What Distro is Google using?

Maarek Stele

Employees have a choice of a MAC (mostly for image designing, movies, and sound) or Linux. Development would highly be a Linux machine for the server applications and the 100% customization of the OS to fit their needs especially for security.

First thought for Linux, DBM or RPM?

Next, KDE or GNOME?

And finally, Intel or AMD? It's not software, but people do have a preference.

adnhack

Google, like many other big companies, use several OS Flavors like Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix, BSD... it depends on the requirement. Linux is great, and I love Fedora, but I know Linux is not the best in all the areas, sometimes you need a windows machine (for example, when you are going to develop and application focused on Windows user), or a Mac (yea, design, movie editor, etc) or Linux (many, many flavors).

What I try to say Google is not married with just one OS, but, for sure in desktop computers, the list should be like this one:
1.- Windows
2.- Mac
3.- Linux

and for servers

1.- Linux
2.- Windows
3.- Other

Source: Voices in my head

mfillpot

For development needs they can easily install utilize remote windows machines for testing, so it would not be required for the desktop systems.

When searching the internet I did see some references from google spokespeople stating that they do use ubuntu internally. My guess is their primary desktop linux based OS is ubuntu and that they use a custom minimalist linux based system for their servers.

Armann

"Goobuntu is the unofficial name of a Linux distribution based on the 'long term support'-versions of Ubuntu, that Google uses internally." "Almost half of the 20,000 employees of Google use Goobuntu."

Maybe old news but taken from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goobuntu

JohnVV

mostly for image designing,

G'mic( formerly GREYCstoration) runs just fine on Arch and Fedora for PDE denoising
i use it all the time

altNull

You should totally do Gentoo. As you build your system from "the ground up" (not all the way like LFS), you learn to master every part of the system. You can try and install anything (and if your good enough you can make it work with RPM or DEB). The only downside, you might have to compile packages that are not found in the Gentoo repositories.