Ubuntu Plans to Ditch Its ‘Minimal’ Install Option
omgubuntu.co.uk
omgubuntu.co.uk
It's this kind of messing around with package and desktop managers that finally sent me to other distros.
Am I reading it wrong?
Mint develops their own desktop environment cinnamon (based on gnome 2).
If a distro is a reskin one should be able to convert an install of the original distro to the reskinned version. Mint comes with heaps of its own software, for managing software installation, software upgrades, managing kernels, managing release upgrades and of course its own DE.
I actually gave up Ubuntu when they moved to snaps as the primary installation mechanism.
Arch treats me just fine, especially with Gnome on Wayland.
Firefox is the only major thing where I've just abandoned the package manager, and it's probably a better experience this way than the .deb was in the first place.
I wish I could articulate this better, but this is how 1 person is creating their own customized version of Fedora Silverblue - with Github workflows:
https://github.com/pkulak/filverblue/blob/main/.github/workf...
I can just rebase off of that image and try it out like a git remote branch.
Add in eventual plans for dm-verity and such, and Fedora's distros (kinoite, silverblue, (sigacea?)) are going to be leaders. Much more dependable and predictable.
Similarly, it seems the Fedora community exists by the good graces...of IBM - how much independence would it have in the future?
That said I also migrated from Arch to Fedora when I needed to pick between Ubuntu and Fedora for work, so I was used to being a bit more hands on to begin with.
And originally, Ubuntu was a high visibility demo piece for Launchpad. If it can manage the full build cycle for Debian, it can certainly handle your niche app.
I work in an environment where I have to auth to web services with a smart card. This is just not possible with Snap FF.
It seems like it's more work for Ubuntu and it makes the installation process more intimidating and potentially confusing.
I'd think it's part of their weird inclination to force everyone to use snaps, but that can't be it either -- they can force that regardless.
So, I'm utterly baffled.
Perhaps this was "my" fault because the machine had been updated several times, originally at 14.04 through various LTS releases, accumulating cruft.
Ubuntu is (almost) 20 years young! As I am sure you can appreciate that means a long history of technical changes. We’re looking to modernise the desktop. We started with 23.04 when we moved from Ubiquity to Subiquity, the Ubuntu Server installer, unifying our tech stack to create a more coherent installation experience across Ubuntu Server and Desktop. We also moved the installer UI from GTK to Flutter to make iterating the interface much easier (Flutter tooling is excellent).
Still, we need to be bolder. In fact we shouldn’t be talking about the installer nearly so much; it's a tool not the destination. I want to improve the installation through the first boot experience so we can move onto more interesting things. We’re exploring a range of changes to get this part right: from declarative configs to answering the question “what does security by default” mean in 2023? In the context of this headline, and to make our intentions clear, we are looking to minimise the default installation. So the plan is to have one lean installation option.
It's late in the UK so I’m going to sign off and be back at this in the morning. We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on what an awesome out-of-box-experience could look like (either here or in the original discourse post).
Best, Tim
[1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/rethinking-ubuntu-desktop-a-m...
unattended fleet VMs with common AUTH linked to billing, none of which is run by me, does not look like the same security as my computer, my choice , Sir
I'm an Ubuntu fan. With that said, I agree that GTK tooling could definitely be better. However, rather than branching off to Flutter, I would much rather see Canonical unite around GNOME technologies and use Vala/GTK.
In a broader sense, I believe Ubuntu is branching off too much and in a number of ways. I myself, and several users I know, have left Ubuntu after the decision to push Snaps so heavily. Flatpak has a number of advantages, and I believe Canonical's efforts would be better spent helping to improve Flatpak rather than building a competing product.
Fundamentally, I believe Ubuntu's vision should be a Debian derivative whose system is updated via aptitude/dpkg on the awesome interim/LTS release schedule that made Ubuntu great. Userspace apps, on the other hand, can and probably should be sandboxed in the form of Flatpaks, which would provide rolling releases and system isolation. With the combined efforts of Canonical and the rest of the community centered on Flatpak, much could be gained.
Ubuntu Desktop, being a desktop distribution, should choose one desktop environment and embrace it wholeheartedly. With GNOME being the environment of choice, I believe Ubuntu should ship GNOME's core apps by default (https://apps.gnome.org/) and no more, no less. Along this vein of thought, while it's cute to have a rebranded version of GNOME software and call it the "Snap Store", that honestly feels tangential. Instead, Ubuntu should use a mostly vanilla GNOME software center (and not a renamed one), and as I said above, switch the Ubuntu ecosystem from Snaps to Flatpak.
Ubuntu was great not when it was different, but when it provided stable, sane defaults that "just worked."
https://dietpi.com/docs/software/desktop/
"DietPi is an extremely lightweight Debian OS, highly optimised for minimal CPU and RAM resource usage, ensuring your SBC always runs at its maximum potential".
debfoster (https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/debfoster) is my favorite tool to keep my Debian installations as small as possible.
I would like to toss out OpenBSD and NetBSD to the minimal list. I doubt nothing is a minimal as these :)
As someone who used Debian for decades before experimenting with Arch on my laptop for a few years now, Debian is far more polished and ergonomic in the package tooling.
Coming from Debian you'd expect `pacman` to support doing this, let alone at least say something about it in its man page.
I'm not even sure how the hell you'd figure out `asp` exists and is something you need to explicitly install if all you knew is `pacman`, without using internet searches as an escape hatch.
There was a time long ago when most distros were a hodge podge of work-in-progress discrete tools you had to discover the names of and install separately. Using Arch feels like going back decades in this regard, not in a good way. It's unclear to me why they haven't worked on consolidating these components into a cohesive entrypoint making everything discoverable and more uniform in their UX.
Also, I often go 6+ months without updating this machine. The only friction I've gotten in years is pacman-keyring updates sometimes need to be done first, before updating the rest of the system because of key expiration from going so long between updates. Recently, they merged the community repo into the extra repo and left community empty for the time being, so the only maintenance I did was to remove [community] from my pacman.conf after running a system update a few weeks ago (again, after months of not updating)--and even that I didn't technically need to do yet, since the community repo still exists for now.
Everyone's use case is different, and I surely don't have the same configuration or packages as you or anyone else, but this kind of comment sounds like bullshit to me.
EDIT: Not that I'm agreeing with the recommendation to use Arch if you used to use Ubuntu's minimal install. Arch is a drastic change compared to just doing a full Ubuntu install and removing a bunch of crap...
But, for anyone else reading, I'll say that I ran Arch on my personal laptop from about 2009 to 2020 before I finally stopped using that machine altogether, and I've run Arch on my current personal laptop from about 2015/2016 until now. This current one has an Nvidia GPU, which is a little hit or miss depending on the kernel/driver version.
At various points I've definitely had to spend some time fixing things after updates, but almost all of those were because of packages I had installed from the AUR (a community "repository" of unofficial, untrusted, packages maintained by individual users) that either updated before or after my official Arch packages did, which cause dependency issues. This is certainly no different than any Linux distro where you install a third-party package outside of the official channels that also depends on specific versions of packages being present.
Other times, things broke because I was doing hacky shit, like custom kernel patches.
Certainly there were a few times that breaking changes came from official updates. There was always enough info on the Arch main page and/or forums to either prevent a breakage or to quickly fix it.
This is the price we pay for a rolling release instead of periodic major releases like most popular distros do. I've run Ubuntu on several machines and I've never done a version upgrade without it borking something (often times it was the GRUB config not being updated correctly and failing to boot). Granted, it's been several years since attempting an Ubuntu major version upgrade, so maybe they're awesome and smooth now--I don't know.
I ran Arch on my first laptop for 10 years without ever wiping and reinstalling it. I've run it on my current laptop for going on 7 years (the machine is falling apart, so it probably won't make it to 10, but not because of the OS) without reinstalling. The most fiddling I have to do with my current one is that I sometimes switch between the proprietary Nvidia driver and the free Nouveau driver.
Now, Arch is not for everyone. If you don't want to actually touch config files for all of your underlying system services, and don't want to think about how to partition your disk or what filesystem to use, Arch is no fun. And, to be completely honest, if I weren't already very familiar with Arch, I might not have the energy/time to get into it today. But, I feel lucky that I found Arch when I was young and had not much better to do than tinker around with my computer's OS, because I get pretty frustrated and overwhelmed these days when I have to use something like Ubuntu where I feel like it's a little harder to do anything that's not "standard" (though, I'm not necessarily saying Ubuntu does stuff wrong--just that I like how transparent Arch is).
I don't understand why people thing infrequent updates will break things. This idea seems to have started spreading a few years ago, but nobody I ask can tell me why Arch would break if you didn't update frequently enough.
And if you aren't part of Arch culture and already know that you need to know this, or you step away from a system for long enough and miss some Arch News, you're going to have a uniquely Arch experience when you reflexively pacman -Syu instead of running informant or checkupdates first.
Is it illogical and inscrutable? Not at all. Does it sometimes skip a few steps here and there that can trip up both new users and old ones? For sure.
Arch breaks things all the time. They've needed specific /etc updates, fixes to unbreak config changes, and as I alluded to, holding off updates to stop breaking due to uneven updates of incredibly common shared libraries
Ubuntu used to have a mini.iso too, and it was almost indistinguishable from its Debian counterpart. Both distros relied on apt, and since these minimal installs essentially just contained whatever was needed to have a working system running apt, they were essentially the same, with slightly different default settings. The biggest difference was the release cycle and the attitude towards proprietary software.
Linux Mint or MX Linux are the way to go here. Time to move on.
Could you elaborate?
So, Ubuntu, but with a slightly reskinned UI?
To me it’s as far from Ubuntu as Ubuntu is far from Debian.
Linux is 100% of one market segment, broadband routers. No matter how staunch a Windows zealot someone is, there's a bunch of stuff they depend on that cannot be done with Windows at all, not no-how.
The "new Ubuntu crap" is actually pretty good. You should take a look at it.
Anyway, no, the new Ubuntu crap is mostly just that. This isn't a mere idea; I teach IT and every semester I require folks to use a Linux desktop. Mint, MX, Lubuntu and Ubuntu, the occasional Arch are all in testing rotation; over the past few years Ubuntu/Gnome give me the most trouble -- they just suck at backwards compatibility.