When you only manage one computer, you can waste time on these things and play around with your Gentoo, Slackware, Arch Linux, and other crap.
When you manage more than 500 servers and thousands of computers, you can't.
Why waste time on things that have already been solved? It's like trying to make your own car wheels by melting aluminum.
I had to learn this philosophy the hard way: simplify, try to be productive, and don't waste time on trivialities.
Do you know which Linux distribution Linus Torvalds uses?
Gentoo.
Just kidding, he uses Fedora.
I'm fond of Gentoo. I was once hired to repair the mess left behind by someone who decided to virtualize the entire infrastructure with Gentoo and KVM to save money. They ended up with ESXi as their hypervisor and Ubuntu LTS on their servers, and they saved money.
I can't be the only one who tried this (went to silverblue + container workflow) and then had a little devil inside telling me to go back to the niche distro and be productively unproductive
My daily distribution is Fedora Silverblue.
So you trust that Ubuntu isn't somehow backdoored?
Or does it not matter because the Kernel or the hardware are compromised anyway?
Why should Ubuntu have a backdoor and Gentoo, for example, not? Ubuntu's code is much more audited.
If we get paranoid, the real problem is the hardware. Most hardware manufacturers are beholden to the NSA and the Chinese government, and there is a lot of documentation about backdoors in the hardware exploited by the NSA.
There is a misconception about Linux distributions here. Why are Ubuntu or Red Hat bad? Because they make money? Would Linux be sustainable if it didn't make money?
Free software doesn't mean you can't make money.
Red Hat is the distribution that brings the most innovations to Linux, for example.
Sytemd is another matter, but that's another book.
> Why should Ubuntu have a backdoor and Gentoo, for example not?
Well, because of incentives maybe?
Because whoever wants access will get more gain for their effort if they target a system that is widely used.
When we only look at the distro level, backdooring Ubuntu (respectively some Ubuntu specific library/package) gives access to more computers than backdooring Gentoo/Arch/SUSE does.
Yes personally I can't stand ubuntu for desktop use but I can see it's purpose as a widely used server system.
maybe, for managing a lot of servers, ubuntu will do, but every time I try to run this on my desktop, i totally hate it. arch is the way to go for desktop. gentoo is fun to play with, but ultimatly too much work for me
