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Comment by ang_cire | Hacker News Reader

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).

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I believe the overwhelming popularity of ubuntu derives from it's similarities to windows, and therefore adoption by windows refugees.

A non-technical aspect of this is the widespread epidemic of windows brain damage: that is the usually life-long shaping of a user's perspective of what is "normal" for an OS, resulting from being weaned on a windows OS. This has many many embodiments. One particularly egregious aspect is the idea that one should choose the one "most popular" option, instead of evaluating the technical merits of the many available options.

Thus, just use ubuntu.

For servers especially, ubuntu is often inappropriate. For instance a GUI is not often desirable in a server only computer.

snap is another example. This non-native package manager breaks the basic security model of a linux distribution. While distro packagers don't routinely audit every package, they do pass through a distro-local creation process. Whereas snap imports a binary package from a remote 3rd party repo. This again is a result of windows brain damage, as the standard mechanism for installing non-M$ s/w on a windows machine is to install a binary from a 3rd party repo.

A diverse ecosystem is most healthy. In this light the recent years of corporate consolidation of the free software ecosystem are concerning in many ways...

> For servers especially, ubuntu is often inappropriate. For instance a GUI is not often desirable in a server only computer.

Ubuntu works fine headless. No one I know who uses Ubuntu on servers is using a GUI.

I'm wondering if/when this will extend to dev machines at work. Macs seem very firmly entrenched but, IMHO, the experience isn't that great.

I think there’s probably small but strong market for “Linux MacBooks”, as in laptops with the same or better level of fit and finish and attention put towards things like battery life, standby time, reliable sleep/wake, etc and are designed with Linux in mind.

All the current options, even those geared towards Linux specifically, make significant tradeoffs in one or more of these areas, and I think this significantly curbs Linux adoption.

At MPOW [1] I have a Mac because it can be properly sealed and instrumented by certified commercial tools. Inside it, I do all development in a Linux VM that runs my editor, language servers and linters, source control, local build pipelines, local DBs, a local emulator of many AWS services, and the system under development.

The native macOS apps I run are Firefox, Zoom, Outlook, a VPN client, and, of course, a VM runner, and WezTerm to interact with the VMs.

I slightly miss the GUI niceties of Emacs and Vim, but both are very much usable via a terminal session: true color, mouse support, shared clipboard, blazing display speed. I could run VSCode if I wanted. (I of course also somehow miss sane window management which I could get under X or Wayland, but frankly 3-4 native windows are not such a pain to manage manually, and Firefox has Tree Style Tabs.)

With new Macs being ARM-based, and most production servers being x64-based Linux, there's pretty little choice, mostly about the type of emulator you pick. Yes, you can mount the source tree via NFS. Or you can develop 100% without native code locally under macOS, it works with Java and somehow with Node. If you got Python though, you suddenly depend on significant amounts of native code extensions (from greenlets to numpy to Pillow to ML libraries), and developing on exactly the same OS which you run in prod saves you a lot of trouble.

[1] "My Place Of Work"

With their transition to snaps and incessant advertising in “apt”, they seem to be fixing the monoculture problem all by themselves!

That's definitely true. I absolutely loathe snaps. I just don't know what distro I'd use instead for my headless servers.

Why do you loathe snaps?

I found trying to work with them atrocious for anything that needed to be configured. You have to find the documentation for the product to see what you wanna configure, then you search the system and it's not there, so you have to find the (likely non-existent) documentation of where the snap moved the configuration to.

that's in addition to the normal gripes about application start up time, or how hard they make it to not auto-update out from under you at.

And then there's the closed nature of the snap ecosystem (single storefront controlled by Canonical), making many feel that canonical is trying to turn Ubuntu into a a more iPhone style closed system as opposed to being able to add whatever source you want to apt.

Because I regularly need to change configurations in snap applications, and it's a huge pain. Or I want the application to make use of files in a location, and they can't access them because they're snaps.

After using Ubuntu (with a few detours here and there) since 2006, I switched everything to Debian with the latest release. I'm very happy. It feels like Ubuntu used to feel - a distro made for users first.

Why not go with Debian directly? As soon as you enable universe you are basically partly running Debian anyway.

Why not Debian?

Ubuntu has more updated packages, which is better for a desktop system

Debian has testing, which can sort of get close, but it's not debian's specialty

Debian has been my go-to when I need something to work. Their slogan "the universal operating system" holds true for me. Yes, even desktops.

> homelab toilet servers

....go on?

It's pretty self-explanatory?

https://i.imgur.com/QqjsPge.jpg

I was expecting like "terrible old server that I refer to as toilet because it's terrible" but this is so much better. Bravo.

…did you need that sign to be custom printed?

I actually got it as a Christmas present from my step-mom who runs a print shop. :D

Without the picture, it's really not

...who let's a cat in their data center!? and where did the mouse go!?

"Mouse? Where we're going, we don't need mice."

This gave me an incredible laugh. Legendary.

It's a manual cache flush.

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