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Comment by elischleifer | Hacker News Reader

Devil's advocate...how much do we really care about these different distros at this point. The world lives out of the browser. As long as I have chrome and VS Code I'm pretty good to go.

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When your browser is shipped via a snap and is 2 versions out of date because the update mechanism sucks and has been failing silently for over a month, it makes a difference.

There's my personal anecdote.

Firefox through snap has been the last straw for me as well. Not quite enough to ragequit on the spot, but next time I have to install a new OS, it won't be Ubuntu.

why do you install it from snap? I'm using ubuntu and don't install from snap most of the time.

It's the default now.

Yup, and installing Firefox via apt installs a snap as well. I manually had to add a separate apt repo for Firefox alone. I seem to have to do this more and more for things that just can't be slow on my machine.

Yep, I did the same. But I don't want to mess around with hacks like that any more, so my next distro isn't going to be Ubuntu, even though I've used some Ubuntu variant for over a decade now. I'm looking at Tumbleweed for my next distro.

I like the security/privacy promises of options like snaps. It seems like other issues, like file sizes, aren’t the worst. And getting it to match your os options seems like a solvable problem. Could somebody explain why they hate these systems?

They live in the past of outdated security models.

I dislike snaps because they introduce inefficiencies and I don't want want applications to each bundle their own copies of the shared libraries they depend on. I also don't want automatic sandboxing.

Good for you I guess, but most features I need aren't offered by web apps. Paradoxically, Linux is the only platform where desktop apps are the default.

Linux still has its fair share of electron wrapper "applications"

There are some, but nothing of real importance (to me, YMMV). There are no electron-based applications that I use.

> The world lives out of the browser

Exactly: my productive environment is «out of the browser» and I want it to be as fitting as possible, for my efficiency and comfort.

Imo package managers/repos, update cycles, and installation process can still be a reasonable differentiator between distros. Admittedly these decisions are fairly minor -- most popular packages are available on the major repos and you probably aren't installing your distro every day. But even though most the time I'm just living in nvim and Firefox, if adding or changing something becomes a chore it can really expand quickly as I might avoid making a positive change to my system just because I can't overcome the initial inertia from having to bend my distro to my will. Then again, that's probably a sign that I should swallow my pride and switch from Arch to Manjaro at some point.

I didn't care much about one distro vs another until I found a lot of packages I wanted were packaged for Arch Linux and not Ubuntu Linux, and the Arch Wiki was better than Ubuntu's docs. And also, yes "Snaps" were annoying.

I still use applications and my file system.

> The world lives out of the browser

Your world does, and I know that it does for many. But mine absolutely doesn't -- there isn't anything critical I use that is browser-based. And many are like me.

Different strokes and all that.

Agree. OSes are practically irrelevant. The only thing I need is a web browser and a terminal with posix like commands. I can (almost) get that on Windows these days.

I’ve run Mac for 20 years now, and before that Linux for almost 10. I can’t think of anything I lost when switching beyond focus follows mouse.

You also need some form of window management, and if you like tiling windows, Linux has the most options by far.

If you miss focus follows mouse and like tiling windows, i3 and sway both have that option.

Others might too, those are the only two I have experience with though.

That's one of the jobs of Finder. And no, I don't like tiling windows.

One of the downfalls of Linux Desktop, besides the fragmentation, was Apple and Microsoft figuring out that a large majority wants a POSIX like experience, and aren't that deep onto GNU/Linux anyway.

There is a certain irony when the Linux Desktop is on minority when looking around laptops at FOSDEM.

Some people run servers.

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