Ubuntu has too many problems for me to want to run it in a enterprise environment. However, it has occurred to me that there aren’t a lot of distros that are like the Ubuntu LTS.
Basic requirements for a LTS:
- at least 2 years of support
- semi recent versions of applications like Chrome and Firefox (might consider flatpak)
- a stable experience that isn’t buggy
- fast security updates
Distros considered:
- Debian (stable)
- Rocky Linux
- openSUSE
- Cent OS stream
- Fedora
As far as I can tell none of the options listed are quite suitable. They are either to unstable or way to out of date. I like Rocky Linux but it doesn’t seem to be desktop focused as far as I can tell. I would use Debian but Debian doesn’t have the greatest security defaults. (No selinux profiles out of the box)
For a desktop I’d use Debian + Gnome (you won’t get cutting edge on stable but it is not that important) and flatpack for most of the apps. Sincerely I don’t see why selinux is so important on a workstation.
I find it interesting that people think things like selinux aren’t important, but at the same time appreciate(?) the isolation in flatpak or wayland.
Tbo, that’s a little bit to little research you provided considering you want to use it for work.
E.g. why do you need more than 2 years of support for a workstation?
Stating that debian isn’t secure enough really confuses me as it is one of the most solid distros out there.
Agree, also confused because Debian seemed to get security updates rather frequently when I’ve used it.
That’s like their whole thing, stable and security updates. I would be curious if there are examples of exploits that weren’t patched quickly on Debian stable.
E.g. why do you need more than 2 years of support for a workstation?
Enterprise isn’t rolling out the new release on release day.
Enterprise is waiting until the “.1” release so that the most glaring bugs can be identified and resolved. And enterprise is doing gradual rollouts after that, with validation, training, hardware refreshes, etc.
For a release with only two years of security updates, it would not be surprising for a given enterprise to only have the chance to take advantage of, at most, one year of them.
A two-year LTS release cadence with a five-year tail of support and security updates is much more practical. That leaves enough overlap in support for enterprises to maintain their own two-year refresh cadence without having to go through periods without security updates and support.
Stating that debian isn’t secure enough really confuses me as it is one of the most solid distros out there.
Where is the toggle to enable NIST-certified FIPS compliance in Debian? On Ubuntu you just enable it using the
proclient and reboot.Debian makes it a little tricky to meet security standards. It isn’t insecure from lack of updates but it doesn’t ship with selinux out of the box.
Not “out-of-the-box” but adding selinux to Debian is pretty simple.
As I see on debian and derivatives apparmor is the way, but not sure if that’s preinstalled.
As far as I can tell none of the options listed are quite suitable. They are either to unstable or way to out of date. I like Rocky Linux but it doesn’t seem to be desktop focused as far as I can tell. I would use Debian but Debian doesn’t have the greatest security defaults. (No selinux profiles out of the box)
Check your requirements … I get that you may need 2 year support and you cannot control that, but are you really going to dismiss one of the greatest Linux distros of all time because the “defaults” are not to your liking? You know you can configure it however you want after the installation right?
If you are going to value stability and nice wallpaper with the same importance, you’ll never find a “quite suitable” match
Enterprise environment in what sense, desktop or server deployment?
I ask because I wouldn’t want a “semi recent … Chrome or Firefox” installed on a production server
I wouldn’t want any GUI installed on a production server.
What issues does Ubuntu LTS have that you need to overcome?
What use case ? - desktops for office work, music production, a student lab?
FWIW. Kubuntu is my favorite, generally used for research and reading, light web mail.
This is more of a general discussion post as I’ve scene many reviews complain about Ubuntu
In contrast to those “many reviews”, this reviewer says that Ubuntu is fine and always has been.
Seriously, Ubuntu hate is mostly just Snap hate. The Snap problem is overstated and easily worked around if necessary. Ubuntu remains a very solid choice on desktop.
Rocky linux is definitely for desktop too. It was designed as a successor of Centos, which was widely used in medium and big companies. We currently use Rocky 8 where I work. It works fine.
Debian.
Debian stable + Flatpak
Debian Testing + flatpak
Testing is shockingly stable, kind of up to date, and rolling. Since you will use Flatpak for all your apps it really removes a lot of risk that dependencies will break an app.
I use this combo as my daily driver for my work PC, knock on wood it’s been super solid!
My wife’s laptop absolutely has to work. For some mad reason I decided on Arch for it. Actually a rolling distro is not so mad. You get the latest stuff and in general issues are fixed as quickly as a LTS jobbie or you get a work around in the forums or you dig out the source and a compiler. It’s no accident that the Arch wiki is an oft cited resource. Its not for everyone!
I’ve been looking at a similar thing for my company and Kubuntu so far is my choice and I’ve already ditched the LTS bit. I need to run AV and the usual corporate bollocks to pass silly tick box exercises, so my options are rather limited.
There is no perfect one size fits all distro, that’s what we have rather a lot of them to choose from - they rise and fall according to natural selection and not artifice. Imagine if all computers were sold with a free/libre OS or none at all and Windows or Apples were a paid for add on. Monolithic OSs are completely deluded about being able to cater for all, without some dreadful contortions.
Anyway, back to the job in hand! If you want a LTS then you must accept older software or you use an LTS as a base and add newer stuff yourself. Most Linux distros allow you to run your own add-ons formally or informally. Gentoo has a rather nifty user patching mechanism for distro ebuilds and you can have your own ebuilds take over entirely. RPM and pkg distros can handle user packages and Ubuntu has PPAs too. I could go on. Also you can go off piste and put stuff into /opt and/or /usr/local!
Please reconsider your use of the term “unstable”. I suggest you write down a list of your requirements and score them according to importance. Then grab a list of OSs and distros - all of them, don’t preclude Windows and Apples: they have their uses. Then score the OSs/distros against your requirements. The scoring might be in the form of a matrix (table). I suggest keeping it simple with a score of -1 to 1 for each item (-1=dislike, 0=neutral/whatevs, +1=like)
Do a pilot project and see how that goes. Take your time. If it is for personal use then run your tests in a VM. Most modern hardware can easily run a VM or two. Virtualbox or VMware Worskstation or KVM (libvirt is a good effort)
The choice is yours. Note that word “choice” - its very important.
Yeah I do not want Arch or recent packages. I want something I can set and forget.
Right now Pop OS and Linux mint seem like the best options even though they both lack the support of a larger company.
I run Mint Cinnamon. It’s been Rock solid for me. You can modify, add, remove whatever you want. With Flatpacks you are mostly up to date. If you want to install a newer kernel you can, and if you have Timeshift running and something breaks, you just roll back.
I see Mint as an Un-enshittified Ubuntu.
I find cinnamon very frienly and comfortable, which I need in a daily driver. To play I have things like NixOS. I could Arch, but I’m not vegan. :)
That said, I’m giving Fedora Kinoite (Atomic) a try in a VM
Arch can definitely be a “set & forget” type of distro. Just install it, use it correctly, and that’s really it. No need to upgrade to new releases; just keep the system up to date…
I don’t want to keep the system up to date
just keep the system up to date…
The idea that downloading gigabytes of packages every week is a normal and required aspect of using a computer is part of why I left Windows…
Doesn’t have to be every week. Could be every other week or at least once a month. I haven’t used Windows since 2002, but personally, I update once a week, and it never takes all that long, maybe 2-3 minutes tops. But I understand that it’s not for everyone…
2-3 minutes on what kind of internet connection? How long at 10Mbps?
Both Pop and Mint offload much of the heavy lifting to Ubuntu. They are not rolling everything from scratch.
True, but unlike Ubuntu they get it right
I was responding to “they both lack the support of a larger company”.
Honestly, we (a large Fortune 500 company hosting sites serving between 250m and 500m unique monthly visitors) have standardized on Ubuntu LTS and Rocky Linux. Both have been rock solid. Kubernetes and other things that need regular updates and patches (aka things that directly power forward facing apis/sites) tend to be Ubuntu and the rest Rocky. We do NOT however run any ui’s or browsers or the like on them. I highly recommend against doing so on any server.
If you mean desktop, we tend to not use Linux for desktop apps, instead going with MacOS and Windows with group policies and forced updates. Definitely prefer the stability of MacOS over Windows, but both have their place in the enterprise. When I was running a Linux desktop there, it was Fedora Silverblue. Snaps are not my friend.
Hey just to ptich in my two cents. Our shop is running a very similar setup (Enterprise FinTech, MAU is around 100-200m across all sites), with Ubuntu and Rocky on k8s with all workstations running MacOS and Windows since compliance policies are easy to apply to both. I can vouch for Ubuntu LTS given other options. Doesn’t require a support contract, really solid security patch cycles and everything runs without issues.
Also unsure of using Linux as a workstation solution since at the time of setup, all the viable distos required you to either manually roll a compliance solution, or use their specific sometimes built-in solutions (see RHEL). That may have changed in the passed few years though.
Mint is built on Ubuntu LTS but removes some of the problematic bits, it has a recent Firefox and Chrome is of course available, Fletpak support is also integrated.
I’ve run Alma and RHEL as a desktop and it was fine, my main use case was “like Fedora but stable” (more than a year of support). However the repositories are very limited, even with EPEL and third parties, so it eventually irked me enough to switch away. Also no btrfs support without replacing the kernel and adding support from third party places.
This is the response I was expecting
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Not as a spin but both vanilla and Ubuntu versions of Gnome are available in the repositories.
Not officially, you can install it separately but you’ll probably have to tie up some loose ends (haven’t tried)
You can look into Fedora if you want a good gnome experience or Debian if you prefer. The latter will have an old gnome version.
Debian or Alma
I’ve found a nice home with Mint Debian edition. It has the right balance between stable and current that I prefer.
If I didn’t use Ubuntu LTS, I’d be using Debian.
What problems do you have on Ubuntu? What software is too out of date? Why do you need LTS for a workstation?
