Nah Linux Mint is a Kia Ceed.
Ubuntu is a Ford Focus, they successfully stole the volvo estate market (Debian). The car was fun, good value and very practical. It was everywhere. Then Ford started increasing the size, weight, price, etc.. killing the point of the Focus.
So along comes Kia trying to make a competitor in the Ceed.
In theory the Ceed is a great car, its super cheap, lots of cabin space, nippy, the inside has every modern convenance, but....
- It plays engine noises via speakers that aren't aligned with what you are doing
- The boot space is rubbish, so 5 people can happily travel in the car you barely fit a suitcase in it
- There is an steering sensitivity button that stays on at 70 MPH with no indication on the display
- A Vauxhall Nova just out accelerated you
Your left wondering why anyone is bothering with hot hatchbacks these days as you climb into your volvo
You do, but considering the scales they process data I suspect Google would be better building Go tooling (or whatever the dominate internal language is).
A few years back I was trying to teach some graduates the importance of looking at a programming language ecosystem and selecting it based on that.
One of my comparison projects was Apache OpenNLP/Camel vs Flask/Spacy.
Spacy is the go to for NLP, I expected it to be either quicker to develop, easier to use, better results or just less resources.
I assigned Grads with Java experience Spacy and Python experience OpenNLP.
The OpenNLP guys were done first, they raved about being able to stream data into the model and how much simplier it made life.
When compared with the same corpus (Books, Team emails, corporate sharepoint, dev docs, etc..) OpenNLP would complete on 4GiB of RAM in less than a second on 0.5vCPU. Spacy needed 12GiB and was taking ~2 seconds with 2vCPU. They identified the same results...
Me and a few others ended up spending a day reading the python and trying to optimise it, clearly the juniors had done something daft, they had not.
It rather undermined my point.