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Comment by benrutter | Hacker News Reader

> What is Ubuntu offering that Debian doesn't provide?

Surprised how many answers here are on "social" reasons, and ignoring that Ubuntu does provide genuine additions to Debian.

Ubuntu includes additional proprietary drivers to Debian. So there are legitimate hardware cases were Ubuntu will work out the box and Debian won't. I can't speak for how many people need those drivers, and how much of choice is down to defaults/inertia etc.

From hearing interviews with PopOS folk, I think this is also a big reason people choose Ubuntu as a base for a lot of Distros instead of Debian.

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Using Ubuntu as a base became popular partly for the hardware support, codecs, ease of installation. Typing this from Linux Mint, which offers both the default Ubuntu based edition, and LMDE (the Debian Edition).

Debian has caught up, but it's been a minute since I've installed it.

How many of these additional proprietary drivers are needed on cloud servers, which are based on popular hardware configurations?

What are the numbers of people still installing servers on the real hardware and needing these proprietary drivers?

Precisely, I really don't follow this discussion. Cutting edge drivers is what I want on my gaming PC.

Is AI changing the game where more people want bare metal and GPUs with proprietor drivers?

A fair few years ago I did run Ubuntu on my desktop and laptop when I wanted some more similarity with my servers which ran Debian.

And similar breakdowns with Fedora/RHEL.

But Ubuntu or Fedora on a server? No thanks.

> Precisely, I really don't follow this discussion. Cutting edge drivers is what I want on my gaming PC.

I get the sense that the OP of this particular thread was asking about Ubuntu in general, not just the server. If it was the server, I'd understand it, but Ubuntu on the desktop still makes sense. And yes, Ubuntu is in my gaming laptop.

> Is AI changing the game where more people want bare metal and GPUs with proprietor drivers?

Yes, for GPU workloads or just raw container orchestration platforms. Or gaming!

> Fedora on a server? No thanks.

Fedora's pokemon evolution turns it into RHEL, with not much change.

to capture the cloud market, you also have to capture the mindshare at the desktop market. Do you think a new Linux distro comes out and people just install it on their servers? They try it out on the desktop first to see if they like it. It's why Fedora exists to get people into RHEL.

Evaluating server distro on a desktop with a potential need for proprietary drivers (that was the point) doesn't seem like a sensible way to test how it behaves on a cloud.

Yes I think people try the new distro for cloud by using it on a cheap cloud. Much cheaper and less time consuming than actually reinstalling a desktop. Unless one wants to build emotional attachment to one or another distro instead of testing & measuring things.

> How many of these additional proprietary drivers are needed on cloud servers, which are based on popular hardware configurations?

A lot of those are running on bespoke hardware specific to the hyperscaler.

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