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 itās been great. Shouldāve done it earlier.
I never understood why people run Ubuntu on servers. Itās madness. Ubuntu is a fork of unstable Debian packages. You donāt 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 Back in the days the Debian release was really long so much software was a tad outdated after a couple of years.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 donāt 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.
Ubuntu is a fork of unstable Debian packages
And where do you think debian stable packages come from exactly ?..
itās basicaly the exact same thing. In both case :
- At some point freeze unstable (snapshot unstable in case of ubuntu),
- fix bugs found in the frozen set of packages,
- release as stable.
We should be clear on our terminology here. Debian Unstable is called that because the package āversionsā 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 āstableā than anything in Debian, including of course āDebian Stsbleā. 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 āstableā. 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.
Ubuntu on Desktop I can understand.
Not anymore. A whole extra, unneeded, proprietary, locked-in package system. Ads in the default install.
Thereās Mint, Pop!, and plenty of other options that actually respect the user.
Definitely. But back in the day it was good for desktops. Ubuntu has never been good for servers.
It was awesome back when during the install you could just select āLAMPā, 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 itās the kind of industrial rated system that will just keep chugging along no matter what you throw at it.
I get it.
I donāt love Snaps either.
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 doesnāt 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 youāve seen.
If you want a Linux distro that shares your preferences and wonāt 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 itās been headed for YEARS seems ā¦ futile :)
Thereās no way to install a snap except through Canonicalās snap store (or snap store proxy, which gets them from Canonicalās snap store).
Theyāre charging for kernel security live patches. They charge for LTS. If they get enough buy-in re: snaps, theyāre going to do the only thing a for-profit company can do.
Red Hat and SUSE also charge for extended support, itās literally the only fucking way to make money off of a distro
Canonical still offers 5 years standard at the enormous cost of 0.0$
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.
Youāre decision to not recognize the blatant & obvious Talisman does not make you correct. Itās not your choice. Itās the choice of that occult chant and signature.
Humans are inherently evil. There is but a thin veneer we call ācivilizationā 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? :)
Itās astonishing.
Fedora introduced a whole new distro where you canāt 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
Mir is not a good example of distro engineering, because itās 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 isnāt 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 donāt 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. Wouldnāt be surprised if they tried to make it a Snap or force Snaps into it.
@babara@lemmy.ml
The difference with Fedora Atomic, which I think you refer to, is that itās 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. Itās just that Flatpak āwonā and doesnāt 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 ātesting groundā that is well thought out imo. Therefore people are expecting to ātest outā new generation Linux stuff, itās just part of Fedora. If you donāt like that, use Debian instead.
I can recommend you to give Fedora Atomic a chance, itās 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 doesnāt have nearly as much influence as people think, itās mainly community driven, and therefore choices arenāt (in theory) influenced by $$$
Fedora Atomic a chance, itās 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 havenāt regretted it, but Iāve been hesitant to go all in on my main laptop (Iām wary of my laptop iGPU and GPU switching becoming a config issue, and Iām dreading having to configure my wsl dev environments againā¦)
Windows is getting blatantly terrible enough I know Iām just putting it off, maybe a cool new technology might help make it sound more fun
I donāt know what I should say tbh š
For the start, you can read my post about image based distros: https://feddit.de/post/8234416
Imo, Fedora Atomic is NixOS made easy. You can go to the uBlue-builder and modify a custom image if youāre 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 ādistroā 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 youāve 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)
- Itās 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
- And much more
I love nothing else more.
Fedora Silverblue is in an entirely different ball game. You canāt use dnf because itās an immutable image based system where you canāt make direct changes to the Root system without making use of the rpm-ostree & VCS mechanisms. Youāre 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 itās not an immutable image based system.
Ubuntu doesnāt make use of any such system so their reliance on containerized user-space apps isnāt 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 ālargerā 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 āupdatedā every time I ran flatpak update).
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 isnāt 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.
$ flatpak list | grep nvidia
nvidia-550-76 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-550-76 1.4 system
nvidia-550-76 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-550-76 1.4 system
Edit: looks like itās fixed by this.
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 itās 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) donāt 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 āwinā 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 distroās goals align with its communityās, even a distro based on Ubuntu will usually be better than straight Ubuntu. For example Mint keeps the good things about Ubuntu (in Mintās opinion of course), removes the bad things like Snaps, and adds other features that the community wants that Ubuntu wonāt (like built-in Flatpak support among other things).
The lesson is to use a Community distro, not a Corporate distro.
Okay, but you donāt see these kinds of complaints with Fedora or SUSE. While I donāt necessarily disagree with your core point (community is better), this doesnāt seem like an issue with corporations so much as an issue strictly with Canonical.
Been running KDE on fedora for the last 6 years after giving up on everything Ubuntu based back then. Havenāt thought to look elsewhere since as its been just fine
I went through something similar 2 years ago. I was sold in PopOS, mainly because Debian based distros were easier to find help for. Almost 2 years ago I started using Fedora on my PC while still having PopOS on my laptop. Within 3 weeks I was setting my laptop up with Fedora as well, and Iāve never looked back (other than the regular distro-hopping bursts, lol).
Youāre being purposefully obtuse. Corporate distro means āby and for companiesā which rolling releases are not
Okay? OpenSUSE Leap is a point release by and for companies. While Fedora isnāt necessarily a server distro, it IS a point release designed with enterprise use in mind.
If we look at both of their strictly enterprise counterparts, Iāve never heard of any complaints about SUSE and any complaints with RHEL Iāve heard are with source availability. Neither of them have the mega amounts of bad publicity of Canonical.
This is why I moved to Linux Mint. Then, when I got tired of having to reinstall the entire OS every time thereās 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 isnāt free.
Mint has an auto-upgrade tool so you donāt 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 youād be spending on proprietary software, itās not so hard to do and feels good too.
Alsoā¦ the amount of money Iāve saved by being able to revive old hardware! I havenāt bought a new computer in 11 years. My computer before that (and still working) was a gift in 2006ā¦ that bitch is old enough to vote.
I have other computers that people have given to me because they were ājust too old,ā but for me, it was an upgrade. I revived a windows 98-era HP a few years ago, just so I could use the 9-pin connection to fix my bricked OG Xbox that I was modding.
Granted, I donāt game on PC or require heavy lifting (though I am saving for a personal build, because thereās some hobbies I just canāt do without a good desktop), but for everyday use, I have more than enough.
I currently have 4 āworkingā computers. Two of them are my main, one still needs to be āreinvigoratedā (itās 18 years old), and one is my server.
I have a 5th desktop that was given to me (because it was too slow/old), and it just recently crapped out on me (either because of windows bullshit, or a bad hdd. But I have my hunches). So itās about to be revived when I have time.
Hardest part was getting my wife onboard with switching to Linux, instead of buying a new computer. But now sheās getting ready to switch her Mac to Linux because itās been struggling. And I think sheās starting to realize that a brand-new computer isnāt really ānecessaryā, if all youāre doing is email, browsing web, and editing docs. Shit, our phones can handle most of that; you donāt need a $1k+ computer for that, or pay for windows software that will barely work on the hardware you have.
So yeahā¦ end rant. Absolutely love how much Linux has breathed new life into my old hardware. Has saved me time and time again, as well as a bunch of money. I definitely need to throw a donation at a distro, cause they have saved me more than just money at this point
Someone being enraged about snap on behalf of Windows users was certainly a take I didnāt know I needed.
