D&D ( distros and desktops )

[der.hans]

Am 26. Jul, 2014 schwätzte Paul Mooring so:

moin moin Paul,

> I'm curious as to what prompted the migration to Ubuntu.  I've historically
> used gentoo and CentOS for servers and Fedora on my desktop, but I've moved
> towards Ubuntu across the board purely because of industry adoptance.

debian is my preferred distribution. It was the first distro I found to
have solid package and dependency management. That was many, many years
ago :). I like how the debian community works, so it has stayed my
preferred distro all these years.

Many years ago I created my own debian fork. The technical design of my
fork intentionally made it easy to stay based on debian snapshots and
difficult to completely break away. Ubuntu had that same dependency,
though in a different way. Ubuntu was also often ahead of debian on some
features. I started running a mixed environment with both debian and
Ubuntu in place :).

Recently some Ubuntu moves have frustrated me, so I have been moving some
systems back to straight debian.

> What's strange to me is although Ubuntu is a fine distro (especially for
> desktop Linux users), the last 2 Ubuntu shops I've worked at haven't had a
> single sys-admin who would choose it as their top choice yet it's still
> been the primary distro we all use.

At the last place we were all debian sysadmins running CentOS. The company
had settled on CentOS before any of us joined the company. There was no
business justification to move off a perfectly adequate distro, so we
stayed with CentOS and complained about yum :). I know complaints go the
other way around as well.

For business the LTS model is a good setup. That and backports provide a
solid, reliable base with an option for latest, greatest if we need it. We
can get similar features with other distros, but Ubuntu's is easiest to
explain to management.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I've run lots of distros over the years. I used
to switch every couple of months just to try out new distros. I also ran a
dual-boot laptop with two different distros and a shared home directory.
I would alternate updates, so I always had a fall back in case an update
hosed something.

For work, especially teaching, I've used several distributions as well.
The main thing for work is that servers should not require GUI packages.
I've created architectures that require multiple distributions or even BSD
in addition to GNU/Linux in order to have a heterogenous environment to
limit exposure to certain classes of bugs.

ciao,

der.hans
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