Ubuntu-minimal depends on Ubuntu-advantage-tools
bugs.launchpad.net
bugs.launchpad.net
I guess anybody interested in a minimal Ubuntu install would be better off installing Debian instead. The value Ubuntu added "back in the day" was end-user friendliness, where end-user is somebody not necessarily technical. But that's kinda pointless anyway for a minimal install. Ubuntu was also useful vs Debian for its regular release schedule and long term support but you basically have this with Debian too nowadays and it's been like this for years now.
Can't wait to have the linux kernel installed as a Snap package.
IMO, PopOS is the ideal Ubuntu alternative right now. They're mostly doing things right. For Desktop, anyway.
It does have some nice UI improvements.
It is also terrible:
- Suspend did not work
- My GPU would always be activated, which would make my fan run at maximum speed.
- Steam didn't work out of the box, so I never actually played any games, which was the whole point. Steam did work with some effort on regular Ubuntu.
- Eventually, the system became glitchy in record time, i.e. random crashes.
Going back to Ubuntu server edition, I felt like I had been given a new computer again.
Debian is a community project, therefore everything is best-effort rather than guaranterd like Ubuntu or RHEL/-clones.
Although for all the hate it gets, Ubuntu Pro is genuinely a good offering when comparing it to something like RHEL.
Also fuck snaps, no body wants to use that crap, neither on the desktop(flatpak is just better) or the server(use containers already).
If you want to study the data, I guess you could compare <https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/rss.xml> with <https://www.debian.org/security/dsa-long>.
26 years of Linux, been running Ubuntu for at least a decade.
Ubuntu server on laptops, because it gives me nice things.
Debian on servers, because it's minimal and conservative.
I'm unhappy with them but it will be a tragedy when they are finally acquired.
Snap has some downsides for server/infrastructure packages. Automatic updating being the most visible, but they are generally all about lack of control. This is what Snap does, it moves the power from users to developers.
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/LXD
- Debian still has the unattended-upgrades thing. I don't like this.
- Debian's package manager doesn't support zstd compression so you can't use modern Ubuntu packages on it (I _think_ they're fixing this)
- Debian's packages can be quite far behind, for example the current version of Boost is 1.74 where the offical release 1.81
- I couldn't see any obvious performance improvements (Apache stack)
+ No snap shit.
If anyone can provide me with more ammo to move to Debian I'd welcome it.
Then don’t install it? I don’t get the problem.
> - Debian's package manager doesn't support zstd compression so you can't use modern Ubuntu packages on it (I _think_ they're fixing this)
Fixed and released a week ago: https://bugs.debian.org/892664
> - Debian's packages can be quite far behind, for example the current version of Boost is 1.74 where the offical release 1.81
Boost 1.81 is in experimental; download the package if you want it.
> - I couldn't see any obvious performance improvements (Apache stack)
“No obvious performace improvements” is a negative? What you can reasonably expect of Debian is the same as Ubuntu, minus the bloatware.
> Boost 1.81 is in experimental; download the package if you want it.
1.74 was a year old when bullseye was released, and there had been at least three boost releases in that time. PHP is another example. From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28180482 :
> PHP 8.0 is 10 months old, and debian’s upcoming release will be upgrading from 7.3 to 7.4, which will make 7.4 the standard for the next ~3 years (even though it only gets upstream support for 1 more year)…
There is plenty of software this happens to in Debian, and Debian isn't the only distro this happens with. We need distros maintaining stability as must as we need distros moving fast and breaking things, and everywhere in between. It just means that some distros might not be an exact fit for all use cases. And that's fine.
Packaging PHP 8 would have required to drop, e.g., the mediawiki package, which only become compatible with PHP 8 in 1.39, released November 2022.
Debian is released every two years. Debian gets security updates through LTS for five years.
If the packages in Debian are "old" it's because of the biennial release cycle. As a sysadmin I'm fine with that, and Debian is no worse than Ubuntu which has its LTS every two years as well.
If you're on the desktop then there could be an advantage to running the more frequent non-LTS releases. But I'm fine with the biennial LTS, which makes Debian and Ubuntu roughly equivalent.
>>Canonical has been taking steps to advertise their paid offerings in increasing velocity lately. Is there something that's been triggering this?
>https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/21/canonical-now-hopes-to-ipo... "Canonical now hopes to IPO in 2023" (April 2022 story).
So it sounds like it is the start of an active commercialisation of the users. Since Snap started getting pushed more heavily I've been looking to change. I've tried Pop_OS but it doesn't fit well for me. I want to stay on a relatively vanilla KDE ... probably try Debian next (been on Ubuntu for something like 15 years, was Slackware before that).
Ubuntu runs boost 1.74 just like Debian. Upgrading to a new version is likely to break stuff and neither Ubuntu not Debian are rolling release distros, so it wouldn't make sense for them to update already. The upcoming 23.04 not containing the newer Boost version makes less sense, unless there are compatibility problems that can't be fixed before release.
Either way, Debian is Ubuntu without all the Ubuntu. If Ubuntu works for you now, Debian will probably work for you with minimal changes to your workflow. In many cases it packages more recent versions of software because it's "LTS" cycles are faster than Ubuntu's.
If you want rolling release updates completely under your control, consider Arch or one of its derivatives (Endeavour/Manjaro/etc.) instead. All three of them come with the warning that a standard system update can make your OS unbootable if you don't read the change logs, but that's just a consequence of always using the latest and greatest.
You can always run Debian testing or sid if you don't need rock solid stability.
If you don't want to do that, you can stay on Debian stable and use the backports repo: https://backports.debian.org/
Well... okay? You can't install Fedora RPMs on it either. Installing packages from another distro might sometimes work, but only more or less by coincidence; you really shouldn't be doing that.
Do debian ships with a microsoft signed bootloader ? Is that easy to install on Debian ?
All of this is installed by default with a normal Debian install.
Yes.
Remind users to apt-get ubuntu-advantage-tools if they want to upgrade.
“No, `apt-get ubuntu-extended-support` isn’t an option, because users should be able to use Ubuntu without using apt-get.”
So, who exactly is using Minimal Ubuntu (“…a set of Ubuntu images designed for automated deployment at scale…”) without using apt-get? Your description of the distro as “…not intended to be comfortable to use at the command line, but you can apt-get and snap install anything as usual…” sure sounds like you expect users to use apt-get, in the rare circumstance that anyone ever does log in as a user to one of these distros.
“Sorry, but we will not budge on this ‘must have access to advantage/pro without apt-get’ technicality.”
So there’s this line, once again from the Ubuntu wiki’s own description of Ubuntu Minimal: “The `unminimize` command will install the standard Ubuntu Server packages if you want to convert a Minimal instance to a standard Server environment…”. So make a `get-advantage` or `go-pro` command. There, access to advantage/pro without apt-get.
“Look, we are a business, and advantage/pro upgrades are how we make money, we’re not taking it out.”
I’m sure you have telemetry tracking upgrade conversions - maybe in ubuntu-advantage-tools itself, maybe elsewhere. Take a good look at that data and find out how many people are upgrading to advantage/pro from minimal. Is it zero? It’s zero, isn’t it?
I don’t expect to need to change distros for the foreseeable future.
Centralized store with no open source implementation server-side that you can self host.
We already have Flatpak for this use case that does not have the previous issue and that we could have standardized on. Didn't need another standard for this.
Stuff not ready / broken in several ways with it but still provided by default (Firefox).
When you already own your perfectly fine APT package repositories and have a total control on what dependencies you can rely on, you don't need this kind of stuff to provide software on your distro.
Is it really that easy? Would ubuntu-advantage-tools "benefit" from being cryptographically validated to ensure that users do not substitute the original release from Canonical with "counterfeit" replacements?
I'd prefer a set of build files over a package like this, but if it's as empty as it claims to be then this is a great solution to this ridiculousness.
Yes - https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/ubuntu-minimal shows a lot of dependencies and two actual files with documentation.
I think the main issue would be getting this ubuntu-other-minimal package into Canonical's official repositories. Otherwise, you've just made another Ubuntu remix.
If Ubuntu needs people to have this package for support, why don't they have a ubuntu-recommended package that depends on it and that's installed by default, and let people who want something minimal to have it?
This tool might even be why minimal needs it. Bad/dark packaging.
Is this mass exodus moving to Debian for things like Amazon AMI’s?
(Though I guess that in itself wouldn't be a large enough group to be seen as a "Mass Exodus")
The one Docker container that doesn't, in fact, is based on CentOS so I can run Davinci Resolve in CentOS when my desktop OS is really Ubuntu.
Ubuntu gave up on having the best desktop experience when it gave up on Unity and replaced many packages with Snaps. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu and has its own Cinnamon desktop but also offers other desktops and a version based on Debian instead of Ubuntu.
I've been considering it since their apt and motd spam, and their holding back of updates (paid or otherwise). I won't make any definitive changes until the next LTS gets released though.