I happily use Ubuntu on a few thousand servers running 10s of thousands of containers. We're a polyglot shop with lots of java and lots of go/node and my comfort level with ubuntu is high.
Thanks so much for sharing -- I think I'm going to give Ubuntu Server a try -- Canonical has done so much for open source (as noted by the other comment) and a bunch of innovation lately -- LXD is something I've actually wanted to play with as well as a virtualization option, which I actually failed to set up on Container Linux[0]. I swear I'm not trying to blog-spam, I just legitimately have been dealing with this stuff lately and have been effectively swimming upstream by not using Ubuntu -- looks like I need to stop.
I was mainly worried I'd be spending time downloading noveau/radeon drivers and associated packages on a server with no attached GPUs. I've been leaning towards languages that compile fat binaries (and running with docker regardless), so this is why I'm a little wary of Ubuntu bringing too much to the table. Also, it's been a long time since I ran Ubuntu on a personal machine, I am still a little worried about the risky the dist-upgrade process can be.
Basically all I feel I need is ufw, docker, ssh and was worried that Ubuntu brings too much along for the ride.
Server is based on a very minimal seed. There are no graphics drivers or anything X or desktop related. The seed is ultimately very close to what a cloud instance of Ubuntu will include if you want to give it a spin.
I am also a big fan of Ubuntu Server and Mark Shuttleworth. The guy does not get the proper credit. He's basically running a charity for hackers and startups yet, for some reason, is not very popular on HN.
He's a risk taker with Unity/Ubuntu Phone/other things that didn't pan out, and people treat it like Google abandoning their products. Canonical has money, but not Google money.
People also get overly bent out of shape for having Amazon search integration with the desktop at one point, which I did not like, but it had a clear, functional way to disable that function.
Their revenue of ~$126M in 2017 is very modest compared with its rivals Red Hat (~$3B) or Microsoft (~$90B). My biggest fear is that one of them may take over Canonical and shut down Ubuntu.
