Okay, I’ll start. Ubuntu is good at providing a way to test and build packages for platforms you don’t necessarily have access to, for free. And because Launchpad does snap builds, that extends to those too. I have in the past used Launchpad builds to generate debugging information that solved an architecture-specific bug I wasn’t able to reproduce in QEMU and which would otherwise have remained a mystery due to my lack of access to 6 figures worth of mainframe. And I didn’t have to be an Ubuntu maintainer or anything for that. I just had to have a free Launchpad account.
Your example of Ubuntu being a good desktop is a web service run by Canonical that is relevant to maybe 1% of users, if not less?
Look, I’m happy that it works great for your use case. But this doesn’t matter to most users, and it’s also not even intrinsic to Ubuntu itself. OpenSUSE also has fantastic build services. Basically all major git services do too.
Launchpad is the basis of Ubuntu. And while OBS is pretty good, it’s nowhere near as good as Launchpad. And what Launchpad does helps speed up Linux development in many ways.
Another example though, that’s maybe more relevant: Ubuntu made it super easy for me to swap out CUPS on 22.04 with the latest version (published as a snap) that added a driver for a printer we needed. On most LTS type distros, doing something like that is painful. On Ubuntu, it was incredibly simple.
Okay, I’ll start. Ubuntu is good at providing a way to test and build packages for platforms you don’t necessarily have access to, for free. And because Launchpad does snap builds, that extends to those too. I have in the past used Launchpad builds to generate debugging information that solved an architecture-specific bug I wasn’t able to reproduce in QEMU and which would otherwise have remained a mystery due to my lack of access to 6 figures worth of mainframe. And I didn’t have to be an Ubuntu maintainer or anything for that. I just had to have a free Launchpad account.
Your example of Ubuntu being a good desktop is a web service run by Canonical that is relevant to maybe 1% of users, if not less?
Look, I’m happy that it works great for your use case. But this doesn’t matter to most users, and it’s also not even intrinsic to Ubuntu itself. OpenSUSE also has fantastic build services. Basically all major git services do too.
Launchpad is the basis of Ubuntu. And while OBS is pretty good, it’s nowhere near as good as Launchpad. And what Launchpad does helps speed up Linux development in many ways.
Another example though, that’s maybe more relevant: Ubuntu made it super easy for me to swap out CUPS on 22.04 with the latest version (published as a snap) that added a driver for a printer we needed. On most LTS type distros, doing something like that is painful. On Ubuntu, it was incredibly simple.
distrobox