Canonical shows ads in the Ubuntu CLI
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* Oh, you want to install a package, here are two very distant versions in snap and apt. Select one!
* Oh you selected snap, sorry now all program starts are slow now because we need to mount compressed disk for sandboxing.
* Oh, this snap does not support sandboxing, here install with --classic flag.
I use macOS daily, but when I need Linux, I use Arch btw (meme) but seriously it's much more clear.
Would it be possible to switch from Ubuntu to Debian without having to reinstall the whole system?
I hope something like updating sources to debian unstable and doing apt-get upgrade should just work, but am afraid to try it on the running system.
Looking at the way Canonical is operating, as a Linux Mint Cinnamon user, I sure am glad they're building for a "if Ubuntu was ever to disappear" world.
"Its goal is to ensure Linux Mint can continue to deliver the same user experience if Ubuntu was ever to disappear. It allows us to assess how much we depend on Ubuntu and how much work would be involved in such an event. LMDE is also one of our development targets, as such it guarantees the software we develop is compatible outside of Ubuntu."
I think in theory at least if your username is anthropodie, you should be able to copy /home/anthropodie to an external hard disk just for backup, install your new distro, set up your new user and copy your user home directory back. Anyone tried this?
It would be slightly more work involving parted (or whatever partition manager you prefer) to create a new partition, resize existing partitions, etc., but quite doable (if tedious and time consuming).
/home is kept intact. After installation of apps on new setup I don't even have to configure them most of times because they can find their config directories in /home/myuser/
Instead I backup my home dir with borg backup to drives/cloud.
I have a script to borg mount my most recent borg backup, so when I set up a new OS install, I just run the script and copy my files over from my backup to my computer's SSD.
I love this method because I can easily install a different SSD, switch to a new computer, or just do a clean OS installation very easily.
It worked quite well for me, although there were a few issues (for instance, I didn't get kernel updates anymore, and when I fixed that, the Wifi driver was missing). There are probably still a few issues that went undetected and might cause problems later.
It's certainly possible, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you're willing to spend quite some time on it. And don't count on it working at all. (And backup your data. I didn't, and got lucky, but in retrospect, that was irresponsible.)
A good idea? No. If you need to ask, you will have regrets.
A fresh install would be faster, easier, safer, and more secure.
Arch actually has a guide to do it from within the other Linux, which seems crazy and fun. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Install_Arch_Linux_from_exi...
It's not as crazy as it sounds, after all installing a Linux system is a matter of populating the rootfs, and passing kernel+initrd images to the bootloader. Just regular file system operations, apart from actually installing the bootloader to the MBR.
You can install Debian-based distros the same way using the "debootstrap" script.
You mean copying bootx64.efi onto the ESP, right?
It's 2022... MBR is beyond ancient at this point!
I've been using Arch since 2003 and am still salty about the loss of the text guided installer.
0. If you have Windows, a bit tiny work to correctly setup secure boot and UEFI
1. Create partitions manually, carefully. For best results I use seperate disks but windows installer still fucks up.
2. Mount and chroot
3. Install packages
4. Install a network manager
5. Reboot
6. Install a favorite login and desktop manager and if have any nvidia drivers
7. Reboot to ensure nvidia drivers load (F** you secureboot)
8. Install a nice font (sorry, yes)
9. Audio mostly works out of the box but if not install pulseaudio or something else.
10. Install yay or any AUR helper to install non-official packages in AUR.
11. Occasionally run pacman -Syu to update system to be not left behind a lot. There are no fixed releases like Ubuntu 22.04 or sth.
It looks complex, I know, but it's fun and there are literally every package with almost latest versions in Arch and if not, in AUR which helps a lot.
* Your Firefox can't read the HTML attachment you opened from Thunderbird because we messed up the sandboxing.
* Popup: Close your Firefox to update it. Oh, also, unless you manually run the update, it will just tell you to close it as soon as you reopen it. Some variants of the update command will also tell you no updates are available unless Firefox is closed.
apt-get purge snapd --yesInterestingly, snap has a service that self-heals, so that if one tried to hack it, it will overwrite the changes. That's... quite malwarish, I'd say, and very unusual in the Unix world.
Regarding hacking it: it's necessary because once snapd is installed, the ubuntu upgrader will sync on every update, so snap is not a service that can be just disabled.
Personally, I've switched to a plain old .tar.gz extracted in a folder to fix Canonical's snap obsession because Snap'd Firefox doesn't play nice with some debuggers I was using. Same with Chromium; quite a pain.
Had similar problems before, so I guessed it was some snap bullshit. This page seemed to confirm it https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1290489
Followed the instructions here https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/04/how-to-install-firefox-d... , and then it worked as normal.
Out of curiosity, how did you do it? I ended up downloading the firefox tar from their website and setting that the default browser. Could not find any trustworthy deb packages.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w...
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/04/how-to-install-firefox-d...
This method will:
- Install from the Mozilla PPA.
- Automatically update Firefox.
- Let you install third party integrations (I needed keepassxc).
Side bonus: I'm also not getting the annoying "You need to update Firefox popups" that are super cryptic and don't explain that you apparently need to close Firefox then, I don't know, wait a few minutes, I guess, for stuff to update in the background.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/04/how-to-install-firefox-d...
what do you mean?
I nuked Ubuntu and installed Arch.
Microsoft and Windows are totally safe for now+15 years.
Saving files and images both work for me.
Need to multiply two numbers, it's faster to do on paper than to wait the app to launch.
Thankfully they walked back on that one.
Also e.g. the "Whiteboard" program which replaced the older "Sketchpad" program in Windows 10 tablets. The Sketchpad opened even before I released the button on the pen, while the Whiteboard crap just takes forever to open, then takes forever to "login to Microsoft account", then takes forever to load anything...
The tech industry is absurdly dedicated to chasing trends. As an example, most people have forgotten the reason you probably don't have a headphone jack on your phone is because Apple wanted to shill wireless headphones and the entire industry turned on its heel in response.
If I'm elsewhere in GUI tho, Meta+C (shortcut I have for the calculator app) is faster than firing off terminal, starting bc, then closing it up after oneline calculation.
.. at least, it should be faster ;-)
Disclaimer: bc implementer. I'm biased. I use bc for all of my calculation. And Mac doesn't have my bc.
I didn't have any problem with this. But your case may be what they're solving by moving from Pulseaudio to Pipewire (see Ubuntu Kinetic 22.10).
Ubuntu is moving closer and closer to Microsoft with each passing year.
But I miss a bit Ubuntu...
I don't know why the default location couldn't have been in `/usr` or `/opt` or something, or ideally simply been configurable.
If you use FOSS then donate or the developer might have to pivot into adware. Or abandonware.
If the HN crowd can’t afford to financially support the FOSS they use then who will? You’re a huge group of SV types. Probably amongst the top representation of shareholders in some of the most valuable companies on the planet. Feel shame if you’re not supporting the tech ecosystem supporting your literal bottom line.
Or show that you’re an actual entrepreneur/capitalist and provide the pricey RH style support of whatever it is and make it official.
But yes, I do agree that paying for FOSS should be the norm, where possible. And hopefully this will indeed prevent ads in many cases.
It's a shame that advertising has become so normalised that is reflexively added to so many fledgling projects. Most startups fail, but there are always others being born in their place, churning out more ads into the gap.
Another niggle, which is admittedly at a tangent from what I took as your main point. Not everyone in the "HN crowd" is in a position to donate. Recently I read a comment here from someone who said they're homeless, for example. But for those HNers who are employed, yes, donation to FOSS should be far more common.
And of course there’s an inappropriate audience to my original comment. That’s life.
Sorry, but who are you referring to?
And that's not even going into the whole "It's not an ad - it's a promotion for another one of our shows" crock of bullshit they pull.
From https://help.paramountplus.com/s/article/PD-What-plans-are-a...:
Essential - Stream with limited commercial interruptions for $4.99/month
Premium (formerly Commercial Free - all the benefits remain the same!) Watch with no ads for just $9.99/month...live TV streams have commercials, and a few shows include brief promotional interruptions to keep you in the loop on new and upcoming Paramount+ programming
I absolutely hate this trend. Whenever Prime Video does it I just get annoyed and skip either way.
Twist my arm, why don't you?
Ubuntu could be rebranded "Microsoft Linux" and WSL2 could begin full integration into Windows. Windows would really become "Windows subsystem for Linux" which would be a proprietary, fully-working version of WINE for compatibility with old Windows software. It has been speculated in the past, but it might be the future.
EDIT: stuff like this isn't that new. GNU Parallel has that infamous "cite me in your work" long ramble every time you invoked it until you used a flag claiming you'd cite them. This is an ad which makes it commercial may be, potentially raising a different level of ickyness at least in some people's minds, but it definitely is of the same kind of behavior.
At the very least, if you're paying canonical, that shouldn't be there.
Of course - users must want exactly what creators want and products are created by creators for creators.
If your goal with a program is to have users beyond yourself, then it becomes a dialogue. The question above implies that creators should always do whatever they want regardless of what users think about it.
Of course creators can always say no/ignore users, and users can always go somewhere else. This has a greater effect when there's something financial on the line (e.g. people leaving a subscription for a better competitor)
This is hardly new BTW. I remember switching from LimeWire to FrostWire to avoid ads a couple of decades ago.
LimeWire: Open source brings commercial success (NewsForge)
[Posted July 11, 2005 by corbet]
NewsForge looks at the business behind LimeWire, an open source Gnutella client. ""On the development side, LimeWire LLC engages open source developers by paying bounties for features. Small bounties, listed as being 'good for beginners,' pay $50; medium bounties, 'good for learning the intricacies of the code,' pay $200; and large bounties, for projects that are 'difficult, but very useful,' pay $500.""https://sources.debian.org/src/parallel/20220722+ds-1/debian...
Ubuntu/Canonical has been erratic for quite some time now. Time to get back to a non-company backed up distro.
So yes, possibly annoying that a commercial Linux distro is trying to advertise their commercial products, but hardly nefarious.
Plus if I wanted random companies marketing things to me I'd use Windows.
In this particular case, the user used the "apt" command, which is meant to be used by humans and not by scripts. It's explicitly documented that its output is unstable, and prints out a warning when stdout is not an interactive tty. For scripting, use of the apt-get/apt-cache/etc tools is recommended.
However, traditional ads aren't nearly as violating as targeted ads, even if they are still annoying, unwanted, etc.
I've never seriously heard it claimed that "ads" are targeted or they're now something different: do you want to maintain your argument? What are these other things called nowadays?
Here's what I like about it: * it doesn't interrupt me when I'm in the middle of something, rather it comes at just the moment when I'm the most interested in purchasing a new book * it's just black normal font-size on white background, nothing screaming or annoying. * it's curated and decent quality recommendations rather than whoever-pays-the-most.
To me, the MOTD is like a bulletin board where I expect messages from distro maintainers about updates and the like, and it doesn't seem like a huge deal for it to include self-promotion.
Injecting advertisements into the package manager, though, feels like a distinct level, even for self-promotion. And I am not a fan. :-\
No, that's called "targeted ad". Or spyware which happens to also deliver ads, depending on your tolerance for privacy violations.
> but hardly nefarious
Harmless ads are annoying and distracting too.
1. Try Ubuntu Pro beta with a free personal subscription on up to 5 machines.
2. Learn more at https://ubuntu.com/pro
At least it didn't crash!
Displaying ads is one thing, breaking interfaces for something as important as package management doesn't look good.
Yes, it's silly, and horribly neglected.
A simple text notification offering a paid service for an otherwise free OSS software is really pushing the definition of what an "ad" is.
> Anyone can use Ubuntu Pro for free on up to 5 machines, or 50 if you are an official Ubuntu Community member.
From what I can tell it's LTS but with double support (10 years instead of 5).
People did say similar things about that. It was a big shitshow.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/npm-bans-terminal-ads/
And even if you don't count donation requests as ads, the article mentions those too:
>The upcoming change will allow developers to silence any type of non-error terminal messages, such as ads, or calls for donations -- an issue many times more widespread[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] than Funding's ads ever were.
Those are all links to people complaining about donation requests.
I think a "notification offering a paid service" could be pretty good definition of an ad, certainly no "pushing the definition" in that.
Offering a paid service when nobody asked is the very definition of an ad.
[1] https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210...
... and with older packages, but that's usually okay.
Reject ads in your shell, return to Debian.
Just use sid/unstable. Debian really did a disservice for naming it "unstable". Don't use "testing".
There's a few system-breaking changes a year, e.g. gnuplot broke last month.
Unfortunately for me, I only seem to like the font rendering in Ubuntu, any other distro I tried (and I habitually try lots) don't seem to get it quite right (for my taste anyway).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4558049 ("Ubuntu Will Now Have Amazon Ads Pre-Installed", 2012)
If I were to change I should somehow be convinced that the other distribution would work as well. I really see it as a direct replacement for Windows or Mac - which for me is a compliment.
Every once in a while I contemplate switching - like when Ubuntu is discussed on HN - but I have yet to see the clear argument in favor of other distributions for desktop usage.
Seriously, the outrage over this is ridiculous. This is nothing compared to what Apple, Microsoft, and Google do.
Ubuntu is a great distro and makes some reasonable tradeoffs on usability.
Debian is great but you have to be sure to grab the hidden installer with the needed firmware blobs to make it useful on a modern system.
Fedora, also great, but you have to muck around to get your media codecs installed, and ZFS is a pain to setup on it.
Arch, is well Arch, you use it because you like to fiddle with your system.
as far as other distros go, if you're a beginner, Ubuntu and this prompt on apt notwithstanding, is still totally fine.
there are other decent Debian derivates: popos probably serves beginners better than Ubuntu.
Nice installer, unadulterated GNOME, well-stocked official repos and easy to add third party ones.
That's all I want these days. The only negative thing I have to say about my day to day Linux use is caused by Nvidia's shitty driver and power management issues. My next build will be AMD (or maybe Intel) graphics.
I am a researcher and simulations developer, so I can't live without CUDA.
For example, I had to disable suspend because sometimes it doesn't wake properly. I need to reboot to make it work again. The fact I needed to enable a bunch of services (nvidia-suspend.service and friends) to even get it to sleep was enough of a pain. I'm running a 1660 GTX so it's not like I have a niche card with special functionality or anything, it's very run-of-the-mill.
Compared to my laptop (ThinkPad), where everything just worked, it's a chore.
I set up a (Beelink) computer for my parents with AMD graphics and it's been flawless for the past year, I've not even had to do any tech support in that time.
Maybe Ubuntu/Canonical's position is secure at this point, having cemented themselves as a major brand on the popular cloud environments, in WSL, and as the de facto target platform for popular proprietary software (e.g., Steam, Discord, Slack, Google Chrome, VS Code) among GNU/Linux distributions. But things like embedding ads in APT, the telemetry once built into Unity, and pushing an immature implementation of a containerized app platform with a proprietary repository backend (Snap) have made Ubuntu harder and harder to distinguish— culturally— from the corporate, pushy, stifling, restrictive desktop operating systems available from Microsoft and Apple. Ubuntu is still worlds apart from either of course. But it's no longer the breath of fresh air it once was, in comparison to them. At the same time, Ubuntu no longer stands out as miles ahead in terms of usability or newbie-friendliness.
And so for the next generation of tinkerers experimenting with Linux (who might yet become the next generation of Linux developers and Linux sysadmins), Ubuntu has already been largely displaced (chiefly by user-friendly/OOTBE-oriented downstreams of Arch, as it happens) in that place of discovery, experimentation, and pleasure at home.
It's not that Ubuntu is a horrible catastrophe all of a sudden. It's that when you've been using a suffocating corporate product for your operating system for your entire life, using an operating system that isn't a product at all is a bit stunning once you realize what you're looking at, like those photos of Pyongyang where advertisements are banned and the bus stops are instead decorated with paintings and photos of natural landscapes. In its early years, Ubuntu still felt like that, despite Canonical's (shifting) hopes for it. I don't know what I hope for in relation to all this, exactly, but I know for sure that if I were growing up learning Linux/Unix/FOSS today, I'd have no interest in Ubuntu.
SElinux is mostly why i use rhel based system's. But debian, fedora, nix and arch are great too...like all originals.
You usually get "older" versions of packages on Stable (less so on Testing/Unstable), but you can also use Flatpak (or Appimage or even Snapd) to get 'current' versions of things.
The only difficult thing with Debian is hardware support, but they're working to improve that. Future point-releases of Bullseye and the next Bookworm release will include non-free firmware by default, with the choice to opt out. You can also use non-free drivers and software by opting into the "contrib" and "non-free" repositories.
That's fine for getting the latest version of Firefox, but you (apparently) can't flatpak, say, your shell. I'm thinking specificially of Fish, which I need the latest version of at all times because it's constantly changing and I've grown used to the latest features added to it.
I know there are backports, but those are available at the whim of individual maintainers, and aren't guaranteed to be present. There's also the possibility of running testing or unstable, but it's more straightforward to just install a rolling release distro rather than installing Debian stable and then dist-upgrading.
I have great respect for Debian and if I had to use it on the Desktop I would be happy with it, but for me, in 2022, it just makes more sense to use a rolling release distro.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/xxafiu/how_to_remov...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-advantage-t...
Having had bad experience with snaps I thought all those app packaging options are similarly flawed. So I wasn't very hopeful to try vscodium(vscode minus Microsoft) as a flatpak on guix. However, it run surprisingly well. I still dislike flatpak polluting my list of mount points and running a bunch of services for one app, but at least from the typical user side it responds fast. It is fast to start and the only compatibility issue I encountered is that python scripts run from vscodium(vscode) can't access cuda for some reason.
I loved the idea of a well curated modernised version of Debian that contains recent packages and is stable. Unfortunately canonical made too many mistakes in its execution of the idea.
https://archlinux.org/news/grub-bootloader-upgrade-and-confi...
https://archlinux.org/news/wxwidgets-32-update-may-need-manu...
https://archlinux.org/news/keycloak-1701-2-update-requires-m...
I’ve been running Debian with unattended updates enabled for 5+ years now and never needed to manually intervene after an update. You wouldn’t put pacman -Syu in cron.
In any case, just subscribe to the arch announcements mailing list and you'll get an email notification in these cases. Not sure if I would put pacman -Syu into cron though.
> In any case, just subscribe to the arch announcements mailing list and you'll get an email notification in these cases. Not sure if I would put pacman -Syu into cron though.
That's exactly my point. With Arch you're expected to watch out for mailing list updates and running updates automatically with no human supervision is not a supported usecase. With Debian it very much is a supported usecase.
It doesn't mean that Arch is a bad distro. It just means it's not suitable for some scenarios that Debian is suitable for.
It basically removes the bad parts of Ubuntu while offering a delightful choice of easy to use DEs.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-advantage-t...
I'm no fan of Ubuntu or advertising in general, but advertising their own things is perfectly fine
Especially considering it's a tiny text file responsible for this - don't like it, change it.
Mir, Snap, Unity, Amazon integration, Whatever the fuck Ubuntu One was, Ubuntu Software Centre, Upstart, Bazaar.
But the worst thing they do, is keep changing where the desktop configuration lives. Every damn release I need to update my script that unfucks their default config to something sane, because they've discovered yet more readline shortcuts to shadow with something irrelevant.
Canonical, Fuck you.