What is keeping people on Ubuntu instead of just using Debian? I'm genuinely curious. What is Ubuntu offering that Debian doesn't provide?

I think it's just brand, ubuntu was what I knew from using it as a personal desktop and then it's the default/most obvious option for a lot of providers, I think even 10+ years ago AWS EC2 defaulted to it above Debian, digital ocean too I think?

I don't remember why exactly but it was definitely just 'linux VPS = Ubuntu' for a long time. I think they got reputation as being the 'just works' option because they were happier to include some non-free graphics drivers etc where Debian was the more pure option but most end users didn't care

But since they added snap and I started running into issues with trying to install Docker etc a few years ago I default to Debian now and most of the time I don't even know which it is.

> What is Ubuntu offering that Debian doesn't provide?

Surprised how many answers here are on "social" reasons, and ignoring that Ubuntu does provide genuine additions to Debian.

Ubuntu includes additional proprietary drivers to Debian. So there are legitimate hardware cases were Ubuntu will work out the box and Debian won't. I can't speak for how many people need those drivers, and how much of choice is down to defaults/inertia etc.

From hearing interviews with PopOS folk, I think this is also a big reason people choose Ubuntu as a base for a lot of Distros instead of Debian.

The traditional answer is that Debian is a bit slower-moving in both the Linux kernel and userland, so people who want current versions of popular software often find that they have to do some extra work in Debian.

A gradually increasing number of popular userland applications have been publishing their own apt repositories however so this is less of a problem now than it used to be.

Over the years though I've found that I much prefer Debian's relative stability and more thoughtful, if slightly plodding, release cadence.

Back in the day in 2008, Linux was niché.

It had issues all the time, and finding solutions required searching online, manually. Time consuming, difficult process. Very un-beginner-friendly.

From the throve of all possible distros, one stood out. Ubuntu. Very popular. Askubuntu Forums (with coffee beans denoting ranks) was the place when, 9/10 times, the answer to your problem could be found.

So when your fedora friend cried trying to get his camera and sound working, you either found the solutions already, or asked for them and got them. Usually the former.

That was the biggest advantage of Ubuntu. Big community and wealth of troubleshooting knowledge already available. And it had the opinion of a beginner friendly system. Which made the community grow and created a large market/userbase for help threads/tutorials.

Add to that, that people are creatures of habit and 'voila - you have a lot of people sticking to Ubuntu just because they never got so pissed at them that they would change their distro.

Ubuntu is a Debian distribution that releases more often. A faster update cycle for their packages is basically their entire reason for existing.

I may be biased as a Debian user, but if Ubuntu now reacts slower than Debian this may push some people to reconsider their choice.

For me it's just because I've been using Ubuntu full time since 2008 and has served me well my entire career, I think it's fair to say it's the flagship desktop OS that introduced many to Linux.

I feel like we're close to a post-distro era of operating systems though. My ansible playbook customizes so much already it wouldn't take too much more to just start from debian tbh.

For me, it's not so much "what does Ubuntu have that Debian doesn't" and more that "just use Ubuntu" has only bitten me twice.

It's 2009 or so and I want to try Linux. "Just try Ubuntu" they say, and I have a good time. I see that many "How to use X on Linux" guides, or FOSS software, often build for only Debian, and sometimes only Ubuntu. This is fine until snaps give me huge problems in 2018, and so I completely stop using Ubuntu desktop.

Now in 2026, I manage three servers (two on Ubuntu), one Raspberry Pi (on Ubuntu), and two Linux desktop installations. I stopped using Ubuntu desktop in 2018 but snaps are less problematic for my server workflows, so now I have three Ubuntu server installs. On my desktops and my one non-Ubuntu server, I find myself sometimes missing Ubuntuland. (These aren't Debian though, so I might just be missing Debianland.)

"Just use Ubuntu" is now something that has bitten me in using servers. Two bites in 17 years is a fantastic track record. But this slow response to a CVE fix has me looking at Debian, and this has shaken my faith in canonical. "Do they pull in upstream security fixes quickly" is one of my first questions for any FOSS I use.

But my servers aren't Nix or IaC or whatever, and so... Taking them down and putting them up would take a lot of time and risk, which are two things I'm not so willing to spend. Maybe it's 10 minutes, or maybe there's a bandaid fix I have from 2023 that I forgot about and would need an hour to re-derive. So, I find myself taking the security gamble instead.

Ubuntu offers a path from free use to paid first party support. For me, that makes it very attractive for a startup or small business that may want to add a support contract later. Ubuntu makes it a lot easier than Red Hat. Paid support for Debian is via third parties. Ubuntu is a solid distro, although I think Debian is a better one if paid support isn't an important feature to have.

Ubuntu has a timeline for how long they will provide updates for a given long term distribution release. I moved over to Ubuntu back when CentOS was converted in to a Fedora type release without a long term commitment to providing security fixes.

I might be moving over to Rocky Linux 10.

Install Ubuntu and you get 10-15 years of support of your current software stack.

Install Debian and you get 3-5 years of support.

Ubuntu also invests a lot into their desktop experience while Debian is closer to stock Gnome. That's more of a preference thing, though.

Debian has also traditionally been a pain to use with proprietary software. Nvidia drivers, WiFi firmware, you name it. It got better in the past years but it's hard to shake the bad name.

Historically, Debian didn't ship proprietary wireless firmware in the installer (because it was proprietary software, and Debian doesn't do proprietary), so you couldn't install it on most laptops without plugging them into wired Ethernet to download the wireless firmware packages from non-free.

They changed that a few years ago, but plausibly the underlying prioritization of end-user experience is still lower than Ubuntu's degree of user focus.

I still wish Mark would rename his company "Ubuntu". He's a great guy, the company does great work, but I keep getting undeserved credit for it because we wouldn't sell him the domain name.

For some reason I had feeling that Ubuntu more "serious" than Debian. I mean they're asking for money from people. So it's basically Debian with paid services. Can't be worse than Debian and probably is better, maybe they paid some engineer with these money to patch things faster.

That's just some rough reasoning in my head.

Also when you install third-party software, 100% of them will support Ubuntu. That's more about workstation usage, though. But having tested platform matters.

I find major version upgrades a lot more reliable on Ubuntu. Every time I've done that on Debian something big broke.

If your infrastructure doesn't use landscape, kernel hot patching, JuJu or similar Canonical technology, or doesn't have its own Snap storefront, there's no need to install Ubuntu. Rest is just momentum.

Debian used to move a bit slow in terms of userspace, and that's true, but for servers, that's a non-issue for the last 20 years or so (from my experience).

On the Desktop side, Fedora and Ubuntu moves faster on the userspace front, but if your system is behind a NAT, and you know what you're doing, Debian Testing is just as good, more stable and it's rolling (except when it's feature freeze, but a stable workhorse is better than a shiny but breaking one).

Debian allows me to sleep well at night, provides guaranteed updates, and works rock solid all-round, so I won't be touching Ubuntu for the foreseeable future. Esp, with controversial choices like uutils, etc.

Debian doesn't have any of the Ubuntu Pro features, e. g. Kernel live patching.

I always assumed the software is newer. You can update to a LTS more often, if your server needs that. For example, I think podman adoption is hampered by Debian's slow release cycle. Trixie finally supports quadlets.

Debian often ends up as Frankendebian, or with custom repos added. How do you run e.g. Nextcloud on Debian? Where do you get the new php version required for the upgrade from? Right, there is a community repo somewhere...

Proprietary drivers, desktop first experience similar to how Mandrake used to be, or SuSE, and the most relevant, in regards to proprietary software on Linux distributions, it tends to be either Ubuntu or Red-Hat.

At my company, it’s the pateena of “enterprise”. I came to th company with strong open source bias. The more traditional/conservative IT guys were all about Microsoft and RedHat. When I lobbied hard for some Debian assets, Canonical was the compromise. But I think we’re real close now to seeing the next round of allocations be straight Debian.

> What is Ubuntu offering that Debian doesn't provide?

I'm on an nvidia jetson which comes out of the box with Ubuntu pre-installed (it's slightly more complicated but that's the gist). You can run other OSes but it is a messy experience and you can easily run into problems.

Yes, it is shitty from nvidia that they do it this way. But it is also convenient.

I used Debian on my machines (after I got past their ideological view on drivers and found I could get them separately and made it work) ... until a patch came out and WiFi was broken on my machines. I went back to Ubuntu, have not had issues like that. Ubuntu works reliably, from my experience, on real world machines.

Ubuntu did what Debian failed at. Better LTS, More features including drivers, available by default by most providers, lot more branding/documentation and in the early days, easier distribution. I am old enough to remember distro like SuSe Linux etc and when Ubuntu came on scene, it became the de facto.

Just that it’s already installed, and I haven’t tried a new distro in over a decade.

But 15-20 years ago it was easier to install the nonfree stuff on ubuntu, like drivers and DVD playback and stuff. I don’t know if its still like that.

I never understood ubuntu as a server over debian, but for a desktop it was a nicer experience for a while.

It's the default for my VPS provider

They test run a little more tests on their backports (and have the manpower to actually look into what is failing) and they have really far out EoL once the kernel release is selected at fixed intervals. So if you managed to get the capabilities that you care about in their tests, there is a low probability that applying updates will cause some catastrophic outage or data loss over the next 10 years. Which can be improved further by fine-tuning phased update rollouts.

Unfortunately, they did in recent history manage to still break iptables, zfs, nilfs and a bunch of machines with weird (arguably broken) firmware anyway, so my personal comparison between Debian (or simply directly the Kroah-Hartman/Levin stable upstream) and the Ubuntu backports is not exactly in favor of Ubuntu.

In my case, I started using Ubuntu like 10 years ago because the desktop experience was much more polished.

For example, the fonts and the font rendering in Ubuntu and its derivatives were noticeably better than on stock Debian/Arch/etc.

Debian by default has had ancient versions of stuff, and if you want third party software, Ubuntu has more mindshare so it was more likely to be tested - anything from graphics card drivers to Steam games.

[for clarity, I am not talking about servers]

When a non-technical person asks me “which Linux?” I recommend Ubuntu because it is about as gentle an experience as Linux is going to be. The install is friendly and the culture is less RTFM than anything else.

Those are the same reasons I run Ubuntu on my laptops that aren’t running Windows…I prefer low friction to arguable technical superiority. I’ve looked at other distros in the past and decided they weren’t worth the bother…To Me.

But that’s me, not you or anyone else. And my use case not yours or someone else’s.

I'm not a Linux user, but occasionally self-host some stuff. One time I tried Debian instead of Ubuntu, it was a lot of "this is not installed" & "this is not set up" errors during setup process of software I wanted. In the end I succeeded in doing what I wanted, but I also wasted time on doing things I never have to do when using Ubuntu.

Consumer-centric customizations and non-free package options. It’s somewhat akin to answering “How can I add stuff like OneDrive to Linux and not have to configure/self-host everything?”

I used to like Ubuntu and Canonical products and these days I’m more indifferent towards them. Their products have a place, but I wish Canonical would stop killing off some of the more interesting side projects.

MySQL. You can make a totally valid argument that sites should just switch to Maria DB instead, but there's also no doubt that dropping MySQL support from Debian cost it a lot of LAMP servers. That, combined with Debian's release cadence which made it difficult to run numerous PHP apps basically pushed LAMP servers to Ubuntu.

Familiarity. Many Ubuntu people(who were introduced to Linux via Ubuntu) never change horses. I am speaking about IT people not common folks.

You and I know Debian isn't much different, they don't know cuz some never investigated. I say some because they landed in a role with a company that is Ubuntu and never had reason to learn anything else.

ZFS.

For desktop use, new-ish user-facing packages without any hoops (such as backports) jumped. Especially where collaboration is involved it can be a major issue when a program lags behind its commercial OS counterparts by several months or years in terms of features and behavior.

I don’t use Ubuntu but use Fedora (and its derivatives) partially for that reason.

I only run Debian personally, but my dayjob company runs on SQL Server, and the officially supported options there are Windows Server, Ubuntu, or RHEL. It's not worth the effort dealing with management/auditors/etc. to try to run our prod DB on a non-supported platform.

They probably don't know Mint was based on Kubuntu. Or that they all - like DSL, Knoppix and others are all based on Debian and if you're brave, you can pivot to Sid from each of them.

When I worked at Canonical, the funnel I observed was Gamer Culture and the Chronically Online. They don't know from Debian.

For me, habit. A habit I'm getting tempted to break by exactly the grumble in this post. This has been an awful ~two weeks for maintaining infrastructure and the ubuntu lag on this specific issue is contributing to the awfulness.

Enterprise support contracts for Linux and the compliance legal liability. No large commercial companies would run purely contributor supported systems because of the lack of those two things.

Their kernel is vastly superior when dealing with buggy enterprise hardware.

It's the default that a bunch of vendors package. For example, Nvidia's official CUDA images used to only be provided for Ubuntu (they have since expanded their offerings somewhat)

Desktop Ubuntu purely because of the drivers. Normally used Debian for my own servers, but haven't done that in so long, and Ubuntu is often default on cloud providers so yeah.

FIPS mode? It's a pretty niche requirement, but I was under the impression that options are somewhat limited for FIPS-compliant crypto (both disk and networking)?

It’s the default offered by most cloud providers, so in some sense it’s pure inertia.

I really don’t care what I run on, as long as it’s some flavour of Linux, it works reliably, and it’s secure.

Software, such as AMD Vivado, tends to support Ubuntu more than Debian by testing against Ubuntu only. Nvidia's Jetson stack supports Ubuntu.

Suppose you are an enterprise paying large amount of money to NVidia to buy their AI hardware to run AI workloads locally. Are you going to say we will refuse the default OS (https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx/dgx-os-7-user-guide/introduction...) on such hardware and lose hardware support, or are you going to stick with the supported OS for your hardware?

Enterprises care far more about vendor support than the typical Linux hacker at home.

All my servers were debian until I brought some Raspberry Pi 5 boards. Debian still does not have tested images for them today.

Approx. two years ago I saw a teacher at my IT school trying to install Debian on a students virtual machine, side by side to a Windows 11. Just for fun, while watching them, I installed Ubuntu side by side on my virtual machine. These two were not done after three sessions and ultimately failed to install Debian. The installation GUI was full of cryptic words I never heard of and looked like from the year 2000. Meanwhile, the Ubuntu installation went flawless. it was done in under 15 minutes, the GUI looked modern and sexy. All I had to do was enter a nick and password, and drag a slider to tell the procedure how much space I want to reserve for Ubuntu.

I hope that answers your question.

    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Inertia, I'm guessing. I have a couple of older on-prem servers still on Ubuntu LTS. Newer ones are on Debian stable.

Please suggest a better alternative for a cloud server? (Genuine question, where do I move?)

ROS, which is not officially supported on Debian. Not using it myself, but users here do use it.

AFAIK with Debian you remain on older versions of packages (unless you are on Debian testing).

I have a company laptop that came with Ubuntu from the factory, Debian wasn’t an option.

How is the gaming experience on Debian? I'm genuinely asking, not a snark.

I use desktop Ubuntu because it's up to date and it just works for me, and I can play the latest games in it with Steam + Proton. I don't have to tweak it or do any additional downloading of stuff besides the Nvidia drivers (I actually don't remember how I installed them).

Can I do this with Debian, in a no fuss way? (I know this can be done in any distro, that's why I'm stressing "no fuss").

I would need to reinstall OS on my laptop and deal with all time-consuming migration stuff for everything that changed and to configure Debian where it is doing weird things

> What is Ubuntu offering that Debian doesn't provide?

I have it right now at zero additional effort

Paid support. Doesn't look like it's worth it, though.

1. Faster and predictable release cadence. New releases every six months, April and October (hence x.04 and x.10). New LTS releases every April on even years (26.04, 28.04, 30.04, etc).

2. The LTS releases are supported by Canonical for at least five years on the free tier, and up to fifteen years with paid support contracts.

For servers, livepatch, latest ZFS and ZFS-on-root supported ootb, faster release cadence

For desktops, gaming and commercial software support, "it just works" (my fresh install of 26.04 with Wayland, recent WiFi, HDR+VRR, i didn't have to fuss with anything)

For laptops, I've routinely had issues in the past where Fedora or Mint wouldn't work ootb when Ubuntu did.

And then since it's what I'm used to on my server and my desktop, i just use it on my Pis and WSL installs for consistency.

I still try out other distros occasionally and i do run Debian on some specific VMs for various things, but I've just had relatively few issues with Ubuntu, been using it for >10 years, and don't see any reason to switch.

More recent packages

"Ubuntu" is an ancient Swahili word meaning "I can't install Debian".

I use it as default for WSL2, because it's a default

They have more kernels, more support for modern hardware etc... good luck running Debian on a modern laptop.

Ubuntu kernels are not the one that Debian uses. The latest stable Debian is based on a 2 years old Kernel ( 6.12 ).

Ubuntu's remote OS upgrade feature exists and works pretty well in practice. I am not saying this is enough to stay but it does exist.

>What is keeping people on Ubuntu instead of just using Debian?

1. It uses much newer packages and people want shiny

2. It was marketed as one of the easiest to use linux distributions maybe 15yr ago or whatever, so a lot of new people and then tutorials went to it because newer software and features just worked.

3. What is keeping them on it now? Familiarity. Inertia.

Speaking as somebody who stayed on it way too long (until 10 years ago, maybe) it was because people constantly told me scare stories about how difficult it was to configure into something usable.

I had to go through the torturous path of Ubuntu -> Mint -> Mint Debian -> Debian. The last step was after I used a Debian live disk to do something and I could see that the stories were nonsense; just something that had adhered to the word Debian in my mind through repetition.

The two worst parts about it were 1) that I had long left Ubuntu on servers and had been using Debian there for years - I was just afraid of the desktop for some reason, and 2) that if I had just listened 15-20 years ago when people told me that FrankenDebians were nothing but problems, I would have never been caught in the net.

I've never been a fan of Ubuntu's business practices, but I'm just generally not into Debian derivatives anymore. If I were to leave Debian, it would be for an entirely different (and philosophically different) distro. I probably make an exception for Devuan, because it's only trying to change one thing (that I think of as the biggest threat to Linux, the final boss evil spawn of RedHat.) Devuan is an escape hatch for when the rugpull happens.

Mostly:

1. Hardware generally just works

2. Videos that use patented formats just play without fiddling

3. Proprietary closed-source software, if they even support Linux, usually releases Ubuntu binaries before anything else

It's just the default target. For backend stuff, you're right that there's really very little true value. But client software just has a lot of complexity. If you run binaries from wherever, they're probably built and tested on Ubuntu first. Like, your vendors won't support distros officially, install scripts and AppImage integrations are going to tend to assume stuff. Driver/runtime integration for things like binary GPU stacks are going to document Ubuntu first. If someone makes an assumption about Python version (a personal peeve -- LOTS of python software ends up lagging the tip, it's not a super compatible ecosystem), it's going to be that you're running Ubuntu LTS version "one before latest", etc...

Are those fatal flaws? No. But lots of people just don't want to deal with it. And there's a market for that.

Because every where you used to go on the internet you read that debian is “slow” on updates but stable as a trade off, if you are after certain new packages you have to use Ubuntu, also, some use cases (say jetson boards) have ubuntu by default plus nvidia drivers.

much newer software, kernel, default setup is much more user friendly

Ubuntu is the gateway drug to Debian, in a lot of ways. You get used to GNU/Linux with Ubuntu, then you find out that there are more refined options and go for those, and a not-insignificant part of that crowd likely goes to Debian because of how familiar it is.

Back when I used Ubuntu it was because I was tired of being excited about a new feature and not getting to use it until it made its way to Debian 5 years later.

"Ubuntu" is an ancient African word meaning "I can't configure Debian."

Debian's ancient packages and kernel.

Increased safety with Rust utilities. /s

On the desktop, Debian is pretty weak.