I don't really understand this post. My take is that, if anything, the host OS is becoming less and less important (not that I would choose ubuntu for... well... anything these days).<p>There is an explosion of viable alternatives that are all running in containers (nix, alpine, debian, hell - lots of folks are just using distroless/scratch containers these days with static binaries). For folks on managed clusters, they don't even care what the underlying hosts are at all (and again - they aren't ubuntu).<p>Kernel consolidation is real, but I definitely don't see an Ubuntu monoculture. I see a <i>linux</i> monoculture. My guess is that won't change until Linus steps back from running that show, and then I expect it to fracture again (It's always the people that end up mattering).<p>I also don't agree that ARM isn't coming. It is (I'm already running several services on rpis, and I get issued ARM macs for work). From a power perspective... hard to beat - The performance/watt is just too good to ignore. Graviton/TauT2A are already here, and they're economical on the hosted side.<p>Basically - this feels like the "I'm getting on up there and just want a stable thing I know" type nostalgia post. Ubuntu fits that bill for a lot of folks, but it's not where I see the next generation going.<p>If you're only seeing ubuntu... I suspect you've been doing the same thing for too long. Time to jump out of the rut. Go somewhere new, see the cool new-fangled things the kids are playing with (it's not ubuntu).<p>Ubuntu is a perfectly fine solution (and frankly - debian more-so) but the view the author has from the context of a university setting is... as outdated as my professor that insisted on smalltalk still in 2007. It's not wrong, it's just aged.