It takes years to cultivate a garden, but only minutes to destroy it.
[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-mint-dumps-ubuntu-snap/
We know redhat is just as bad at forcing people to use their software (systemd...) but they have to key points which ubuntu lacks:
- they usually win their software wars
- their software usually works well enough and they give you great support
- they mantain their projects and live with their decisions, unlike ubuntu which flips and flops with major updates (I'm waiting for them to switch from netplan to something else again and fuck up all my ansible config again, which was already battle tested)
- they have better management tools overall.
The only reason we went with ubuntu in the first place was because it was familiar to all of us (we had all ran it on our desktops). When they take that familiarity away, then they lose their only real advantage.
Or maybe Shuttleworth doesn't care at all and he just wants the big bucks from MS.
It's always the same, you hear people complaining the most.
Ubuntu has been a success because they took some risk.
The first one has been to make installing proprietary drivers easy. Something they got a lot of heat for.
And since they managed to become the most popular Linux distro ever, I think critics should maybe ask themselves why.
But they messed up with Unity 8 and Mir. They didn't want to work with the community, they didn't care if they were working on stuff that already existed. Instead of working with the upstream devs, they worked alone. Where did they end up? Back to Gnome Shell with a lot of years of effort down the drain.
And this is even worse. More info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23433794
Original comment:
They also created their own init system Upstart, only to replace it with systemd later. They have their own source control system, Bazaar.
I really appreciated Ubuntu back in '06 when my laptop's wifi and graphics drivers just worked out of the box. I've used Ubuntu in various forms for a long time. But their management has some serious NIH problems.
Citing these as a case of NIH is inaccurate -- Upstart and Bazaar predate Systemd and Git, respectively.
It's fairer to say that Canonical's technology, for whatever reason, often doesn't seem to catch on with the broader FOSS community.
Nobody can assemble some new kind of app packaging, slowing the starting speed to 5-10 seconds and call that "good rounded software"
"It is just a couple of seconds more sometimes, not a big deal" isn't going to cut it. Most of the Internet using Ubuntu, already knows that.
I think Canonical is again in denial.
It already happened a couple of times: MIR, Unity (buried by not being community driven probably), Unity8, the mobile project or something, all but forgotten now.
This snap thing is probable the pet project from a couple top guys in Canonical. Maybe hundreds of powerpoint presentations have been watched about some "big strategy" for the next years, but they didn't know the thing (snap) is unbearable slow.
It's a complicated endavior, and it will need many iterations before becomming a decent solution. That's why we have to start ASAP.
There's no comparison.
The recent I ran Debian and now Ubuntu will be gone. Evaporated in a poof of smoke. I'll be elsewhere. Probably back to Debian.
Launching Chrome: I click the Chrome icon.
Launching PrusaSlicer: Start a terminal and type
chmod 755 ~/Downloads/PrusaSlicer-2.2.0+linux-x64-202003211856.AppImage
~/Downloads/PrusaSlicer-2.2.0+linux-x64-202003211856.AppImage
Often apt's versions trail behind the newest versions. There are some good reasons for this, but it can get in the way sometimes.
I have had to ad a lot of PPAs to get some of the software I wanted. The Aurora channel PPA for Firefox stopped getting updates at one point (they discontinued it), and I didn't realize until a few versions later. I don't think any of these package managers have that problem figured out, but PPAs are commonly maintained by third party community/unofficial folks. I had the same problems with Arch's AUR.
I believe it's fixed now, but for a long time Steam required a lot of 32 bit libraries, which meant two versions of several dependencies were installed on my machine.
Additionally we were using an older version of Ruby at work which required OpenSSL1.0 for certain libraries, and a Ruby upgrade (from an old version to a less old version) broke my development environment.
Not that the others are perfect. Just for example the Spotify snap package from the software center doesn't even work. The Deb had problems on my machine which I couldn't resolve. I finally installed Flatpak to get a working version.
Well, I have found some strange, out of common, software - mostly comercial stuff - which doesn't have any .deb available nor ppas, nor nothing.
It is clearly a decision from somebody who said "no, we are not spending hours packaging our app, if they want it, they will try to install it with the methods we will provide"
Kind of nonsense, except that if you're in Linux looking to install a comercial app, special snowflake, is probably because you have zero chances to do otherwise, then you bit the bullet and try whatever crazy method to deploy their app they have put in place.
Most common stuff I found: - Just download my zipped binary, you know how to deploy it - Just run this command line, "sh something" giving it root credentials to run code from the Internet (YEAH I KNOW TOO, as much insecure as it gets)
Having said that, many comercial apps are there for to be easyly downloaded as .debs (they should just install with a GUI right out from the link, in old-Ubuntu behavior). Or they even offer you detailed instructions to configure a ppa (to manually install with apt).
Heck, nowadays it is common sense and good netiquette to make your installation scripts in the downloaded .deb to just deploy the ppa for apt, so next upgrade happens automatically.
If you ask me and I wouldn't dreaming to control the app-deployment infrastructure in Linux, I would say "yeah, you need to contact EVERY software not providing the .deb format and start working with them, providing them free support, even free scripts to handle the packaging"
I remember in the 90s, there was LOTs of shareware because Microsoft knew this stuff from the 70s and 80s: if you want you're software in use, you need to talk directly with those who could probably use it.
No, links hanging in some flashy website won't cut it, nor repos in github half sharing some code.
$ sudo install ~/Downloads/PrusaSlicer[tab] /usr/local/bin/PrusaSlicer
$ PrusaSlicerMy experience is completely different. I spent 7-8 years using linux on a laptop about 4 of those using either ubuntu or derivatives, my experience was that after about 6 months it was time to reinstall the OS.
Since I have installed fedora and it has been the most stable and resilient system I have ever used, I have also been treating it badly as an experiment (like powering off randomly if my 50 reddit tabs where causing too much lag) and it has no problems at all.
Currently I am using mostly my office laptop with debian and it has the same issues as ubuntu.
From my point of view I cannot understand why fedora is not more popular.
I'm still using Ubuntu 16.04, which I think I might have reinstalled once (after I upgraded to an SSD, so it doesn't really count), and dragging my feet about upgrading because it simply works marvelously and I don't like change. It does everything I want, coding, watching movies, gaming.
I am not saying ubuntu is bad, but it was not a good fit for me
https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+archive/ubuntu/chromium-...
It's available on Ubuntu 20.04.
Once the regular Chromium had a higher version number than the Chromium in the PPA. aptitude updated to the regular Chromium. I then gave the PPA Chromium a priority of 1000 by creating a file called /etc/apt/preferences.d/saiarcot895-chromium-beta with the following content:
Package: *chromium*
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-saiarcot895-chromium-beta
Pin-Priority: 1000More seriously, this is not an unexpected response if you've been using a system for 10 years or more. If you were new to the system you would just say "oh, interesting, this is how it does self contained packages" but your perspective of having a system you understand well, has worked for all your needs, and you know all the ways in which to work around it if you can't get exactly what you want works against your perception of a new feature.
In my experience it is the leading cause of burnout in engineers. You learn things, you use things, you customize them to your needs, and then the 'new participants' who don't have any experience and find those things "arcane" or "opaque" re-implement them for themselves, their friends, their company whatever. And then its something new and something new gets the exposure so still more people see the 'new' thing without even knowing there was an 'old' thing and its just "the way this feature is done."
As an experienced person it is tiring and bothersome to have to re-implement tool flows, capabilities, and other parts of your environment because some youngster re-invented the wheel yet again and you were not in a place to educate them on why the existing wheel was just fine.
The longer you live the more cycles you go through and the more ridiculous each new re-imagining of how to do 'X' becomes until all you seem to do is complain about how in the previous versions everything worked fine and this new stuff is crap and you aren't going to put up with it.
At which point ageism kicks in and your employer lays you off with mumblings about "not a team player" or "resistant to learning new skills" as if sharpening a knife with a round stone is any different or any better than sharpening a knife with a square one. It is easy to get bitter. It is easy to just roll over and whine with your fellow "oldsters" about the "good old days". It is also a kind of death.
Counter intuitively, I suspect that if companies invested in keeping the status quo engineering salaries would go down. That would result from skills learned as a junior engineer always being relevant to the current environment but increasingly more efficiently applied (as it typical as people get more experienced, they do things more quickly). That minimizes the number of people you need to develop your products and that keeps the number of engineers you need to employ down, so your costs go down and the poor engineers who aren't currently working have to compete more aggressively for available entry jobs by taking a lower salary. Fortunately, because it is counter intuitive I don't think there is any risk of it coming to pass.
In my opinion, the elves have left Middle Earth. Ubuntu and Ubuntu's current cohort of developer/users are more interested in an open source version of Windows than anything else. As a result more and more "windows like" architecture and features are replacing the old "UNIX like" architecture and features.
I'm really conservative about software and I want to keep my apt, dammit it! I did like Unity, but only because I was never too attached to Gnome.
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[1] I still remember when KDE devs broke that desktop for me, I think it was KDE4? They decided you just couldn't place desktop icons -- "you're doing it wrong", foreshadoing Steve Jobs -- and there was much gnashing of teeth, and I and many others ragequit to Ubuntu. Little did we know, of course :P
Then my laptops ability to connect to WiFi broke, and there was no way I could figure out to solve it. So I made a new partition, installed Pop_OS, moves my old home directory to this one, and was done with it. Pop_OS has been amazing - I always liked GNOME 3, and Pop Shell really helps in that dept.
The AUR is work of genius.
I still build all my containers at work with Ubuntu though.