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 Back in the days the Debian release was really long so much software was a tad outdated after a couple of years.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 donât 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.
We should be clear on our terminology here. Debian Unstable is called that because the package âversionsâ 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 âstableâ than anything in Debian, including of course âDebian Stsbleâ. 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 âstableâ. 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.
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.
Three years ago I moved to fedora and RHEL based distros like Rocky for my devices and servers because Iâve gotten suck of Canonicalâs shit. Donât regret it.
However, a thing I try to remember and wish others would as well is simply this: Canonical is a company. Their goal is to make money. They are not out to create the ultimate free as in freedom Linux distribution.
This does (to my mind) not make them evil, and ESPECIALLY doesn't make the folks who work there evil. It makes them participants in the great horrible game that is Capitalism, and expecting anything else from them is going to lead to heartache, as you've seen.
If you want a Linux distro that shares your preferences and won't try to jam snaps down your throat, you might consider giving Debian a whirl as many others have.
Continuing to ride the Ubuntu train and raging against the dying of the light when it continues chugging in the direction it's been headed for YEARS seems ... futile :)
Nice to see that KDE is so well supported! I'd been running Manjaro KDE the last time I had Linux installed on my desktop but I may give Debian a try this time around.
There's no way to install a snap except through Canonical's snap store (or snap store proxy, which gets them from Canonical's snap store).
They're charging for kernel security live patches. They charge for LTS. If they get enough buy-in re: snaps, they're going to do the only thing a for-profit company can do.
Money is literally the very incarnation of evil via the Talisman it bears.
If they trying to make money then they are, not a fiber of otherwise, Evil.
You're decision to not recognize the blatant & obvious Talisman does not make you correct. It's not your choice. It's the choice of that occult chant and signature.
Humans are inherently evil. There is but a thin veneer we call "civilization" that stops of from beating each other to death with whatever object can be brought to hand.
And what does any of this have to do with the price of tea in China? :)
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
@[email protected]
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Ubuntu has long suffered from NIH syndrome, constantly inventing its own non-standard components (snaps, Unity, etc) and trying to make them "win" by forcing them on their own users. Reminds me of Microsoft with its non-standard Internet Explorer, its own non-standard version of Java and others.
The lesson is to use a Community distro, not a Corporate distro. When the distro's goals align with its community's, even a distro based on Ubuntu will usually be better than straight Ubuntu. For example Mint keeps the good things about Ubuntu (in Mint's opinion of course), removes the bad things like Snaps, and adds other features that the community wants that Ubuntu won't (like built-in Flatpak support among other things).
This is why I moved to Linux Mint. Then, when I got tired of having to reinstall the entire OS every time there's a new version I moved again. Spare a thought for the poor saps who feel stuck with an OS from a single vendor. And sometimes even paying for the privilege.
That being said fund open source. Freedom isn't free.
Mint has an auto-upgrade tool so you don't have to reinstall each time. It used to be only for minor version upgrades but now you can auto-upgrade to a new major version as well. In any case there are plenty of great distros to choose from.
And yes! whatever distro (and other FLOSS software) you use, support them with a donation if you can! When you consider the value you are getting for free vs. what you'd be spending on proprietary software, it's not so hard to do and feels good too.
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.
Point form since I forgot to save to clipboard first.
Tried mint - booted to black screen
Tried ubuntu - got silly crashes like in the post trying to install stuff. It also wanted me to sign up for some sort of support package with 5 free devices to get updates or something. Also, trackpad scrolling was uncontrollable. Would scroll up half a screen or more as I lifted my fingers off.
Tried fedora - only 100% and 200% zoom option, and no right click.
Managed to fix the fedora issues with some command line found on Google and a gnome customising addon.
n00b here, just playing. Can't migrate fully as I need VBA and Playit Live etc.
Asus F555D - 12G RAM, AMD R8 M350DX GPU and a sticker that says Radeon Dual Graphics. That's probably what was tripping up the system booting to a black screen.
Time to switch to mbin! The features you might miss are new comment highlighting and the all content view, but these are being worked out and mbin still has, otherwise, way more features.
I took a similar path but eventually ended up on openSUSE for my desktop. I've been pretty happy with it. I can't think of a single issue that I wasn't able to quickly resolve. I even got CUDA installed and working in under an hour.
Idk, I probably haven't used Debian derivatives long enough, but isn't installing random .deb-s somewhat of a bad practice? I mean, repos exist for a reason (ignoring the fact they usually have like 3 packages in the official repos)
"I understand that Canonical has every right to make the decision about their product."
That seems fair. There are loads of distros available so why not try something else if you don't like Ubuntu?
Linux and other mainstream Unices such as FreeBSD or OpenBSD int al (that's not something I ever thought I'd be able to say a few decades back) are not Windows or Apples or whatevs. You do you and not them!
If Ubuntu fails to scratch your itch then move on. Debian is the upstream for Ubuntu so you'll probably be fine with that instead. There is loads of documentation for Debian via the wiki etc and of course most Ubuntu docs will apply as well.
You only got part of the quote, and not the part that really is what the article is about.
I understand that Canonical has every right to make the decision about their product. You want to promote Snap over Deb, fine. But don't do it in a deceiving manner.
And there is a pretty reasonable middle ground:
If you would like to keep your 'Snap store' deb-free, fine! At least have the decency to provide Gdebi by default for local deb file installation.
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?
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.
Ubuntu used to bring a bit of spit and polish at a time when most Linux distros lacked that. Nowadays it brings nothing worthwhile to the table anymore, it's just brand recognition, but what it does bring is aggravation for experienced users.
I had this realization a few years ago when I found myself fighting against 20.04 and I asked myself: what exactly is Ubuntu doing for me that plain Debian can't? The answer was nothing really, so I moved all my Ubuntu VMs over to Debian Bullseye and never looked back.
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.
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."
For my server I simply switched to Debian and add the packages I need on top, without all that proprietary snap crap.
For desktop I'm tempted to switch to an atomic distro like Fedora Silverblue (Gnome) or Fedora Onyx (Budgie), and for the Steam Deck I'd go with Bazzite.
I was a long-time Xubuntu fan, tried Ubuntu directly from canonical for my new laptop.
It's been a bit rocky, all things considered. I think I'm trying something else next time, maybe mint or whatever. Maybe Xubuntu, but only if this snap shit has been cut out.
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 layerâthe 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).
Definitely time to just use debian, mint MX, or pop os even. I did a lot of hopping though and I've settled on Nobara KDE. Mint was great but the Bluetooth was finicky for some reason, and debian is mostly just ubuntu with some gui stuff removed. PopOS is basically just debian until COSMIC but still good too.
I've seen a video where the guy installed steam on Ubuntu 24.04. Of course it was the snap.
The guy usually tests distro to see of it's easy to game on it. If the drivers are easy to install, etc...
He usually launches steam, then tests Valheim, Overwatch, Tomb Raider and cyberpunk.
Overwatch didn't launch, cyberpunk neither. Valheim reported that a service didn't launch. Tomb raider was OK.
Then he uninstalled the steam snap and installed the .deb one. Everything worked.
Enforcing packages is already something that people don't appreciate on Linux, enforcing packages that don't work is surprisingly hated.
Ubuntu is supposed to be a distro for beginners, how am I supposed to recommand a distro when I have no confidence the applications will work ?
I donât use Ubuntu myself but I put Zorin on my dadâs computer. He 82 and he doesnât know what an operating system is. He seems to be able to use it though đ€·