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Comment by curtis3389 | Hacker News Reader

We all know that you can't trust Microsoft, but a lot of people blindly trust Canonical just because they create a Linux distro.

I haven't trusted Canonical since I noticed their pattern of creating competing alternatives to new Linux standards instead of helping them (Mir & Wayland, Snap & Flatpack, Unity & Gnome 3). It'd be one thing if they were bringing better ideas and long-term support to their alternatives, but they just seem to be half-baked copies. I appreciate all they've done for the Linux ecosystem, but I'll stick with my Debian.

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Mir and WAyland was because wayland couldn't do what they wanted technically.

Snap came BEFORE flatpak. Flatpak was the "new competing standard" in that situation.

And Gnome shell, quite frankly, sucked. IMO it still sucks, but back then it sucked WAY worse.

Yeah, I wouldn't put down Ubuntu's traditional attitude as "we'll copy something so we can own it" - it's more of a "we'll do whatever we think is better for the experience we provide, screw the community". Which is still misguided and fundamentally doomed to fail in the long run, but not as malicious as, say, Apple's moves.

At the end of the day the scorecard reads:

- Mir: failed

- Unity: failed

- Snap: mostly failing

Meanwhile RedHat takes over stuff that doesn't work, makes it work a bit better, and pushes it on the whole ecosystem as "the" solution. And they win, and win, and win.

> - Snap: mostly failing

As much as I hate Snap and remove it from my Kubuntu systems, I don't see where it is failing. I frankly see a lot more non-linux-focused vendors support to snap than flatpak. Could you expand on that point?

It took years to get any sort of buy-in from app-developers, and I know quite a few users who are actively running from it. Just last week I helped a friend who was surprised and somewhat disgusted by the fact that certbot seems to have embraced it.

It’s not a question of which one will succeed between snap and flatpak, it’s whether the ecosystem really needs either one of those.

> Unity: failed

unity failed because they abadoned it, but it was way better than wayland+gnome. the problem was that it was based on gnome2 and had mir under its belt, so it would've been really really hard to somehow upgrade it

Mir is still going as one of the better Wayland compositors out there.

Unity didn't fail: ongoing development on it was cancelled because there was no way to successfully monetize it. It was, and remains, one of the most successful desktops out there.

Everybody knows how the FOSS ecosystem works: if you don’t get buy-in from the community, a project dies. Unity wasn’t adopted by the community, and as soon as sugar-daddy money ran out, it died. That’s what failure looks like on the Linux desktop.

Unity had fantastic buy-in from the community. There were more installations of Unity 7 than there were of Gnome 3 or KDE 4 back when it was still being distributed.

If your definition of community is "people who develop desktop environments for open source software" then you're already limiting the size of your community to a few dozen or so individuals, and we had a few dozen contributors to Unity so I'm not convinced of the strength of this argument.

If your definition of community is "people who don't use Unity" then of course "everybody knows" that's trivially true. Some people also know it's a tautology.

Unity is still around, it was forked by the community and renamed to Lomiri:

https://ubports.com/

> Mir and WAyland was because wayland couldn't do what they wanted technically.

What exactly is it that you think Wayland couldn't do and why was it necessary to invent an incompatible application interface to achieve that?

> Snap came BEFORE flatpak. Flatpak was the "new competing standard" in that situation.

And AppImage came before snap.

> What exactly is it that you think Wayland couldn't do and why was it necessary to invent an incompatible application interface to achieve that?

From the mir technical architect (found on askubuntu): https://samohtv.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/mir-an-outpost-envi...

> And AppImage came before snap.

Exactly right! And if the ONLY goal was compatibility, we all should be using appimage over snap. But snap was and is trying to promise more in terms of end-user security and transactional updates from the vendor. So there is a legitimate reason to make something new.

For servers, I would trust Debian over Ubuntu/Canonical any day. The way their releases work, the default set of running services, etc.

In general, I personally prefer the way Debian works (Debian the Project - not the Distro). It has a board of elected developers governing the project. I would prefer that over somewhat opaque functioning inside a company (Canonical).

To cite as an example, here's how they decided on the question of init systems [1].

[1]: https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_002

I'm not sure how many times this needs repeating, but Snap wasn't an "alternative" to Flatpak; the latter didn't even exist when the former was created. Many people arguing about this issue don't seem to get this.

Yeah, stuff like this is why I only treat Ubuntu as a stepping stone.

I even tried to install Debian while I'm still not really used to Linux, but the graphics card immediately crapped itself on boot, so it will have to wait...

> tried to install Debian […] but the graphics card immediately crapped itself on boot

https://fiendish.github.io/The-Debian-Gotham-Needs/

This is kinda both hilarious and helpful. Thanks for sharing.

I guess you have an Nvidia card? The two other major vendors have mainline (therefore GPLed) drivers and basically work out of the box. Keep that in mind during your next hardware upgrade.

Nvidia was the least terrible solution about 10 years ago (I have PTSD from installing binary blobs and editing Xorg.conf to make it work.) While others have improved tremendously and you don't have to do anything to get full 2D and 3D acceleration (just boot the system), the Nvidia experience™ hasn't changed much since then.

No, AMD (which indeed surprised me).

I have to decrapify every ubuntu install. They have so much telemetry and autoupdate and other BS.

I'm starting to learn too much about apt to try and prevent things from reinstalling themselves.

Why keep using Ubuntu at that point? There are plenty of other Distros.

Launchpad, Bazaar, Upstart.

Some of them nice projects in their own right, but it's hard the shake the feeling of NIH syndrome.

Since Launchpad existed before Github, Bazaar before Git, and Upstart before systemd, I am not sure where the NIH feelings are coming from.

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