“I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”

So what? It costs half of Windows rents and guess what .net can now run on Linux.

"Since all workstations ran Ubuntu and all servers ran Ubuntu"

Admittedly our company is small (~5 fulltime devs), but we have: mac osx catalina, debian buster, debian bullseye, and ubuntu bionic beaver. So precompiling .debs won't work here. Docker gives us all a common ground, minus some wonky mac docker issues with DNS.

Also, this assumes that one is using a server in the first place. We run our own kubernetes cluster that we automatically provision and deploy pods to, so there is no server to upload files to.

"You aren't relying on some guy with a blog post to keep his server up. And it makes you very directly consider what your dependencies are. Do you really need that unmaintained library written in an esoteric language that requires a SPARC to compile? Docker allows you to hide bad dependencies behind the idea that they are inside a container so the harm they can cause is limited and the headache is localized."

Again, this is a strawman. You can butcher things with docker, or without docker. The same can happen with i.e. Ansible & Terraform (which we also use). I can, and do, analyze our images to see what we can reduce to. Most of our images are either on Scratch or Alpine Linux, thanks to multi-stage builds.

Since each build is localized to a container, we can independently update images and not have to worry about dependency mismatches, or random directories being modified, etc.

My opinion will be biased because I've written at least ~120 docker images in the last two months and spend a good bit of time tweaking and optimizing them.

Desktop: I don't know a single person who went to Arch Linux and regretted it. There is a slight learning curve but nothing a HN reader couldn't deal with.

"Just works" type desktop: Don't use linux. Personally, Arch is my go-to desktop and IMO if you can't deal with that, just use macOS or something. There's lots of things that don't "just work" on Linux even today. Bluetooth audio for example has a lot of problems and those will be present cross-distro.

The distros have less and less meaning nowadays, they're just what software is shipped in repos and initially. Ubuntu does a lot of custom shit so you want to stay away from them. Debian is constantly out of date but if you don't mind that it's still a solid distro. Fedora has always been pretty good as well but imo is straight up worse than Arch for sort-of-the-same philosophy.

I used to be a ubuntu user from the time they were mailing cds like you. I abandoned ubuntu for debian when they started doing strange things with my desktop like putting the window controls on the wrong side of the window for no other reason than user lock in.

Last week my son installed ubuntu on his cheap tablet pc. it worked flawlessly : wifi, sound, track pad and even touch screen. on screen keyboard worked. even the wacom tablet worked out of the box. when he was on windows he had to install a driver for it to work!

so I guess I'm not mad at ubuntu anymore. it's just not for me. or any linux geek. it's for windows users.

Yeah, I agree with your interpretation and that makes sense from Microsoft's perspective. Just one open question that that raises: does a name and employer count as "contact details"? Do Microsoft's terms allow Canonical to reach out to someone on LinkedIn for marketing purposes as long as they don't look them up using the email address Microsoft gives them?

And if the answer to that last question is no, what can Canonical do with the data that's actually valuable to them? If I were given access to a database of sales leads that I was explicitly disallowed from contacting, I would actively avoid even accessing the data to avoid any accusation or perception that I violated those terms, just in case I independently got in touch with those same leads through a different channel.