To be honest, I'd not be too bothered by that specific ad. Hoever, I gave up using Ubuntu long ago with the push for snap applications and all the mayhem it caused.
* Oh, you want to install a package, here are two very distant versions in snap and apt. Select one!
* Oh you selected snap, sorry now all program starts are slow now because we need to mount compressed disk for sandboxing.
* Oh, this snap does not support sandboxing, here install with --classic flag.
I use macOS daily, but when I need Linux, I use Arch btw (meme) but seriously it's much more clear.
Early in Win10 days the calculator 'app' was slower to open than it used to be on a Pentium 75 running Windows 95. It was one of the reasons I migrated away from Windows - only to find Ubuntu decided they wanted to follow suit. WTFSMH.
Well maybe not slower than anything from the 9x era, but it is definitely slower than it was on Vista for example.
Also e.g. the "Whiteboard" program which replaced the older "Sketchpad" program in Windows 10 tablets. The Sketchpad opened even before I released the button on the pen, while the Whiteboard crap just takes forever to open, then takes forever to "login to Microsoft account", then takes forever to load anything...
only to find Ubuntu decided they wanted to follow suit.
The tech industry is absurdly dedicated to chasing trends. As an example, most people have forgotten the reason you probably don't have a headphone jack on your phone is because Apple wanted to shill wireless headphones and the entire industry turned on its heel in response.
I believe the calculator app as snap was only launched for testing. But yeah, I've left Ubuntu and the Linux desktop altogether over too many crap: the entire point of a Linux distro is to provide a coherent set of dependencies; browsers delivered as snaps are ok for web site testing, but a declaration of bankruptcy of a distro for a component as important as the primary browser; can't even save pages! Add shenanigans such as gnome 3+ and wayland which are for apps after all, but without any new end-user apps developed for over a decade now just serve to make life difficult for the extant desktop app developers on Linux. I'm treating the Linux desktop now as a canned development system with kindof qa'd productivity apps such as Teams needed for customer projects, much like I used Windows VMs many years ago.
BC is actually super useful when in the shell (less fuss than firing up python shell or similar). I use(d) it a lot, though didn't dig deep into what it can do, beyond setting `scale=2` (set output to two decimal places) when dealing with currencies etc.
If I'm elsewhere in GUI tho, Meta+C (shortcut I have for the calculator app) is faster than firing off terminal, starting bc, then closing it up after oneline calculation.
The snap situation seems like a travesty. For example, the Firefox that's installed by default on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS can't save pages or images. I had to google for how to install the non-snap version, and that fixed it.
That's problematic unfortunately, because one may need a program that is distributed via snaps.
Interestingly, snap has a service that self-heals, so that if one tried to hack it, it will overwrite the changes. That's... quite malwarish, I'd say, and very unusual in the Unix world.
Regarding hacking it: it's necessary because once snapd is installed, the ubuntu upgrader will sync on every update, so snap is not a service that can be just disabled.
You can just turn off the service and uninstall snapd. It is annoying to have to do it, but it is pretty straightforward. But yes, you will need to then add PPAs for thing that were only in snap, or use appimage or flathub.
By default, Firefox doesn't have the permissions necessary sometimes. I had that issue. Not hard to work around, but quite annoying to have to look up.
Personally, I've switched to a plain old .tar.gz extracted in a folder to fix Canonical's snap obsession because Snap'd Firefox doesn't play nice with some debuggers I was using. Same with Chromium; quite a pain.
I installed jetbrains clion via snap, not realising the implications. I spent a long long time trying to work out why it couldn’t find dev libraries installed via apt. It wasn’t until I attacked the process with truss/strace that I realised the package manager had installed a snap version, and it was horrifically sandboxed.
Very good demonstration [for me] of current state Linux-Is-Ready-For-Desktop thing - even those with technical background, who _have_ idea on dev libraries (which I think really are headers with somelib-dev packages), strace/truss (is not truss a BSD thing?), not plain mere mortal person have issues on realizing how it works under the hood and how to make it work in desirable way.
Microsoft and Windows are totally safe for now+15 years.
> I had to google for how to install the non-snap version
Out of curiosity, how did you do it? I ended up downloading the firefox tar from their website and setting that the default browser. Could not find any trustworthy deb packages.
- Let you install third party integrations (I needed keepassxc).
Side bonus: I'm also not getting the annoying "You need to update Firefox popups" that are super cryptic and don't explain that you apparently need to close Firefox then, I don't know, wait a few minutes, I guess, for stuff to update in the background.
That would not be advisable. If you do end up moving to Debain but start missing features, Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) may be a better fit.
Looking at the way Canonical is operating, as a Linux Mint Cinnamon user, I sure am glad they're building for a "if Ubuntu was ever to disappear" world.
"Its goal is to ensure Linux Mint can continue to deliver the same user experience if Ubuntu was ever to disappear. It allows us to assess how much we depend on Ubuntu and how much work would be involved in such an event. LMDE is also one of our development targets, as such it guarantees the software we develop is compatible outside of Ubuntu."
Like others recommendations here, I also switched with fresh installation of Debian. If you don't do this you would end up with broken system and also you would not see what all debian has to offer.
What you should be able to do but I have never tried in practice is to keep your home directory. Most "novice" computer users like me, would only need one user anyway although this should work for multiple users as well?
I think in theory at least if your username is anthropodie, you should be able to copy /home/anthropodie to an external hard disk just for backup, install your new distro, set up your new user and copy your user home directory back. Anyone tried this?
The approach I've followed for many years is to have /home mount on a separate partition from anything else. Then when you do any kind of fresh install or upgrade, you only have to make sure that partition doesn't get touched (and usually that's the default) and all is well with the world.
It would be slightly more work involving parted (or whatever partition manager you prefer) to create a new partition, resize existing partitions, etc., but quite doable (if tedious and time consuming).
I used to keep my home dir on a separate partition, but I was always worried I'd wipe it out during the OS install.
Instead I backup my home dir with borg backup to drives/cloud.
I have a script to borg mount my most recent borg backup, so when I set up a new OS install, I just run the script and copy my files over from my backup to my computer's SSD.
I love this method because I can easily install a different SSD, switch to a new computer, or just do a clean OS installation very easily.
/home is kept intact. After installation of apps on new setup I don't even have to configure them most of times because they can find their config directories in /home/myuser/
No, absolutely not. Although people colloquially refer to Ubuntu as Debian with a little stuff sprinkled on top, parts of the underlying architecture are fundamentally different.
Here's a video of someone giving it a go. (Doesn't even boot)
I did exactly that about a year ago (except it was testing instead of unstable). You need to pass some extra flag to APT because Ubuntu and Debian use different version schemes, so you wouldn't get updates anymore -- might have been '--reinstall', but don't quote me on that.
It worked quite well for me, although there were a few issues (for instance, I didn't get kernel updates anymore, and when I fixed that, the Wifi driver was missing). There are probably still a few issues that went undetected and might cause problems later.
It's certainly possible, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you're willing to spend quite some time on it. And don't count on it working at all. (And backup your data. I didn't, and got lucky, but in retrospect, that was irresponsible.)
It can be done, but don't attempt this unless you're ready to fix a ton of tiny problems all over the place. Backup your data and move it over to a fresh installation instead.
* Your Firefox can't read the HTML attachment you opened from Thunderbird because we messed up the sandboxing.
* Popup: Close your Firefox to update it. Oh, also, unless you manually run the update, it will just tell you to close it as soon as you reopen it. Some variants of the update command will also tell you no updates are available unless Firefox is closed.
I'm on Ubuntu. I've got my home on a separate partition. Is replacing Ubuntu with Arch as easy as wiping the root partition, installing Arch and mounting home as home? Wiping and re-installing Ubuntu (which I do every couple of years instead of a dist-upgrade) has always been remarkably smooth, as in it took like 10 minutes and I was back on a working desktop with Firefox restoring my tabs from the previous install.
The installation will be the easy part. Getting to really understand the different parts of your system, configuring it to your liking, forgetting where you put that config file and why this package is installed and getting lost on your own machine will take years, perhaps a decade. Giving up and installing an all-in-one Arch-based distribution with sensible defaults, like Manjaro, will then take 10 minutes, and everything will be smooth again.
> Arch actually has a guide to do it from within the other Linux, which seems crazy and fun.
It's not as crazy as it sounds, after all installing a Linux system is a matter of populating the rootfs, and passing kernel+initrd images to the bootloader. Just regular file system operations, apart from actually installing the bootloader to the MBR.
You can install Debian-based distros the same way using the "debootstrap" script.
It should be that easy, I myself went from Debian to Arch in the past an it just worked. The Arch install process will probably take more like 20 minutes if you do it for the first time though.
If you want a quick way to install Arch, Endeavour OS works really well. Got me up and running with what is basically an Arch install in about 10 minutes.
I've used Ubuntu as my main desktop OS for 9 years and recent changes make me want to leave. So many things just... broke. Doing a screen recording with mic audio is a huge pain in the ass; all the old tools don't work. When I try to open a file from a program (Firefox, whatever - with "File -> Open" I get a notification that "X(1) is ready" and have to alt-tab to it instead of having it be brought to front and getting focus. And for... what?
Don't forget that the Snap server is proprietary software, and that Ubuntu's snap server URL is hardcoded into the official snapd code, together with automatic updates, which you cannot disable (except for recompiling the whole thing with auto-updates removed from code).
Ubuntu is moving closer and closer to Microsoft with each passing year.
You can turn off snap and install regular versions of stuff. Canonical chose snap because it makes their life easier and not the users. I think snap is awful, but I'm familiar with Ubuntu so I continue to use it and variants, I use flatpak/appimage wherever I can. I also run a couple of servers with Endeavour OS to kind of also have a bleeding edge machine or two for dev if I need it. I love every minute of having the choice to do both. I feel a lot of us look a gift horse in the mouth and expect free things for no price.
This is petty, but I'm also constantly annoyed by the presence of the `snap` directory in my home folder, which (to my knowledge) is hard-coded and not configurable. Now, if I want to back up my home directory, I have to configure my backup tools to exclude `snap`.
I don't know why the default location couldn't have been in `/usr` or `/opt` or something, or ideally simply been configurable.
I agree. I have wrote a small post[1] one year ago, because Ubuntu20 was hard to configure in safe manner.
I started switching to Debian all my servers from that day, and for the meantime it pays my bills.
Here’s the deal. Pay for your software or someone else will.
If you use FOSS then donate or the developer might have to pivot into adware. Or abandonware.
If the HN crowd can’t afford to financially support the FOSS they use then who will? You’re a huge group of SV types. Probably amongst the top representation of shareholders in some of the most valuable companies on the planet. Feel shame if you’re not supporting the tech ecosystem supporting your literal bottom line.
Or show that you’re an actual entrepreneur/capitalist and provide the pricey RH style support of whatever it is and make it official.
While I fully agree with the sentiment here, paying or donating doesn't necessarily prevent ads. Some software and entertainment providers just jam ads into everything, even for paying customers.
But yes, I do agree that paying for FOSS should be the norm, where possible. And hopefully this will indeed prevent ads in many cases.
It's a shame that advertising has become so normalised that is reflexively added to so many fledgling projects. Most startups fail, but there are always others being born in their place, churning out more ads into the gap.
Another niggle, which is admittedly at a tangent from what I took as your main point. Not everyone in the "HN crowd" is in a position to donate. Recently I read a comment here from someone who said they're homeless, for example. But for those HNers who are employed, yes, donation to FOSS should be far more common.
If there’s money in forking a project that just added advertisement solely to remove the ads and take donations away then there’s an avenue of counterbalance.
And of course there’s an inappropriate audience to my original comment. That’s life.
AFAICT you just have to pay enough: Windows Professional versions can switch all such stuff off, also control the installation of updates, reboots, etc.
Essential - Stream with limited commercial interruptions for $4.99/month
Premium (formerly Commercial Free - all the benefits remain the same!)
Watch with no ads for just $9.99/month...live TV streams have commercials, and a few shows include brief promotional interruptions to keep you in the loop on new and upcoming Paramount+ programming
part of the deal with cable tv a few decades ago was that the cable channels didn't have ads because you paid for them directly every month. (local stations obviously had their usual ads).
Canonical has half the revenue of Suse. Which is less than half Fed Hat... So yes they're third by a long shot and definitely least funded of the "commercial" distros.
You mean well. But I get very strong sense that huge number of folks here either are or like to be oblivious to the cost of things they like using. It could be software utils, IDEs, cloud storage, free tiers of various services, internet charges, piracy and so on.
I have lost hope in Ubuntu. They should just complete there merger with Microsoft and get it over with. So many distros outperform Ubuntu with a fraction of the resources.
>> I have lost hope in Ubuntu. They should just complete there merger with Microsoft and get it over with. So many distros outperform Ubuntu with a fraction of the resources.
Ubuntu could be rebranded "Microsoft Linux" and WSL2 could begin full integration into Windows. Windows would really become "Windows subsystem for Linux" which would be a proprietary, fully-working version of WINE for compatibility with old Windows software. It has been speculated in the past, but it might be the future.
So I upvoted expecting the worst, but this isn't that bad. The only thing I'd be worried about is canonical selling ads to third parties in terminal, then yes, fuck that.
EDIT: stuff like this isn't that new. GNU Parallel has that infamous "cite me in your work" long ramble every time you invoked it until you used a flag claiming you'd cite them. This is an ad which makes it commercial may be, potentially raising a different level of ickyness at least in some people's minds, but it definitely is of the same kind of behavior.
At the very least, if you're paying canonical, that shouldn't be there.
Regarding GNU Parallel, the nag screen got patched out on Debian due to not being GPL compliant, for now. There's some back and forth "because the citation notice is not part of the license, but part of academic tradition"
Exactly. Hell, even VIM has an "ad" every time you start the editor up for donating to Uganda. The donate to uganda may be more altruistic and not-profit-seeking, but it takes up more real estate than this canonical ad, and is "Unwanted". Why is one acceptable and not the other?
LimeWire: Open source brings commercial success (NewsForge)
[Posted July 11, 2005 by corbet]
NewsForge looks at the business behind LimeWire, an open source Gnutella client. ""On the development side, LimeWire LLC engages open source developers by paying bounties for features. Small bounties, listed as being 'good for beginners,' pay $50; medium bounties, 'good for learning the intricacies of the code,' pay $200; and large bounties, for projects that are 'difficult, but very useful,' pay $500.""
"If that’s what the creators want what business is it of yours?"
If your goal with a program is to have users beyond yourself, then it becomes a dialogue. The question above implies that creators should always do whatever they want regardless of what users think about it.
Of course creators can always say no/ignore users, and users can always go somewhere else. This has a greater effect when there's something financial on the line (e.g. people leaving a subscription for a better competitor)
They should do what they want worrying about the customers that matter to them. They don’t have to worry what you as an individual care about. How much were you paying them? Submit a ticket to your paid support agent if you want them to listen to you. Otherwise… stop complaining about how this free thing isn’t how you want it.
When most people think "ad", they think that third parties are collecting data about the computer or user attached to it, and then those third parties respond with a bid and an ad. (Maybe this is done real-time like on the web these days, maybe in advance based on demographics and surveys like on TV.) But this is just self-promotion (the second-party is showing this), and not targeted (the second party didn't collect any signal to decide what ad to show).
So yes, possibly annoying that a commercial Linux distro is trying to advertise their commercial products, but hardly nefarious.
When most people think "ad", they think of injecting an attempt to sell you something into an environment where it would not naturally occur, pulling your attention away from what you were doing (commercials, billboards, web pages, magazines, command line tools, MOTDs, books - oh wait they don't do it there yet).
I have read books that after the end of the story had a page or two listing similar books. I would classify that as an ad, but I also consider it the kind of respectful and tasteful advertisement that benefits both the publisher and reader.
Here's what I like about it: * it doesn't interrupt me when I'm in the middle of something, rather it comes at just the moment when I'm the most interested in purchasing a new book * it's just black normal font-size on white background, nothing screaming or annoying. * it's curated and decent quality recommendations rather than whoever-pays-the-most.
> When most people think "ad", they think of injecting an attempt to sell you something into an environment where it would not naturally occur, pulling your attention away from what you were doing
To me, the MOTD is like a bulletin board where I expect messages from distro maintainers about updates and the like, and it doesn't seem like a huge deal for it to include self-promotion.
Injecting advertisements into the package manager, though, feels like a distinct level, even for self-promotion. And I am not a fan. :-\
This is a very old interpretation of the word. Today, "ad" almost always implies "targeted". I guess "what most people think" is a different question...a loaded one imo.
If you're watching TV and they interrupt the show to say "Consider subscribing to this streaming service, buying that brand of instant noodles, booking a flight to some holiday destination with a certain travel agent", surely that's still an ad break? and if you walk past a bus stop and you notice something inviting you to buy deodorant or vote for a certain candidate, it's still an ad?
I've never seriously heard it claimed that "ads" are targeted or they're now something different: do you want to maintain your argument? What are these other things called nowadays?
> When most people think "ad", they think that third parties are collecting data about the computer or user attached to it, and then those third parties respond with a bid and an ad
No, that's called "targeted ad". Or spyware which happens to also deliver ads, depending on your tolerance for privacy violations.
> No, but the thing is about the shell is you can automate it, so random stuff could break shell scripts.
In this particular case, the user used the "apt" command, which is meant to be used by humans and not by scripts. It's explicitly documented that its output is unstable, and prints out a warning when stdout is not an interactive tty. For scripting, use of the apt-get/apt-cache/etc tools is recommended.
Fwiw, it's included in the output of `apt-get dist-upgrade`, so using `apt-get` is not going to immunise you from unnecessarily patching scripts that break.
I don't get the outrage. I don't see people say similar things when authors display "sponsor my work on OpenCollective/Github Sponsors" through messages on npm install and the like.
A simple text notification offering a paid service for an otherwise free OSS software is really pushing the definition of what an "ad" is.
>I don't see people say similar things when authors display "sponsor my work on OpenCollective/Github Sponsors" through messages on npm install and the like.
People did say similar things about that. It was a big shitshow.
And even if you don't count donation requests as ads, the article mentions those too:
>The upcoming change will allow developers to silence any type of non-error terminal messages, such as ads, or calls for donations -- an issue many times more widespread[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] than Funding's ads ever were.
Those are all links to people complaining about donation requests.
It's not the first time Canonical is pulling this kind of thing. Years ago, they were showing Amazon ads in their launcher in Unity[1]. I guess this made people quite skeptical about this. APT is also one of the most important and sensitive parts of the OS. Ads have no place there, no matter from whom they are. What if they decide to put third party ads in there too? "Thank you for installing Apache, but first a word from our new sponsors shadow legends..."
I've had a similar experience. Most of the little irritations that induced me to switch to Ubuntu have been solved in the base Debian distro. Some of Ubuntu's default settings are still a little more user friendly, but it is really not hard to fix them, certainly less irksome to me than seeing ads on my CLI.
My only gripe with Debian is the "we do support systemd, but not really, but also we don't fully support not using it, so all packages are an eldritch abomination of systemd services loading initscripts loading systemd services loading initscripts" situation that keeps making service debugging harder than it has any right to be.
> Debian is like Ubuntu but without all the cruft.
Unfortunately for me, I only seem to like the font rendering in Ubuntu, any other distro I tried (and I habitually try lots) don't seem to get it quite right (for my taste anyway).
Getting ready to be acquired by Microsoft I guess. I've spent a lot of time with Ubuntu it's been a faithful friend for so long but I do wonder what the 10+ year roadmap looks like for Canonical and maybe this is an indication.
How is this related? This was a) 10 years ago, b) nothing to do with injecting it in a cli, and c) in this instance Canonical is advertising their own product, within their own product, compared to the original where Amazon paid Canonical to advertise for them.
I cannot see this as annoying enough to force a change for me. For me everything just works with Ubuntu. I have an X1 Carbon Gen 9 and I have had zero issues with it so far.
If I were to change I should somehow be convinced that the other distribution would work as well. I really see it as a direct replacement for Windows or Mac - which for me is a compliment.
Every once in a while I contemplate switching - like when Ubuntu is discussed on HN - but I have yet to see the clear argument in favor of other distributions for desktop usage.
I don't care honestly, and we have the option to disable the motd anyway.
It's all to sponsor a free program to extend the security of some machines.
Ubuntu has done more good than harm to open source adoption.
What a time to be alive: Canonical is putting so many different ads into Ubuntu that people confuse them when they're telling you it's nothing to worry about.
Well at least they're taking their own advice, if the worry about it so little that they don't even know where the ads they aren't worried about are showing.
I use arch and I don’t like fiddling with my system, I just wanted something light. After the painful initial install a few years ago it’s been really stable on the laptop I used to run xubuntu on. I switched because I was having problems with ubuntu running stuff I didn’t care about in the background and eating up CPU time.
Ubuntu is basically Windows-lite nowadays sadly w/ the new direction by Canonical & friends; I quite liked the distro but I've had to become an "Arch btw" kinda person now.
That 's strange, just updated to latest version, 20.22 or something, and didn't get any promp whatsoever, upgrades run painlessly, including Lenovo stuff. Until now, I wasn't even aware ther was a pro version of it...
22.04, coming from 20.04, if looked up correctly. So from Fosa something to something Jellyfish. Only thing that doesn't work anymore is that darktable lost a lens profile of one of my older lenses. Pretty sure so that this has nothing to do with Ubuntu so, and the profiles of the newer ones work perfectly fine as well.
So what? Sounds like a good deal with me. Don't like it, just download debian or arch. I've been using LTS pop_os and ubuntu for years and have been relatively happy with them. I don't really like snap, so I don't complain, and I download flatpak or ppa's that are useful to me. When I start paying for it, I'll start bitching about it and sending nastygrams.
Fedora is now my distro of choice for most of purposes. It is also well supported, easily upgraded between releases, and do not have this sort of pushing things down the throat as of yet.
Nice installer, unadulterated GNOME, well-stocked official repos and easy to add third party ones.
That's all I want these days. The only negative thing I have to say about my day to day Linux use is caused by Nvidia's shitty driver and power management issues. My next build will be AMD (or maybe Intel) graphics.
For the most part it works for me, but there are some definite rough edges.
For example, I had to disable suspend because sometimes it doesn't wake properly. I need to reboot to make it work again. The fact I needed to enable a bunch of services (nvidia-suspend.service and friends) to even get it to sleep was enough of a pain. I'm running a 1660 GTX so it's not like I have a niche card with special functionality or anything, it's very run-of-the-mill.
Compared to my laptop (ThinkPad), where everything just worked, it's a chore.
I set up a (Beelink) computer for my parents with AMD graphics and it's been flawless for the past year, I've not even had to do any tech support in that time.
Yeah. Fedora is my favorite. I like Debian and Arch, and am philosophically more aligned with community-driven projects like those. But Fedora hits the sweet spot, so I’m using it until IBM royally screws it up.
Ubuntu's path to success in the cloud was building an audience of kids, students, and experimenters of other kinds who went on to work in IT and software development later in their lives/careers. When they had choices of what to deploy, they saw that what they 'grew up with' was available and had comprehensive support, and they gladly went for it.
Maybe Ubuntu/Canonical's position is secure at this point, having cemented themselves as a major brand on the popular cloud environments, in WSL, and as the de facto target platform for popular proprietary software (e.g., Steam, Discord, Slack, Google Chrome, VS Code) among GNU/Linux distributions. But things like embedding ads in APT, the telemetry once built into Unity, and pushing an immature implementation of a containerized app platform with a proprietary repository backend (Snap) have made Ubuntu harder and harder to distinguish— culturally— from the corporate, pushy, stifling, restrictive desktop operating systems available from Microsoft and Apple. Ubuntu is still worlds apart from either of course. But it's no longer the breath of fresh air it once was, in comparison to them. At the same time, Ubuntu no longer stands out as miles ahead in terms of usability or newbie-friendliness.
And so for the next generation of tinkerers experimenting with Linux (who might yet become the next generation of Linux developers and Linux sysadmins), Ubuntu has already been largely displaced (chiefly by user-friendly/OOTBE-oriented downstreams of Arch, as it happens) in that place of discovery, experimentation, and pleasure at home.
It's not that Ubuntu is a horrible catastrophe all of a sudden. It's that when you've been using a suffocating corporate product for your operating system for your entire life, using an operating system that isn't a product at all is a bit stunning once you realize what you're looking at, like those photos of Pyongyang where advertisements are banned and the bus stops are instead decorated with paintings and photos of natural landscapes. In its early years, Ubuntu still felt like that, despite Canonical's (shifting) hopes for it. I don't know what I hope for in relation to all this, exactly, but I know for sure that if I were growing up learning Linux/Unix/FOSS today, I'd have no interest in Ubuntu.
When most of the IT world was hiding OS and software names from leaking from prompts, pre-login banners etc, Canonical was injecting "Ubuntu" string into every such place imaginable to advertise their distro.
I ran Linux on the desktop (and LOTS of servers) for 19 years, starting with Slackware in 1994. I spent multiple years on each of RedHat, SuSE, Gentoo, and Ubuntu. (I tried Debian only briefly.) I keep a wary eye on Apple, and the possibility of moving back to Linux, in the back of my mind. "I'm gettin' too old" for Gentoo or Arch. As proper, paid, commercial distros, I would consider RedHat or SuSE before Ubuntu these days (especially RedHat, because they're still heavily involved in kernel development), but I haven't seen anyone on this thread suggesting them as the alternative. Why is it all Debian?
Debian is great for desktop, I've been using 'stable' for about 3 years (Buster and currently Bullseye) with nothing but good experiences. It's basically all the good things about Linux without any of the nonsense unless you specifically opt in.
You usually get "older" versions of packages on Stable (less so on Testing/Unstable), but you can also use Flatpak (or Appimage or even Snapd) to get 'current' versions of things.
The only difficult thing with Debian is hardware support, but they're working to improve that. Future point-releases of Bullseye and the next Bookworm release will include non-free firmware by default, with the choice to opt out. You can also use non-free drivers and software by opting into the "contrib" and "non-free" repositories.
I've experimented with the idea of running Debian stable and using flatpaks+appimages on top of it, but I quickly discovered that those formats are really only for GUI apps.
That's fine for getting the latest version of Firefox, but you (apparently) can't flatpak, say, your shell. I'm thinking specificially of Fish, which I need the latest version of at all times because it's constantly changing and I've grown used to the latest features added to it.
I know there are backports, but those are available at the whim of individual maintainers, and aren't guaranteed to be present. There's also the possibility of running testing or unstable, but it's more straightforward to just install a rolling release distro rather than installing Debian stable and then dist-upgrading.
I have great respect for Debian and if I had to use it on the Desktop I would be happy with it, but for me, in 2022, it just makes more sense to use a rolling release distro.
I was using xubuntu over a decade, but after they switched the focus away from the desktop, I moved to Debian as the base and installed home-manager to setup my desktop and personal packages. Never looked back.
I'm pretty happy I switched to arch (with brief use of guix system) after the push for snaps. The slowness of snaps, the compatibility issues etc annoyed me sufficiently to switch.
Having had bad experience with snaps I thought all those app packaging options are similarly flawed. So I wasn't very hopeful to try vscodium(vscode minus Microsoft) as a flatpak on guix. However, it run surprisingly well. I still dislike flatpak polluting my list of mount points and running a bunch of services for one app, but at least from the typical user side it responds fast. It is fast to start and the only compatibility issue I encountered is that python scripts run from vscodium(vscode) can't access cuda for some reason.
I loved the idea of a well curated modernised version of Debian that contains recent packages and is stable. Unfortunately canonical made too many mistakes in its execution of the idea.
I had a love/relationship with Ubuntu until 20.04. It broke too easily and too often. Canonical have improved the system quite a bit since the early / mid 1x releases, and these days I really enjoy it. I can take an ad or two in exchange for that.
I think with Pacman finally supporting parallel downloads the last major technical advantage that Debian based distros had over Arch is now gone. I think it is time that Arch is considered as a serious base for more projects.
One thing Arch is never going to have is smooth unattended upgrades. I host a web server on a Debian-based VPS and, aside from updates between releases every couple years, I don’t need to ever bother myself with keeping it up-to-date. It’s done automatically. On Arch you’re expected to read Arch news before updating and apply manual steps when needed.
I’ve been running Debian with unattended updates enabled for 5+ years now and never needed to manually intervene after an update. You wouldn’t put pacman -Syu in cron.
And which of these announcements really required manual intervention on a VPS running a webserver? A webserver clearly doesn't use a GUI library like wxwidgets, probably won't run keycloak, and the GRUB change depends on your environment, with good chances that it will still work without re-writing the bootloader.
In any case, just subscribe to the arch announcements mailing list and you'll get an email notification in these cases. Not sure if I would put pacman -Syu into cron though.
Strictly a web server doesn't appear to would have required manual intervention in the course of those exact updates. But the point is that manual intervention is required from time to time. Also, Keycloak is very much on my TODO list to host.
> In any case, just subscribe to the arch announcements mailing list and you'll get an email notification in these cases. Not sure if I would put pacman -Syu into cron though.
That's exactly my point. With Arch you're expected to watch out for mailing list updates and running updates automatically with no human supervision is not a supported usecase. With Debian it very much is a supported usecase.
It doesn't mean that Arch is a bad distro. It just means it's not suitable for some scenarios that Debian is suitable for.
2 lines of text in the terminal, on an Ubuntu OS for an Ubuntu service - that is free for home users? Linux purists really do get bent out of shape for the most minute things.
I don't see anything nothing wrong with privacy-respecting ads, no matter their format. They can be pop-ups or must-view ads like those on Youtube, for all I care.
Canonical have been consistent on backing the wrong horse so many times.
Mir, Snap, Unity, Amazon integration, Whatever the fuck Ubuntu One was, Ubuntu Software Centre, Upstart, Bazaar.
But the worst thing they do, is keep changing where the desktop configuration lives. Every damn release I need to update my script that unfucks their default config to something sane, because they've discovered yet more readline shortcuts to shadow with something irrelevant.
Yeah I don't see the issue here. It's not a 3rd party service, I see this as no different than say, an NPM package asking for supporters when you install it.
Seems pretty tame compared to the Amazon shopping lens thing they did, what’s it been like a decade ago iirc. Seems like this will be even easier to fix.
* Oh, you want to install a package, here are two very distant versions in snap and apt. Select one!
* Oh you selected snap, sorry now all program starts are slow now because we need to mount compressed disk for sandboxing.
* Oh, this snap does not support sandboxing, here install with --classic flag.
I use macOS daily, but when I need Linux, I use Arch btw (meme) but seriously it's much more clear.