Ubuntu Linux Reviews

• Surprised with the better use of resources for old machines.
• The GUI is easy and friendly.
• The environment was a test machine with Intel i586 (recommended).

Improved on the recycling of old computers, but most users ask for a solution for new equipment. 

Use of the tools for systems and software to test functionalities. The integration with other applications, like Chrome or Firefox, works excellent for users navigating and test browsing.

Developing more applications for businesses could work better, but that is not part of the OS piece. Let the developers work on other apps, therefore the needs for consuming less memory do not affect the performance of this OS version.

Old equipment works for at least two or three years more, which means a significant savings.

With Web services, many DevOps require different configurations that could cause problems with each project's needs. We are able to supply a cheap, stable server that can cover the DevOps team, using standards we can apply very easily.

RTO with the use of templating support for VMware for fast deployment of recovery or new systems, with the least amount work needed on custom settings, within application installed from install repositories. Shorter overall time with the vetted packages. Normally install and go. Time from Dev to Prod has been reduced from months to weeks in most cases.

Each server has been installed to serve as a solution for a service needed. LAMP seems to be the most used package over all.

Stability of our systems has only improved since moving from CentOS to Ubuntu LTS.

Scale would normally be limited to the hardware. As with most Linux distros, HA packages for most apps are available in the repositories and many great support  forums with how-to's.

With the great support forums available, I have not needed to contact support as of yet.

We still have a mix of servers and must support our legacy systems that range from Red Hat, CentOS, and FreeBSD. As time goes, on we require more stable services with updated security, and we replace them with Ubuntu LTS to unify our systems to a standard that is easy to support and deploy.

With all the systems our network requires, this was one of easiest deployments thus far.

Many other Linux distros were selected for testing, but Debian core was very stable. However, the Debian distro itself was very annoying, missing many basic packages, and had little to no support for template deployment in VMware vCenter 5.5 to current.

We are a non-profit consumer with a small budget, hence the need for a stable, low-cost server to provide services to our users.

While I would recommend Ubuntu LTS (stable v16.04.3 at time of this review) try other distros to see how long it takes to deploy, and how much tweaking it will take to implement your project. 

The Ubuntu LTS server is very stable. I use Ubuntu on most of my servers and I'm very pleased.

Updates on packages are the main reason that I use the Ubuntu server. With this tool, my servers are up-to-date and secured. It is easy to use. The Ubuntu server is good for new admins. We use it for HAProxy load balancers, to database, and web servers with high availability.

I think it should only be for the desktop. Maybe it is good idea to say goodbye to Unity and say hello again to Gnome.

I have been using Ubuntu for five or six years. I use it mostly on web servers.

It is very stable. For all those years, I never had any problems.

I've never used technical support. I use askubuntu.com which is free and it is great!

I used SlackWare, then Debian. My most important servers are still using Debian, but the other ones are Ubuntu servers.

The setup was straightforward. It is pretty easy to use for beginners to advanced admins.

Use Linux. It is free!

We did not evaluate other options.

Ubuntu is a very stable Linux. I highly recommend it.

Because they are cheap and they do not charge me for traffic.

I need to upload a very large amount of data do Google Servers and Digital Ocean doesn´t charge me for traffic like Amazon does. This was the best option.

Compare it to Amazon AWS and you will see how much they can grow. Every company wants to grow as much as possible, or even more than AWS. So compare Digital Ocean with AWS and you will see how much they can grow. I don´t mind using AWS anymore and I think that what Digital Ocean offers me is enough.

I believe we have been using it for a year.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

I didn´t have to ask for technical support. Their documentation solved my problems.

We used Google Compute Cloud, and we switched because Digital Ocean is cheaper.

The initial setup was straightforward. They require very little information in order to start your droplet.

If you need a cheap server, this is the way you should go.

We evaluated Google Cloud Compute and Amazon AWS.

It works like the others, but it seems cheaper. If you´re looking for a robust implementation, then go with AWS.

It's a free and open source software-defined storage (SDS) that runs on various platforms such as Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, IBM Z, among others.

It can be used for a bulk object including as an alternative to OpenStack Swift, Swiftstack, and others. Can also be configured for the block as well as the file.

Hmmmm…….Good question.

Ease of use, ease of management, ease of deployment, ease of troubleshooting, resiliency, automation, and performance.

I have used various versions of Ceph off and on at different times, going back several years.

Yes, on the other hand, deploy in a controlled environment, stay within the “box”, and it works well.

For my use, I did not scale it very large, as was concerned with doing so and with not having enough hardware to maintain performance.

In other words, depending on what you are looking to do, while being SDS, Ceph is also hardware dependent, as is all SDS.

However, it also needs CPU, memory and fast storage for OSDs as you scale activity.

N/A, relied on various forums and Ceph site (looked at Red Hat site info, however, found ceph and other sites more useful).

I have used and do use various others, including services such as AWS S3 /EBS /EFS /EC2 instance, as well as Azure Files/Blobs/etc, GCS.

Also on-prem software, including Microsoft S2D, VMware vSAN, OpenStack/Swift among others.

Depends on your experience, and what you are trying to do, there are some useful scripts floating around, or you can get a turnkey kit solution from vendors such as Fujitsu, SUSE, Red Hat, and many others.

Look beyond the initial cost, for example, free if open source version, or price for a kit from Fujitsu, SUSE, RHEL among others.

Look at ongoing costs for maintenance. This is particularly important if you are going the free route as you will end up paying regarding allocating or using more of your staffs time to support, maintain, upgrade and enhance.

VMware vSAN (still have), Microsoft Windows Storage Spaces Direct/S2D (still have), Dell EMC ECS/Atmos (still have), OpenStack Swift (still have), AWS S3 (still have), Azure (still have), Datacore (did a trial), and many others.

Some others to look at and consider include Dell EMC ScaleIO, Elastifile, Hedvig, HDS HCP, NetApp StorageGrid, Nexenta, Noobaa, Rozo, Starwind, Storpool, Virtuozzo, and WekaIO, among others.

Do a proof of concept (POC), scaling as large as you can as close to your intended production environment.

If needed, use Google, AWS, Azure or some other cloud to do the POC in.

Look for several things in your POC including what are the hardware performance and resource (CPU, memory, I/O, SSD) dependencies, how easy to manage, tune, troubleshoot along with resiliency.

For example, fail nodes and see how system recovers as well as what you need to do to support the environment. Don’t be scared of Ceph, be prepared and informed, use it where it makes sense and is capable of meeting your needs. Make sure that you can get ceph to work for you, vs. you having to go to work for ceph.

The package manager is easy to use & the OS supports a lot of hardware that enabled us to bring back to life old equipment and do more with less. Its ability to manage thousands of servers seamlessly using Landscape reduces the TCO by a huge margin.

We have developed an internal Document Management System around Ubuntu and MySQL, which came at no extra cost and our efficiency has improved dramatically. We now scan and save all our documents and correspondence.

As a product, I can't think of anything much because we are yet to fully utilize the product and it has met all our expectations. The technical training is the one that needs to be updated regularly and also engagement of more technical training partners.

No.

No.

The Ubuntu paid support is probably second to none because we have never needed it. The community support is so engaging and world class such that we have never really needed any enterprise support.

Yes. We had RHEL servers and we took all of them out because of the TCO and the package manager which was a nightmare. A standard Ubuntu server is three times or more faster than RHEL server in booting up.

The initial setup was smooth and self explanatory with an option to go through a standard setup or an advanced one.

Ubuntu Enterprise solution is the best route to pursue for SME. We recommend the standard SLA for 10*5 phone.

RHEL and SUSE Linux.

If you are going to implement this platform then you must run a new installation rather than upgrade any other distro's. This is to avoid garbage in and garbage out.

I like it that Ubuntu is actually free and was one of the first with a decent hardware recognition during installation. It is still free, where some other distributions are no longer free and with a large and active community. A large community means that if you run into issues you have a place to find a solution or to help others.

I have used it professionally on some occasions but mainly to maintain the home network. Long Time Support has helped me to prevent regular updates on stable servers.

The Linux for desktop marketing could be improved but that is not only for Canonical/Ubuntu an issue.

How could these areas be improved? All parties (commercial, idealogical and non-commercial (I.e. the rest)) together could be a force to rekon with. But I do not think that there is a way to let them join forces. So, it is down to smaller initiatives to make people aware of the alternatives to Windows. Also, the required buying of Windows on each PC does not help. I think this is not helpful for IT as a whole.

I have used Linux for over 20 years now and Ubuntu for over 10 years.

It is rocksolid!

I did not run into scalability issues.

I used community support (and Google) for the issues I ran into and solved most within a short time.

I used other distributions, such as Slackware, Mandrake, Redhat, Debian and, of all of those, I like the way Ubuntu is setup the best.

The initial setup experience was the best of all other distributions and it was a smooth ride :)

Go for it if you need al Linux based server. Just start downloading it and using it. It is free.

Ubuntu MATE provides me with a complete OS experience, so I don't have to switch between multiple OS for my work; I can do my development, usual browsing and accessing tools on the same machine.

I mostly use the OS for development purposes by running IDE like PyCharm. I also use the OS to connect to other machines in our development environment.

We moved from Ubuntu 12 to Ubuntu 16 recently, owing to the various new fixes that were shipped with its new version.

Ubuntu is the standard deviation OS in our environment and we have built our own image that the developers can just download and begin using it.

Stability is a big issue in my opinion. I have found version 12 to be more stable. I have tried various desktop environments and MATE seemed most stable to me.

I have been using it for the last four months. Before this, I was using Ubuntu 12.

We have encountered stability issues. I find it less stable when I am using Ubuntu as a virtual machine.

There were no major issues with its scalability.

We have never used technical support.

We were using Ubuntu 12 and we switched to Ubuntu 16, so as to solve the performance issues and version upgrade for development purposes.

The setup was straightforward. We found it easy to set up version 16 compared to version 12.

MATE Desktop is most suited if you want to run Ubuntu 16 in a virtual environment.