Ten years of Ubuntu

Ubuntu LTS is the only GNU/Linux distribution that keeps me on Linux on one of my laptops (an Asus netbook).

All the other distributions fail short of 100% laptop support out of the box.

As I am no longer on my 20's with lots of time to spare, either it works out of the box, or it doesn't. I don't care about starting weekend projects that become week long projects just to get something working.

Or just trying out distributions to see how they look like. My first distribution, Slackware 2.0, was a long time ago.

Ubuntu is great and I do like Unity as desktop environment on my netbook.

I tried T440s exactly for 3 days and sent it back! Lenovo just screwed their trackpoint/trackpad experience (and part of keyboard as well). The virtual buttons do not work on Linux out of the box. Had to buy a refurbished T430s, with which I'm quite happy - only the battery time is really bad, I get just 2 hours on Linux.

So, before I knew what linux was (and was teased on various forums) I ordered some free CD's from Ubuntu. (I didn't have the internet at home). (eventually I got them; ubuntu 5.04 I think [Horny Hedgehog from memory])

When I received them I was pleased, everything worked.. well, not everything, but it sorta worked! I had a desktop environment and a command line and I felt a small sense of accomplishment because I'd navigated the strange menu's safely before anakonda or full-framebuffer installers

Because of the peer pressure I learned about how to do my bits, and I carried on.

Later in the year I found fedora, and Blue is a nicer colour than brown (I was young and fickle) but it was less user friendly, so I committed to learn that and get off the "Noob Friendly" Ubuntu OS.

Many years later I got a small laptop for my mother, at this stage in my life I was "awoken" and I knew the power a machine could hold if it ran linux, so I put ubuntu on it- She's not the most technically apt lady in the world but was able to do most things with ease, and I put that down to having a "Good UX outside microsoft" (since most people who learn the microsoft way are generally committed to a mindset and anything outside of that is pushed away).

A few issues with Flash, some performance hiccups on some websites that seemed to try and avoid supporting linux in strange ways (that I take for granted I know how to bypass) and eventually the machine gave up the ghost.

I bought a new machine and put ubuntu on it (13.10 I think) and she was somewhat less than pleased, the UX had changed, she didn't know what was available anymore, nothing was organised in a way she understood.. and so I installed mint, she's now happy.

So I'll say this for Ubuntu, they put linux in the hands of people who we should really be targetting, it allowed me access to linux acting as a base plate and later acting as a full blown system for someone who was not interested at all in computers. And they pushed a trend for that, so we should all be thankful.

> > Upgrade to newer version always fails. I'm left with a broken OS at the end.

> I'm pretty sure that this is an issue of having a more sophisticated package management.

I'm pretty sure that it's Ubuntu. My understanding is that Debian—from which Ubuntu is derived and which is also apt-based—is known for reliable upgrades.

It's part of why I've standardised on Debian.

A follow on from this story and many moons after my "fickle" switch to Fedora/RHEL.

At this point in my life I'd been involved in a half dozen large companies and used linux on enormous scale.

I moved to a company that was using ubuntu LTS (10.04) (old at the time) in production, it was heavily invested and I expected that wouldn't change as Developers were very hesitant to change to debian (which is too old/doesn't make things easy enough) or centos/RHEL which suffers the same issues and has the added benefit of having SELinux (which I'm an advocate of understanding rather than disabling).

I go through my daily security advisories and a local privilege escalation means all our virtual machines and virtual machine hosts are affected, luckily it's patched as 10.04 is still supported so I apt-get update;apt-get upgrade and send out an email saying the server will be down for 30 minutes while it receives patches.

I was wrong, it was down for 6 hours.

unfortunately someone upsteam caused that particular kernel update to rebuild all initramfs' on the machine, and had also named lvm2 to lvm, so now my drives wouldn't mount.

On any kernel version/initramfs version

normally you can drop to shell load the module, mount the drives and continue startup, but unfortunately that stopped a lot of things from loading such as the bonding we had in place on the nics.

obviously I didn't know why it broke at the time and was attempting to get help from #ubuntu on freenode.

the response was "Sometimes it's better not to know why it broke"

that server was smoothly running CentOS before I left that company.

So in my opinion support and enterprise is where it falls down.