Canonical announced today it will release Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on 21st April, featuring the new ‘snap’ package format and LXD pure-container hypervisor. This is the latest version of the world’s most widely used Linux platform across desktop, IoT and cloud computing.
The images are available for download now, but no official announcement just yet.
I have a hard time believing that. Maybe it’ 0.8 of the 1% desktop Linux market, but I’d bet RHEL is the most widely used Linux overall especially in commercial environments.
I agree in theory, but it may just be how you slice up the numbers. If you could Mint as “Ubuntu-based” (among other derivatives) I’m betting there are more of those than RHEL deployments.
Perhaps, however Mint is so very different from Ubuntu at this point that including it, and derivatives like it, would essentially be an outright lie on behalf of Canonical’s marketing.
The UI might be different, but it is still Ubuntu underneath (e.g. lsb_release, etc.). Also, I have never seen Mint & friends being used on. e.g. AWS, while we were using Ubuntu all the time I was working in a cloud company.
Good grief, I’m hopeless today. Meant to say this one was deleted, not post another new comment saying deleted. What the @#%/ is wrong with me today?
Edited 2016-04-21 15:53 UTC
Deleted. Wrong article.
Mint is mostly ubuntu with mate/cinnamon and a green theme with slightly slower servers.
ubuntu-mate does the about same thing nowadays,
providing the old gnome 2 desktop with little fuss.
The file browser even has an undo function.
I think its probably the most widely used. Its always free and updated regardless of any support you pay. So for those that don’t really care that much about compatibility for more than two years ( like most people that just use a web server or what not), I’d think they’d use ubuntu LTS or otherwise.
Now depending on how you want to define “commercial environments”, I’d agree RHEL or its variants are most likely in greater numbers.
I have to say that Ubuntu LTS and Kubuntu LTS versions are supported during five years.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS
http://kubuntu.com/support/
And RHEL has a 10 year lifespan.
If I want stability then it is either SUSE or RHEL/CentOS.
I got fed up with Canonical breaking things, fixing them in time for the next release and breaking them again. This was around 10.11. Never went back. no need to do so for my use case. YMMV though.
This is another discussion.
yeah, sorry, was wrong about that.
But will ubuntu purposefully introduce limitations into packages to maintain existing behavior with older versions of popular networking hardware, just so nothing will change as new technology comes through?
Red hat will! If thats a good thing to you, you are their customer base.
I should note, that despite this, I largely admire the company for both its financial success as well as its important contributions to foundational projects that benefit the whole community in an open and fair manner.
So I can overlook funny things like that. Plus its Free as in beer now for developers*! Wheee, I’m redhatting like its 1999!
* well, a single license
I might depend on how we define commercial environments and deployments. For example, an article last week claimed Ubuntu has something like 10 times more OpenStack instances than Red Hat and CentOS combined. But on bare metal, in America at least, I would imagine Red Hat is king of the server room.
I think the original post was referring to desktop usage though, where Ubuntu and its community editions do likely out number everyone else by a large margin.
We are a commercial environment whose management don’t know anything about Linux and specially if you spend money just to run a computer, they would hesitate to support you.
Come Ubuntu as free, so its natural for us to select Ubuntu than Redhat. CentOS specifically if I want to run the Directory Server, I’d argue that Ubuntu was more visible and greater in numbers than Redhat/CentOS combined.
Yeah depends on the company culture. Hence my weasel words. too sick of “enterprise” true scotsmen. There is a certain style of conservative company that is just now comfortable with linux instead of unix. This is redhats bread and butter.
I think the most widely used desktop Linux distribution is ChromeOS.
IoT I am less sure, OpenWrt maybe or OpenEmbedded or even Android, but certainly not Ubuntu.
Cloud, that is indeed Ubuntu.
Edited 2016-04-21 17:29 UTC
You might be surprised at how much Ubuntu Server is out there. My last 4 employers have all run their fleet on Ubuntu Server, which included a cloud provider.
Ubuntu Server LTS is stable, has a far greater range of packages available in the upstream repository and is cheaper than RHEL (if you pay for your support)
Hands down. And a very distant 2nd is SuSE Enterprise Linux but mostly in EMEA region. USA is 100% RHEL.
Ubuntu is gaining momentum with OpenStack and Docker stuff… but It’s more hot air than reality. When you deploy a Linux server (physical or virtual) in a Fortune 500 company… 99.9% of the time you go RHEL.
I don’t know if that’s good or bad, I just describing what I see. Ubuntu Server is pretty good, I don’t have nothing against it.
That seems to be the common wisdom, which either means I live in bizarro world or the common wisdom is wrong.
SuSE is big in Germany, but Germany isn’t the entire EMEA region. I can count the number of SuSE systems I’ve seen in the wild here in the UK on one hand. Likewise my last four employers have all been US companies…and they’ve been firmly running Ubuntu Server.
Perhaps I’m just not working for sufficiently Enterprise-y companies?
Well, Openstack has recently released the results of their user survey.
Regarding which operating system is used for the Openstack deployments, the results are:
1- Ubuntu Server 55%
2- Centos 20%
3- RHEL 16%
So, more than half of the deployments are Ubuntu, the rest of the distros are sharing the other half.
The pdf is here: http://www.openstack.org/assets/survey/April-2016-User-Survey-Repor…
By the logic of them lumping Mint in with Ubuntu you could lump Ubuntu in with Debian and Debian would be the greatest one used everywhere!
Seriously though, something tells me that the ‘cloud’ bit there especially is definitely not Ubuntu, but is Rhel/CentOS.
I’m sure they have some narrow definition of what “cloud computing” is that doesn’t include things like EC2. I’d suspect this has to do with all of the Docker images that are based on Ubuntu. If your definition of “cloud” is “Docker” then maybe Ubuntu is the most widely used…
http://www.zdnet.com/article/ubuntu-linux-continues-to-rule-the-clo…
Two comments:
1. just “Linux” is Amazon’s RHEL/CentOS version
2. obviously the actual HW might run Amazon’s RHEL, but clearly, people are using the Ubuntu images way more
Yeah, I’m pretty sure they are referring to the amount of OpenStack/Docker downloads or some stupid measure.
At SoftLayer for example, more than 90% of Linux deploys are RHEL 6 or 7.
I know SoftLayer is mostly used by big/huge companies and It’s not 100% representative of the Linux world… but the RHEL advantage is so huge… I don’t think Ubuntu plays in the same league really.
> Most widely used
That’s what it was also said in the Wikipedia reports:
https://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2015-06/SquidRepor…
Heh, of the all comments, nobody discusses the new features in Ubuntu = Snap packages and ZFS which are more exciting than the number of deployments being highlighted here.
Snap-packages are not exciting, they’re a security-hole just waiting to happen. The task of keeping all of the app’s dependencies up-to-date is now on the shoulders of the people doing those packages, and they therefore either have to keep duplicating the same work distro-wide package-maintainers are already doing, or the more likely approach where they just ignore keeping those dependencies up-to-date and only focus on the app itself!
It’s fucking lunacy, that’s what it is.
As an application developer I strongly disagree. People usually want to use the newest versions of libraries (let’s take Qt as an example) while distributions have much older versions in their repositories. This has been a huge PITA with debs and you have been forced to ship your own libraries anyway. Your opinion is really short-sighted.
Edited 2016-04-22 09:15 UTC
Speaking of Snap and security holes…
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/42320.html
No thanks, I’ll stick with Slackware and Alpine.
Ah, if only I could. If we had a text-based web browser as good as alpine is for email, I’d probably do just that. Always did love Slackware. Most BSD-like of the modern Linux systems and solid as a rock once it’s configured.
Sorry, I was actually referring to Alpine Linux, though the Alpine mail client is awesome too.
The advantages overweight the security holes.
And besides, you don’t run snap packages when you’re involved in highly secure environment when security is paramount, like working in Pentagon or any intelligence agencies if you want.
Linus Torvalds is right when criticizing people who gives first security than usability, that is the real lunacy.
One telling thing about Ubuntu on servers is that Dell doesn’t offer it pre-installed – Windows Server, Suse Enterprise, RHEL: yes, but Ubuntu Server: no. This would suggest to me that on bare metal kit, Ubuntu is behind both SUSE and RHEL/CentOS, but I could well believe that w.r.t. containers/VMs, Ubuntu Server is ahead.
Edited 2016-04-22 06:47 UTC
So it must be Dell telling us that Ubuntu is below Linux and Windows, while IBM’s LnuxOne tells you that Ubuntu/Redhat/Suse are equally important.
Backup up before upgrading and use the commandline to do the upgrade, not the graphical tool. I upgraded my laptop from 14.04 and it left with a borked system.
Ah, business as usual, then. If Ubuntu Server has that same upgrade process, their supposed advantage of numbers won’t last for crap.
Yeah, upgrading an existing setup has NEVER worked for me. I just back-up my home and do a clean install. It gives me a chance to do house-cleaning at the same time as my old install will have become cluttered.
Got Xubuntu 16.04 ISO via torrent last night… just letting it seed for awhile while I make my back-up of /home. I’ve stuck with Xubuntu since 2010. I let my brother try everything else, and after watching how he does, I stick with Xubuntu.
Well, you should always backup of course, but for a server upgrade a clean install is often a last resort option. It entails a lot more downtime for said server, and a lot more work for the admins.
> clean install
Clean installs are the best for desktop systems.
I’ve never had a serious problem updating Ubuntu over the past decade.
A week ago I went from 12.04 -> 14.04 -> 15.10 on an old laptop without a hitch.
Rule No 1. Remove Xscreensaver before updating. The last thing you want is your computer suspending/hibernating during the upgrade.
I’ve been under the impression that the graphical tool just runs do-release-upgrade. Of course that might not be the case
File a bug if they produce different results.
The graphical tool crashed and took down the process itself.
Why would you upgrade as soon as the new version was released?
Trusty (14.04) still has four years of support remaining. !0.04 still has 12 months support remaining.
I wait a few months for the first update release before upgrading. It saves quite a few hassles.
Because I wanted to try it out.
Edited 2016-04-23 05:38 UTC
Why not try it out risk-free in Virtualbox?
In the past I haven’t had much problems upgrading Ubuntu. But I do like to try it on a separate harddisk.
The Dutch translation of the disk partitioner managed to install on the wrong partition but the english version went allright.
16.04 on my laptop (with 15.10 and windows 7) doesn’t like the boot partition the previous version created and complains.
Grub is weird and I don’t know if efi is really an improvement.
Edited 2016-04-23 10:38 UTC
I dunno. It was on my laptop and I wasn’t really worried about losing any data since I had anything important in dropbox already.
And yet Debian has little to no issues going from one stable release to the next.
This is why I no longer use Ubuntu, especially going from one LTS to another LTS should be considered doable and a top priority for them to have it working correctly.
Debian has a much smaller installed base. Ubuntu has around 50% of all Linux users. The comparison is pointless in so many ways. I would be using Debian if it was “better” for me. It isn’t.
What? How is that relevant to “Debian is better/more stable than Ubuntu?” You are aware that Ubuntu is derived from Debian and it just happens to be that Ubuntu is created based on Debian unstable, yet is generally more unstable than Debian unstable, right?
Of course I know that! But more users means more hardware combinations and more different kind of issues. My point was that if Debian had as many (similar) users as Ubuntu it could be just as “unstable”.