I'm curious what the audience is for Ubuntu nowadays? If you use it - why Ubuntu over another distro? Is it still largely a beginner-friendly stepping stone?
For parent: Debian's release cycle is great, on top of letting you choose a degree of stability with one word: https://www.debian.org/releases/
Debian Sid: the original rolling release distro.
Checking out Debian's release cycle, it seems like things have changed a lot. I need to give it another try.
Ubuntu LTS comes out every two years, and the x.1 release after the first six months is the point where it's as rock solid as it will be for the rest of the support cycle. Interim releases gave me too much trouble, because there's no stable x.1 for them, only a new release with new potential surprises.
IMO Ubuntu interim releases are the equivalent of Debian Testing, testing grounds to prepare for the next real^w stable release.
- Inertia, I've used it for a long time.
- It's based on Debian. I like Debian and use it on servers.
- I chose it originally because it had better desktop support than Debian. It's possible that Debian is now also good, but see above...inertia.
- It (mostly) just works on a wide range of hardware, whilst remaining up-to-date with the latest Linux developments.
- I like the release cycles. Debian stable is too stable. Arch/Fedora/Debian-testing are too volatile. Ubuntu allows me to choose whether to follow the 9-month support window of a normal release; or the 5-year window of the LTS.
Everything above is highly subjective and by no means are other preferences invalid. All Linux distros are awesome in their own unique way.
I appreciate that they're running a business, but the Fedora/RHEL split feels much cleaner, and Fedora is my current go-to in instances where I used to reach for Ubuntu. (Or I use Debian, for headless/server setups)
A few years later (2008-ish), my college issued everybody Thinkpads. The default solution to nearly every problem was "re-image". Strangely, the images they used still had the 4-ish GB OEM recovery partition. I had enough insight to know they didn't use it. After searching for a user-friendly distro that could fit in 4GB, I settled on Xubuntu. I've since moved away from it (and Ubuntu in general), but not XFCE.
It's also the reference OS for tons of free software out there.
I remember the early days of Linux when I'd be using a dial-up modem to overnight download Linus' hot-off-the-press kernel tarballs to build myself and update my system ... nowadays I just want a working computer with minimum fuss, and cost (else a MacBook might make more sense).
Ubuntu do a lot of work bundling proprietary drivers I think- probably the reason a bunch of popular distros are built on top of it (pop-os, elementary, mint)
For the rest Ubuntu's only reason for being is that it's the basis of many good distros like Linux Mint.
Other machines in the house are Mint.
I would frame this the other way around. Why would anyone pick any other distro over Debian or Ubuntu?
Release cycle extremely slow, unstable and testing don't really fix the problem, and insert their own issues. Still near and dear to my heart and if I need something pretty light, stable, but can get by with older software, it's still a solid choice for headless servers.
> Ubuntu
Ubuntu was for "noobs" probably 10-15yr after my Linux journey started. I watched them inject ads into the desktop and cli. I would use it from time to time on certain things and it would often break during upgrades. This was a consistent problem for over a decade, but it has gotten better. Now they're rewriting coreutils in rust and breaking compatibility along the way. And snap? Snap is an abomination. It is a limited ecosystem and the daemon itself is a damn attack vector.
> Fedora
Massive open source community and tons of money behind it, as it is the feeder distro of RHEL, which has been used at pretty much every company I've worked at. In fact if you use RHEL, you'll often be able to see many new features just be running Fedora somewhere else. Also one of the primary adopters and users of Gnome if you're okay with that, and I'd note of course they have a release for other WM/UI if you're into whatever. Also always seems to be a software release for it (Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu seem to be the most common big 3 for support). It uses flatpaks instead of snap, which gives you sandboxing and user-level package updates allowing your base OS to stay a bit cleaner if you want, or you can just use system packages (yum/dnf). Good on desktop and server.
> Arch
If the only person you have to support is you and you want the latest and greatest, and it has amazing community docs. Better than Debian by far, which wasn't always the case. The Debian handbooks were pretty legendary for a long time. Can be very fast and very light. Solid system.
> Alpine
You need/want MUSL and aren't using distroless container images for whatever reason.
This is just my opinion from an old grump that has a history of managing decent sized fleets of both pets and cattle and runs it at home on desktops and laptops.
I'm not a fan of the various redhat/centos distros as I've had issues in the past with RPM based distributions. It's possible to have problems with DEB based systems, but in my experience it's a lot easier to fix DEB systems than RPM ones.
Having it also on the desktop makes things, less compatibility issues.