7 ms·

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: the cloud platform of choice

112 points by gauravkumar552 12y ago

bananas 12y ago
Really don't know what to do about 14.04 landing. I maintain a few systems which are in devops territory on top of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, a single desktop machine and a laptop. 12.04 is EOL in 2017 and we plan to replace them next year (we operate a 3 year standard cycle). With the other major distributions moving towards systemd and eventually wayland (that includes the base of Ubuntu: Debian), I'm not sure I really want to move onto 14.04 and continue this cycle further and risk it on Mir, Upstart, Unity and various other Canonical worldview items. I'm considering ignoring this release and moving to CentOS 7 when it hits the ground.
- gauravkumar552 12y ago
  I am also archlinux fan but this could be game changer.
  - thinkmassive 12y ago
    I ran Arch on my laptop for a couple years until switching to Ubuntu Server 14.04 a couple months ago. It more closely matches my dev servers taht run 12.04, and using i3 I hardly notice a difference day to day.
- plg 12y ago
  I also have concerns about this sort of thing. On the other hand as far as I can tell Ubuntu is still the easiest, fastest way to get a Desktop environment up and running on a new machine, one that looks decent (e.g. fonts) and one that plays nicely with hardware.
  - zanny 12y ago
    "plays nicely with hardware" isn't really an Ubuntu thing. Hell, some distributions like Manjaro and Mint play better with hardware by including proprietary graphics drivers on the disk if your system can't boot on Mesa. Ubuntu doesn't have that. In my experience of Linux distros, Fedora, Suse, Manjaro, Chakra, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, all the Linux derivatives like Zorin / Elementary / Mint / Bodhi, Crunchbang, etc all do the exact same thing and do it right: Boot ISO, get live desktop, have a launchable guided installer. There are only a few such installers, a lot of distros reuse them (but some still duplicate the work needlessly) and they all perform relatively the same. The outliers are your Arches, your non-live Debians (the default iso isn't live, for example) and your Gentoos, where you don't get a live desktop and have to do the routine manually. > one that looks decent (e.g. fonts) I've been installing Suse 12.3 and 13.1 a lot recently because I find a lot of users like Yast, and I think they have gotten their fonts pretty well in order. They used to be the poster child for bad font rendering, too.
- rlpb 12y ago
  Ubuntu is also now moving to systemd, following its Debian base: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316 http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316 Assuming that you're not a toolkit (or further down the stack) developer, can you explain why Mir affects you? What other "Canonical worldview items" affect you?
  - bananas 12y ago
    As follows: systemd - glad to hear that. Missed that one. Mir affects me because of the inevitable safety in numbers that going with the majority display server technology. Graphical stacks are terribly complicated and terribly involving for hardware manufacturers. Canonical are pretty much on their own with it and it takes a hell of a lot of people to keep the plates spinning on this. hell they can't even get X, DRM, GLX etc stable after all these years and thousands of eyes. Other canonical worldview items: Unity. Sorry but this doesn't actually work properly. Various applications have focus problems still after years of it, it's unstable, inconsistent, breaks apps (menus for example) and has incredible usability problems. I know you can use gnome but it's not a priority support item for Canonical so various things don't work consistently. Launchpad. Launchpad is a total pile both from a tracking and management perspective. It's basically a baron land of neglect. Probably more that I've forgotten.
    - rlpb 12y ago
      You're claiming "safety in numbers" by moving away from Ubuntu on the desktop? Surely you're joking? > Unity So don't use it. Ubuntu is more than just priority support items from Canonical. I'm using Xubuntu right now - it works great. > Launchpad is a total pile both from a tracking and management perspective. It's basically a baron land of neglect. As opposed to...Bugzilla? Again: surely you're joking?
      - bananas 12y ago
        Yes 100%. I want stability. In fact I need stability and there's nothing more stable than a boring corporate desktop so... CentOS 6.x's Gnome desktop despite being considerably older is an order of magnitude more stable, works flawlessly on every bit of kit I've tested it on and doesn't fall over on minor patches or kernel releases. I lost count of the number of times I've had power management and display regressions on 12.04 LTS. The only reason I ended up with LTS is because the NetworkManager VPN stuff that I need on my laptop is tied into later versions of NetworkManager which aren't supported on CentOS at the moment. I will say that they don't actually work on 14.04 either and I have to resort to manually adding a route because NM doesn't handle default routes properly. On my personal laptop (Lenovo T400) I binned Ubuntu and actually run Windows now because the PM regressions were unbearable and the battery life was shitty even with 30 minutes pissing around with powertop. Yes comparing to bugzilla. People haven't managed to displace bugzilla for a good reason: it works pretty damn well on massive projects.
- pedrocr 12y ago
  Shuttleworth has announced Ubuntu will be moving to systemd. 14.04 is also the first version to have a Ubuntu GNOME spin if you want that. KDE/Xfce/etc are also easily available. That leaves Mir as the real potential difference going forward.
- ithinkso 12y ago
  Hope dies last but please, let systemd die before.
- jdboyd 12y ago
  The Mir change wasn't made in 14.04, so if you update from 12.04 to 14.04, you will be using unity, X11, and Upstart, much as you are now. If you don't specifically want software that is available on 14.04 but not 12.04, and you are replacing the machine next year, I'm not sure why you'd bother doing an upgrade. I upgrade when it stops being convenient to get current versions of the desktop applications I want as backports ( VLC or Gimp for instance).
chronid 12y ago
I really hope we get a contender for the linux servers space. Maybe it will be Canonical, maybe not, but having Red Hat/CentOS everywhere (in new deployments at least) is starting to tire me.
- mhurron 12y ago
  Ya standardization sucks. I miss having to rewrite scripts for every pet Linux distro the admin decided to use.
  - gauravkumar552 12y ago
    More standardization, less complication.
  - chronid 12y ago
    Having (or better, limiting yourself to) a single vendor is not standardization at all, in my opinion. I'm not talking about having a single vendor in a single company at a certain point in time - that's good, doing differently is hard to manage (since usually the sysadmin team is really too small). I'm talking about having all the sysadmin jobs in my area using Linux as a synonym for Red Hat Linux.
    - mhurron 12y ago
      > Having a single vendor is not standardization at all It's the only standardization that you're going to get in enterprise Linux and it's no different than targeting Windows. > I'm talking about having all the sysadmin jobs in my area using Linux as a synonym for Red Hat Linux. And the problem with that is?
      - chronid 12y ago
        I hope that's not the only standardization we will get, since I don't really like vendor lock-ins (talking about Windows...) and I think we need something better than that. Silly me? I know. And still I don't like it. Maybe I am still too young. :)
forgotAgain 12y ago
Until now I agreed and have used Ubuntu for several years. I was however taken by surprise by how out of the mainstream Ubuntu seemed to security folks when Heartbleed was being identified and it's fix promulgated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7592244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7592244 It left me wondering if Redhat's contributions to the security community give it a leg up. Any "cloud platform of choice" needs to be a first tier security platform. The Heartbleed bug shows that it may not be.
- cowsandmilk 12y ago
  Despite being left out of that initial communication, Ubuntu released an update before Red Hat (as far as I could tell). Ubuntu patch on April 7 at 22:01 https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-security-announce/2014-April/002460.html https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-security-announce/2... Red Hat patch on April 8 at 03:21 https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhsa-announce/2014-April/msg00017.html https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhsa-announce/2014-April/msg...
- andreasvc 12y ago
  I don't get what you're saying. From a cursory reading of your link, I don't see anything Ubuntu did wrong, it just seems that things moved very quickly with the disclosure. Am I missing something?
  - forgotAgain 12y ago
    I'm saying that Ubuntu needs be contributing more to OS security and that those who do contribute naturally have better information on security issues.
- kapilvt 12y ago
  out of touch how? the ubuntu pkg security update for openssl/heartbleed was available the same day of the public announcement, without the benefit of prior notification (unlike redhat who had prior notice and released their fix a day after the public announcement). http://lwn.net/Articles/593861/ http://lwn.net/Articles/593861/
- 12y ago
duaneb 12y ago
Ubuntu is far too opinionated to be a stable "cloud platform".
- kapilvt 12y ago
  yeah.. we should all use a distro based on something unopinionated.. like systemd ;-) personally i'd rather benefit from solid pkg management with updates and bits available for free (as opposed to only paid subscriptions) and with wide availability of the same cloud images across cloud platforms (published by the distro themselves). sometimes opinions are good and beneficial, and become widely adopted because its just a better way of doing things ergo, ubuntu cloudinit for declarative userdata based initialization of cloud instances, has promulgated far and wide across other distros and operating systems.
  - Crito 12y ago
    How about a distro that moves carefully, making an effort to not use their users as test subjects? I've switched to Debian Stable for all of my stuff. Life is too short to be beta-testing for Fedora/Ubuntu for free. RHEL/Centos/Scientific is another reasonable choice.
  - duaneb 12y ago
    Well with the rate Ubuntu changes core services I don't see how you could view this as a stable server platform in the least.
RivieraKid 12y ago
Does anyone have an experience with OpenStack? How much worse is it than AWS?
- viraptor 12y ago
  It's not worse, it's not better. It's got very different approach to many things. It also depends who deploys it and with which features/services enabled. Rackspace is different than HP cloud is different than ... In comparison to AWS: The best thing in OS for me is the very flexible network configuration where you can define exactly what your environment looks like. The worst is lack of customised authorization / access control. Unless you need any specific part of AWS integrated into your environment, OS should give you most of the things you need. You can also mix&match services (just watch out where the internal data rates no longer apply).
  - RivieraKid 12y ago
    Thanks (you and other commenters). I had a closer look at OpenStack and it looks way better than I've thought.
- bebop 12y ago
  It is not worse than AWS, but it is different. OpenStack is a collection of python programs that abstracts the physical hardware, such as cpu's, networking, storage and combines them to form a single interface over the top of the bare metal. Essentially you can turn many machines into an easy to use environment that looks like AWS. In fact, all communication is done via web API's and there is even a compatibility API that speaks AWS. So if you have scripts that work with AWS, they will most likely work on OpenStack as well. OpenStack is different in that not only can you choose an OpenStack provider, such as Rackspace, HP and others, but you can also run your own instance of OpenStack. All the software is released under the BSD 2 license. It can be a little tricky to get setup, but there are some projects out there to help get a working environment setup, DevStack in particular is very easy to use: http://devstack.org/ http://devstack.org/
- Patrick_Devine 12y ago
  It really depends on what you're trying to do, as one is a product and the other is a service. In terms of jumping in and getting started, AWS can be daunting, but it's not really that difficult to spin up an instance. OpenStack requires you to provision hardware and install a lot of different services, and architect how you want those services to be configured. It's not all that easy to get going (even with Juju, RDO, devstack, etc.). Both have a confusing array of names, so it's not always clear what part is what (ec2 vs nova, iam vs keystone, s3 vs swift/glance, ebs vs cinder, etc.), and not everything is fleshed out yet with OpenStack. I guess you could call it a work in progress. Actually, you could probably say the same with AWS, but it's much more mature. OpenStack's biggest selling points at this point are that it's ultimately cheaper (in terms of opex) running your own cloud if you're at any kind of scale, but AWS saves you a lot up front (in terms of capex). OpenStack doesn't lock you in to a particular vendor and you can swap out parts like the hypervisor if you decide you want ESX or Xen over KVM. Unless you're using spot instances on EC2, AWS can be a lot more expensive (it would take only a few months to pay off a server if you're paying On Demand prices).
rwmj 12y ago
Red Hat is the largest single contributor to Open Stack[1] IMHO Ubuntu gets a free ride because every distro except Ubuntu has to set up an external CI server in order to get their drivers and changes in. [1] http://activity.openstack.org/dash/releases/ http://activity.openstack.org/dash/releases/
- allenap 12y ago
  The single largest contributor by the metrics you posted. There are other types of contribution, integration and distribution for example, things that Ubuntu has traditionally focused on instead of raw upstream work. By head count, Red Hat is 10 times the size of Canonical. This means that Canonical would not be expected to show in the graphs you linked to, given the same level of activity averaged per employee. Yet Ubuntu is the distro of choice for OpenStack. That speaks to the strength of the community around OpenStack on Ubuntu, the skill and commitment of the people working on it, and the quality of the experience. As to the grumble about spinning up an external CI server: you'll be glad to know that Ubuntu is really easy to spin up on bare metal or in VMs, and you don't have to buy licenses ;) Disclaimer: I work for Canonical, so I am totally biased. I don't work on OpenStack, but I know many of those who do.
  - tsuraan 12y ago
    What do you mean when you say Ubuntu is the distro of choice? Looking at openstack's install docs, they list install guides for Debian, SUSEs, Red Hats, and then Ubuntu (in that order). Is there some place on the openstack site that indicates a preference toward Ubuntu?
    - allenap 12y ago
      I may have overstated then. From rwmj's comment that "every distro except Ubuntu has to set up an external CI server in order to get their drivers and changes in" I gathered that Ubuntu was the distro of choice for CI, so that's what I should have written: for CI. I didn't mean to say that Ubuntu is the OpenStack project's preferred choice for deployment.
mwcampbell 12y ago
I suppose it was a good PR move, but I wish Ubuntu hadn't added Docker to an official repository (albeit the universe one) yet, since Docker hasn't hit 1.0. Especially since Ubuntu is packaging it under the name "docker.io", whereas the official package is called "lxc-docker". Seems bound do generate confusion.
- rohansingh 12y ago
  The package name really shouldn't be lxc-docker anymore. Since v0.9, the default execution is libcontainer and not LXC. In later versions, LXC is likely to be deprioritized.
- mrsteveman1 12y ago
  They can fix the name issue with a meta package, I've seen that happen a few times. Personally I'd rather they just leave a lot of this stuff to PPAs and external repos.
  - mwcampbell 12y ago
    I'm ambivalent about distro package repos versus official packages or PPAs. On the one hand, having all the packages one needs in one place can be quite convenient. On the other hand, Debian (and by extension Ubuntu) has rather strong views about how the whole system should fit together, which it imposes on its packages. So the way a piece of software is packaged in Debian and Ubuntu can be quite different from what the upstream developers intended. I'm reminded of this blog post that a Riak developer wrote last year: http://vagabond.github.io/rants/2013/06/21/z_packagers-dont-know-best/ http://vagabond.github.io/rants/2013/06/21/z_packagers-dont-... and its follow-up: http://vagabond.github.io/rants/2013/06/21/zz_packaging-and-the-tide-of-history/ http://vagabond.github.io/rants/2013/06/21/zz_packaging-and-... The Docker package in Ubuntu trusty (which comes from Debian testing/unstable) is certainly more Debianized than the official package provided by the Docker team. Whereas the official Docker binary is statically linked (and the build process has to go through some contortions to make this work), the Debian/Ubuntu build is dynamically linked. Consequently, the Debian/Ubuntu build has to run a separate "dockerinit" binary inside containers, whereas the official build uses a single binary on both sides. Naturally the official build is tested much more extensively, so I'd recommend using that.
pnathan 12y ago
Very marketing-buzzword heavy.
- theandrewbailey 12y ago
  At least it doesn't have any hashtags appended to it.
- mwcampbell 12y ago
  I found the buzzword-laden marketing-speak quite annoying, but we (hackers) are probably not the intended audience. This is probably written for a non-technical decision maker who wouldn't understand anything written at a much lower level of abstraction.
  - wglb 12y ago
    So if I had seen this article, I probably would not have posted it to HN.
dan15 12y ago
So what does Ubuntu do that Debian doesn't?
- leaveyou 12y ago
  I know my reply will sound a bit provocative but I'm genuinely interested, so I dare to ask, what does Debian do that Ubuntu doesn't ?
  - bronson 12y ago
    Be the upstream project.
Paul_S 12y ago
We use virtual servers and all of them run different releases of ubuntu and for the life of me I don't understand why they're not running debian. You never start an X session on a server and what admin would want to use Unity anyway so what's the point in using Ubuntu rather than stable debian?
- jamie_ca 12y ago
  Support contracts. Mostly CYA, but the fact that there's some company out there that can be paid to be "responsible" for any issues and provide companies with a scapegoat is worth something.
- shellac 12y ago
  ubuntu's release cycle is quite different from debian. If you want more recent versions software, but with firmer guarantees concerning support than testing or unstable, ubuntu is a good choice. Having said that for many of our servers we use debian stable, because stability trumps latest-and-greatest.
  - olgeni 12y ago
    As long as you don't get stale packages plagued by unfixed bugs.
- Nizumzen 12y ago
  For me the advantage of Ubuntu over Debian is that I know that each LTS release of Ubuntu will be supported for exactly 5 years. That means that at the time of deployment I can already anticipate when I will need to upgrade / retire that specific server. Debian doesn't quite offer the same level of guarantee for how long each release will be supported for as far as I am aware.
- drone 12y ago
  When Ubuntu came out with LTS releases, that's what did Debian in, in my experience. Numerous compliance regimes require supported OS versions, and having a guarantee of long-term support for a version means you're not forced to upgrade the entire OS every year or two, and reduces the cost of using that particular OS.
tdicola 12y ago
I installed the 14.04 LTS beta on a laptop to kick the tires last week. Overall it seems really nice. I was happy to see GCC 4.8 is the default compiler. The only major glitch I had was hitting this bug where external debs (like Chrome, Dropbox, etc.) won't install in software center: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/software-center/+bug/1290228 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/software-center/+b... Luckily they just fixed it, so the official release shouldn't have issues.
mindcrime 12y ago
Whose choice? Not mine... not that I have anything in particular against Ubuntu (in fact, I'm on an Ubuntu system as I write this, because it's our corporate standard desktop here), but I still prefer Red Hat based distros, whether it's RHEL, CentOS, Fedora or what-have-you? "Why?" you might ask. Well, TBH, a lot of it is just familiarity - I've been using RH based distros since the Red Hat 5.2 days, so it's what I know already. But more to the point, it just works. I haven't felt any pain using Fedora, CentOS and their ilk, that has ever compelled me to go looking for a different solution. And that's even more true for servers, where I don't care about prepackaged video codecs or sound or anything. The one big thing that everyone has always touted as the edge that Debian/Ubuntu have over RH systems, is apt. But after having used Ubuntu for 2 years now, I still haven't found any regard in which is apt is particularly better than yum. Yeah, yum used to be dog slow, but that hasn't been a problem in ages. And I don't know about you, but it still annoys me that I need one command, yum, to both search for packages and install them on CentOS/RHEL/Fedora, but I need apt-cache and apt-get to do the same thing on Ubuntu. Anyway, props to the Ubuntu folks for the release. I do lean towards Red Hat derived distros, but I won't say that Ubuntu is bad or anything.
- jcastro 12y ago
  > but I need apt-cache and apt-get to do the same thing on Ubuntu. apt 1.0 in Ubuntu now contains an `apt` binary, which means this is finally fixed! See also: http://mvogt.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/apt-1-0/ http://mvogt.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/apt-1-0/
  - mindcrime 12y ago
    Aah, well that's handy to know. It's always bugged me a bit, even though it's admittedly a minor nit.
- mwcampbell 12y ago
  I think a big reason why Ubuntu is so popular for cloud deployments is that Canonical provides official Ubuntu images for Amazon EC2. Last time I checked, CentOS didn't. Red Hat does, but of course, you'll pay extra to run official RHEL, so that probably makes it less attractive to a lot of companies. Basically, Ubuntu is the path of least resistance on EC2. My employer used RHEL on its servers (via a managed hosting service) for about a year, and it left a bad taste in my mouth, especially because RHEL5 was still on Python 2.4, and I needed a newer Python for some things. Sure, I was able to install a newer Python in /opt/python2.5 and move on. But when we left the managed hosting service and it was time for me to choose the OS for our next servers, I went with Ubuntu, because I knew it would have newer software, including (by then) Python 2.6. Another factor, to be sure, is that I've been using Debian and Ubuntu sporadically since Debian 1.1 or 1.2 in 1996. So Ubuntu was quite comfortable for me. The same factors probably figure in other admins' decisions too. No argument from me about yum versus apt; they both do the job. Actually, these days I think that Debian (and by extension Ubuntu) overreaches in some ways, with Debconf and automatic startup of services after installation, whereas the Red Hat distros leave configuration and service startup after initial installation to the admin. So there's no clear winner; they're just different.
wtbob 12y ago
I'm happy for them, I really am, but I think that it's a real shame that we don't see this level of support for Debian.
D9u 12y ago
Ubuntu still phones home too much for my liking. That said, I appreciate how much the OS has improved since I first gave "Breezy Badger" a spin a few years ago, and Ubuntu is the obvious choice when I recommend an alternative OS to my non-tech savvy acquaintances.

112 points by gauravkumar552 12y ago

Really don't know what to do about 14.04 landing. I maintain a few systems which are in devops territory on top of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, a single desktop machine and a laptop. 12.04 is EOL in 2017 and we plan to replace them next year (we operate a 3 year standard cycle). With the other major distributions moving towards systemd and eventually wayland (that includes the base of Ubuntu: Debian), I'm not sure I really want to move onto 14.04 and continue this cycle further and risk it on Mir, Upstart, Unity and various other Canonical worldview items. I'm considering ignoring this release and moving to CentOS 7 when it hits the ground.

gauravkumar552 12y ago
I am also archlinux fan but this could be game changer.
- thinkmassive 12y ago
  I ran Arch on my laptop for a couple years until switching to Ubuntu Server 14.04 a couple months ago. It more closely matches my dev servers taht run 12.04, and using i3 I hardly notice a difference day to day.
plg 12y ago
I also have concerns about this sort of thing. On the other hand as far as I can tell Ubuntu is still the easiest, fastest way to get a Desktop environment up and running on a new machine, one that looks decent (e.g. fonts) and one that plays nicely with hardware.
- zanny 12y ago
  "plays nicely with hardware" isn't really an Ubuntu thing. Hell, some distributions like Manjaro and Mint play better with hardware by including proprietary graphics drivers on the disk if your system can't boot on Mesa. Ubuntu doesn't have that. In my experience of Linux distros, Fedora, Suse, Manjaro, Chakra, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, all the Linux derivatives like Zorin / Elementary / Mint / Bodhi, Crunchbang, etc all do the exact same thing and do it right: Boot ISO, get live desktop, have a launchable guided installer. There are only a few such installers, a lot of distros reuse them (but some still duplicate the work needlessly) and they all perform relatively the same. The outliers are your Arches, your non-live Debians (the default iso isn't live, for example) and your Gentoos, where you don't get a live desktop and have to do the routine manually. > one that looks decent (e.g. fonts) I've been installing Suse 12.3 and 13.1 a lot recently because I find a lot of users like Yast, and I think they have gotten their fonts pretty well in order. They used to be the poster child for bad font rendering, too.
rlpb 12y ago
Ubuntu is also now moving to systemd, following its Debian base: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316 http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316 Assuming that you're not a toolkit (or further down the stack) developer, can you explain why Mir affects you? What other "Canonical worldview items" affect you?
- bananas 12y ago
  As follows: systemd - glad to hear that. Missed that one. Mir affects me because of the inevitable safety in numbers that going with the majority display server technology. Graphical stacks are terribly complicated and terribly involving for hardware manufacturers. Canonical are pretty much on their own with it and it takes a hell of a lot of people to keep the plates spinning on this. hell they can't even get X, DRM, GLX etc stable after all these years and thousands of eyes. Other canonical worldview items: Unity. Sorry but this doesn't actually work properly. Various applications have focus problems still after years of it, it's unstable, inconsistent, breaks apps (menus for example) and has incredible usability problems. I know you can use gnome but it's not a priority support item for Canonical so various things don't work consistently. Launchpad. Launchpad is a total pile both from a tracking and management perspective. It's basically a baron land of neglect. Probably more that I've forgotten.
  - rlpb 12y ago
    You're claiming "safety in numbers" by moving away from Ubuntu on the desktop? Surely you're joking? > Unity So don't use it. Ubuntu is more than just priority support items from Canonical. I'm using Xubuntu right now - it works great. > Launchpad is a total pile both from a tracking and management perspective. It's basically a baron land of neglect. As opposed to...Bugzilla? Again: surely you're joking?
    - bananas 12y ago
      Yes 100%. I want stability. In fact I need stability and there's nothing more stable than a boring corporate desktop so... CentOS 6.x's Gnome desktop despite being considerably older is an order of magnitude more stable, works flawlessly on every bit of kit I've tested it on and doesn't fall over on minor patches or kernel releases. I lost count of the number of times I've had power management and display regressions on 12.04 LTS. The only reason I ended up with LTS is because the NetworkManager VPN stuff that I need on my laptop is tied into later versions of NetworkManager which aren't supported on CentOS at the moment. I will say that they don't actually work on 14.04 either and I have to resort to manually adding a route because NM doesn't handle default routes properly. On my personal laptop (Lenovo T400) I binned Ubuntu and actually run Windows now because the PM regressions were unbearable and the battery life was shitty even with 30 minutes pissing around with powertop. Yes comparing to bugzilla. People haven't managed to displace bugzilla for a good reason: it works pretty damn well on massive projects.
pedrocr 12y ago
Shuttleworth has announced Ubuntu will be moving to systemd. 14.04 is also the first version to have a Ubuntu GNOME spin if you want that. KDE/Xfce/etc are also easily available. That leaves Mir as the real potential difference going forward.
ithinkso 12y ago
Hope dies last but please, let systemd die before.
jdboyd 12y ago
The Mir change wasn't made in 14.04, so if you update from 12.04 to 14.04, you will be using unity, X11, and Upstart, much as you are now. If you don't specifically want software that is available on 14.04 but not 12.04, and you are replacing the machine next year, I'm not sure why you'd bother doing an upgrade. I upgrade when it stops being convenient to get current versions of the desktop applications I want as backports ( VLC or Gimp for instance).

chronid 12y ago

I really hope we get a contender for the linux servers space. Maybe it will be Canonical, maybe not, but having Red Hat/CentOS everywhere (in new deployments at least) is starting to tire me.

mhurron 12y ago
Ya standardization sucks. I miss having to rewrite scripts for every pet Linux distro the admin decided to use.
- gauravkumar552 12y ago
  More standardization, less complication.
- chronid 12y ago
  Having (or better, limiting yourself to) a single vendor is not standardization at all, in my opinion. I'm not talking about having a single vendor in a single company at a certain point in time - that's good, doing differently is hard to manage (since usually the sysadmin team is really too small). I'm talking about having all the sysadmin jobs in my area using Linux as a synonym for Red Hat Linux.
  - mhurron 12y ago
    > Having a single vendor is not standardization at all It's the only standardization that you're going to get in enterprise Linux and it's no different than targeting Windows. > I'm talking about having all the sysadmin jobs in my area using Linux as a synonym for Red Hat Linux. And the problem with that is?
    - chronid 12y ago
      I hope that's not the only standardization we will get, since I don't really like vendor lock-ins (talking about Windows...) and I think we need something better than that. Silly me? I know. And still I don't like it. Maybe I am still too young. :)

forgotAgain 12y ago

Until now I agreed and have used Ubuntu for several years. I was however taken by surprise by how out of the mainstream Ubuntu seemed to security folks when Heartbleed was being identified and it's fix promulgated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7592244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7592244 It left me wondering if Redhat's contributions to the security community give it a leg up. Any "cloud platform of choice" needs to be a first tier security platform. The Heartbleed bug shows that it may not be.

cowsandmilk 12y ago
Despite being left out of that initial communication, Ubuntu released an update before Red Hat (as far as I could tell). Ubuntu patch on April 7 at 22:01 https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-security-announce/2014-April/002460.html https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-security-announce/2... Red Hat patch on April 8 at 03:21 https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhsa-announce/2014-April/msg00017.html https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhsa-announce/2014-April/msg...
andreasvc 12y ago
I don't get what you're saying. From a cursory reading of your link, I don't see anything Ubuntu did wrong, it just seems that things moved very quickly with the disclosure. Am I missing something?
- forgotAgain 12y ago
  I'm saying that Ubuntu needs be contributing more to OS security and that those who do contribute naturally have better information on security issues.
kapilvt 12y ago
out of touch how? the ubuntu pkg security update for openssl/heartbleed was available the same day of the public announcement, without the benefit of prior notification (unlike redhat who had prior notice and released their fix a day after the public announcement). http://lwn.net/Articles/593861/ http://lwn.net/Articles/593861/
12y ago

duaneb 12y ago

Ubuntu is far too opinionated to be a stable "cloud platform".

kapilvt 12y ago
yeah.. we should all use a distro based on something unopinionated.. like systemd ;-) personally i'd rather benefit from solid pkg management with updates and bits available for free (as opposed to only paid subscriptions) and with wide availability of the same cloud images across cloud platforms (published by the distro themselves). sometimes opinions are good and beneficial, and become widely adopted because its just a better way of doing things ergo, ubuntu cloudinit for declarative userdata based initialization of cloud instances, has promulgated far and wide across other distros and operating systems.
- Crito 12y ago
  How about a distro that moves carefully, making an effort to not use their users as test subjects? I've switched to Debian Stable for all of my stuff. Life is too short to be beta-testing for Fedora/Ubuntu for free. RHEL/Centos/Scientific is another reasonable choice.
- duaneb 12y ago
  Well with the rate Ubuntu changes core services I don't see how you could view this as a stable server platform in the least.

RivieraKid 12y ago

Does anyone have an experience with OpenStack? How much worse is it than AWS?

viraptor 12y ago
It's not worse, it's not better. It's got very different approach to many things. It also depends who deploys it and with which features/services enabled. Rackspace is different than HP cloud is different than ... In comparison to AWS: The best thing in OS for me is the very flexible network configuration where you can define exactly what your environment looks like. The worst is lack of customised authorization / access control. Unless you need any specific part of AWS integrated into your environment, OS should give you most of the things you need. You can also mix&match services (just watch out where the internal data rates no longer apply).
- RivieraKid 12y ago
  Thanks (you and other commenters). I had a closer look at OpenStack and it looks way better than I've thought.
bebop 12y ago
It is not worse than AWS, but it is different. OpenStack is a collection of python programs that abstracts the physical hardware, such as cpu's, networking, storage and combines them to form a single interface over the top of the bare metal. Essentially you can turn many machines into an easy to use environment that looks like AWS. In fact, all communication is done via web API's and there is even a compatibility API that speaks AWS. So if you have scripts that work with AWS, they will most likely work on OpenStack as well. OpenStack is different in that not only can you choose an OpenStack provider, such as Rackspace, HP and others, but you can also run your own instance of OpenStack. All the software is released under the BSD 2 license. It can be a little tricky to get setup, but there are some projects out there to help get a working environment setup, DevStack in particular is very easy to use: http://devstack.org/ http://devstack.org/
Patrick_Devine 12y ago
It really depends on what you're trying to do, as one is a product and the other is a service. In terms of jumping in and getting started, AWS can be daunting, but it's not really that difficult to spin up an instance. OpenStack requires you to provision hardware and install a lot of different services, and architect how you want those services to be configured. It's not all that easy to get going (even with Juju, RDO, devstack, etc.). Both have a confusing array of names, so it's not always clear what part is what (ec2 vs nova, iam vs keystone, s3 vs swift/glance, ebs vs cinder, etc.), and not everything is fleshed out yet with OpenStack. I guess you could call it a work in progress. Actually, you could probably say the same with AWS, but it's much more mature. OpenStack's biggest selling points at this point are that it's ultimately cheaper (in terms of opex) running your own cloud if you're at any kind of scale, but AWS saves you a lot up front (in terms of capex). OpenStack doesn't lock you in to a particular vendor and you can swap out parts like the hypervisor if you decide you want ESX or Xen over KVM. Unless you're using spot instances on EC2, AWS can be a lot more expensive (it would take only a few months to pay off a server if you're paying On Demand prices).

rwmj 12y ago

Red Hat is the largest single contributor to Open Stack[1] IMHO Ubuntu gets a free ride because every distro except Ubuntu has to set up an external CI server in order to get their drivers and changes in. [1] http://activity.openstack.org/dash/releases/ http://activity.openstack.org/dash/releases/

allenap 12y ago
The single largest contributor by the metrics you posted. There are other types of contribution, integration and distribution for example, things that Ubuntu has traditionally focused on instead of raw upstream work. By head count, Red Hat is 10 times the size of Canonical. This means that Canonical would not be expected to show in the graphs you linked to, given the same level of activity averaged per employee. Yet Ubuntu is the distro of choice for OpenStack. That speaks to the strength of the community around OpenStack on Ubuntu, the skill and commitment of the people working on it, and the quality of the experience. As to the grumble about spinning up an external CI server: you'll be glad to know that Ubuntu is really easy to spin up on bare metal or in VMs, and you don't have to buy licenses ;) Disclaimer: I work for Canonical, so I am totally biased. I don't work on OpenStack, but I know many of those who do.
- tsuraan 12y ago
  What do you mean when you say Ubuntu is the distro of choice? Looking at openstack's install docs, they list install guides for Debian, SUSEs, Red Hats, and then Ubuntu (in that order). Is there some place on the openstack site that indicates a preference toward Ubuntu?
  - allenap 12y ago
    I may have overstated then. From rwmj's comment that "every distro except Ubuntu has to set up an external CI server in order to get their drivers and changes in" I gathered that Ubuntu was the distro of choice for CI, so that's what I should have written: for CI. I didn't mean to say that Ubuntu is the OpenStack project's preferred choice for deployment.

mwcampbell 12y ago

I suppose it was a good PR move, but I wish Ubuntu hadn't added Docker to an official repository (albeit the universe one) yet, since Docker hasn't hit 1.0. Especially since Ubuntu is packaging it under the name "docker.io", whereas the official package is called "lxc-docker". Seems bound do generate confusion.

rohansingh 12y ago
The package name really shouldn't be lxc-docker anymore. Since v0.9, the default execution is libcontainer and not LXC. In later versions, LXC is likely to be deprioritized.
mrsteveman1 12y ago
They can fix the name issue with a meta package, I've seen that happen a few times. Personally I'd rather they just leave a lot of this stuff to PPAs and external repos.
- mwcampbell 12y ago
  I'm ambivalent about distro package repos versus official packages or PPAs. On the one hand, having all the packages one needs in one place can be quite convenient. On the other hand, Debian (and by extension Ubuntu) has rather strong views about how the whole system should fit together, which it imposes on its packages. So the way a piece of software is packaged in Debian and Ubuntu can be quite different from what the upstream developers intended. I'm reminded of this blog post that a Riak developer wrote last year: http://vagabond.github.io/rants/2013/06/21/z_packagers-dont-know-best/ http://vagabond.github.io/rants/2013/06/21/z_packagers-dont-... and its follow-up: http://vagabond.github.io/rants/2013/06/21/zz_packaging-and-the-tide-of-history/ http://vagabond.github.io/rants/2013/06/21/zz_packaging-and-... The Docker package in Ubuntu trusty (which comes from Debian testing/unstable) is certainly more Debianized than the official package provided by the Docker team. Whereas the official Docker binary is statically linked (and the build process has to go through some contortions to make this work), the Debian/Ubuntu build is dynamically linked. Consequently, the Debian/Ubuntu build has to run a separate "dockerinit" binary inside containers, whereas the official build uses a single binary on both sides. Naturally the official build is tested much more extensively, so I'd recommend using that.

pnathan 12y ago

Very marketing-buzzword heavy.

theandrewbailey 12y ago
At least it doesn't have any hashtags appended to it.
mwcampbell 12y ago
I found the buzzword-laden marketing-speak quite annoying, but we (hackers) are probably not the intended audience. This is probably written for a non-technical decision maker who wouldn't understand anything written at a much lower level of abstraction.
- wglb 12y ago
  So if I had seen this article, I probably would not have posted it to HN.

dan15 12y ago

So what does Ubuntu do that Debian doesn't?

leaveyou 12y ago
I know my reply will sound a bit provocative but I'm genuinely interested, so I dare to ask, what does Debian do that Ubuntu doesn't ?
- bronson 12y ago
  Be the upstream project.

Paul_S 12y ago

We use virtual servers and all of them run different releases of ubuntu and for the life of me I don't understand why they're not running debian. You never start an X session on a server and what admin would want to use Unity anyway so what's the point in using Ubuntu rather than stable debian?

jamie_ca 12y ago
Support contracts. Mostly CYA, but the fact that there's some company out there that can be paid to be "responsible" for any issues and provide companies with a scapegoat is worth something.
shellac 12y ago
ubuntu's release cycle is quite different from debian. If you want more recent versions software, but with firmer guarantees concerning support than testing or unstable, ubuntu is a good choice. Having said that for many of our servers we use debian stable, because stability trumps latest-and-greatest.
- olgeni 12y ago
  As long as you don't get stale packages plagued by unfixed bugs.
Nizumzen 12y ago
For me the advantage of Ubuntu over Debian is that I know that each LTS release of Ubuntu will be supported for exactly 5 years. That means that at the time of deployment I can already anticipate when I will need to upgrade / retire that specific server. Debian doesn't quite offer the same level of guarantee for how long each release will be supported for as far as I am aware.
drone 12y ago
When Ubuntu came out with LTS releases, that's what did Debian in, in my experience. Numerous compliance regimes require supported OS versions, and having a guarantee of long-term support for a version means you're not forced to upgrade the entire OS every year or two, and reduces the cost of using that particular OS.

tdicola 12y ago

I installed the 14.04 LTS beta on a laptop to kick the tires last week. Overall it seems really nice. I was happy to see GCC 4.8 is the default compiler. The only major glitch I had was hitting this bug where external debs (like Chrome, Dropbox, etc.) won't install in software center: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/software-center/+bug/1290228 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/software-center/+b... Luckily they just fixed it, so the official release shouldn't have issues.

mindcrime 12y ago

Whose choice? Not mine... not that I have anything in particular against Ubuntu (in fact, I'm on an Ubuntu system as I write this, because it's our corporate standard desktop here), but I still prefer Red Hat based distros, whether it's RHEL, CentOS, Fedora or what-have-you? "Why?" you might ask. Well, TBH, a lot of it is just familiarity - I've been using RH based distros since the Red Hat 5.2 days, so it's what I know already. But more to the point, it just works. I haven't felt any pain using Fedora, CentOS and their ilk, that has ever compelled me to go looking for a different solution. And that's even more true for servers, where I don't care about prepackaged video codecs or sound or anything. The one big thing that everyone has always touted as the edge that Debian/Ubuntu have over RH systems, is apt. But after having used Ubuntu for 2 years now, I still haven't found any regard in which is apt is particularly better than yum. Yeah, yum used to be dog slow, but that hasn't been a problem in ages. And I don't know about you, but it still annoys me that I need one command, yum, to both search for packages and install them on CentOS/RHEL/Fedora, but I need apt-cache and apt-get to do the same thing on Ubuntu. Anyway, props to the Ubuntu folks for the release. I do lean towards Red Hat derived distros, but I won't say that Ubuntu is bad or anything.

jcastro 12y ago
> but I need apt-cache and apt-get to do the same thing on Ubuntu. apt 1.0 in Ubuntu now contains an `apt` binary, which means this is finally fixed! See also: http://mvogt.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/apt-1-0/ http://mvogt.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/apt-1-0/
- mindcrime 12y ago
  Aah, well that's handy to know. It's always bugged me a bit, even though it's admittedly a minor nit.
mwcampbell 12y ago
I think a big reason why Ubuntu is so popular for cloud deployments is that Canonical provides official Ubuntu images for Amazon EC2. Last time I checked, CentOS didn't. Red Hat does, but of course, you'll pay extra to run official RHEL, so that probably makes it less attractive to a lot of companies. Basically, Ubuntu is the path of least resistance on EC2. My employer used RHEL on its servers (via a managed hosting service) for about a year, and it left a bad taste in my mouth, especially because RHEL5 was still on Python 2.4, and I needed a newer Python for some things. Sure, I was able to install a newer Python in /opt/python2.5 and move on. But when we left the managed hosting service and it was time for me to choose the OS for our next servers, I went with Ubuntu, because I knew it would have newer software, including (by then) Python 2.6. Another factor, to be sure, is that I've been using Debian and Ubuntu sporadically since Debian 1.1 or 1.2 in 1996. So Ubuntu was quite comfortable for me. The same factors probably figure in other admins' decisions too. No argument from me about yum versus apt; they both do the job. Actually, these days I think that Debian (and by extension Ubuntu) overreaches in some ways, with Debconf and automatic startup of services after installation, whereas the Red Hat distros leave configuration and service startup after initial installation to the admin. So there's no clear winner; they're just different.

wtbob 12y ago

I'm happy for them, I really am, but I think that it's a real shame that we don't see this level of support for Debian.

D9u 12y ago

Ubuntu still phones home too much for my liking. That said, I appreciate how much the OS has improved since I first gave "Breezy Badger" a spin a few years ago, and Ubuntu is the obvious choice when I recommend an alternative OS to my non-tech savvy acquaintances.