Comment by bgorman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bgorman | Hacker News Reader

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Sure, Ubuntu and Debian change the source code/setup of upstream packages, and generally add very little value compared to just using Gentoo/Arch/Red Hat based distros which actually use upstream components with much less touches and provide a more sane way to install your own packages, run docker container etc. In addition, Ubuntu does not do any real work pushing desktop linux forward.

Ubuntu focuses its efforts on ill-advised efforts like writing its own compositor (Mir) and Desktop environment (Unity).

Currently, most work to advance the Linux desktop is focused on a new project called Wayland (Used by Fedora for last few releases), yet Ubuntu has decided to double down on X11, a legacy project that clearly has no future and has issues like screen tearing that are basically impossible to fix.

Another tangible example related to developers: On Fedora/Arch you can run docker containers without requiring root due to Red Hat's work pushing podman forward, however you cannot do this on Ubuntu/debian because they lag behind upstream

I feel like I've gone back in time to 2013 reading your comment.

What was wrong with unity? Plenty of people preferred it.

Also Mir was ill-advised back in 2013 and was dropped in like 2017.

Wayland has been around as long and is only just becoming usable.

Or are you saying that Ubuntu should have funded Wayland development?

Any proof they're "doubling down" on Wayland?

If Ubuntu isn't pushing desktop Linux forward. Gentoo, Arch or Fedora sure ain't.

Also lol. Podman seems to be an alternative to docker. Why should I use that? Why isn't that ill-advised? Is it because Red Hat made it?

What's wrong with this?

https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/rootless/

Podman is a technical superior implementation to docker. No background daemon is required to run.

See details here: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/02/21/podman-and-bui...

I'm not sure what you mean by Ubuntu doubling down on Wayland. They have no plans to migrate to Wayland.

That article told me nothing useful.

Honestly it seems like a clone of docker selling the slight advantage of root less.

Which docker already does.

I don't understand why I should care that it's a Daemon. In fact that blog post says that they won't go into why it's bad. Just that they do things different.

In fact it seems like it's a "Not invented here" implementation from Red Hat.

Searching Hacker news there's not many posts on it. Seems like it'd be as silly as using Mir to run this in production.

Also on my doubling down, I misquoted you saying they're doubling down on X11.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence of this. I wasted time googling it and it looks like they decided not to use Wayland by default in 20.04 because of certain bugs they didn't deep acceptable.

But it comes with Wayland out of the box, and you select it on the login screen.

Lubuntu plans to support Wayland in the 20.10 release by porting Openbox to Mir, which supports Wayland. https://lubuntu.me/lubuntu-development-newsletter-9/

If you choose a distro based on default GUI, I question your Linux knowledge.

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