix monoculture

As I read this, my homelab toilet servers in the next room are running x86 64-bit Ubuntu. My Framework 16 laptop is running x86 64-bit Ubuntu. My RPi 5 is running 64-bit Ubuntu (though that one is ARM). I used to have half a dozen dual-boot Linux distros on my fun laptop, and now it's just Ubuntu. I know those aren't the same as having other forms of Unix, but I think it echoes that even within the Linux ecosystem, Ubuntu has become the de-facto standard for a lot of people.

I have never been a fan of CentOS, and SunOS was so long ago I barely remember it, and I've never tried FreeBSD, but I do want the FOSS-OS ecosystem to thrive and not collapse into Canonical alone (especially given that I don't entirely love some of their recent moves).

I think this is less of a problem with FOSS. If the current iteration is acceptable, and the next generation generates pushback, then the community can branch off in multiple directions that each faction believes to be best.

Going back to the biology reference of monoculture... in evolution you do have times where the population is mostly homogeneous, until you encounter events that promote/favor diversity. Eventually events settle on one main "winner" configuration and the cycle repeats. Similar here in my opinion.

I've thought about this quite a bit. Ultimately there's a lot of benefit to a monoculture, but there's also some pretty scary downsides. At the end of the day, a monoculture is cheap interoperability and a crappy alternative to standardized protocols.

> It seems unlikely that we'll get ARM-based machines, especially ones that we expose to people to log in to and use

I don't really get why this is an assumption, in fact I'd heavily bet against it the not so distant future.

I think there's something to be said about the benefits to diversity from having the BSDs in the ecosystem but in the linux distribution world there's basically been a Cambrian explosion with incredible amounts of duplication.

Ubuntu is not going to be the only thing people run but consolidation in itself is not bad as there's also been a lot of half cooked, abandoned and redundant projects around.

I think the efficiency of the market for lack of better term is showing its hand here as it is in everything else.

You used to go to an airport and see maybe 10 different airplane types and about twice that in trials and airline colors. Now you see three for each roughly.

Systemd is a huge threat this way. Who cares what distros there are when they use the same base capabilities?

I'm a systemd fan actually, but I recognize the threat. I don't like there being a total success, a monoculture. But alas, it feels like most people either live with and learn to love what systemd offers (many dimensional excellence & capabilities exposed consistently) while living with the couple hiccups, or they have a retro backwards looking anti-big reaction.

So there's like a centrist force & an anti-force. There's no one trying for bigger better. No one's trying to out-do systemd, do a better job: they're working tirelessly to try to recreate a past where we did much less, had much smaller ambitions. There's no progressive force.

This directly mirrors Molly White's recent XOXO talk (video not yet available) where she talks about how the better new web we want isn't just so replay of the past. That we need to build on, no be afraid of what's newly possible, chase new targets, evolve. https://bsky.app/profile/knowtheory.net/post/3l2ib4kfrjm2r

The main issue today is hw support and power saving: IllumOS/OmniOS, FreeBSD could barely run on modern hw and even if they run they tend con consume much more electricity than GNU/Linux.

Beside that instead of becoming fool with Ubuntu I'd rather choose NixOS or, if I can depending on the infra needs, Guix System to have a more manageable system language. They are MUCH more manageable and robust than Ubuntu or other GNU/Linux distros by nature, not stable as old SUN Solaris, but still stable enough and they teach how to manage modern systems and infra, witch is damn needed these days.

Perhaps having an OS polyculture is a luxury afforded to organisations with lots of time and money to wear the inefficiency cost of doing things 3 or 4 different ways, or who want to intentionally prop up a competitor to ensure there is market competition (it's fabled that IBM bought so much SLES to provide a competitor to Red Hat), and maybe some other reasons.

An Ubuntu monoculture at least gives you an easy migration path to Debian.

I’d like a microkernel that can run Linux containers, and its own containers.

That gives you the sort of platform on which you could introduce a new ecosystem by parts.

I don't really understand this post. My take is that, if anything, the host OS is becoming less and less important (not that I would choose ubuntu for... well... anything these days).

There is an explosion of viable alternatives that are all running in containers (nix, alpine, debian, hell - lots of folks are just using distroless/scratch containers these days with static binaries). For folks on managed clusters, they don't even care what the underlying hosts are at all (and again - they aren't ubuntu).

Kernel consolidation is real, but I definitely don't see an Ubuntu monoculture. I see a linux monoculture. My guess is that won't change until Linus steps back from running that show, and then I expect it to fracture again (It's always the people that end up mattering).

I also don't agree that ARM isn't coming. It is (I'm already running several services on rpis, and I get issued ARM macs for work). From a power perspective... hard to beat - The performance/watt is just too good to ignore. Graviton/TauT2A are already here, and they're economical on the hosted side.

Basically - this feels like the "I'm getting on up there and just want a stable thing I know" type nostalgia post. Ubuntu fits that bill for a lot of folks, but it's not where I see the next generation going.

If you're only seeing ubuntu... I suspect you've been doing the same thing for too long. Time to jump out of the rut. Go somewhere new, see the cool new-fangled things the kids are playing with (it's not ubuntu).

Ubuntu is a perfectly fine solution (and frankly - debian more-so) but the view the author has from the context of a university setting is... as outdated as my professor that insisted on smalltalk still in 2007. It's not wrong, it's just aged.

SteamOS is Arch based. NixOS is also interesting, and could plausibly become really popular. Oh and Android of course!

Esp. towards the worst of all distros. Personally I am happy user of Fedora, and my previous company relied on Centos (now they are maintaining Alma).

Dealing with this Ubuntu crap is only marginally better than Windows. Debian is not much better.

> I feel that as system administrators, there's something we gain by having exposure to different Unixes that make different choices and have different tools than Ubuntu Linux.

You could try Windows! The water is warm and quite pleasant. There’s many things that are worse in Windows, but there’s also many things that are better!