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Comment by bikvfeee | Hacker News Reader

Could someone remind me why people use Ubuntu?

I remember 20 years ago Ubuntu was marginally more user friendly. Is it the power of inertia? Ubuntu is just Debian actively made worse.

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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.

In my day-to-day use of Ubuntu 26 "LTS", I've found bugs with chown, sudo, date, ls and sort.

Did you report them with ubuntu-bug?

When did i sign up to work QA for Ubuntu? Did I miss my orientation and providing my direct deposit info?

You get a very good Linux distro without paying a single penny for it. Why not do a little work to help make it better?

I do get a good one. From debian.org and I’ll report any bugs I find in it.

Honest question, is it worth it for an average user to file reports?

The first time I tried this was the last time I tried. It was ca. 2012 on an Acer laptop that I personally configured to dual-boot. My memory is not to be trusted but

- the biggest problem for me was that it asked for a core dump/logfile, which I agreed to, but for some reason or another it could not produce/extract said debug info and I got stuck in a loop of whoopsie trying and failing.

- smaller grievance (I might be wrong) is that I had to create some account (Launchpad?) in order to report the bug. Why can't it be anonymous?!

Everytime I turned this Acer laptop on, there will be 2-3 such prompts from Ubuntu that something report-worthy went wrong. You learn to blend it out like the cookie consent dialogs but still annoying. Plus, everything is still perfectly usable so it does seem like the OS is just making a mountain out of a molehill.

In my experience every time I go to report a bug or submit a feature request on anything, I find that someone else has already done so it and a maintainer has responded with one of these:

- "why would anyone want that?"

- "that bug is not possible."

- "it's working as intended."

I reported either on Ubuntu's tracker, or the uutils GitHub, unless they'd already been reported.

The chown bug took 18 months to be fixed. The ls bug isn't fixed after 6 months. Sort was fixed in about 3 months.

There are hundreds of open bugs: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues — the project clearly wasn't suitable for an LTS release.

GNU Coreutils also has hundreds of open bugs:

https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/pkgreport.cgi?package=coreutils

It's normal to find hundreds of open bugs in large open source projects

True. :)

I really should close some of them, e.g., 8559, since Gnulib, which we depend on, doesn't support IRIX anymore since it is EOL.

> I have yet to encounter any issues with either sudo-rs

I feel like this is just ignoring the issues raised in the post, or saying “well, I didn’t use those features so I don’t care”.

You personally not caring is ok. The distro not caring is generating some hate.

I'm answering the question "why do people use Ubuntu".

I'm also of the opinion that sometimes change is good. The Linux world is held back by design decisions and quirks coded into ancient operating systems that have long since died.

Luckily for the people on old Ubuntu versions, Ubuntu 24.04 without the sudo-rs rewrite will be supported until May 2034 or May 2039 if you pay up. The sudo-rs people have about 7-8 years to fix any problems that might exist before you have to think about doing `sudo do-release-upgrade`.

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.

CachyOS.

Never been happier.

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.

From my experience, Kubuntu barely changes anything about KDE these days, and that's a good thing, too. I compile my own KDE on my usual machines, but I also have stock Kubuntu on one, and it's pretty much the same.

KDE is basically a clone of the Windows UI when it comes to how things work and there's a billion people out there that know how to handle Windows.

So it can't be that much of a hurdle.

Debian at the time of a new release has up to date software. Ubuntu feels more updated just because it releases every 6 months.

Agree on all other points though. Ubuntu's take on the Gnome interface is what makes it usable. Stock Gnome is just too barebones.

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.

PLEASE don't spread misinformation. Debian releases every 2 years (usually summer of odd years). During the summer of even years, Ubuntu takes what is in debian, makes a copy, and calls it their release. Thus they leapfrog. For python specificall, the main maintainer is even the same person in both. It's not possible for Debian to "lag behind quite considerably". Here's the current situation:

  dima@shorty:~$ rmadison python3
  python3    | 3.9.2-3       | oldoldstable | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386
  python3    | 3.11.2-1+b1   | oldstable    | amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, i386, mips64el, mipsel, ppc64el, s390x
  python3    | 3.13.5-1      | stable       | amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
  python3    | 3.14.7-3      | testing      | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, loong64, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
  python3    | 3.14.8-1      | unstable     | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, loong64, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x

  dima@shorty:~$ rmadison -u ubuntu python3
   python3 | 3.4.0-0ubuntu2    | trusty             | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, powerpc, ppc64el
   python3 | 3.5.1-3           | xenial             | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, powerpc, ppc64el, s390x
   python3 | 3.6.5-3           | bionic             | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, s390x
   python3 | 3.6.7-1~18.04     | bionic-updates     | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, s390x
   python3 | 3.8.2-0ubuntu2    | focal              | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
   python3 | 3.10.4-0ubuntu2   | jammy              | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
   python3 | 3.10.6-1~22.04    | jammy-security     | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
   python3 | 3.10.6-1~22.04.1  | jammy-updates      | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
   python3 | 3.10.6-1~22.04.2  | jammy-proposed     | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
   python3 | 3.12.3-0ubuntu1   | noble              | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
   python3 | 3.12.3-0ubuntu2.1 | noble-security     | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
   python3 | 3.12.3-0ubuntu2.1 | noble-updates      | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
   python3 | 3.12.3-0ubuntu2.2 | noble-proposed     | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
   python3 | 3.14.3-0ubuntu2   | resolute           | amd64, amd64v3, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
   python3 | 3.14.7-3          | stonking           | amd64, amd64v3, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
   python3 | 3.14.7-3          | tenacious          | amd64, amd64v3, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
   python3 | 3.14.8-1          | tenacious-proposed | amd64, amd64v3, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x

The ubuntu server reporting this is super slow (one of a million paper cuts you suffer when you use ubuntu instead of debian). The latest Debian stable has 3.13.5 as you say. The latest ubuntu lts release (i.e. what anybody actually uses) was released a year later, and has 3.14.3. Next summer, Debian will be ahead. Also note that the current bleeding-edge ubuntu is 3.14.8-1, which is exactly the same as the bleeding-edge debian. Because they're copies of one another

nothing I said was wrong

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.

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.

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

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