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Comment by billme | Hacker News Reader

Largest issue I have with Snap is that it appears to assume the owner of a system is not in best position to make choices for their own systems.

Sure, this might be true for the average user, but it is toxic to the “super user” community that’s in the best position to help support the larger community and may end up pushing them away.

Snap at the very least should have an opt-out feature, if not be opt-in during an install.

More criticisms maybe found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(package_manager)#Critici...

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There are parallels with the Gnome team's stance that "we know what's best for you", and that turns off a lot of linux users. There is a tension between those who wish to turn linux into Mac OS or Windows, and those who want fine-grained control over the workings of their computer. The arrogance of the gnome team and the snap apologists is a huge red flag to me. I don't use Ubuntu or Gnome, and I'm glad linux provides me that choice.

I find gnome to be pretty configurable. The opinionated defaults aren’t so bad because you can just replace the environment if you dislike it

The problem is configuration churn. A lot of gnome2 stuff didn't carry over if I recall and had to be reinvented for gnome3

Gnome 3 has been out for 9 years now, which is longer than the time between the releases of Gnome 2 and 3. I don't think there is a lot of config churn. (It may have been worse in the early days of Gnome 3.)

You literally have to install a special tool to configure the look and feel. Did you miss the whole thing about how gnome devs don't want user themes to be supported? Or how they are forcing csd and dropping menus and config left and right? I'm guessing you weren't a gnome 2 user because it's night and day.

Trying to explain to a non-technical user that GNOME doesn't let them reconfigure something because the GNOME developers think they're an idiot who will be confused by configurability is a nightmare. I ended up telling my dad to install XFCE and he's not looked back since.

The problem isn't that GNOME devs are trying to make user friendly software for non-technical users; that intent is commendable. The problem is the GNOME devs have incredibly insulting opinions about the skills and intelligence of non-technical users.

Yeah, its targeted for the ederly if you guys werent aware.

How do you set the background colour in GNOME?

At least in the recent versions I've tested, you literally can't. You can only set it to an image.

No. NO.

You can't even change language shortcut from default (Win + Space). As I understand this comes from MacOS, which gnome devs brainlessly copy.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/41480/how-do-i-change-my-key...

Your example is dead wrong. I run Gnome and my language shortcut is CapsLock. I used the Tweaks configuration software which is part of Gnome (it is the one you are supposed to use for more invasive configuration).

I do find Gnome plenty configurable. You just need to go in order of Settings -> Tweaks -> their weird registry -> custom extensions. I would agree this is convoluted, but I do not mind it (as a power user it took me 5 minutes to google how to do it, while it probably makes sense to have only the first state (Settings) visible by default).

You do understand that them being extensions means they are not part of GNOME.

You picked the 4th stage but conveniently skipped all 3 tools that precede it. The Tweaks tool is a GUI that is a part of Gnome and it deals with the examples that OP raised.

Yup, you can all the miracles in the console, BUT reread the parent comment

> I find gnome to be pretty configurable. The opinionated defaults aren’t so bad because you can just replace the environment if you dislike it

IT'S NOT CONFIGURABLE. You can hack your way around their "opinionated defaults" which are for MacOS user from USA.

Take a look at the KDE's settings for this case https://i.stack.imgur.com/ukKmp.png

There is no reason to google, install some tool and mess with it.

The examples from the OP are configurable from Tweaks which is a GUI. No hacks, command line use, or third-party installs. In particular, the equivalent to the screen shot you showed is available from Gnome's Tweak tool.

FYI, the Gnome Tweaks interface is basically identical to the KDE settings here.

Screenshot: http://pvv.org/~jabirali/tweaks.png

You must be really new to Linux. I mean, wow.

This is a rather childish way to respond to my comment... What is the point of being antagonizing like this? How do you see the conversation progressing or what point are you trying to make?

For context, I have used Linux and other Unixes for 14ish years, spanning the spectrum from embedded devices to supercomputers, with (or without) a variety of graphical shells.

Compare against KDE and check how far is "configurable".

Even Windows and macOS provide a higher level of configurability out of the box than Gnome does.

I recently switched all my systems to another desktop environment because an app I needed to run was buggy under gnome and gnome developers in their infinite wisdom decided to remove the setting needed to fix it. Mind you, the setting had existed in gnome shell for years.

What gnome devs seemingly fail to realize is that gnome is only a means to an end (i.e. to run software). People /will/ switch to alternatives the moment that it fails to do it's job. The exact same thing applies to ubuntu.

> Sure, this might be true for the average user

To be fair, that has always been Ubuntu's target market...

There is an opt out feature: diversity.

You can always use only the system package manager, or use a distro that doesn't use snap.

All those complaints feel so moot.

It's really hard to be in FOSS nowaday: you can't make a move without your users judging you all along the way, because a lot of them are idealists that expect a lot from you, yet don't think about the non tech saavy users.

It's way easier to make proprietary software: most of your users don't criticise any single decision you make, you don't have to justify yourself, you get much more users, and you make money out of it.

> It's way easier to make proprietary software: most of your users don't criticise any single decision you make, you don't have to justify yourself, you get much more users, and you make money out of it.

Why on Earth would you think that users of proprietary software don't criticize it? I'm pretty sure that Windows gets more criticism than Ubuntu...

Take zoom: in HN we heard a lot of complains for ethical reasons, but the biggest part of the user base doesn't care and are just happy with it.

On FOSS, you'll have complains about the software it self AND ethics from most of your users, because they are mostly technical, and contains way more idealists than the average user sample.

Super users should be using Debian. Not being snarky.

I'm a super user but the last time I tried to use Debian as a desktop OS the experience was so disappointing that I reformatted to Ubuntu. I gave a shot to KDE and reformatted again to Gnome after a couple of weeks. That was 2014. I removed Debian as a possibility, KDE maybe someday. On a server Debian is OK.

What didn’t you like about Debian on the desktop? Old software?

I don't remember exactly, it was 6 years ago. I remember the general feeling of having to do too much work to get a usable desktop. Maybe the settings? Keep in mind that I don't need anything fancy. I liked Gnome 2 and I stayed with Gnome Fallback until last year when there were enough Gnome Shell extensions to bend it to what I like a desktop to be.

Maybe Debian is on par now. Old software can be worked around with containers and third party apt repositories. I often do that on Ubuntu too.

Debian has improved greatly in the last six years.

Try it with the xfce or mate flavours.

I personally use any distro based on the situation.

As others have pointed out, common reasoning behind picking a distro include: hardware requirements, existing ecosystems, end user, package management, configurableness, security, long-term support, ease of learning, driver support, core dev team’s opinions, funding, etc.

These days Debian Gnome and default Ubuntu are so similar these days the difference is negligible once you installed 1 or 2 plugins that mimic the Ubuntu functionality. Ubuntu's gnome is just plain gnome with a few in-house extensions made by Canonical - hardly worth it in my opinion while Debian is rock solid. Buster (the current stable) is nearly perfect IMO.

“Super users” in this case is relative, as in the super users of Ubuntu’s community are the users to most likely have an issue with this and willing to leave to another distro if needed.

Beyond that, increasingly common to see Ubuntu used in enterprise and the dev tasked with dealing with the issue may not have the authority to decide to use Ubuntu or not.

I'd expect users who go into Debian expecting some power-user version of Ubuntu to be disappointed. To be happy on Debian, you need to adopt their philosophy that stability is better than having the latest-and-greatest.

For those unfamiliar, Debian releases come out about once every two years, at which point all software in Debian's repositories is frozen at its current version. Software receives security updates between releases, but nothing else.

I personally think this is wonderful, and I would absolutely use Debian if I was interested in switching to Linux (which I'm not, at the moment). Constant change is inherently frustrating, even when the changes themselves are a net positive (they often aren't). Debian's approach provides a level of reliability and consistency that is sorely lacking in most modern software.

So, while I also recommend Debian, I do so only if you too agree with the above paragraph.

Consider that LTS editions of Ubuntu, which are very popular and Canonical themselves recommend, work exactly the same way.

Debian has stable, testing, unstable, and experimental repositories.

If you only enable stable, then you are signing up for very outdated software.

If you add `testing`, you get quite a ways towards having an up to date system, while still not having to worry too much about odd bugs.

Adding in `unstable` gets you about as close to up to date as you can get without compiling the source yourself.

Experimental is good to keep around, but in my experience most things skip it and just hop straight to unstable.

The beautiful thing about Debian compared to Ubuntu is that it actually is a rolling release system. Ubuntu users have to worry about what version they are on. With Debian, you set what track you want to follow and just remember to install updates as they become available.

Because it's a rolling release, you're much more likely to catch small issues and be able to isolate what package is causing the problem, as opposed to doing a thousand package upgrades at once and then being snagged because one of them had an install issue.

Debian strongly advises against mixing repositories: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Don.27t_make_a_Frank...

Debian Testing is an option, but would you recommend that over a distribution focused on rolling releases, like Arch? From my vantage point (which isn't particularly good, as a non-Linux user myself), most of the Debian project's effort is concentrated on producing Debian Stable. Case in point, security updates for Debian Testing are sometimes significantly delayed.

> would you recommend that over a distribution focused on rolling releases, like Arch?

Everything about Debian except the `stable` repository is explicitly a rolling release.

> Debian strongly advises against mixing repositories

Certainly you wouldn't want to add in the other repositories if you're aiming for Debian Stable type guarantees.

This is the `sources.list` file that I've been using for nearly a decade:

   deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing main non-free contrib
   deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib
   deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ experimental main non-free contrib

And then I have a preferences file that prefers testing to unstable to experimental (actually three separate files in the preferences.d directory, but I'd think you could combine them.

   Package: *
   Pin: release a=testing
   Pin-Priority: 700
   
   Package: *
   Pin: release a=unstable
   Pin-Priority: 650

   Package: *
   Pin: release a=experimental
   Pin-Priority: 600

It may not be advised, but it works pretty well. Sometimes you have to get a bit creative when you go to run `apt-get dist-upgrade` and it wants to delete half your system, but usually you can just manually install individual upgrades (`apt-get install <x>`) until it unwedges itself.

back when I used debian(10 years ago) testing was the staging ground for the future stable version, so it got a couple of issues that varied as the mantainers stabilized the system.

then unstable was a really rolling release system, in my experience more stable than testing(understandable quirk as is was used by mantainers to prepare the next release).

At that point I decided that I'd rather use arch then unstable debian, but unstable was quite similar regarding package candence and stability.

Debian offers both the stable release which you mentioned as well as more up-to-date 'testing' and relatively cutting-edge 'unstable' releases. The 'unstable' release tends to be stable enough for day to day use by the so-called 'power/super/hyper/turbo/whatever' user, it hardly ever breaks. I tend to run stable on servers, unstable on user-facing desktop/laptop/notebook applications. Even on servers I sometimes add the testing or unstable repository at a lower precedence to be able to selectively add packages from there. I've done this for decades and have yet to have a significant breakdown on either server or user-facing installations.

I have to disagree. I've used debian for years. I stand by the assertion that it's a wonderful platform for a server, but marginal for a desktop.

Should? Maybe. Probably will at this rate? Almost certainly.

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