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Google Ditches Ubuntu for Debian

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 23 2018, @07:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the goocafeteria-serves-googurt dept.

Apparition writes:

For years, Google used an in-house Linux distribution called Goobuntu (based on Ubuntu LTS releases), as its development platform. No more.

After more than five years with Ubuntu, Google is replacing Goobuntu with gLinux, a Linux distribution based on Debian Testing.

[...] As MuyLinux reports, gLinux is being built from the source code of the packages and Google introduces its own changes to it. The changes will also be contributed to the upstream.

[...] How does Google plan to move to Debian Testing? The current Debian Testing release is upcoming Debian 10 Buster. Google has developed an internal tool to migrate the existing systems from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to Debian 10 Buster. Project leader Margarita claimed in the Debconf talk that tool was tested to be working fine.

Google also plans to send the changes to Debian Upstream and hence contributing to its development.

[...] Back in 2012, Canonical had clarified that Google is not their largest business desktop customer. However, it is safe to say that Google was a big customer for them. As Google prepares to switch to Debian, this will surely result in revenue loss for Canonical.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @08:44PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @08:44PM (#626744)

    gLinux is being built from the source code of the packages and Google introduces its own changes to it.

    It's just like gentoo, except they have to do far more work and they have a package manager that's inappropriate inappropriate for the purpose.

    They could at least have used Devuan, geesh.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @12:01AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @12:01AM (#626866)

    It's about the same amount of work as any other Linux distro - end users aren't building an entire system from source like Gentoo. Just the gLinux central repo maintainers. Everyone else would still pull down binary packages with apt.

    It isn't uncommon for large organisations that find value in the Linux ecosystem to run a fully or semi-customised build like this - adding or replacing a few upstream packages for ones more appropriate to their requirements, up to fully building the whole repo from source to ensure they're using validated and reviewed source code on internal systems.