Ubuntu has too many problems for me to want to run it. However, it has occurred to me that there aren’t a lot of distros that are like the Ubuntu LTS.
Basic requirements for a LTS:
- at least 2 years of support
- semi recent versions of applications like Chrome and Firefox (might consider flatpak)
- a stable experience that isn’t buggy
- fast security updates
Distros considered:
- Debian (stable)
- Rocky Linux
- openSUSE
- Cent OS stream
- Fedora
As far as I can tell none of the options listed are quite suitable. They are either to unstable or way to out of date. I like Rocky Linux but it doesn’t seem to be desktop focused as far as I can tell. I would use Debian but Debian doesn’t have the greatest security defaults. (No selinux profiles out of the box)
Hey just to ptich in my two cents. Our shop is running a very similar setup (Enterprise FinTech, MAU is around 100-200m across all sites), with Ubuntu and Rocky on k8s with all workstations running MacOS and Windows since compliance policies are easy to apply to both. I can vouch for Ubuntu LTS given other options. Doesn’t require a support contract, really solid security patch cycles and everything runs without issues.
Also unsure of using Linux as a workstation solution since at the time of setup, all the viable distos required you to either manually roll a compliance solution, or use their specific sometimes built-in solutions (see RHEL). That may have changed in the passed few years though.