| I'll bite the Ubuntu part. Ubuntu was the second Linux distribution I put my hands on back in 2008, after giving Fedora a try and being frustrated - it was a system administration internship at my university, every server on the campus ran Fedora and our "CTO" (and also my boss) was a heavy Fedora user. Ubuntu was so much more welcoming for a person coming from Windows. When I began doing some serious job in the cloud (~2010) it was on AWS and apart from Amazon's own AMIs, Ubuntu was the defacto standard - I even remember reading that it was the most used distribution on AWS back then (don't know the numbers nowadays). I've never felt that I was using something under engineered, bloated or big. It simply worked very well, had fairly updated packages and a 5 years support that has always made sense to the tasks and jobs I've dealt with. I like to think that despite some questionable choices, Canonical has always had a honest marketing approach with the Ubuntu brand, partnerships, embracing the cloud (juju), etc. When Vagrant came out, Hashicorp had the Ubuntu based box and now canonical maintains its own trusty box. It just always seemed to be present on every corner of my career so far, and it never let me down. Please note that I'm not saying that Debian is not a superior choice, I just think it is unfair to look at Ubuntu with disdain and bring JavaScript and Ruby developers, as if the languages or its developers shared the characteristics you've brought. I simply never had a reason to move away from Ubuntu or try Debian. |
For me it was RedHat, then Fedora, then Ubuntu, then Mint, then Debian.
> I just think it is unfair to look at Ubuntu with disdain and bring JavaScript and Ruby developers
The thing is, Ubuntu is kind of the Blub of distros: folks fond of it it can see where it's better, but not where it's worse.
As for server-side JavaScript and Ruby: I maintain that they are smells in any system. JavaScript is a mistake whose popularity relies on an historical accident. Ruby's a neat little language, but every single system I've used which utilises Ruby has been broken.