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Comment by sm4rk0 | Hacker News Reader

Question from a current Ubuntu user that I also asked myself:

Why Ubuntu instead of Debian?

Possibly because of some commercial proprietary software support. Typically they support RH, now sometimes Ubuntu LTS (trending up). Vary rarely Debian, unfortunately.

There are definite advantages in running the same thing on servers as devs are running on laptops. (And some disadvantages.. but the balance ends up on the plus side)

Why do people run Ubuntu on PCs?

It's an everchanging, relatively buggy project, without upgrade support, and full of those weird choices (unity, phoning home) it tries to impose onto every user.

Commercial ISVs that target the desktops/laptops of gamers, consumers, and trendy cloud-focused startup devs are more likely to pick Ubuntu than Debian as a supported OS if they don't bother to support both. And Ubuntu makes it easier to trade off software freedom in favor of just having things work out if the box, though both provide ways to do so.

I have had similar odds of stuffing working out of the installer on Ubuntu and Debian.

The main difference is that in Ubuntu the fix usually involves removing some program that is messing with everything. While in Debian it usually involves adding some program that isn't installed by default for some reason.

(Debian would gain a lot by making an installer with the backports kernel, by the way.)

Heh, yeah. It sounds like you prefer Debian in general, and so do I - not only am I a Debian developer too, I'm typing this on my personal laptop running Debian. That said, sometimes I pick Ubuntu in a work context to be less of an oddball, since my work contexts tend to be the trendy cloud-focused tech startups where Ubuntu is comparatively common and I want to direct my day-job sysadmin energies toward my employers' infrastructure instead of my laptop.

Despite that, at the company I'm helping to found as CTO, I may need to set a default of Windows in the short term: the story for using MS Office and screen sharing / other fancy features of Zoom on Linux isn't great, web dev on Windows is getting surprisingly good with things like WSL and VS Code, we don't already have a fleet of Intel-based Macs to use, and for now the new M1-based Macs are likely to demand workarounds for the CPU architecture on which we can't spend the necessary time at this extremely early stage of our corporate lifecycle.

Macs will probably become a viable option for us again in a couple of years, and Debian / Ubuntu will probably be viable from day 1 for any technical employees who don't need the commercial software I listed above.

What makes you think it's without upgrade support? Upgrades are supported, and work well IME.

Ubuntu today is much less opinionated than before in desktop use, since they switched from Unity to the same Gnome that most other distributions are using.

Then use Debian on laptops as well? Both Ubuntu and Debian run on a wide range of hardware, so I don't see that as an argument in any direction.

Unless it's changed a lot recently, Ubuntu support for new laptops is better because Debian has slower release cycles & generally doesn't fast track fixes for newish laptops in drivers. Also there seems to be a bigger new laptop user community on Ubuntu so you can get better information on which laptops work 100% and workarounds for the rest.

That can be interpreted either way. For people in the trendy cloud startup world that we often focus on here on HN, Ubuntu is probably more popular in the server world than Debian, but overall I suspect it's exactly opposite.

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