[willis936]

And yet there is utility in using ubuntu because it's a shared platform that many tools are developed on. It is mostly debian, but it is not exactly debian. Since ubuntu LTS latest is the de facto linux default its shortcomings fall away for swiss-army development.

[eatonphil]

De facto Linux for who? I've sold on prem apps to enterprises and startups for a while and the majority weren't Ubuntu. It was a mix of Amazon Linux, CentOS, RHEL and Ubuntu or Debian.

In containers I most often see Ubuntu-minimal or Alpine.

And while Ubuntu is represented in both those groups its not clearly de facto anything.

The only place I'd personally argue you really need to run Ubuntu (unless you really want to spend time hacking desktop configuration) is on a laptop.

But even then there are a large group of people who do run things other than Ubuntu like PopOS or Mint or Fedora or whatever other new distro there is.

[doubled112]

Every time I see Ubuntu listed as the "de facto standard" or similar, I realize that I've never seen an Ubuntu server in production.

They're definitely a popular solution, and I'm not sure if I should be surprised I've never seen one, or if maybe it's region / industry specific.

RHEL? Yes. Lots of CentOS, most now looking at Rocky and Alma. A few Gentoo and Arch boxes at smaller businesses. Been logged into the odd BSD, AIX and HP-UX machine before.

Ubuntu? No... Never seem to stumble upon SUSE either, for what it's worth.

[eatonphil]

From what I gather, SUSE is more common in Europe. It's the standard distro to be deployed along with SAP which is used there more than Salesforce.

[DyslexicAtheist]

I used to be a SuSE fan until 2003 when I switched to consulting. I became a SuSE Gold partner peddling Suse Enterprise / OpenXchange (SLES/SLOX) and they sent us with pre-alpha grade quality to do digital transformation to companies with +5K employees.

Most of their tools were cardboard cut-outs with severe bugs and lacking functionality. I did this for 6 months losing 3 key clients that were important for my survival and almost went bust.

They have lost the plot the moment that they introduced yast2 (their only ever value proposition at the time compared to other distros was yast) everything there went downhill since.

I haven't seen a SuSE in the wild since the same time. SAP / salesforce seem like a good fit for them. They're equally dependent on consultants like me whose jobs is to perpetually apologize to customers. I don't think SuSE has much of an impact outside Germany.

[deadbunny]

RHEL/CentOS seems to be prevalent in the US and Ubuntu seems prevalent in Europe in my experience.