What distro do you think would become THE distro if Ubuntu disappeared?

[LloydLynx]

Ubuntu is the Linux distro. By that I mean the name is assosiated with desktop Linux, and it's almost always the target distro for big companies that want to bring their products into the Linux world. It's been like that for many many years. 

 

Big hypothetical, like, shower thought level hypothetical: What if Ubuntu just disappeared?

 

If Ubuntu disappeared, like Canonical ceases to be or just stops development on Ubuntu, what distro would become the Linux distro? And why?

 

My thoughts:

Maybe Fedora, because it loves popularizing new desktop standards and actually has the power to do it. It's a fairly professional distro with RedHat behind it. It feels like it's pushing towards a newb friendly sort of desktop eutopia. Though it suffers from early adopter syndrome because it adopts so many new technologies and standards so soon. And it'll never ship with proprietary codecs which a lot of online and offline media requires. 

Pros and cons. So many distros. That's why I made this thread. 

[RONOTHAN##]

A shot in the dark: either Mint or Pop_OS!. A lot of Linux users already recommend these over Ubuntu anyway for people in Ubuntu's target audience (people who are new to Linux and people who want Linux to just be well documented). 

 

Something RHEL based would be cool if it took off and became the new "mainstream" distro, Fedora is an awesome distro, but I highly doubt that since basically everything is written for Debian based distros and it's basically the "tried and true" distro that most distros people are currently using is based off, a transition like that would be highly unlikely. 

[LloydLynx]

3 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

basically everything is written for Debian based distros

A lot of those distros would take a massive hit because most of them are based on Ubuntu. I figure that gives other bases a better shot. Mint will be fine because it's been preparing for an Ubuntupocalypse, and others like MX are already based on Debian itself. 

[Lightwreather]

Either Mint or Fedora imo.

Although I geniunely hope by some turn of fate OpenSUSE becomes the dominant Distro

[Matt_in_NE]

Mint would be my guess since it's designed to be similar to Windows and people love the familiar. I use Pop_OS as a daily driver, but it's a fork of Ubuntu and if it disappeared I think it'd take the forks with it. 

[YamiYukiSenpai]

My vote goes to Pop!_OS

 

Maybe (and my hope) is that they'd even be the ones to replace Ubuntu as its maintainers if it goes kaput.

[Sauron]

It would be the inevitable Ubuntu fork that takes over and continues developing the distro. Given the place it occupies right now it's unthinkable that it would just be allowed to unceremoniously die.

[10leej]

We're screwwed if Ubuntu disapears.

[HowardPlayzOA]

@10leej

Hey man, here are my thoughts when Ubuntu actually discontinued.

 

When Ubuntu discontinued, everyone are still get the source code of all Ubuntu versions. This greatly helps all developers all around the world when they need some sort of systems to make something compatible. However, some people said it was a doom to let Ubuntu discontinued/disappeared, and yes, I knew this would be disastrous. On the other hand, Debian is the perfect substitution for Ubuntu because of the similarities when you look into both of their source codes and the installation of packages that you will need. In my opinion, when Ubuntu developers said that they are gonna discontinue Ubuntu, you can still using them until you can switch to another Linux Distro(s). Therefore, you don't need to worry about the disaster of disappearance of Ubuntu.

 

Edited May 8, 2022 by HowardPlayzOA
mention

[FUIT1985]

Haiku, maybe … for Ryan Reynolds' videos …

 

 

[maplepants]

I think the real answer is that it would still be Ubuntu. If Canonical stopped supporting it, the community probably wouldn't. And there's a chance that some other big company (like Microsoft) would happily take Canonical's place in getting certifications for the OS.

 

The server / cloud space is basically just RHEL or Ubuntu. At any big company they're going to want your linux distro to have pages like these: https://ubuntu.com/security/certifications/docs & https://ubuntu.com/support

 

Obviously this ignores the desktop market, but the desktop market basically doesn't matter. Ubuntu and Fedora dominate the tiny Linux desktop market because Ubuntu Server and RHEL dominate the server space.

[jde3]

I think I read somewhere that only 8% of Linux code is actually made by individuals anymore and most of it is made by IBM.. through their shell company RedHat.

Let me be very clear here... You _do not_ want Big Blue in charge of your OS. I've seen that world before and it wasn't good. Long live Ubuntu.

[10leej]

On 5/8/2022 at 6:25 PM, HowardPlayzOA said:

@10leej

Hey man, here are my thoughts when Ubuntu actually discontinued.

 

When Ubuntu discontinued, everyone are still get the source code of all Ubuntu versions. This greatly helps all developers all around the world when they need some sort of systems to make something compatible. However, some people said it was a doom to let Ubuntu discontinued/disappeared, and yes, I knew this would be disastrous. On the other hand, Debian is the perfect substitution for Ubuntu because of the similarities when you look into both of their source codes and the installation of packages that you will need. In my opinion, when Ubuntu developers said that they are gonna discontinue Ubuntu, you can still using them until you can switch to another Linux Distro(s). Therefore, you don't need to worry about the disaster of disappearance of Ubuntu.

 

The problem is that every other online guide assumes your using Ubuntu, and honestly that fact alone actually does matter.

[Alexeygridnev1993]

Ubuntu is based on Debian, so, if Canonical goes bankrupt today, I believe most of its additions "on top of" Debian will move to Debian. And it will also be easier for both server and dekktop users to move from Ubuntu to Debian than to RHEL once Ubuntu is no longer maintained.

[HowardPlayzOA]

5 hours ago, 10leej said:

The problem is that every other online guide assumes your using Ubuntu, and honestly that fact alone actually does matter.

This was up to debate, nowadays.

[BionicSeaSerpent]

while there's a lot more out there Manjaro is pretty much the second best bet on a Great Distro. everything else has rather hard usability problems on different hardware as i can see. i was given a Celeron N3350 / 4GB RAM /128GB laptop by the school alongside getting this Travelmate from 10 years ago in 2019. i tried multiple other distros Like Ubuntu and PopOS on this Little Celeron crapbox and nothing else really worked on it. especially when running GNOME. Fedora with KDE was slower than Windows 11 and Manjaro ran Perfectly. all of these had the same issues on USB (3.0) and Installed to the Soldered On Storage. Manjaro Seems to just work with the low end hardware that i can't say many people have but its nice it runs so well on such crappy overpriced Hardware (This thing is still sold for 400 AUD, oof) the problem i've had with linux on this laptop was Sound. i'm sure its laptop specific but my Speakers would instantly disappear once you installed any form of Linux to it. and it would presist in windows until the driver package was downloaded and installed

[TorC]

There is no THE distro, it's just that ubuntu has become the windoze of the Linux world!  Now, (IBM by any name) WANTS to be the Linux top dawg.

 

I always disliked RedHat, now that it's changed hats and has a different management, I do so even more.  Same agenda, different hat.  Bigger pot of cash.

 

Watch out!

 

 

[maplepants]

19 hours ago, Alexeygridnev1993 said:

Ubuntu is based on Debian, so, if Canonical goes bankrupt today, I believe most of its additions "on top of" Debian will move to Debian.

This is an interesting thought. My gut reaction was that people would just keep making Ubuntu with or without Canonical. But the idea that they'd just straight up turn Debian into Ubuntu isn't crazy.

 

I can imagine what some of the Debian mailing list old timers would think, hahaha.

[BionicSeaSerpent]

6 hours ago, maplepants said:

This is an interesting thought. My gut reaction was that people would just keep making Ubuntu with or without Canonical. But the idea that they'd just straight up turn Debian into Ubuntu isn't crazy.

 

I can imagine what some of the Debian mailing list old timers would think, hahaha.

with a userbase dedicated enough to Tinkering like there is with linux it won't be out of the Question that if any major distro died someone would be picking it up and continuing its legacy. Open Source is wild and frankly the best thing for Computing since the Microprocessor. 

[jde3]

You need to also keep in mind here that Desktop Linux does not matter. At all. Nobody cares.. MacOS is Unix on the desktop. Get use to it. I know we all have our fav distros and stuff but in the real world desktop linux doesn't really matter.

 

The only thing that matters is the server and that will be *and is now* RHEL.. a commercial distro from IBM for all case and purposes. RHEL and RHEL clones prob have 70% dominance in the market.  - it's dangerous and a bad thing.

I don't think we will ever go back to a major server distro being maintained by a volunteer community.. but Debian has the best chance of that as it has some business acceptance. FreeBSD is also volunteer run and it likewise has a lot of random deployments in enterprise.

You have to understand the people that make these decisions are upper management and they don't know a bash shell from a ham sandwich. They just run what the Dell rep suggests to them or they seen some ad in a magazine when they were on a flight. Technical people are NOT in control of this question.. and if they were we all prob wouldn't even be using Linux.. we'd be using Illumos.