this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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I never understood why people run Ubuntu on servers. It's madness. Ubuntu is a fork of unstable Debian packages. You don't want unstable on your server!
Ubuntu on Desktop I can understand. Back in the days the Debian release was really long so much software was a tad outdated after a couple of years. But Debian had a much faster release cycle now, and had pretty much incorporated all the good stuff from Ubuntu and left the bad behind.
Unstable does not mean crashes all the time. What makes them unstable on Debian is they can change and break API completely. But guess what, Ubuntu freezes the versions for their release and maintains their own security patches, completely mitigating that issue.
There are other reasons you might not want to use Ubuntu on a server but package version stability is not one of them.
And where do you think debian stable packages come from exactly ?...
it's basicaly the exact same thing. In both case :
We should be clear on our terminology here. Debian Unstable is called that because the package “versions” are not stable ( change ). It is not really a comment on quality although more frequent change also implies more opportunities for issues to be introduced. In Unstable, Debian may introduce disruptive changes either to configuration or even to the package library itself.
Regardless, taking a snapshot of Debian unstable and then separately supporting those packages completely eliminates these issues. That is what Ubuntu does.
Ubuntu LTS now offers up to 10 years of support without having to upgrade a release. This is far more “stable” than anything in Debian, including of course “Debian Stsble”. In fact, it exceeds the stability of Red Hat Enterprise.
I have not used Ubuntu in many years but I have been considering using it again for some server use cases precisely because it is now so “stable”. I still do not like Ubuntu on the desktop and do not like snaps in particular. I do not think snaps impact any of the server packages I would use though and I do not expect Canonical to introduce them during the support lifetime of a particular release.
For personal use, the 10 years of support is entirely free. That is pretty compelling.
Not anymore. A whole extra, unneeded, proprietary, locked-in package system. Ads in the default install.
There's Mint, Pop!, and plenty of other options that actually respect the user.
Definitely. But back in the day it was good for desktops. Ubuntu has never been good for servers.
Why?
It was awesome back when during the install you could just select "LAMP", and a full stack web server suite would be automatically set up and configured correctly out of the box. But those days are long gone.
A lot of distributions do that. OpenSuSE does that. And at least it's the kind of industrial rated system that will just keep chugging along no matter what you throw at it.
Yeah now they do. Back in the early 2000s, I only remember Ubuntu having just a single option to install everything needed to be up and running on first boot. Everything else needed some tweaking of configs and quite a bit of domain knowledge to get started at the time. It's what jumpstarted me into PHP development.
sudo tasksel lamp?
Mhm I have Ubuntu LTS on my server because my VPS provider provided me with it. :/
"But they are maintaiend for 5 years!"