When you start thinking that everyone on the Internet deserves to hear your opinions on everything, it’s time to shut the fuck up. This guy is at that step, and this “article” has no information in it that could be deemed useful to a reader.
Ubuntu is just getting worse and worse. I was pretty happy running Ubuntu server for years after moving from Gentoo; I jag lost interest in spending time taking care for that server and wanted something easy.
I went to Debian half a year ago and it's been great. Should've done it earlier.
I never understood why people run Ubuntu on servers. It's madness. Ubuntu is a fork of unstable Debian packages. You don't want unstable on your server!
Ubuntu on Desktop I can understand. Back in the days the Debian release was really long so much software was a tad outdated after a couple of years. But Debian had a much faster release cycle now, and had pretty much incorporated all the good stuff from Ubuntu and left the bad behind.
Ubuntu is a fork of unstable Debian packages. You don’t want unstable on your server!
Unstable does not mean crashes all the time. What makes them unstable on Debian is they can change and break API completely. But guess what, Ubuntu freezes the versions for their release and maintains their own security patches, completely mitigating that issue.
There are other reasons you might not want to use Ubuntu on a server but package version stability is not one of them.
It was awesome back when during the install you could just select "LAMP", and a full stack web server suite would be automatically set up and configured correctly out of the box. But those days are long gone.
A lot of distributions do that. OpenSuSE does that. And at least it’s the kind of industrial rated system that will just keep chugging along no matter what you throw at it.
Yeah now they do. Back in the early 2000s, I only remember Ubuntu having just a single option to install everything needed to be up and running on first boot. Everything else needed some tweaking of configs and quite a bit of domain knowledge to get started at the time. It's what jumpstarted me into PHP development.
We should be clear on our terminology here. Debian Unstable is called that because the package “versions” are not stable ( change ). It is not really a comment on quality although more frequent change also implies more opportunities for issues to be introduced. In Unstable, Debian may introduce disruptive changes either to configuration or even to the package library itself.
Regardless, taking a snapshot of Debian unstable and then separately supporting those packages completely eliminates these issues. That is what Ubuntu does.
Ubuntu LTS now offers up to 10 years of support without having to upgrade a release. This is far more “stable” than anything in Debian, including of course “Debian Stsble”. In fact, it exceeds the stability of Red Hat Enterprise.
I have not used Ubuntu in many years but I have been considering using it again for some server use cases precisely because it is now so “stable”. I still do not like Ubuntu on the desktop and do not like snaps in particular. I do not think snaps impact any of the server packages I would use though and I do not expect Canonical to introduce them during the support lifetime of a particular release.
For personal use, the 10 years of support is entirely free. That is pretty compelling.
Three years ago I moved to fedora and RHEL based distros like Rocky for my devices and servers because I’ve gotten suck of Canonical’s shit. Don’t regret it.
Disappoint is a sober word here. I am actually pissed at the casual arrogance of Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical.
I’m actually baffled that this would come as a surprise to people. Canonical has been like this for a long time and you’d have to have blinders on to not see it. They are hell-bent on doing things their way and ignoring the wider Linux community and even their users. That is, of course, their prerogative and to some degree I even welcome their attempts at differentiating their distro from others. As a user though you should be aware of their history and the apparent direction they’re heading.
I just wish they’d stop stalling and went all-in on snaps already, since that’s pretty obviously where they’re headed.
as far as I remember I could always double click the .deb and the GUI would let me install it, pretty handy. Aaand it stopped working some time ago. I’m not using ubuntu outside of work and there’s not much system package installing in work environments so I’m out of touch now, but it was handy at the time.
The discord snap is basically unusable for me so that’s the only way I can have discord installed. I’ll probably switch away from kubuntu next time if it inherited this problem.
you can go into the command line and write “flatpak upgrade”, but every time I open the discord app it apparently downloads something, idk if it’s self updating correctly or not.
What are you talking about? It is not even “for free”, they get a lot value from the community.
They’re nothing without the users, it’s not that they would be making it if nobody uses it anyways. Users used to love them, they trusted them, they went on spreading their system, reported issues, created tutorials, flavors, videos, tools, and so on, they helped Cannonical become what it is now.
I don’t think they’re giving us anything “for free.”
Ubuntu is built on Debian’s skeleton. RHEL is built on Fedora. Many more examples.
Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, but in a much deeper and more connected way than Ubuntu is based on Debian. It even shares many of the same software repositories.
The next closer level is how Xubuntu, Lubuntu, and Kubuntu are just slight variations of Ubuntu. People like to call these “flavours”.
Finally, you get to the closest layer—the thousands of people who have taken a stock Ubuntu installation and swapped out one or two components to meet their requirements. We don’t even think of these as distros in their own right.
It’s a continuous spectrum, and any labels we try to apply will be pretty much guaranteed to have fuzzy edges.
No. It based on Ubuntu but without all the bullshit. .deb ist standard and flatpak is also built in. Whenever both are available, you get a choice right from the software manager. Mint is very much its own thing and great if you want to ditch Ubuntu.
@Rustmilian classic Mint is basically Ubuntu without snap. Then there's Mint Debian edition which is built on Debian (sort of insurance if Ubuntu goes Red Hat way).
Does this mean you have to use apt-get to get the deb version again? Or is there an even more complicated command? I’m wondering what happens for the other Ubuntu flavors. I’m usually running Kubuntu.
Why does this break apt? Just because, I assume (I am using Debian btw), it installs a placeholder deb-package which, while running the postinst script, installs chromium via snap commands?
The issue here is that people don’t like this other thing and so the distribution which has been moving towards this other thing for like a decade now I guess is the bad guy for continuing to work towards that goal.
I have serious doubts about that due to the role of early Ubuntu in popularizing desktop Linux. For many including me, Ubuntu was the first taste of GNU/Linux and it was a breath of fresh air compared to the contemporary clumsy and cumbersome distros like Fedora. Only Ubuntu from those days has any resemblance to the experience we expect from desktop Linux today.
The problems at Canonical seems like a systemic institutional issue, probably related to egotistic management with temper issues. That of course means that Shuttleworth is the source of those personality disorders. But still…
Same here, it’s the reason why I kicked Ubuntu off my laptop. They removed any way to choose and made it such a pain to get around the Snap bullshit. I’m on Linux because I want to choose what I do with my system.
It is a good idea. Imagine you are completely new to Ubuntu and want to install chromium. You’re gonna search on Google how to do that and you will probably find an old article telling you to use APT. If ‘sudo apt install chromium’ did not work it would be very frustrating.
It is about installing .deb that you manually downloaded from somewhere. You can’t install them by double clicking on them, you have to install from command line.
Fedora introduced a whole new distro where you can’t install anything with dnf anymore and people love it. People love using flatpaks instead (yes I know of all the shortcomings, but you can always choose another install method for that broken package). And ubuntu users just hate ubuntu for what they do. The difference may also be that fedora gives a choice to the user and does not directly force it
Fedora Silverblue is in an entirely different ball game. You can’t use dnf because it’s an immutable image based system where you can’t make direct changes to the Root system without making use of the rpm-ostree & VCS mechanisms. You’re making a conscious choice by using Fedora Silverblue, and the pros out way the cons for most people making that choice.
In contrast Fedora Workstation allows you to use dnf just as normal because it’s not an immutable image based system.
Ubuntu doesn’t make use of any such system so their reliance on containerized user-space apps isn’t a technical one.
Mir is not a good example of distro engineering, because it’s an extreme case of NIH syndrome. Unlike what it is today, the original Mir was an alternative to Wayland.
The story started when Canonical decided that X isn’t good enough and they needed an alternative. They chose Wayland first, exciting the entire Linux desktop community. But then they dropped Wayland in favor of the new in-house Mir project, citing several drawbacks to Wayland. The Wayland community responded with several articles explaining why Canonicals concerns were unwarranted. But in typical Canonical style, they simply neglected all the replies and stuck with Mir.
This irked the entire Linux community who promised to promote Wayland and not support Mir at all. This continued for a while until Canonical realized their mistake late, like always. Then they repurposed Mir as a Wayland compositor.
Now this is a repeating story. You see this with Flatpak vs Snap, Incus vs LXD, etc. The amount of high handedness we see from Canonical is incredible.
FYI my understanding is that Incus is forked from LXD, because nobody trusts Canonical any longer. I don’t think LXD itself is them doing the thing that makes them untrustworthy.
You might be referring to something they have done since then, apologies if I misunderstood. Wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to make it a Snap or force Snaps into it.
LXD was under the Linux containers project earlier. After the Canonical takeover of LXD, the following changes were made:
The repo privileges of the original LXD developers were revoked. Those developers are driving the development of Incus now.
LXD’s license was changed to AGPL+CLA
The first point means that Incus is the true successor of the original LXD. The current LXD is a jealously guarded pet project of Canonical in the same manner as Snap and Mir.
As for the second point, I’m usually a proponent of AGPL. But CLA corrupts it so much that it’s more harmful than with a permissive license. The real intention of this license change is to prevent Incus from incorporating changes from LXD (since the copyleft license of LXD code is incompatible with the permissive license of Incus). Meanwhile LXD continues to incorporate changes from Incus, although the Incus developers haven’t signed any CLA. This move by Canonical is in very bad faith, IMO.
So yes - I consider LXD to be untrustworthy. But that doesn’t cover the old LXD code, its developers or its community. Those transformed fully into the Incus project the same way OpenOffice was forked into LibreOffice. And I don’t trust the LXD name anymore in the same way nobody trusted the OpenOffice name after the fork (before it was donated to the Apache foundation).
Well there is immutable, which you probably refer to with Fedoras new distro, and then there is Canonical pushing their shitty snap format, and kinda non-sideloading. Can’t wait for the day when apt only ever allows to install snap packages.
@babara
The difference with Fedora Atomic, which I think you refer to, is that it’s totally open. For example, people started using the OCI containers differently than Fedora intended, which resulted in uBlue and stuff like Bazzite.
Also, no one forces you to use Flatpak. You can still use Distrobox and use Pacman/ APT/ DNF/ whatever you prefer and export your apps that way. It’s just that Flatpak “won” and doesn’t have many drawbacks, and is very convenient. I mostly like them.
And, most importantly, Fedora is the fronteer of innovation.
There were many projects and ideas that failed, but many more succedded (Wayland, image based distros, etc.), and Project Atomic is just one more “testing ground” that is well thought out imo. Therefore people are expecting to “test out” new generation Linux stuff, it’s just part of Fedora. If you don’t like that, use Debian instead.
I can recommend you to give Fedora Atomic a chance, it’s an extremely nice family of distros (e.g. Bluefin/ Aurora, Bazzite, etc.)!
Edit: one more thing is that Fedora is, in contrast to Ubuntu, not controlled by a company. RedHat doesn’t have nearly as much influence as people think, it’s mainly community driven, and therefore choices aren’t (in theory) influenced by $$$
And, most importantly, Fedora is the fronteer of innovation.
What I find impressive about this is that they turn this into a stable product. Early Fedora Core was more of an experimental distribution but those times are long gone (IIRC around Fedora 19).
Fedora Atomic a chance, it’s an extremely nice family of distros (e.g. Bluefin/ Aurora, Bazzite, etc.)!
Can you elaborate on this? I landed on nix for my PC turned server and haven’t regretted it, but I’ve been hesitant to go all in on my main laptop (I’m wary of my laptop iGPU and GPU switching becoming a config issue, and I’m dreading having to configure my wsl dev environments again…)
Windows is getting blatantly terrible enough I know I’m just putting it off, maybe a cool new technology might help make it sound more fun
I don’t know what I should say tbh 😅
For the start, you can read my post about image based distros: feddit.de/post/8234416
Imo, Fedora Atomic is NixOS made easy. You can go to the uBlue-builder and modify a custom image if you’re a tinkerer.
NixOS is down-to-top (local config file that defines your host), while uBlue is top-to-bottom (you modify an image, image gets built on GitHub and then shipped to you).
This allows you to fork or create an existing “distro” without having to maintain a whole distro yourself.
Other than that, especially uBlue is extremely user friendly imo.
It updates itself in the background, updates get staged and applied after you’ve shut down your PC in the evening.
You can rebase anytime you want to another flavor, e.g. I switched to KDE 6 from Gnome after it came out.
You have to use containers for everything (mostly Flatpak, but also Distrobox or Nix)
It’s ultra low maintenance and even more reliable, you can boot into an old image if a new update broke anything or made something buggy
For a casual user, not distinguishable from regular Fedora
Ok, when I googled it earlier I saw “containers and roll back to previous version” and I made a note to do more reading
Your write up was good, much clearer than what’s on fedora and Wikipedia. And the fact you pitched immutable OS’s in general first caught my attention… The concept is a no brainer. Decouple the os and the rest of the software, and don’t bother digging into one of a kind conflicts when updating things - just make it rebuildable and create it fresh. You never know when the wrong bit will flip
Nix’s “learn this one thing, configure it once, and you’re done” stuck in my head. And after a different distros, a couple lines installed Nvidia, Nvidia’s docker package and docker
But then I had to configure WiFi and spend half an hour learning why I couldn’t mount an external drive and how to manage it… I still have no regrets, I’ve got a USB that should start converting my friends and family’s old PCs into a self organizing AI/self hosting cluster… Hopefully it works next month lol
But not what I want in a daily driver. I want something that’ll quickly do what I tell it and gracefully handle the fact I have 6 versions of Java and no idea why I need a version from 2018 specifically. And that I’m going to add a repo to install something and instantly forget what I did if it seems like the best path forward at the time
You’ve sold that pretty well - my takeaway was that atomic fedora is very modular and low side effect and also an interchangable foundation I can swap out and roll back easily… At this point, if it can run containers and the drivers I need, it sounds like a great option.
I used to use VMs so every 6-12 months I could start clean with the latest and run setup scripts for my dependencies… It was just easier than debugging some conflict. This sounds even cleaner - I swap out the base at will, and the stuff I’ve built on it should stay intact. Plus it sounds much more testable
So my main concern is will it run on an HP omen - it has zero Linux support and a bunch of concerning driver needs, but it does have a second m2 slot… What’s the worst that can happen? Except apparently some models forget they have fans in Linux and I just know the iGPU-GPU switch will cause some problem with sleeping… But Windows is only going to get worse
Now that you’ve convinced me this might be the best course (I only see less problems than other distros would have), and I’ve talked myself into giving it a go, is there any recommended reading or key concepts I should look into? Any particular flavor(s) you’d point me to first?
Now that you’ve convinced me this might be the best course (I only see less problems than other distros would have)
Sometimes, software, especially install scripts for something, are less common for Silverblue, but executing those is very risky anyway and I never felt the need for it.
And, as I said, some things just work differently. But NixOS is one million times worse than that in that regard, so don’t worry about it. You shouldn’t have many issues.
any recommended reading or key concepts I should look into? Any particular flavor(s) you’d point me to first?
I don’t know. In my opinion, my post should cover most stuff concepts and differences.
Don’t worry about it, you’ll use Flatpak anyway most of the time, and it updates itself automatically, so the package manager (rpm-ostree) doesn’t matter much for you.
You can still use your prefered package manager (apt, dnf, etc.) in Distrobox.
Other than that, just don’t worry and use your laptop for whatever you want to do.
Well hey listen, I appreciate it. I would’ve spent who knows how long waffling between distos that I don’t feel drawn to, and even if I came across an atomic flavor, I probably would’ve just assumed it was marketing fluff
Good ideas need advocates, and this is a good idea… It’s a promise of an OS I want, not just running from one I don’t
I’m probably going to look at bazzite first. If I have containers that can run LLMs on my GPU, that checks off everything on my wish list except gaming. I’ll read up on it though, you’ve given me the context I need to care about learning more
People love using flatpaks instead (yes I know of all the shortcomings, but you can always choose another install method for that broken package).
Not on Ubuntu nor Fedora, but yes: If a “larger” package breaks on update and there is no fix available and I use that application on a pretty much daily basis, then I remove it and install the Flatpak variant.
Flatpaks are slower, do not work super well with Wayland (especially scaling, some applications have GIANT text, some have 5 pixels large text, but fortunately I was able to circumvent those issues for most applications I use via Flatpak), and you need to run another system for updates and updates are friggin slow.
There is also this monstrosity ...It is not fault-proof and it throws an error if there no older drivers, but this prevents accumulation of outdated Nvidia driver packages (at one point I had nearly 30 different variants installed, resulting of a couple of gigabytes of unused drivers that are “updated” every time I ran flatpak update). bash flatpak-update () { LATEST_NVIDIA=$(flatpak list | grep “GL.nvidia” | cut -f2 | cut -d ‘.’ -f5) flatpak update flatpak remove --unused --delete-data flatpak list | grep org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia- | cut -f2 | grep -v “$LATEST_NVIDIA” | xargs -o flatpak uninstall flatpak repair flatpak update }
On the other hand, the applications provided via Flatpak just work.
And messing with 32 bits multilib dependency hell for Steam or installing pretty much half of Kde just for Kdenlive simply isn’t something I want.
I think they got the nvidia driver accumulation thing straightened out. On Fedora 40, I had it automatically remove a bunch of older versions and now it only lists the 64 and 32 bit versions I expect it to.
<span style="color:#323232;">$ flatpak list | grep nvidia
</span><span style="color:#323232;">nvidia-550-76 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-550-76 1.4 system
</span><span style="color:#323232;">nvidia-550-76 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-550-76 1.4 system
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span>
I think you have a typo in your last paragraph.
Flatpak should run better on Wayland compared to Snaps. Not to mention Flatpak has much better XDG Portal Integration.
It is absolutely a different situation if it is opt-in. If Ubuntu made Snaps opt-in, people might not like them but it’d be a minor critique instead of fleeing the distro.
Right. I just installed OpenSUSE MicroOS to try out, and it’s the same idea. I agree with some of the anti-snap rhetoric. Closed, Canonical-centric system for profit; linking placeholder debs to download a snap. But the philosophy of all user applications come as chunky but robust packages that (almost) don’t interfere with each other and the system - I think that might be the future for safer computing for non-technical users.
Google is an advertising company. Their goal is to maximize profit from advertising. Avoiding government regulation is part of that goal. By imposing “good enough” self-regulation they hope keep governments from stepping in. Their solution is definitely better than the currently dying 3rd party cookie free-for-all.
Mozilla is right to question whether “targeted” ads are a good idea at all. I personally find it easier to ignore non-targeted ads, myself. But, if Mozilla decides not to cooperate & holds out for the Platonic ideal tech, they may cause ad dependent web sites to block Firefox completely. That would not be good for any of us.
Do not know why you are being down voted, you are correct.
I am thankful Mozilla exists because it provides some choice but if you have to changed the user.js --a non-trivial action for regular end users-- or use a fork like Librewolf, or Mullad Browser or even Tor to maximise Privacy that should mostly come available as an easy opt-in setting out of the box, it educates me that Mozilla is not the angel fanboys would like it to be.
Also, their telemetry collection is not trivial either, even more so in their Nightly builds, which in fairness is sort of expected. Also, do not forget that FF has pushed XPIs to end users without their consent in the past.
Does such an angle exist from the google perspective? Probably.
Is it ‘just’ this and nothing else, I’d argue no.
Matters tend to be more complex than simple black and white statements.
I for one think Mozilla is one of the most visible actors with regards to privacy promoting thought and FOSS, with widespread ‘mainstream’ reach. If it wasn’t for Firefox I’d have to use chromium for instance, and that would make the world a sadder day.
I do agree that funding from google is an obvious conflict of interest and probably influences policy in a way not a 100% aligned with humanitarian goals. This is definitely less than ideal and I think everybody involved on this side of the fence would like to see that change. Maybe you could help them with that?
Partially yes, the other concern would be who does the DNS lookups? In my opinion there should be no DNS monopoly so there is no single point of failure if captured.
The entire concept of DNS is predicated on decentralization too.
There are dozends of DNS providers, there isn’t a monopoly. Eg I mostly use Quad9, because is one of the fastes and reliables, apart nothing to do with Google.
The echo chamber is strong. I am a big popularizer of that phrase for at least 2 years now. Agreed. Still the questions had to be asked to keep the concern alive.
My sibling in Christ you commented this on a post about Mozilla going against what Google said. If Mozilla was a puppet this article would not have been written.
Mozilla has signed a contract with the devil, this is their problem. Although Mozilla is very privacy focused, its movement is limited to what Google allows. It is always a problem when a company depends on external investors, since they have a say in the decisions it may have. They may object to accepting FloC or other Google mechanisms, because Google does not require them to do so, because it already has its googleanalytics and googletagmanager built into Mozilla with which they obtain their data. I only hope that Mozilla manages to free itself from this contract this year, as it has announced, because only then will it have a free hand to be truly private.
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