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Comment by Darmody | Hacker News Reader

I can understand Canonical pushing for snaps. It's their product and they want it to succeed.

That said I hate their dirty ways. I find it even morally wrong. How can "sudo apt install chromium-browser" not install the apt package but install instead a snap? How I, as a user and also as a professional, trust Ubuntu if when I use their package manager I'm being tricked?

I don't use Windows for a reason, more than one actually. I've been using Ubuntu even with all the "weird" stuff Canonical has been doing over the years but I think this is the nail in the coffin.

Right now I'm using 20.04 but as soon as I finish some work I have left I'll install a fresh new distro.

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What distro? I use Ubuntu because I just want an OS, not a hobby.

If you have linux experience Arch Linux can be a good idea.

Sure the daunting setup process would fall into the "a hobby" category but once it runs it tends to just keep running as long as you update it from time to time.

Using it now for ~5 Years and in that time I had two times problems one was that the new kernel version didn't work with my laptop and another which was fully my fault by doing some "special" boot setup with some custom self written package and not maintaining it. Oh and the only reasons they where problems was because I never setup recovery boot or boot prev. kernel version.

Besides that I remember having more work with maintaining Ubuntu when I used it ~8 years ago.

Also disclaimer I had some more work like setting up edurom with network manager without using any proper UI for it (nmtui...). It's doable but not properly documented. But non of this is a problem if you "just" use Gnome or KDE or at last part of the tooling from Gnome/KDE.

EDIT: But Fedora is probably what you are looking for. Widely used, well maintained and normally up to date.

Ugh, no. Manjaro is the no-nonsense "I really don't want to waste time troubleshooting my own shit" version of Arch Linux. I stopped using Arch when I found Manjaro and I'm so glad I did. Arch just requires way too much fiddling for it to ever feel "complete" and or finished.

The cost of Arch over anything else is 100% in the installation. After that, it IS Manjaro except you are using the real thing, not a derivative. I've had to trouble shoot Arch far less than any other distro I've ever used.

My main problem with Arch is that there's rarely a point where I feel like I've finished installing. There's always something missing or something not configured right. Shit, dialog still isn't a default package in 2020, which you need to use wifi-menu during the install process. So if you happen to forget to install that (and it isn't mentioned anywhere in the documentation), you're going to have to reboot into the live media, chroot into your install, install dialog, then reboot again.

https://www.archlinux.org/packages/core/any/netctl/

Why in the fuck is dialog an optional dependency?

Which sort of ties into my next problem which is that Arch simply isn't opinionated enough. Which is fine for people who want that kind of experience, but if you used Ubuntu before and you want a similar "install and go" experience, Arch really isn't the right answer. It is if your goal is to tinker with Arch, but that isn't what everybody wants.

Hmm... not my experience. Not discounting yours at all, I promise, but I have a 20-package one-liner install script that I run on new systems and it's ready to go. After I pull in my dotfiles and symlink them into place, I can't even tell it's a different install.

Arch is pretty much exactly as opinionated as I want a distro to be. Hell, there are LOTS of folks who think it's too opinionated for forcing you to use systemd. The real installer is pacstrap, and it installs, I think, 300+ megs of stuff. That's all someone's opinion. And keeping it to just 300 megs is an opinion too, I guess.

EDIT: Okay, re-reading, and it sounds like installing 20 packages is a pain. But when I used Ubuntu I had to go through way more to get it how I liked it (and OS X is a nightmare 2 hours of clicking menus and buttons, and installing from web pages). I don't remember all of it now, but I had to get rid of the weird mini-vim and replace it with neovim, strip out Libre Office (nothing against them, I just have no use and it's a pain to wait for the giant updates all the time), my printer drivers were on a webpage somewhere, not the repo like Arch, etc. Ubuntu is WAY more work for me to get set up with just because removing and replacing is more work than installing.

> Why in the fuck is dialog an optional dependency?

Not all people who use netctl want wifi-menu.

> it isn't mentioned anywhere in the documentation

It sure is. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide -> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Network_configuration -> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Netctl And there on the top of the netctl page it lists in a table dialog as a dependency of wifi-menu.

> Which sort of ties into my next problem which is that Arch simply isn't opinionated enough.

Maybe, but not all people have the same opinions...

Arch Wiki changed a lot over years, entire install was one page http://web.archive.org/web/20080517121811/http://wiki.archli... (and grass was greener):

> Don't worry about getting all the packages you want - you can easily install more of them once the basic system boots by itself. The only exception to this rule is installing any packages you need for setting up internet connectivity. These packages usually are:

> dhcpcd

> wvdial

I had fresh install recently, rebooted three times in LiveUSB to pick wifi-menu, wpa_supplicant, dialog (rechecked with pacman -Qe). That's fine, I still use Arch. And it is good Manjaro provides another set of defaults.

> DON'T PANIC!

> The Arch Linux system is assembled by the user, from the shell, using basic command line tools. This is The Arch Way.

I miss it much http://web.archive.org/web/20080720082349/http://wiki.archli...

Please tell me you're fucking joking. You can't be serious. This ties into one of my other comments about how god awful the documentation is for beginners (or even intermediates) after scrapping the beginner's guide.

> Maybe, but not all people have the same opinions...

Yes. And that's fucking fine. Arch Linux isn't opinionated. Which is great, but not what I (or others) might be looking for in a distro.

Installing Gentoo is super simple. It only takes three commands to install Gentoo.

# cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/grub.conf.samp le /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6

That's the first one... http://bash.org/?464385

On the other hand, it’s the RTFM approach of Arch documentation that forced me and others I know to actually learn Linux, and step up from beginner use to power user status.

Sure, if you want to remain a Linux beginner forever, the Arch docs would be terrible.

This whole thread started from “ I just want an OS, not a hobby”. So, no thanks.

Well, my point was just that yes, Arch takes longer to install, and requires work, but it doesn't become a "hobby" _after_ that. Then people got into a flame war about how hard it is to install, which it is, and I freely acknowledge. :shrug:

Sounds like you're not an arch person (which is fine).

I find arch refreshing.

by the way, I like yad.

I used to be when I was younger. I used to spend days and weeks on this stuff and enjoyed it. But nowadays I have more important (and interesting) things to do (from my perspective).

Ditto, have downloaded sources from kernel.org and mirrors and predecessors probably hundreds of times, wrestled endlessly with xf86config, window manager configs, installed slackware, gentoo... it got old, real old.

My experience with Arch a few years ago was if you miss a few updates things tend to get REALLY broken. More than once I would have to hard reset some things because pacman + aurget would break something. If you update every day it’s okay, but it wasn’t my daily driver and I ran into that problem a lot!

I'm inclined to think that complexity in the installation is to put away random impatient users to keep the community cleaner. Of course many cloud providers provide a pre installed OS image too though.

That’s a good case for using Manjaro.

Does Manjaro do pretty well with wireless and graphics drivers. I honestly want something I can live boot, install and use immediately. I dont mind customizing later, but I've had my fun fighting with getting linux set up.

I've tried it on nVidia and AMD systems, and I'd been using it to troubleshoot customer laptops as a technician. Never had issues with drivers.

From my perspective Manjaro seems like Arch+added nonsense. I honestly don't see what are you trying to say regarding Manjaro with "I really don't want to waste time troubleshooting my own shit" or "Arch just requires way too much fiddling". On the other hand I could understand if you just wanted something that requires less knowledge to set up the first time, but then why not go with Debian or something?

To clarify, I doubt that Manjaro is more debuggable than Arch, considering it's just Arch+added complications.

Manjaro is install and go. Arch Linux is ... well, if you haven't done it before, you're going to waste at least an hour going through the awful documentation trying to piece together what the installation flow is supposed to be. The beginner's guide was scrapped and the replacement is awful. So if you're new, it's going to be painful. And if you aren't new, it's still painful if you just want to install your OS and get working on things that actually have anything to do with things that interest you. You like Arch Linux, fine. But don't pretend everybody wants to install and configure everything manually, then mess around with whatever seems to be not working because the moons aren't aligned just right that day. I'm tired of Arch Linux. I'm tired of all the tinkering. I'm tired of the additional cognitive load of all the things I have to make sure is configured right. I already waste hours of my day just getting tooling to work for whatever god awful language I have to work with that day. I just want things to work. Manjaro just works.

I think what you're describing is decision fatigue, which is the hard part of your first Arch install.

It can get really technical really quickly, and you end up making decisions almost randomly if you have shallow or no knowledge of a subject.

It's like ending up at the voting booth, and knowing what president you want, but then your momentum fades and you want to vote along party lines and get out.

I wonder for example, how many people are technically prepared to choose EFI vs BIOS boot, and if they want a bootloader, which one.

I think the thing to keep in mind is that by making the decision, even the wrong one, you build up a valuable pattern in your mind and you are growing.

That said, it's harder on arch to do more involved things like encrypted boot, selinux or virtualization. But when you do it, you can consider yourself a post hole digger.

I agree that installation requires more learning than other distros, but once you get past that I don't understand the problem. I think Arch "just works", too, and I don't see how Manjaro could be better in that regard considering it is closely related to Arch. BTW, you do know you don't ever need to reinstall Arch (on a single machine)?

EDIT:

> I'm tired of all the tinkering. I'm tired of the additional cognitive load of all the things I have to make sure is configured right. I already waste hours of my day just getting tooling to work for whatever god awful language I have to work with that day. I just want things to work. Manjaro just works.

I definitely understand that, but I feel that if I went to Manjaro or Debian or whatever the added complexity would make debugging much more annoying.

> BTW, you do know you don't ever need to reinstall Arch (on a single machine)?

People say this, but I've found plenty of reason to reinstall Arch (none of it necessarily having to do with Arch, and more trying different distros out of curiosity and Arch remaining my main distro). I always have these discussions with Arch veterans who seem so incredulous about my frustrations with Arch. And I sort of chalk it down to the fact that I ended up installing Arch anew more often than once a year and the last time you or some other vet installed Arch was years ago. I think there's a fundamental disconnect between Arch vets and beginners (or even intermediates), which is clearly shown by the scrapping of the excellent beginner's guide.

> scrapping of the excellent beginner's guide

I gather that you simply want something more opinionated than Arch, and that is OK, even the BSDs have a more opinionated install procedure than Arch.

But FTR scrapping the "Beginner's guide" was done for really good reasons: it duplicated the content of other Wiki articles, which is a maintainability nightmare, and was too opinionated for Arch. All the content should still be accessible by wiki links to other Arch wiki articles.

> I gather that you simply want something more opinionated than Arch, and that is OK, even the BSDs have a more opinionated install procedure than Arch.

Yes, this is why I emphasized the "install and go" aspect of Manjaro. It requires a certain amount of "opinionatedness" by the maintainers, which of course isn't a priority for Arch, which is also fine.

I saw and understood the reasons for scrapping the beginner's guide. I still disagreed with it. All I saw was that the Arch community was unwilling to provide for beginners. Yes, it's a lot of effort and it is to a degree duplication, but it's duplication in the same way that Simple Wikipedia is a duplication of Wikipedia. It sort of is, but it sort of isn't.

It's duplicated effort, definitely, and if you don't prioritize onboarding beginners, then it's also wasted effort. But as somebody who personally used the guide a lot, as somebody who takes no pleasure in scouring through 5 different 30 page long wiki pages to find an answer to something trivial, the documentation as is simply isn't an adequate replacement for the beginner's guide. I've accepted that the Arch community has decided that it's the best solution, but I won't stop criticizing them in discussions like this for sacrificing such a great resource just because we happen to have different priorities.

Sorry, I can't agree about scrapping "Beginners guide".

Ubuntu gave me simple install. Once I've started tinkering it become broken. Following Installation guide and Beginners guide I got stable system with internet connection without Gnome toolbar widget. I could build on top of it.

These days I stick with Arch because of fresh packages, rolling release, makepkg and AUR. Just looking at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Network_interface is enough to stick with wifi-menu / wpa_supplicant.

I've had a lot of problems with Manjaro (some hard to fix) and not as much with Arch... maybe only because my main computer is using Manjaro though

Before switching to Arch, check if packages you rely on for your job are not in the AUR. It became "a hobby" really quick for me to rebuild my entire dev stack because of the bleeding edge approach and "let's update every week and fix source code while we're at it".

Do you have any examples of such packages that were missing? I've been using arch for maybe five years at this point and am an embedded developer. I had maybe oneor two times that I had to install something that was not in the aur.

For me, that was ROS (in Robotics). Some people I worked with had issues with Anaconda.

I miss Arch though, I learned a lot about Linux through it, but every hour spent fixing something is an hour less spent on actual work.

What do you use now?

LTS Ubuntu with a window manager I learned when using Arch (bspwm)

> I just want an OS, not a hobby

> If you have linux experience Arch Linux can be a good idea

Something doesn’t add up there...

> Sure the daunting setup process

FWIW I switched from Ubuntu to Arch recently and to me the setup was a breeze. Just follow the instructions. I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner.

Just use Debian. Ubuntu is quite literally Debian+bullshit.

My issue with Debian that I don't want a rolling release, and Debian Stable feels more like "Debian Obsolete" to me (at least it was years ago, maybe now it is different...)

Debian testing is basically my distro of choice: if sid is the rolling release, and stable is the LTS version, testing is roughly equivalent to non-LTS Ubuntu: the packages have been tested so you don’t usually get breakage, but they aren’t stale.

The packages are somewhat tested, but "you are participating in the development of Debian when you are tracking testing or unstable" [1]. My feeling is Debian testing is a little less stable than non-LTS Ubuntu.

See, I'd like to use LXDE, and right now I use Lubuntu. I'm interested in switching to Debian, but then I read someone say Debian testing is "more stable than the name would suggest, as long as you follow a few reasonable best-practices" [2]. Then I look at these best practices [3] and I'm like, I don't really have time for all that...

But maybe that person is just overly cautious. So I look at Debian's page [1] for best practices and it wants me to use btrfs or LVM snapshots in case an update puts the system into an unrecoverable position. I... don't think I have time for that.

Maybe I can use Debian stable and just get software not available in Debian stable via... snap [4]. Ok, they also list Flatpak and docker, but this is getting frustrating... Is that really the best way to go about this? Because other than snap auto-updating on my machines behind my back, Lubuntu's been working great up to now.

So basically, is there a Ubuntu / Lubuntu that just doesn't have snap auto-updates? If anyone knows, I'd really appreciate it!

[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable#What_are_some_best_pr... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23038222 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23044878 [4]: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Snap

> My feeling is Debian testing is a little less stable than non-LTS Ubuntu.

At least a few years ago, Ubuntu's LTS releases were derived from Debian Testing, while Ubuntu's standard releases were derived from Debian Unstable.

Oh, didn't know that. That gives me a better sense of "how stable" each is. Thanks!

I’ve run Debian testing for like 10 years now, and I’ve never been hesitant to apt-get dist-upgrade.

Good to know. I felt that way about Ubuntu / Lubuntu for that time too, until now. This gives me some confidence about Debian to put some time into trying it out. Thanks!

You can try Fedora, switched from Ubuntu 16.04, never looked back

It's an LTS, upgrading every two years. No different than many other distros. If you want a more frequently-upgraded distro, consider OpenSuSE Leap (yearly upgrades) or Fedora (upgrades every 6 months).

Check out testing:

  sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
  sed -i 's/buster/testing/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
  sudo apt dist-upgrade

Getting security updates from unstable (not required):

1. Pin unstable lower than testing.

2. Configure apt/debsecan as outlined here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=725934

I have used Debian for a while (2-3 years) and do not have that feeling.

sounds like you're describing Ubuntu 18.04 :)

NVidia's CUDA only supports Fedora, OpenSUSE, RHEL, CentOS, SLES and Ubuntu, see [1].

So I suppose that rules out Debian (?)

[1] https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads?target_os=Linux&...

I use cuda with Debian and Debian in docker containers and it works fine.

I have the perception (maybe just uneducated guess) that Debian is strictly worse than, say, Arch for personal use. One has to deal with constantly outdated packages, but also with required breaking changes in case of an upgrade from one version to another.

EDIT: I was mostly wrong about the "breaking changes", but this seems like a breaking change: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/c...

Anyway, those release notes are huge, I'd say it is less painful to maintain an Arch system for personal use because of that. You should update/upgrade more often, but the required interventions, if any, are easy.

What I really want is a really stable base OS that's managed totally separately from the individual packages I install. It's the experience one gets with MacOS + Homebrew and it's way better than an "... and the kitchen sink" distro that manages your kernel and basic interface-providing software with the same tool & process that installs and updates Super Tux.

(yes I know there are ways to use another package manager on a given Linux distro, even homebrew, but I'd rather see a strong distro built around that idea, not even trying to provide every-friggin'-thing in the distro's software repos)

The BSDs have that philosophy AFAIK.

Yes, the OS is separate from the rest and the experience much more streamlined than Linux... but it doesn’t support WiFi beyond 802.11n which is too slow for me. If BSD supported modern WiFi I’d have switched to it on my daily laptop long ago!

On sid, I've never had any such issue. I get pretty updated packages and haven't experienced any serious breaking changes, but I also don't do anything that's particularly sensitive or touchy to updates.

Seconding the recommendation for Debian. I switched from Ubuntu Mate to Debian (buster) and the experience is quite smooth; most everything works the same, which is no surprise.

Would Debian be your recommendation for servers as well?

In case you are unsure what the sibling means: Debian is primarily a server OS (one of the best). When people talk about Debian, they mostly think about server use.

(That's why your question sounds like a joke :) Or maybe it was a joke?)

Thank you for clarifying! Not intended as a joke :) #noob

I’ve used Ubuntu since the 2000s and never really branched out to explore different distros. I’ve added LWN’s Distributions List [1] to my reading list to lessen my ignorance.

[1]: https://lwn.net/Distributions/

You're joking, right?

I'm not OP, but I tried Pop!_OS recently, and was quite pleased. It's basically just Ubuntu without the bad parts.

The latest POP!_OS release integrated Flatpak instead of Snap into their package manager. It's very well done in that you can choose if you want the deb or the flatpak version and it defaults to the deb as long as one is available.

The latest release also integrated an excellent window tiling manager into gnome, includes customizable gaps and everything.

POP!_OS is a fork of Ubuntu though, right? In that case if I try to install chromium using apt-get will it install the snap or the .deb?

It will install the .deb because they don’t have snap in Pop OS.

I hear about it often lately but what is better with Pop OS? Couldn't figure it out after testing for an hour.

Mint. It's Ubuntu without the nonsense. I switched when the Unity thing happened, and haven't looked back. This news about snaps reaffirms my confidence in Mint.

I've switched from Ubuntu to Mint a few years back at home, at work I have to use Ubuntu. Functionally, the two are identical for my use case. I love Mint, it just works and there are no surprises as far as I can tell.

Do they do release upgrades yet?

Does Mint allow to safely roll-back package manager operations (i.e. without ever failing)?

If not, what other distro allows this (other than Nix)?

This is the main feature I'm looking for.

Guix also has rollbacks (and a learning curve) like Nix(OS).

https://guix.gnu.org/

Good to know, but they are not officially supported by NVidia.

https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads?target_os=Linux&...

Fedora Silverblue

I've been using Fedora Gnome for a few months now and it's' been great. Updates frequently and nothing's broken so far.

Echoing others here: use Pop_OS or Manjaro. Pop_OS is really the best of Ubuntu, but with sane defaults that respect you. Manjaro just works, every time, every install I try.

Just wanted to chime in here and say Zorin is good too. It's based on Ubuntu 18.04 + Gnome + some extensions (which make it really beautiful to look at). It's fast and gets out of the way immediately when you want it to. But my laptop (ThinkPad X1 extreme) isn't charging anymore. That happened with other distros too (on MSI prestige). I can't figure out what the problem is.

What's wrong with either of Fedora or Debian?

Centos is too slow moving to be suitable for desktop use. Fedora updates to a new version every 6 months. Updates in place have historically been less than awesome and it adopts new tech before it is ready with no practical way to run either the old version of fedora or the old version of the software.

Example rolling out pulseaudio when it didn't work well. One version I recall went from acceptable font rendering to can't stand to start at it levels of horribleness. The release of gnome 3.0 the release of KDE 4.0.

I've had the same Fedora install on my laptop for years, at least 4 versions. Never any of the problems you described.

Fedora was also the only thing that worked on my new laptop, because every other distro runs a super old kernel. I'm a super happy Fedora user :)

I ran fedora from version 1 though I think version 14ish It's entirely possible its better now than it was.

Fedora 14 is 10 years old. Linux in general has gotten so much better in that time IMO

I didn't fully give up on the red hat ecosystem for years after that I even ran stella based on centos and rebuilt rpms to have software that wasn't packaged for same.

This is even still a thing based on Centos 7 and running gnome 2 not a gnome 2 derivative but actual gnome 2.

I agree what you say is presumably so however Ubuntu LTS/Debian or arch update cadence, pick one, are still better than updating every 6 months for most users. If I want really up to date software I would like to have it now not months from now. If I have to wait I would like actual stability.

Fedora is optimized for testing new tech to be rolled out by red hat not for usage by end users. As it stands you can benefit from the sweat of their brow while not actually using fedora by using something that actually is.

Also note that if you install software from additional repos updates between versions may not be as smooth between versions. If you don't package choice is certainly going to be substantially inferior compared to arch or ubuntu.

> Centos is too slow moving to be suitable for desktop use.

Depends on what you need. CentOS Stream is rolling release.

> Updates in place have historically been less than awesome and it adopts new tech before it is ready with no practical way to run either the old version of fedora or the old version of the software.

There's Modularity for different software versions.

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/modularity/

I believe you, but I've better luck with other Debian.

Until I started using FreeBSD on my desktop a few months ago, I had run Debian on most of my personal machines for ~15 years, and often on work machines. For the most part, I was able to track the testing repo and "apt-get dist-upgrade" once a month, and not really worry about anything. Very few breaking changes, and when there were, it was usually related to proprietary drivers (thank you NVIDIA).

IME with Ubuntu on work computers, staying up to date is a much bigger hassle. Besides some of the out of the box settings being brain dead (IMO, of course), upgrading between releases is a pretty big deal with major changes and a lot of breakage.

I don't use Gnome or KDE (on either OS), so that probably helps, but I still always plan for Ubuntu upgrades to break stuff on me.

With Debian, I configure it how I want, and then it just stays out of the way. With Ubuntu, I feel like Canonical is always trying to change my mind and push things on me.

No one has suggested openSUSE so I'll go ahead and do that. Mature, stable and great-looking (with KDE).

Been using it for years, including one installation of their rolling release, Tumbleweed, which is surprisingly stable for a bleeding edge distro.

For some AMD hardware openSUSE has been more stable for me than Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. And off course the best KDE support of the bunch is also a plus.

I highly recommend looking at Fedora. I used Ubuntu for years and put up with obnoxious things. I took a job where the deployment target was RHEL so most devs used Fedora. There was a bit to learn (such as apt v. yum) but overall thinks pretty much "just work" if you are using Fedora Workstation. If you don't want Gnome there are spins available and most are pretty solid, but if you really want a "just works" go with the official Workstation.

> What distro? I use Ubuntu because I just want an OS, not a hobby.

That's very ironic, because I've found that Ubuntu's shenanigans always end up requiring more time and effort from the user than, say, install Debian and just get on with your life.

Back in 2015 I had installed and used Elementary OS - supposed to be a functional Linux distro (inspired by OSX UI 'd say). It wasn't stable at that time. Maybe it's better now.

I want a distro that I can trust. I don't know which one yet but I think I'll stay on the Debian family...I'm used to it.

Me too, but I'm staying on 18 for now because 20 breaks my workflows.

I'm planning to upgrade so you have my attention. What did 20 change to break your workflow?

Replacing the chromium apt with an empty package installing a random self-updating snap. In other words, pinning a specific chromium version, for example for selenium automation, is now broken.

I didn't think about that. Thanks.

mint is a great option, or debian imo. I've switched between debian, mint, and slackware for years now and its been a lot less overhead recently.

Pop!_OS is what you're looking for IMO.

Pop!_OS is like Ubuntu (it's based on it), but easier to install and use and doesn't use snaps, it has flatpaks and the usual apt.

I started using Ubuntu in 2006 and really appreciated the ideals of "Linux for Human Beings" and accessibility (I get a bit nostalgic at that drum sound lol). Over the last several years though I have been migrating my systems to Debian. I like the greater commitment to free software and, nowadays at least, it's just as easy to install. A lot of knowledge carries over too, not surprisingly, and you can get away with most of the same troubleshooting solutions. I'd really recommend giving it a shot!

The process for installing proprietary drivers like NVIDIA is the same for both. I just added an extra buster-backports channel then apt installed it. I chose KDE[1] as the default desktop at install time and I was off to the races for my workstation. It was also easy to install Debian on my Dell laptop too, I just had to use the special firmware-ISO to have the Intel WiFi driver built into the image.

All of that's to say: one of the reasons to use Ubuntu for a while has been that they made installing proprietary drivers easy, and that could be a serious pain-point worth alleviating. But now it's just as easy on other distros too, perhaps due to the relevant drivers being better packaged/supported for Linux by hardware companies.

[1] I was also really surprised how nice and smooth the latest KDE experience is after being on tiling window manager setups for years. It's fast, looks good, can configure absolutely everything, which I like, and it is really complete in terms of application coverage.

On Debian, "sudo apt install mysql-server" will get you MariaDB(tm), not MySQL(tm).

This happens for a technical reason: without it, an upgrade from the older Debian that shipped MySQL will not transition you to MariaDB, but leave your database broken because Debian no longer ships MySQL. The package was adjusted to provide the upgrade path. apt provides no alternative. This mechanism is called a "transitional package".

I'm providing the MySQL/MariaDB example not because I think it's wrong, but because hopefully you'll see that it's the same pattern being used by an entity you perhaps better trust, and that might give you some confidence that it's technically the best approach available.

The same is going on here. Users who have Chromium installed on Bionic, upgrading to Focal, expect to still have Chromium. This is why installing "chromium-browser" in apt results in the snap being installed.

It's not a dirty way, and it's not morally wrong. It's being done for a purpose.

When you install Ubuntu you are consenting to receive the choices that Ubuntu has made for you.

If you insist on using Ubuntu but never using a snap, you can configure apt to never install snapd. See apt_preferences(5).

> How can "sudo apt install chromium-browser" not install the apt package but install instead a snap?

Simple: they decided that maintaining the chromium .deb takes too much effort, and that snap is making that easier. So they moved it to Snap.

But there are many users out there with existing installations who have selected chromium as one of their installed packages. And so as not to keep said users without updates, they decided to migrate them over the best way they found.

I'm not completely sold on the snap ecosystem because of some technical issues, as well as the issues of fully automatic updates. But this particular question has been given a lot more air than it deserves.

The announcement from 2019 is https://snapcraft.io/blog/chromium-in-ubuntu-deb-to-snap-tra...

> Simple: they decided that maintaining the chromium .deb takes too much effort, and that snap is making that easier. So they moves it to Snap.

Their whole distribution is copied from Debian. Is it too much effort to just copy and distribute the upstream package, like they have been doing from the very start?

See the link in the sibling comment. They don't copy.

No, they've got to meddle and mess with every damn thing to create unnecessary headaches for users.

FFS, they build newer packages than Debian.

If you don't like that, use Debian directly. It's a good distro that has stood the test of time.

If you want to switch to Arch, I'd reco Manjaro

Seconded! Manjaro just works.

Ubuntu keeps making the setup work to go from install to a clean and usable linux system more and more work.

I've got to disable global keybinds that shadow shortcuts for fucking readline and basic text editors.

Fix their broken themes to shut up warnings that will drown out logs of applications that couldn't care less about themes.

Fix XDG settings to remove turd directories in home directories that nobody on earth has ever used and applications ignore.

Search the three or four different places they put configuration to fix whatever new setting has screwed things up, whether that be to move the close window button back where it always should have stayed, remove hot corners, or something new.

And yes, remove snap so I have usable output from mount and similar.

Not to mention how broken their LTS and distro upgrade process is. I shouldn't need to edit files to upgrade distros, and it shouldn't break basic applications or drivers.

Why does it matter that it's a snap? Does the program work?

The really annoying thing about snaps is that they pollute the mountpoints on the system. I’ve had as many as 100 mounts on a box after installing just a few snaps, which is super annoying if you ever want to try to get an idea of disk usage. God forbid you want to figure out what lvm volume can get shrinked.

There’s also not as much screening before an update is allowed, as there would be for the default Ubuntu repos (considering that 1-2 years into a LTS release you’re probably bringing in dependencies from PPAs anyway, I don’t know if this matters much).

I wish there was a "df" had a flag for just "real filesystems" (maybe there is and I don't know it).

sort of like df -t ext4 -t ext3 -t vfat ...

`alias df='df -x"squashfs"'` should do it.

webusb doesn't work in chromium snap, I haven't noticed anything else.

Debian, brother

Yikes, that's horrible.

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