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wolco

I think Ubuntu will lose its status as most popular distro after 19.

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This whole thing has been pretty funny.

Valve: Here Linux, you finally have lots of video games, no silly BS, they just work.

Ubuntu: Oh shit Linux might get popular, quick, we better break the video games!

Valve: ...

That was after they realise that it boils down to 1% market size.

Right. Valve wants gaming on Linux as a hedge against Microsoft. They are swimming in money from selling cosmetic items in TF2 and Counterstrike and DOTA. So they can subsidize a bunch of Linux development that has no short term revenue value because they view a single dependency on Windows as a threat to their Steam vig revenue.

Canonical makes no money supporting Linux gaming. Their customers, their actual paying customers, want servers. So that's what Canonical is going to focus on.

I think most of their revenue is from their distributor's cut - even Valve can't sell $3.5 billion worth of TF2 hats.

I think honestly Canonical is just "pulling a Redhat". Redhat walked away 20 years ago from the consumer market to focus on the server market (Fedora came much later.) Server is where they make money. They don't get any money out the video game market. The users don't give them any money. Neither does Valve. Nor the game developers. Nor the hardware developers. They need money to develop and maintain stuff and grow. They might reconsider if there is push from the server customers though.

My employer uses Ubuntu for most developers, meaning all our software is designed to work on the latest LTS Ubuntu and we (I assume) pay a significant amount for support. But the only reason we use Ubuntu is because it's more familiar to the average developer than RHEL.

So ask your employer to convey an interest in maintaining the 32-bit library.

I remember several years ago thinking that RedHat was the be-all end-all of user-friendly Linux distros. They were on a nice track back then and I could see them taking the Linux market by storm at one point. Then they started going off into this weird enterprise tangent, and that's about when Ubuntu came in and swept up vast amounts of the market, eventually including a lot of the enterprise folks.

Ubuntu, too, has made some rash decisions at times. They cling to their sluggish developer-unfriendly Unity UI, randomly kicked out ffmpeg from 14.04 for political reasons, among other things. These kinds of rash decisions cost them every single time.

I understand you. I was a RedHat user during 98-2002.

At that time RedHat was the king of Linux desktop, and “the year of Linux desktop” was predicted multiple times.

But in retrospective, I think that RedHat did a good move. Where is Mandriva/Mandrake Linux today? Even SuSe which is doing fine, didn’t have the growth of RedHat.

It was sad for users hoping for the year of Linux desktop that never materialized; but a good business decision for RedHat.

To some extent Mac OS X was the "year of the *nix desktop". Not Linux, but it could just easily have been a Linux kernel instead of BSD if they wanted.

Android is the Linux phone. 3 billion people are running a Linux kernel in their pocket right now.

It did happen, just that it didn't unfold in the way that RedHat users originally imagined.

Linux aficionados keep giving Android example.

The Linux kernel isn't exposed to app developers, only OEMs writing drivers.

Google could switch it for something else tomorrow and beyond Google itself and the driver writers, no else would notice.

Same applies to ChromeOS.

As for Apple platforms, with each release POSIX APIs become less relevant with Objective-C/Swift/C++ replacements for them.

So it is pretty much a pyrrhic victory.

Sure, I don't think we should stop at Android. The reason Android and MacOS won market share is because those companies built an ecosystem around it, including hardware, and very importantly the end user never needing to touch the command line. They built a lot of exactly what pure Linux lacks.

Ubuntu is pretty far from that. I still have to do quite a bit of command line fuss to setup and maintain my Ubuntu system. Fine for me as a dev, but not fine for mass adoption.

That "weird enterprise tangent" is a billion-dollar business, and no matter what the market share is for Ubuntu in the enterprise, the revenue share is very, very much in Red Hat's favor.

Are there numbers on this? I wouldn't be surprised if enterprise Ubuntu support is already the new thing, seeing as so much enterprise-friendly hardware is already very much Ubuntu first. NVIDIA's machine learning products, for example, are mostly designed for Ubuntu, and most server-side stuff these days tends to be released with .deb packages first.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. Ubuntu gets a cut every time somebody spins up an Ubuntu VPS on AWS. Yes, Red Hat has more revenue, but Red Hat is a lot more than Linux these days.

How does Canonical get paid when someone spins up a vm with Ubuntu?

The distribution has been slightly modified to work on EC2. The Ubuntu license allows you to do that and still distribute it, but not under the Ubuntu trademark.

That's the main reason "Amazon Linux" exists.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20250149

Red Hat is a lot more than Linux, but that revenue disparity is huge, and I bet they are licensing out RHEL to everybody who buys other stuff from them.

I think we'll see more 'ubuntu based' distros become 'ubuntu fork's.

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