The Story Behind Google's In-house Desktop Linux

"For more than a decade, Google has been baking and eating its own homemade Linux desktop distribution," writes Computerworld. Long-time Slashdot reader waspleg shared their report:The first version was Goobuntu. (As you'd guess from the name, it was based on Ubuntu.) In 2018, Google moved its in-house Linux desktop from the Goobuntu to a new Linux distro, the Debian-based gLinux. Why? Because, as Google explained, Ubuntu's Long Term Support (LTS) two-year release "meant that we had to upgrade every machine in our fleet of over 100,000 devices before the end-of-life date of the OS." That was a pain. Add in the time-consuming need to fully customize engineers' PCs, and Google decided that it cost too much. Besides, the "effort to upgrade our Goobuntu fleet usually took the better part of a year. With a two-year support window, there was only one year left until we had to go through the same process all over again for the next LTS. This entire process was a huge stress factor for our team, as we got hundreds of bugs with requests for help for corner cases." So, when Google had enough of that, it moved to Debian Linux (though not just vanilla Debian). The company created a rolling Debian distribution: GLinux Rolling Debian Testing (Rodete). The idea is that users and developers are best served by giving them the latest updates and patches as they're created and deemed ready for production. Google's using what appears to be an automated build system (along with virtualized test suites, and eventually "incremental canarying"), the article points out. The end result? "The entire gLinux development team consists of a single on-duty release engineer position that rotates among team members."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.