Today marks a particularly sad day for me in my technology journey. With little fanfare and not even a notice of family and friends, I wiped what had been my favorite operating system from the final hard drive on which I had it installed. It wasn't an easy decision to make. I've been a fan of Ubuntu from the very beginning. I've installed it, used it, made money off of it, recommended it, and, finally, abandoned it all in the course of a mere 10 years. I held on through some bumpy times and I've defended the distro to friends and customers when it was honestly pretty hard for even me to do so in light of what was happening at the time. Those of us who were loyal to Ubuntu have held on. We've held on through half-delivered promises, ill-planned start-stop attempts at capitalizing on new technologies, and even ridicule from our peers when 'more stable' distros like RHEL quietly dominated the industry. Yes, we held on and we held on tight.
But last week was a breaking point. For the last 7 years, Ubuntu users have tolerated the company carving its own path on the desktop. When everyone was centered on the KDE or GNOME desktops, Ubuntu broke free and created a new desktop called Unity. When everone else was using systemd as an initialization system, Ubuntu created and used their own Upstart system. Oh they had their reasons and they defended those reasons passionately and fiercely. But, in the end, Upstart ended up giving way to systemd and, as of last week, the project dropped its dream of universal convergence and announced the death of the Unity desktop and a re-adoption of GNOME in the upcoming 18.04 release. Just like that. After 7 years. After pushing Unity down our throats, it's dead. And we aren't supposed to react strongly to that?
Don't get me wrong: Ubuntu is a fantastic operating system; particularly on the server. It's stable, easy to use, and supports such a wide variety of hardware and virtualization solutions that it's easier to list what it doesn't work with than what it does. But it's become increasingly difficult to recommend Ubuntu to others - especially those who might be new to Linux - as, at least on the desktop, it seems to be a moving target. New users especially need stability in their technology. They don't want to be faced with having to constantly learn something new. They want to install their software and get into a groove. They want to know that they can develop 'muscle memory' that will last them for a very long time. That's one of the reasons Microsoft faced such harsh critisism when they released Windows 8 and it's exactly the kind of legitimate critisism Canonical is facing right now with the changes coming to Ubuntu. It's simply too many moving parts all sliding around on what feels like a bed of sand.
As a business owner and consultant that makes my living on Linux and building solutions around it, I am in much the same situation as new users are: I need a stable system that I can learn and stick with. I want that muscle memory. I don't want to go through a fit of change every few years as my operating system vendor refocuses to chase whatever the new hot thing is. Give me a good, solid, desktop and server and leave it alone. If you have to change it, make those changes as transparent as possible so I don't have to worry about them. Trick me into thinking that very little has changed even if a lot really did. I'm OK with that.
So, for now, I find myself leaving Ubuntu for greener, more stable pastures. I removed the operating system from my final computer earlier today and and installing a combination of OpenSUSE and Fedora on the desktop and CentOS on the server. I'll miss my old friend Ubuntu and it's going to take a bit of time to get used to the new way of doing things. But I have faith that the operating systems I've chosen will provide me the stability I need to continue to build my business and support my customers for the foreseeable future. I'll revisit Ubuntu from time to time, especially after the 18.04 release. I'll watch for an opportunity to come back to what has become one of my favorite distributions. But, until they decide what kind of company they want to be, I simply have to get off of the ride for a while.
What about you? Are you sticking with Ubuntu or moving somewhere else? What are your reasons either way?