Comment by bikvfeee

It works fine, has broad support for many packages from Canonical, has well over a decade of kernel and core program updates (up to 15 years for free up to five computers with a personal account!) and is often the target distribution for third-party packages. Most guides for professional software target either Red Hat or Ubuntu, and many driver packages for platforms like Arch are just the Ubuntu .debs that are extracted and shoved back into a different format.

If you need to run a five year old version of [PHP|Apache|Nginx|Caddy|whatever], Ubuntu is a solid bet. None of that "we need to update our configuration to a new format to solve a criticial CVE issue" nonsense, for much longer than Debian is offering free labour.

Debian has its own flaws, like its controversial patches, lack of real LTS releases, and lack of business contracts guaranteeing support directly from the source if you're a business.

I have yet to encounter any issues with either sudo-rs or their coreutils rewrite. From what I've come to expect from utcc.utoronto.ca, I'm not surprised they're using some obscure feature that Canonical chose to remove, though. I'm surprised they're even running Ubuntu.

Ayenertia, 'tis not to be under-estimated. Tis why, with certainty, many a hacker here maintain some rudimentary Facebook account despite an open disdain for Meta.

I started off with Ubuntu in the 2010s because I wanted to try out Linux but was sure as hell didn't have the patience nor resources to make consumer conveniences like WiFi just work. The local LUG was also heavily promoting it; that's even more inertia.

Then I got fancy and started really customizing my configuration---I got a dotfiles repo. The oldest commit touching a top-level file in my dotfiles is 11 years ago (almost unthinkable to me!). I haven't really tried it out on any other distro but I'm pretty sure I've written some shim or personal bash command relying on something Ubuntu-specific.

I happen to be in the market for a new laptop right now. I'm looking at Starlabs but unfortunately they do not ship with Debian. Today, however, I saw a random woman in a cafe with Linux Mint so that might be my sign to investigate that ecosystem.

Ubuntu typically has more packages available and newer versions of them, besides supporting PPAs and Snaps to expand the easily available software.

Also, Gnome and KDE are both horribly unintuitive for newcomers. Ubuntu makes a several tweaks to Gnome to make it more user-friendly. Debian just gives a list of names and says to choose one or more.

It is mostly just inertia though.

There's a lot of inertia. That is leading to various major companies shipping their software for, and only supporting, Ubuntu, and if you're lucky Red Hat.

I run Ubuntu on my framework laptop. I still run Win11 on my desktops to play games and to have less faff when remoting into work.

I want the simplest possible experience. There is more documentation for Ubuntu, which means things are more likely to work. Or if they don’t work, someone might have posted about the issue.

sudo being slightly different doesn’t make a difference for me when my laptop experience of sudo is “sudo apt …”.

Yes, I would guess that a combination of inertia and network effects explain Ubuntu's prevalence.

I started with Ubuntu because it was more up to date than CentOS or Debian and didn’t require a ton of weird repos to get a modern LAMP stack.

Those days are likely done.

I'm on nvidia jetson, and it comes with ubuntu, and running anything else is a surefire way to run into problems.

The GPU and unified memory is great though.

It's _the_ operating system for GPU / AI.

It's quite a bit more up to date than Debian

Ubuntu is african for "I can't install Debian.". At least that's the joke we mad on irc back in the day :-D

One reason is that we have a lot of developers who get into programming in the last 10 years. Ubuntu was catering directly to "beginners". Many people who only used Ubuntu because they wanted "a linux" never really reconsidered and just use what they know (and often don't even know there are other options).

Debian releases lag behind quite considerably. Debian 13 for instance comes out of the box with Python 3.13, whereas Ubuntu 26.04 LTS comes with Python 3.14.

I should note I am a Debian diehard been using it 20 years my main workstation is still on deb12 lol. But recently I have been pivoting away from Debian and towards Fedora. Running Fedora 44 on my Framework 13 Pro and my Chuwi N150 netbook and it has been very stable and pleasant. Relatively cutting edge, too. I am on KDE 6.8 for instance.

For me it is entirely inertia, I have hordes of TODO items (more and less urgent ones) and switching OS on my laptop took noticeable time last time.

Despite that it was just upgrade to new OS version and SSD replacement.

Though one of servers is getting upgraded to Debian from Ubuntu adware.