Ubuntu…wtf
Aug 1st, 2007 by antics
I love ubuntu, I’ve been running it for a couple years now and have been pretty happy over all. Let me restate that: I have been running it on desktops and am pretty happy. In my quest for the perfect distro I went through many iterations (I won’t name names since they are all better than windows IMO and we are ultimately on the same team) but settled on ubuntu for a few reasons.
1. It is quick, easy, and brainless to setup a new box - pop in the CD and click ‘Next’ until its done.
2. Package Management - I found apt easier to setup and use than yum
3. Upgrade path - Huge! This is why I also like gentoo. Who wants to rebuild their system every 3 months. Not me and Ubuntu provides a way to just upgrade to the newest release
4. Its quick, easy, and brainless to maintain your box. I’m an embedded developer and spend enough time wrestling with embedded linux. I want my development host to just work without a lot of effort.
All this being said, ubuntu isn’t a great choice for servers. I do come from an older school of thought perhaps but I like to know what’s on internet facing boxes and have fine grained control over those packages. Case and point, while installing updates on my laptop today I noticed that bind and dnsutils where installed. ??? There is no need for those on my laptop - why are they there. That’s the sort of thing I don’t want to have happen on a server. I often notice upgrades are being installed for packages that I have no use for. I’d rather go through a more tedious install and know exactly what is on the box than have so many random packages.