this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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From my perspective, if used for work, automatic security updates should be mandatory. Linux is damn impressive with live patch. With thousands or even tens of thousands of endpoints, it's negligent to not patch.
Features? Don't care. But security updates are essential in a large organisation.
The worst part of the Linux fan base is the users who hate forced updates, and also don't believe in AV. Ok on your home network that's not very risky compared to a corp network with a million student and staff personal information often with byo devices only a network segment away and APT groups targeting you because they know your reputation is worth something to ransom.
Most organizations care about maintaining document compatibility, especially formatting, and that usually means Office365. Microsoft is notorious for publishing a standard and then ignoring their own standard, making it exceedingly difficult to use other office suites.
I've heard OnlyOffice does the best at maintaining compatibility.
Sorry to clarify: updates come as security or as feature updates. If I've already got a standard operating environment (SOE) with all the features I/staff need to do work, I don't need new features.
I then have to watch cves with my cve trackers to know when software updates are needed and all devices with those software get updated and the SOE is updated.
I can go on a rant about how bad the Linux has recently made my life as someone's policy is that any Linux bug might be a security vulnerability and therefore I now have infinite noise in my cve feed, which in turn is making decisions on how to mitigate security issues hard, but that is beyond this discussion.
So in short I'm only talking about when you update, updating only security fixes, not the software and features. Live patching security vulnerabilities is pretty much free low effort, low impact, and in my personal opinion, absolutely critical. But software features patching can be disruptive, leaves little to be gained, and really only should be driven for a request to need that feature at which point it would also include an update to the SOE.
I agree, this doesn't explain why Ubuntu would be any better than other OSes that also auto update by default...
They probably have been using it for years, and for the last more then a decade I've been using Ubuntu as my main Linux distribution since I have work to do and I'll get to doing work faster in ubuntu than any other distribution.
Why did I start with Ubuntu? 10+ years ago Ubuntu was lightyears ahead for community support for issues. Again, I had work to do, I wasn't hobbyist playing "fuck windows".
In fact look at things like ROS where you can get going with "apt install ros-noetic-desktop" and now you can build your robotics stuff instantly. Every dependency to start and all the other tooling is there too. Sure a bunch of people would now say "use nix" but my autonomous robotics project doesn't care I am trying to get lidar, camera, motors, and SLAM algorithms to work. I don't want to care or think about compiling ROS for some arch distribution.
I won't say I don't dabble with other distributions but if I've got work to do, I'm going to use the tools I already know better than the back of my hand. And at the time, when selecting these tools, Ubuntu had it answered and is stable enough to have been unchanging for basically a decade.
Oh and if I needed to, I could pay and get support so the CEO can hear that risk is gone too (despite almost every other vendor we pay never actually resolving a issue before we find and fix it.. Though I do like also being able to say "we have raised a ticket with vendor x and am waiting on a reply").
I think your first point is the main reason Ubuntu has its popularity to thank for; 10-15 years ago it was (one of) the best desktop Linux OSes, people used to its workflow will continue using it as there's no imminent reason to switch to whatever new thing just came out
Inertia is just a sign of maturity. It's fine. Nothing wrong with it. Especially when the new stuff is happening along side it. In 10 years there may be people asking why you're using arch or nix, when whatever new thing is superior. But it'll just be proof that nix can run in production for 10+ years.