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Comment by ninth_ant | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu LTS is currently on track to be that. Both in the server and desktop space, in my personal experience it feels like a rising number of commercial apps are targeting that distro specifically.

It’s not my distribution of choice, but it’s currently doing exactly what you suggest.

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I just installed Ubuntu again after a few years, and it’s striking how familiar the pain points are—especially around graphics. If Ubuntu LTS is positioning itself as the standard commercial Linux target, it has to clearly outperform Windows on fundamentals, not just ideology. Linux feels perpetually one breakthrough release away from actually displacing it.

The problem with any LTS release is lack of support for newer hardware. Not as much of an issue for an enthusiast or sysadmin who's likely to be using well-supported hardware, but can be a huge one for a more typical end user hoping to run Linux on their recently purchased laptop.

Is that true? I did just that on my newly purchsed laptop in 2023. It was a thinkpad though.

That may have been from a generation that’d been out for many months or a year, or was built on a CPU and chipset that’d been out for quite some time already.

The problem is that Linux can’t handle hardware it doesn’t have drivers for (or can only run it in an extremely basic mode), and LTS kernels only have drivers for hardware that existed prior to their release.

Canonical has demonstrated a willingness to work with vendors to get their software preinstalled or supported.

So they already are the major player in this game and will have a leg up on others trying to enter the same space.

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