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Comment by agilob | Hacker News Reader

A few days ago I wanted to update an Ubuntu laptop that hasn't been turned on for over a year. I had steam and brave browser installed using snap. Updating these two took as much time as updating everything else in the system (1.6Gb of downloads). Then I uninstalled brave, which took about 6-8 minutes. The laptop has NixOS today.

NixOS has official GUI installer now https://nixos.org/download.html#nixos-iso

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I've upgraded Arch machines after a year offline and it sounds like that was less painful.

Ubuntu has been making some interesting choices lately.

I found lxd very appealing in the beginning, but when they favoured snap as distribution channel, where, apparently, updates and restarts could only be blocked using the firewall [0], I moved away from it. And Ubuntu in general.

[0] https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...

I liked LXD but had the same issues.

I think OpenSUSE and Alpine have it in their repos as not-snaps now.

Honestly, I could have packaged it myself, but it eroded my trust in the ecosystem. They seem to target a different use case. Which is fine by me, I just won't be in for the ride.

Not true any longer. Debian has been officially [1] supporting LXD Debian packages [2] since September last year. And you can add this APT repo [3] — which follows the same Debian recipes - into your sources.list to install LXD natively with APT.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/LXD

[2] https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/lxd

[3] https://apt.calenhad.com/

>Ubuntu has been making some interesting choices lately.

Interesting like the Chinese Curse...true ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...

Yeah updating flatpaks on the Steam Deck takes ages, and because of the way the SteamOS is set up - you really are incentivized to use flatpaks over actual packages (which could break with updates).

Updating Flatpaks takes a few seconds. The standard Discover application that comes with the KDE desktop environment is awfully slow, though.

Running flatpak update or whatever the exact command line is in the terminal will be much faster than trying to go through the GUI. I've seen this happen before on a Kubuntu install and on an Arch VM, I think it may just be a Discover bug.

Thanks for the tip!

which kind of packs takes ages. I don't have this issue. There is no could break with updates. It is they will be wiped by an update. Install packages with distrobox.

I think Steam specifically does quite a bit more complicated stuff that can affect the rest of the system just to support games than most other pieces of software. It has its own built-in update mechanism, which I think makes it one of the few pieces of software I'd avoid using the package manager for.

I run a `snap` command to update steam

I start/restart steam to update it.

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