Google uses Debian

Google uses Debian

This piece is for guys and girls who are grumbling about Linux in YouTube.

Google has switched to Debian from Ubuntu, since it is (2 year) stable and trusted. 

Ubuntu is much flexible and it's 24.04 is fabulous and I have three copies in my NUC.

1. Minimal version without LibreOffice which is bulky.

2. Full version for testing applications using Synaptic Package Manager and Flatpack

3. Stable version for my day to day work.

I am a long time user of Debian and my Love for Ubuntu is recent and growing. 

Both are based on Gnome Desktop.

Rolling Releases of Debian

Reproduction
When we designed gLinux Rodete (Rolling Debian Testing), we aimed at removing the two year upgrade cycle and instead spread out the load on the team throughout time. The general move to CI/CD in the industry has shown that smaller incremental changes are easier to control and rollback. Rolling releases with Linux distributions today are getting more common (Arch Linux, NixOS).
We considered going with other Linux distributions, but ended up choosing Debian because we again wanted to offer a smooth in-place migration. This included considerations towards the availability of packages in Debian, the large Debian community and also the existing internal packages and tooling that were using the Debian format. 

While the Debian Stable track follows a roughly two-year jump between releases, the Debian testing track works as a rolling release, as it's the pool of all packages ingested and built from upstream, waiting for the next stable release to happen.

The time from upstream release to availability in testing is often just a few days (although during freeze periods before a Debian stable release, it can sometimes lag a few months behind). 

This means we can get much more granular changes in general and provide the newest software to our engineers at Google without having to wait longer periods.