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Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

Snaps are getting me off Desktop Ubuntu after 12 years of happily using it.

Canonical seems to be trying to push users off of Ubuntu. I switched to Arch from Ubuntu about 6 years ago after seeing how aggressively Ubuntu would auto-update, and because of Zeitgeist. I would never look back.

Arch is customizable, simple (in the sense that there are no surprises; things work as expected), and has a great community. Folks here can argue about snaps or flatpaks, and I can happily use AUR to install nearly anything. If it’s not there, I can publish it.

I’m not forced to adopt whatever GUI Canonical thinks is best for me in a given year or whatever their trendy new craze is. I can enjoy i3, tmux, vim, and ignore the rest.

I also switched to arch for a bit, but then I was left with an unbootable system after the arch devs shipped grub's master branch as stable. The arch devs were completely unapologetic and told me 'well maybe you shouldn't use arch if you can't recover a system who won't boot'

Immediately formatted and switched to pop OS and I've never been happier.

Yeah, Arch is definitely geared toward a more technically proficient user base. Their users, myself included, are typically willing to wrestle with changes like that. Recovering a system that won’t boot is almost a rite of passage in the community, since there’s an expectation that you probably built up the entire boot process by yourself, so you ought to know what it’s doing. For some users, that’s simply not true.

For future reference, if you ever decide to switch back, breaking changes or ones which require manual intervention are usually announced on archlinux.org.

Yeah I was using endeavoros which was basically vanilla arch with an installer at the time.

https://old.reddit.com/r/EndeavourOS/comments/wygfds/full_tr...

That was the event that got me to stop using "Basically" arch (Endeavour, arco, etc) and just use arch itself.

iirc this also happened in arch itself, the endeavor team just happened to have the better writeup on it.

Shilling Manjaro as the best of both worlds, imo.

It's a user-friendly and maintained Arch with some goodies like kernel switcher and driver updater GUIs.

Gnome keeps me off of pop. I look forward to the popos team are ready to ship cosmic as the default desktop.

Have you tried OpenSuse Tumbleweed or Gecko Linux? Tumbleweed is a rolling distro but the maintainers apparently test all of the updates they push. OpenSuse can feel a but clunky (it asks for passwords for “everything” for instance), but theres Gecko, which acts a bit as a wrapper of a distro to make OpenSuse a bit more user friendly.

I don't understand the hate for gnome, but xfce / kde / i3 or whatever is just a sudo apt install away.

I've heard good things about tumbleweed and it even has support for WSL, so I might try that if I ever build a gaming pc and have to main windows.

Regarding gnome, I personally don’t like that you have to install browser extensions to change settings on the ui.

I’ve tried adding desktop environments to a pop installation, but I really don’t like having all of the apps included with other desktop environments cluttering the taskbar menu and the like.

> I don't understand the hate for gnome

I avoid it because I find it hard to use and hard-or-impossible to configure adequately. It takes a "my way or the highway" approach. If you like how it does things, it's great. If you don't, you're better off using a different DE, which is what I do.

https://archlinux.org/news/grub-bootloader-upgrade-and-confi...

In regards to this specific incident, The Arch team did release a statement on how to handle the update.

Yeah this is what keeps me off arch personally. The community that instantly goes 'just get good' when you have an issue. While I never needed any help, I didn't like how the community treated other newbies. I know it's not always meant in a bad way, there's some tough love 'don't give a man a fish but teach him how to fish' sentiment there that makes sense. But the elitism is pretty strong too in my experience.

Also I wanted a distro without systemd and the init system is the one thing you can't choose or change on arch. I tried it but didn't like arch, in the end I moved my stuff to alpine which still runs my docker server.

In the end I chose FreeBSD which has a really nice combo of stable OS but rolling packages which is not common on Linux at all. And the community is much nicer IMO.

Same here, also i was surprised how well popOS worked "out of the box" with just the default settings, running on a new pc/latest hardware.

> Canonical seems to be trying to push users off of Ubuntu.

I'm on Ubuntu for now because Snaps can be disabled but it does make me wonder since they also dumped Unity Desktop a few years back. It almost seems like they don't care about Linux Desktop users any more.

Same here. I was a happy Ubuntu desktop user for over a decade. Now I’m a happy Arch user.

Same here off Ubuntu and onto centos/fedora rpm dnf world

Glad you have something sorted out.

Just interested: why not Debian? i.e. still deb based distro?

I'm guessing the poster above you wants recent package versions as they went to Arch.

For me it's now Debian on the server (debs) and Arch on the desktop (rolling releases, AURs).

Who controls quality and security in the AUR world? It doesn't seem like something I'd want to trust?

Nobody, but the specs are so simple you can audit them yourself usually. For me it's mostly about low friction packaging my own software tbh.

the AUR is user supported, no claims are made, but AURs are built off of short scripts called PKGBUILDs so it's easy to audit, you're gonna want to look for the line that links to a tar archive or git repository.

In my case Debian’s old package versions can often be awkward because I’m not using Linux exclusively… my macOS and Windows boxes are running latest releases of most things which can cause problems with e.g. sync features.

I usually run Fedora rather than Arch though, because in my limited experience with Arch it really doesn’t like to not be booted into for extended periods of time — if you do that the piled up updates are much more likely to break somehow or things like required config changes will slip through the cracks, whereas I have yet to experience this with Fedora.

That's kind of ironic considering how ancient some of MacOS's userland is.

For my use case, the details of the userland CLI is mostly irrelevant (particularly since I maintain a FreeBSD server, which means I’m reasonably familiar with both BSD and GNU styles of these tools). Most of the time it just needs to exist, not be any particular version, and exceptions are handled well by Homebrew. Third party apps with UIs being up to date is more important.

Need nixos for haskell as well

Same.

It’s pretty much a meme at this point, but yeah. Snaps just finally did it in for me.

I’ve switched all my laptops and workstations from Ubuntu to Arch.

There are rough edges here too, but on overall I’m much happier. I feel like I know how my machine works again. Ubuntu lately has been giving me that windowsy feeling with lots of things running for god knows what reason.

Also in arch the repos seems to not only contain more current versions of things. They seem to bundle more things altogether.

I moved to Debian 11 and recreated exactly the same quite customized GNOME desktop I had on Ubuntu 20.04. Nothing is missing except snaps.

I've had issues recently with WiFi on multiple different machines on Debian 11 and switched back to Ubuntu, is WiFi working for you?

What wifi chip are you using? Debian by default has no unfree wifi drivers included, so that can cause issues with them. If you have a good wifi adapter by a vendor that pushes drivers upstream like Mediatek, it should work just fine out of the box.

Would using debian non free address this?

I presume so, but I wouldn't know because I haven't ever tried.

or install from non-free ... which will not be needed anymore for next release

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-in...

Yes I was using the non-free version. It was working fine until I'd set the machines to auto-update then one day found out they had zero connectivity after an update. I thought about going around to each machine and manually trying to revert back whatever was in the updates that broke it and just decided to wipe and install Ubuntu back on them.

WiFi is working for me even if I mostly use the Ethernet card.

lshw tells me

  description: Wireless interface
  product: Centrino Advanced-N 6235
  vendor: Intel Corporation

I'm using the iwlwifi driver.

Same here. I used to use it coz it was one of the better debugged distributions that "just worked" and I didn't want to futz with deep config files like I would with arch or gentoo or deal with some confusing "nonfree" workarounds like with Debian.

These days it's looking like Fedora holds that crown.

I switched to pop OS (after a brief stint with an arch distro) and have never been happier.

Pop really is a very pleasant experience, and probably the best I've had on a personal computer. 3/4 of my immediate family run it on Thinkpads; the only hold-out is a Gentoo teenager wanting to be "weird".

Hey man, sometimes you want a distro where you can really muck about with the internals. I started with redhat 6.2 and then went to slackware until I cared more about being productive than learning internals. It's good to explore as a teen.

I left Ubuntu server and lxd because of it. Maybe a bit emotional, but f*ck that, I don't need this in my life.

I’ve switched everything off Ubuntu but my servers. That bit is just too much effort and I can’t be bothered yet.

Next server though. Not Ubuntu for sure. Probably Debian?

I chose Debian, FWIW.

How is Debian-support for ZFS these days?

Is it doable to setup Debian with a ZFS root file system?

Can you share bit more details? I have no issues with that setup or at least I cannot notice the issues.

There were a few things wrt to clustering (which I don't need) and storage pool management that tripped me up at first, but not too bad. However, it made me worry about the fact that I might not be the target audience for the LXD project (I just need simple lightweight machines with snapshots, nothing more).

When they decided to stop officially distributing debs, and promote Snap as distribution channel, that was the final straw. I don't understand what's their target audience anymore. Desktop users? My machines are sensitive about reboots, but pretty much sealed off the internet. Upgrades are tested, and happen in scheduled windows. Yet Snap auto-update insists on restarts, whenever it sees fit.

Sure, I can find workarounds [0], but the complete disregard on this issue and the reason that they probably forced the LXD project to promote the dumpster fire that is Snap just didn't sit well with me. I'm gone for good.

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

Clustering/storage pools are very optional, defaults are rather sane to my taste (I don't use clustering, may be yet, but use storage pool to define LXD stuff should reside on btrfs which has dedicated LV for that).

Auto update happens and I can understand your pain here with sealed machines/testing updates. Most small to medium companies around don't care though (from what I see) and probably have unattended upgrades on anyways.

Bit more on autoupdates - just to align yourself with how people care on keeping versions, you can imagine and check yourself of how many dockerfiles contain `latest` or no any specification of versions of pulled images. Many, many, not giving a shit.

In practice, though, autoupdates are not bringing VEs/VMs down and I find update happened after my `lxc shell some-ve` sessions are disconnected from time to time (I tend to keep those in tmux and it could be attached for weeks or even months).

As for use cases and audience - both Desktop/Server works for me - on desktop I use LXD under my WSL (it has systemd support for ~ 6 months now) to quickly play around with something and on servers to split one big machine into smaller ones/limit access to system for other users. Even had the case using it in CI/CD - custom Linux software to be packaged and doing basic installation test for centos6/7/8, Ubuntu 16/18/20.04 and so on. Package installs were done via dynamic creation of fresh VE each time, to ensure system is "clean".

Same, my next OS reinstall will be Fedora and I've been a loyal Ubuntu user for the last 20 years. It takes around 20 seconds to start a silly Spotify client on my dual Xeon workstation with 64 GB of RAM. Numerous users reporting slow startup times but Canonical just pretend the problem doesn't exist and proceed to shove snap down everyone's throats like their lives depend on it.

Same. Just moved to Fedora about 6 months ago and have pleasantly surprised. Works better on my laptop as well.

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