I'm Done with Ubuntu
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ounapuu.ee
I use Bodhi Linux but, besides the Desktop, this is bascially Ubuntu.
On a server we use nala instead, it's quite nice actually, so maybe I'll start using it elsewhere too.
The primary difference between apt and apt-get is apt has better dependency resolution and apt cleans up after itself when you do upgrades (it uninstalls packages that are no longer used).
With apt you don't have to use two separate tools to search for packages to install them. That's probably at least a moderate usability improvement for many people since you don't have to figure out whether you need to use apt-get or apt-cache for some particular command.
I'm more and more disappointed that packages are snaps and not directly installed via apt, myself.
Does that really make a difference? From a user perspective it's only replacing apt-get install by dnf install or pacman -S or apk add
This is up to the repository. If Debian choose RPM it would be as large as it already is
I thought redhat distros later introduced yum as the "apt" equivalent?
Everyone says this about their favorite package manager.
The people moving OSes in response to Snap presumably have strong opinions on package managers :)
But also no: even if they spent years catching up they would not reach the level of not-sucking that .deb get without extra effort, as a result of decades of policy ossified into the supporting tools. Such as the strong expectation that apt deals with packages that can be (re)built from their declared inputs and share common build-essentials. Whereas snapcraft does not even provide the tools yet to easily rule out building from ephemeral inputs or merely-accidentally working rust versions.
There hasn't been a good reason to use Ubuntu over Debian for years.
Many Ubuntu 3rd party repos have no Debian equivalent. But there are more Debian repos than before.
This way, you can also have a rolling distro.
$ stat / | grep "Birth" | sed 's/Birth: //g' | cut -b 2-11
2020-06-20
$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.sources
# Modernized from /etc/apt/sources.list
Types: deb deb-src
URIs: http://deb.debian.org/debian/
Suites: unstable
Components: main non-free contrib
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg
# Modernized from /etc/apt/sources.list
Types: deb
URIs: http://deb.debian.org/debian/
Suites: testing
Components: main non-free non-free-firmware contrib
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg
stat / | awk '/Birth:/ { print $2; }'
A long time ago I ran stable, and pinned testing at low priority.
Across the decades I've slowly upgraded my stance. Now my machines run Debian Unstable, with testing and experimental pinned at very low priorities. Unstable does sometimes have unsatisfiable dependencies, so it's good to have some other options. And sometimes I just want what's coming for a specific package or kernel, and experimental will often be there.
That might have been due to a bug in some issue that you would have to fix under Mint as well.
> It has always been something simple, even less issues than debian, plus other advantages. Again, that is my experience.
Sure, that's fine, I still don't think it makes sense to put down a distro because you were messing with things you shouldn't have been. If you said you had to, then that's different from messing with something you shouldn't have been, since you should have been to fix it.
It seems the real issue was not that you were messing with something you shouldn't have been, bur rather stuff was not working for you as well out of the box.
IIRC it was when an Ubuntu update pushed the Unity DE on me that I abandoned it. And that would have been back in like 2012 or 2013 ish.
The reason I use Linux in the first place is because I know what I'm going to get. There may be a few UI tweaks between Mint MATE versions, but there's rarely breaking changes that completely and fundamentally alter the way that I'm meant to be interacting with my machine. As an end user I want stability in all things. Don't move menus or change keyboard shortcuts (and especially don't change the entire freakin' DE) without making a massive fuss that this "upgrade" might not be for all users with an option to .
In any case, Mint MATE gives me the compromise that I want between a smooth and "pretty" user interface that looks relatively modern without being a heavy resource hog like other DEs that strive for that (cough KDE cough).
There is also a Debian edition of Mint called LMDE. I would recommend Debian second and I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu at all, mostly because of the SNAPs but also because they really gave up trying to provide a good desktop experience when they stopped Unity many years ago now.
if the issue with the current stable version of debian are certain packages - like the kernel -, try debian backports
* https://backports.debian.org/
they have a list of available packages at
* https://packages.debian.org/bookworm-backports/
ps. yes, using testing is another possibility, but for serious systems i personally prefer the "stable" release :))
just my 0.02€
Coming back to a hobby laptop and finding it unable to function because mirrors have been updated or whatever was a really painful thing to find out after a few months away.
However, bumping every three months always renders my configuration broken because of some expression being deprecated. One time it was how pulseaudio got enabled. Last it was how nerdfonts were organised.
I like how nixpkgs gets better. I don’t like thinking “I guess I’m not upgrading packages tonight, I’ll just roll back.”
It just works. It's stable, I don't need to worry about breaking updates and changes anymore. I'm at peace for at least 2 years.
And all the software I care about have their own deb repos or are self updating (Firefox, Chrome, VS Code, Cursor, Signal, Slack, etc), so I always have up-to-date versions. There is flatpak as well but I really didn't have any need for it for now.
It's the best combo, stable unchanging base and up-to-date apps.
Huh. I didn't notice that in my personal experience. And with Fedora I at least get recent versions of software.
My desktop now runs Aurora, which is itself a respin of Fedora Kinoite. Anything that's genuinely "system" level is installed with rpm-ostree, there's the occasional flatpak, but most things are installed with linuxbrew. But most days I'm just using my MBP (my desktop isn't even powered on right now).
It comes by default with the Bluefin family developer editons.
If I had a nickel for every time the Linux community reinvented the wheel for things nobody asked for, but refused to implement a feature everyone asked for...
If you're coming home from work and have one hour of free time, do you really want to spend it investigating why a Meta+Shift+F11 doesn't work in your program under Wayland on Womperloo Linux 11.4?
That's the #1 reason why people need to be paid to work on important software. In a corporate environment (with somewhat reasonable management) boring but important work will land in someone's Jira ticket and they'll be paid to get it done.
The flipside of open source maintainers being unpaid (or, at least, their pay not being linked to their output) is that they have time to care deeply about quality, and many really do. Linus Torvalds is not going to sit idly by while an update is shipped out that breaks Womperloo, I'll tell you that.
That's true, but Meta+Shift+F11 will usually be fixed if it breaks on Windows, and ironically will very likely work Womperloo 11.4 as well, because Wine basically runs all Windows software that doesn't make it an explicit goal not to run under Wine perfectly.
> Linus Torvalds is not going to sit idly by while an update is shipped out that breaks Womperloo, I'll tell you that.
Linux is a great example - it's the most arguably the most successful FOSS project, and that's no small part due to the fact that Linus, as well as a ton of other programmers get paid a lot of money to work on it.
Linus keeps the kernel ABI as stable as he can, but that's only a small part of Linux.
Wayland is the primary example.
Jokes apart, I guess that not all is procedsing yhere is also IO and other stuff going on here so I would not expect C++ to be critical here for most of the workload.
I mean, can't you say the same thing of Fedora? Podman, Systemd, Wayland and tons of other software was created by or sponsored by Red Hat because everything has to be done their way. Canonical tried the same, to much less success, with LXD, Upstart, Unity. But it's literally the same playbook.
Well, at least all of these efforts were and are open source.
Systemd was the second attempt at a new init system. The writing had been on the wall for a while for sysvinit, it just turned out that upstart wasn't really fixable. Later, when systemd started trying to unify more aspects of the distro, a lot of the conventions that were adopted didn't even come from Red Hats distros.
And while Wayland was started by a Red Hat employee on his own time, most of the development was done by Intel if I remember correctly.
It seems to me that you confuse "Red Hat is really good at building communities where everyone can contribute what they'd like" with "Red Hat forces what Red Hat wants onto everyone else". And yes, it helps that everything's open source and without a CLA.
It was still mostly driven by Red Hat people, most notably a guy who was terrible at taking feedback, and proposed "solutions" for security vulnerabilities which were bullshit ("just update systemd", as if you can just do that on any distro). For years systemd had pretty terrible downsides (you know how it deals with conflicting dependencies? randomness! Because that's what you need for an init system, random ordering), yet RH and the person in charge refused to listen.
That all the software RH made/sponsored had some advantage or another over alternatives doesn't change my initial point - Fedora, and RHEL, are full of RH alternatives to existing software. Yeah, Podman is better than Docker in some ways, but RH still removed user's choice by forcing their half baked "drop in replacement" that for multiple years couldn't do half of what the predecessor did. Nowadays Podman is decent, but it has been the forced default for how long now?
Why does it matter? They were trying to solve a real problem, and decided to dig themselves out of the hole that was upstart. I'm not even sure if Fedora or Arch adopted systemd first, but it was pretty close either way.
And Podman (which I admitted was at least partly not-invented-here) was a default but not "forced". I used Docker for years on CentOS 7, and only switched to Podman when it got better than the competition.
You mentioned exactly three cases, of which one was not even Red Hat, and that's being "full of RH alternatives to existing software"?
RHEL 8 and CentOS 8 (for the short life it had) came with Podman as default, with IIRC even aliases of docker==podman.
Fedora has always had Docker and on RHEL you could install it with community support only.
That's forcing an alternative, inferior in terms of features, tool. Canonical were publicly criticised for switching the Firefox apt release to a Snap for their easier maintenance.. Red Hat replacing Docker and telling everyone it' replaced by Podman, even if Podman could do 1/3 of what Docker could, is pretty similar.
And they did the same with the whole ecosystem - buildah is another example of them reinventing the wheel because they just had to. Kaniko exists and works well. Docker build has downsides. But Red Hat just had to build their own one too.
Also, Kaniko was made public in January 2018. Buildah had its first release in February 2018. It's unfortunate that both exist but so is life, they were developed concurrently even though Kaniko came first by a few weeks. Given the previous experience with Docker I am not surprised they chose to build something integrated with podman.
If it is the same playbook, Ubuntu is wildly outclassed here.
Not saying that you are not right, but for clarity, on Podman, and in lesser terms Systemd, there are valid points from RedHat - at least from my perspective as system administrator. I suggest you to make your own mind from this article[1].
> According to Walsh's presentation, the root cause of the conflict is that the Docker daemon is designed to take over a lot of the functions that systemd also performs for Linux. These include initialization, service activation, security, and logging. "In a lot of ways Docker wants to be systemd," he claimed. "It dreams of being systemd."
My key take - Docker's developers cared about moving forward fast and making dev's life easier, not about integrating into existing systems well (which probably alone is the reason why Docker was born - see how FreeBSD guys keep believing they have Jails and it's superior over Docker).
This is just someone who doesn't understand what or why Docker is. And when Docker was developed and released (2013), systemd was barely an init system, let alone the monster with 50 tentacles it is today.
> My key take - Docker's developers cared about moving forward fast and making dev's life easier, not about integrating into existing systems well (which probably alone is the reason why Docker was born - see how FreeBSD guys keep believing they have Jails and it's superior over Docker).
100% agreed. That's why it's useless to compare to systemd.
Hope it clarifies for you.
Their Firefox snap is pitifully slow on my relatively high-end PC. It’s an embarrassment that it was shipped so broken as a default to end users.
Distributions are mattering less and less these days, with Flatpaks looking like the path forward for the end-user applications, and docker for many services.
So all I want now is for the distribution to get out of the way, and Ubuntu has become a relatively poor choice for that.
The Ubuntu maintainers have a cohesive vision for their product, and that vision doesn’t align with what I want.
Yes, I absolutely could shoehorn what I want overtop of their vision, but I’d rather just go with something simpler that gets out of the way and lets me do what I want.
If Ubuntu was the only option I’d still use it, but it’s not. Basically any distro can accommodate my needs of providing a base on which to run Flatpaks and docker containers.
But for many of us it is/was the gateway to Linux and I'm grateful to it for that.
Fedora is great, I did not have half the problems with it that I had on Ubuntu. Every single update went super smooth.
The one downside with Fedora is that you don't really have LTS and there is no rolling releaste that is intended for daily use, but otherwise it's perfect.
I've pretty much landed on Fedora and vanilla GNOME again for the past two years for many things (including some personal services), with Debian as my go-to for SBCs and servers (and Ubuntu as a fallback if what was available was too old).
Snaps completely turned me off it, and the Fedora Bluefin/Bazzite experience is much better (even if I prefer to run some apps outside flatpack due to too many path re-mappings).
Which kind of defeats the entire point: If you set up Elementary OS for someone with elementary computing knowledge, can you blame your grandparents in 4 years for a wildly out of date Linux computer? What grandson wants to download all their pictures, tax forms, emails, and copy it all back in place every few years?
As I said in another comment, it's ironic that a Linux distribution could be said to take the crown for form over function, more than any other OS.
Yep, this turned me off from Ubuntu as well. Pop!_OS fully removed snaps, which is great, but man they're behind the times.
kde-neon fixes a lot of the problems I have with the UX of Ubuntu, but KDE is getting weirder and weirder, and (for me, specifically with zoom) is still behind other WMs in its Wayland support. Looking at this point to go back to a tiling WM like sway on top of kde-neon, which is so weird to say.
One person's "behind the times" is another person's "delightfully stable".
But yes, wondering what happens when they finally release their DE.
Also, I appreciate Fedora's bleeding edge nature, but once I got done distro hopping and no longer needed "bleeding edge" kernel support for my new-at-the-time hardware, the 6-month release cycle does get to me a bit. Although I've never had an install completely hosed by the upgrade, I still have a mild panic attack every time I've gotta do a version bump because something always breaks at the first or second post-upgrade reboot, causing me to fear that the upgrade has failed. I haven't tried doing the once-a-year two-version upgrade yet (although Fedora says it is officially supported), I might look into doing that on one of my boxes next time.
[0] https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2025/02/03/looking-ahead-at-2...
Android has compartmentalized apps by design, and it seems like everything work there, but that's because developers are forced to think about it and make it work.
You can't extend most of this to arbitrary Linux packages. Those are often meant to have complex interactions with other packages, and to do so via arbitrary mechanisms (file paths, Unix sockets, shell variables, etc). You can't easily sandbox something like npm or pip, for example, since their whole point is to be globally accessible. Even less so for something like OpenSSL.
Having gone through update hell just a few months ago when I tried to go from 23.10 to 24.04, and eventually giving up after spending way too much time on it, I'll probably just stick with fresh installs from now on. You may blame me for running a non-LTS release, but at the time, it was the only thing that would run on my new Lenovo Thinkpad.
Snaps are horrible, but I understand that Canonical needs some things to distinguish itself. If I cannot find a repo or a deb file, I would rather install from source than use a snap.
I like Debian, and I like that Ubuntu is Debian based. Setting up a modern dev environemnt on RedHat or Fedora will not give you the latest stable tools. Ubuntu will at least give you some stable tools that were released within the past year or two.
If I could redo Ubuntu, I would have a distro that pulls from Debian Sid and does monthly releases where you will have relatively modern tooling and some stability, you freeze it on a version the way Debian / Ubuntu typically do, but you have drastically more stability.
For now Arch/Endeavour will do for me.
If I were to rebuild my systems, I'd go for Debian.
Totally an aside from the actual content here, but I love that Pitch Meeting has achieved the level of cultural penetration required for this reference to now be turning up in a rant about operating systems.
OP should be aware that using Fedora while relying on DigiDoc is a gamble. It breaks almost every year on Fedora (since 2021 when I've started using it). Last big one I remeber is when DigiDoc devs made some major breaking change right before the deadline for submitting the annual report, and I had to scramble to work around it. Thanks to some Fedora community member that made a copr with fixes ahead of the distribution package.
Now I'm in the posture where I run Ubuntu for the software support, and development inside a Fedora VM.
Also, the smartcard software works with Ubuntu's snap Firefox package, you just need to restart the computer, for some reason to have it picked up.
This. Maybe i am missing something, but Firefox and Thunderbird keep getting replaced with their snap counterparts periodically, even when given priority to the mozilla ppa. Its really frustating.
Throwing everything bleeding edge into a release distro because bug be damned at least the hardware worked, and then as it got more stable it basically just became windows - no longer could config files be edited, you needed to use their wizards. No thanks.
What files? What config? What are you talking about?
Okay? Would you feel better if I quoted the whole thing?
> I feel like the part of my text you declined to quote "you needed to use their wizards. " clarifies things, or at least the context. I don't have specific examples because it's been like 15 years since I played with it, although Upstart, their own gui environment, and snaps are all probably at least loosely related examples.
I have used Ubuntu a very long time, and I don't remember having to use a wizard for anything.
Also, upstart is no longer a thing. It definitely didn't require a wizard to use. Additionally, snaps didn't exist 15 years ago.
It's just weird to omit the part of my text that clarifies what I was talking about in your quote to then ask what it is I'm talking about.
> I have used Ubuntu a very long time, and I don't remember having to use a wizard for anything.
I mean, there definitely are some wizards baked in just for simple stuff, so that's certainly odd. Even Debian has a few wizards. Wizards are not an inherently bad thing that you need to deny their existence in ubuntu completely, lol.
> Also, upstart is no longer a thing. It definitely didn't require a wizard to use. Additionally, snaps didn't exist 15 years ago.
Upstart no longer being a thing and snaps not existing 15 years ago are very, very, very much irrelevant to the point was making. which I think you knew and you're choosing to be very pedantic because you feel the need to defend the software you like and have been using for 20 years.
The point was just to give light examples of Ubuntu-invented and made default solutions to things that require learning the 'ubuntu way' of doing things and are sometimes hidden behind abstraction. The reason my parent comment was upvoted was because the people that agreed understood the gist of what I was saying. I suspect you do as well, you just don't think my point is an issue because it hasn't affected your usage in any way.
There's plenty of examples of what I refer to in this thread, including issues with configuring Unity, snaps being forced without user consent, mount output being unreadable, sys v init scripts hidden behind systemd unit files (which generally include there somewhere being a comment not to edit the file directly). People that just want something simple to use for browsing and office apps and maybe some development don't really care what they use as long as it's stable and don't tinker enough to run into the issues this stuff causes. You probably would have been equally happy on Fedora.
Adding non-free and less stable repos to Debian makes it a very slick and robust experience. Most software I want to have newly stitched edge is in their own repos anyway so stable is usually fine too, with a few select things manually installed alongside some asdf and SdkMan installs.
Don't know if touch screens or biometrics work, but Bluetooth and touchpads and sound and so on Just Works on the machines I've tried it on over the last five years or so. Toshiba, Lenovo, HP Elitebook and ZBook, probably something more.
Just started a new job this year and they gave me a Kubuntu workstation. My impression after one month is that nothing has changed, it's still a very bad OS, and KDE tries to be "fool-proof" like Windows but it fails miserably.
There is definitely an advantage to having a big experienced enterprise behind your distro. RHEL is free for personal use, and Fedora of course, but I'd be willing to pay more for a Fedora license than I ever did for a Windows license.
I just came from 13 years at a microsoft gold partner having to tunnel my traffic through my Windows laptop.
But also the reason for that was security, which I completely understand. There was no good alternative for our VPN host checker on Linux. And the VPN host checker is what verified our systems were up2date and up2standard for working with big government clients.
https://x.com/ChShersh/status/1816514954302025820
if you don't want to click on the link, I've copied most of it below (his second post has a screenshot of the questions!):
"I had been using Ubuntu for 10 years.
Last year, I applied to Canonical for a job to develop Ubuntu itself in Rust.
Before the interview, they asked me to write a 20-page essay about my life, aspirations, philosophy and whatnot."
It is also an immutable distro.
It has been completely smooth for me, that said for Discord, I would recommend installing Vesktop as a flatpak, it is an alternative electron packaging of discord with Vencord (a plugin framework for the discord client) but more importantly it has support for screen sharing, that the official Linux discord client has but with a lot of issues.
Probably it won't make too much difference for you, though...
Ubuntu does have better non-free driver mystery-blob support, and while that is not necessarily a good thing... it makes it compatible with a lot more hardware.
Anecdotally, Fedora was frustrating as F as a desktop due to limited package ecosystem. Thus, it is better for headless servers due to the security model. =3
I've been told Bazzite is a really nice Steam-focused distro: https://bazzite.gg/
Haven't tried it yet, I'm procrastinating moving a gaming desktop to Linux as October gets closer (end of Windows 10 support; end of Windows support for that desktop's CPU/TPM).
Admittedly I have had some sporadic issues with games not starting or having very bad FPS, but I have no idea who is actually at fault for those issues (and I doubt it's Fedora, maybe an app or a gnome extension or night mode messing with the compositor). Like I said, they're sporadic, so it only happens occasionally. The rest of the time it's smooth sailing.
I've had some crashes of Steam itself in the past and I don't know if those were somehow distro-specific.
I don't think I've run into any issues with games themselves on Steam that would have turned out to be distro-specific. Installing and running games on Steam is the same point and click exercise. Steam uses its own set of runtime library binaries for games anyway, so that probably also unifies things for games regardless of the distro.
Discord worked fine when I used it. I wasn't a heavy user though.
Someone said not to use Fedora if you have an Nvidia GPU and I have no experience with that. Also, I don't know about controllers, but I doubt those come with proprietary Linux drivers so I wouldn't assume there'd be much difference between distros.
https://github.com/augustobmoura/asdf-protonge
I have a laptop with hybrid graphics, the discrete chip being NVIDIA. I followed these instructions:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/set-nvidia-a...
A few years ago, i did have all sorts of problems with graphics performance, but recently it's all worked perfectly. I may also have applied some funky environment variables in my Steam settings; will hopefully remember to check later on.
I have a SteelSeries controller, and at one point used that to play Behold the Kickmen. Worked fine, as far as i remember.
DXVK_HUD=compiler gamemoderun %command%
Your ramblings about Snaps are just lame. I've never seen any real issue with snap apart from a childish whining to show how much of a rebel are you. "Mommy, I won't use that snaps because they're ugly. But what's wrong with them? They're ugly because I don't like them!"
I had to take it one step further and switch to Debian Testing to get certain packages, and somehow the experience of installing updates is still better than Ubuntu. Go figure.
With that said I still use Ubuntu for servers (no intention to pay for RHEL). Although with all our App's deployed as Docker containers, Ubuntu isn't doing too much.
I have been putting up with Windows but 11 is going to be my breaking point I think. After this, no more Windows and no more NVidia unless they get much better support on Linux
I'll deal with the headache
Their community is also great, I'm still subscribed to the welcome newsletter and never felt like unsubscribing. Its fun reading about people's lives
I have tried both and they confused me when compared to Slackware. I like the simplicity of Slackware, maybe that "modified" my brain where other distros seems too complex.
I’m very happy to pay Apple money and have macOS. It’s the “user friendly” Unix experience if that’s what you really want.
Ubuntu's biggest problem is that you have to live with problems that were fixed years ago.
I ended with Arch eventually. Rolling distros are much better for consumers.
Still don't understand why it's not more popular.
1. Mostly first-class support for root-on-ZFS.
2. Supported by Microsoft InTune, so my employer can be happy.
It's been with me for almost 20 years. Not great, but definitely workable from a user standpoint.
A tangent, but I just realized that there's no OS nowadays that I feel comfortable upgrading at all lol.
- Windows? Make sure to find that script which disables all the preinstalled crap like defender and updates
- MacOS? It's time for apple intelligence boi
- Ubuntu? System encountered a critical error popup on startup
- Android? Your rooted phone is now again detectable by play integrity malware
So my workflow is instead to make some time and do a clean install every 2 years or so. Keeps the clutter out too (re-install only things I actually need).
I've been using Manjaro for almost a decade, of course it's not perfect but at least the rolling release model makes it suited for being upgraded instead of reinstalled.
If you install Manjaro using BtrFS + timeshift + timeshift autosnap it creates snapshots after every system upgrade that can be quickly rollbacked if something goes wrong
I run NixOS on my laptop and server, and do updates about once a week. I don’t use Timeshift but I do use the NixOS snapshots if an update breaks stuff.
But I really haven’t had any issues with an update breaking anything. I don’t really want to go back to the major release model.
I've told this story here before, but a few months ago I bought a laptop and installed NixOS on there. It worked fine except my USB keyboard would take about 5 seconds to "wake up" if I stopped typing for more than a minute.
If this were any other distro, I probably would have just lived with it, because I would be afraid of breaking Grub to a point where I don't know how to fix it, but with NixOS I figured out how to fix it, and now it's fixed, and it's backed up with git so I always have it if I ever need to do this on another computer.
I try to look at a clean reinstall as a good chance to make sure my backups and restore process are working too. Maybe take a chance to experiment with a different distribution or organize things differently, or new bootloader.
Open to suggestions.
They're Ubuntu based, but it's easy to remove snaps from their ecosystem and just use debs, flatpak, and AppImages.
Is that Debian? I want it desktop-focused actually and that works great with multi-monitor and proprietary drivers from NVidia.
Currently on Ubuntu but I see bugs here and there and a software update messed up my desktop a few weeks ago. It is for work. I do NOT want to waste time with unstable stuff.
I do also have to say that using i3 makes stuff easier, because it is relatively minimalistic and therefore little changes at all. Perhaps you can try Debian? I have heard very good things about its stability.
I would wager Ubuntu is probably the most popular Linux distribution for "cloud" computing. Seems to work fine there. Yet, not for all the people commenting in this thread.
Added "Security" that breaks users workflows is crap. You have to trust the code on your pc. Spend effort making it good, rather than jailing it in case it's bad.
https://github.com/ln-komandur/linux-utils/blob/master/Purge...
They are evil... but a necessary evil... =3
Also, this is a common task:
sudo snap remove firefox
sudo snap remove thunderbird
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa
sudo nano /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozillateamppa
Package: firefox*
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
Pin-Priority: 1001
sudo nano /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozillateamppa2
Package: thunderbird*
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
Pin-Priority: 1001
sudo apt update
sudo apt install firefox thunderbird
Haven't reinstalled it in 8 years. Everything runs smoothly.
So, I made sure my backups were safe and reinstalled Xubuntu 24.01 LTS. Same story - apt update/upgrade broke it again.
Not exactly how I wanted to start my Monday.
I decided to give Debian a shot instead. The installation process was a bit different, but it went smoothly, and everything’s been running great since.
So far, I’m really happy with it. Goodbye, Ubuntu/Xubuntu, and thanks for all the fish!
The push for the horrible little thing that is snap via systematic dark patterns (eg. force snap down user's throat via firefox only available thru snap) is the last straw AFAIC.
But I agree with the article that snaps are infuriating and next time I replace my laptop I'll be surveying the field to choose a replacement for Ubuntu.
Even back in my windows days, I would say wiping the OS and starting fresh about once a year was fairly common, and often avoided a lot of pitfalls.
But... I've been running about 8 Arch machines at home over the last 5 years (6 servers, one desktop, one laptop), and mostly don't feel the need to wipe them.
There's a little bit of cruft, but it's usually related to me doing things, and not the OS itself. So the system still feels stable and solid.
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Personally - I think for Arch, it's a combination of "Not changing upstream" and "upgrading constantly" so that they don't have a lot of custom cruft to start with, and they have to deal with the upgrade process all the time, so it's not some "huge lift" that happens once every 2 years.
Nix has a similar free feel, but it's not so much that upgrades are painless (they aren't), it's more that "wiping" the machine takes a different tone when you basically wipe the machine with every config change, and reverts are simple and easy.
Both are pretty nice, though.
People install LTS then get get pikachu face when it turns out the kernel is too old for their hardware, or they are missing some feature in software that has been there for 2 years.
Just stop it.
There are more stable distros!
I'll sacrifice my camera but I need all 3 OSs
So why not install an alternative desktop instead? Yeah then you can as well use another distro altogether, the point of Ubuntu being within a large group that can be targeted by third party software and integrators.
The idea with gnome 3+ seems to be a tablet-like experience. Ok now I actually do own a tablet (a Surface Go) so I tried Ubuntu and Fedora on it in a dual boot config with Windows. It's not half-bad with device recognition but unpolished; eg. the virtual keyboard isn't localized, gnome's own setting dialogs on actual tablet 3:2 aspect ratios are cut off, can't rely on touch and still need mouse/keyboard, etc. What was tempting with Fedora is that they put some effort into webcam support lately - but then the apps I wanted to use it with (MS Teams or Google Meet on FF) still couldn't use it because pipewire or codecs or whatever, and those web apps officially support Ubuntu only anyway. Ubuntu's current LTS didn't even find it, and if it would find it, FF in a fscking snap or other pointless container dreck would need extra permissions plus AppArmor config nobody is able to figure out. A poor impression considering this is already the .2 iteration of an LTS release (but hopefully the upcoming 24.04.3 update can help).
I thought those problems were a thing of the pre-CoVid past, but unfortunately they aren't, and the Surface Go is ages old. The Linux desktop experience is beginning to feel like an effort of inexperienced developers who put too much refactoring on the plate that they then can't pull off (aka second system effect) with Wayland, containers, and whatnot.
I agree that GNOME's defaults aren't great, but with a few extensions and tweaks it's a very nice desktop. I just wish the defaults were closer to my preferences, but so do we all.
The DE is largely decoupled from the distro; pick whatever combination you want.
That's a setting, isn't it? Install gnome-tweaks, then under "Window Titlebars", you can turn them back on.
Granted, it's a stupid default, and I have no idea what the GNOME team was thinking on that one.
Dropped it a few years ago and switched to Mac.
Linux in a nutshell: Just awful in a laptop, meh in a desktop, and first-class as a server.
On the other hand, my company gave me a Dell with Windows 11, and every once in a while the "Intel® Smart Sound Technology for MIPI SoundWire® Audio" speakers and microphone occasionally just disappears from the system and so I have to restart which takes about 10 minutes each time.
Overall though when Linux breaks I can fix it, or I can change out parts I don't like. That's better for me than, eg, Windows's Start Menu search searching on the internet and being unable to change that
Upgrades are the bane of tech. They are justified by "security" like every law that takes away freedom and privacy is done in the name of "protecting children". It's all BS.
My main machine in on Windows 7. It can't be upgraded anymore. No updates for me! Which is exactly what I want. Pure joy.
People and companies get hacked all the time because people use scare quotes around security and wire up their windows 7 computers to the internet.
So if you don't upgrade you better be happy with what you have for the rest of your life haha.
Exploits are a liberal myth! Jesus didn't need no patches!!
It is very cool, Bateman. But that's nothing. I use MS-DOS 5.0, before it got ruined with needless bloat in version 6. Limiting memory to 640K (or 1MB with UMB extenders) means that I'm immune from recent malware attacks. No networking ability reduces my attack surface. I find text-mode user interface to be clean and simple. Lack of multitasking ensures that I remain focused throughout the workday. I will never upgrade.
Do you post on HN via mail?
Doesn't seem like you really learned your lesson.
Try voidlinux...
It's been a while. Don't know if they reverted it. Anyhow, the trust is gone forever.
Debian never disappointed me.
I enjoy my Mac so much more when I want to to development. Linux just kinda faceplants itself every time i even attempt to use it for anything else than a server.
Looks gorgeous. It's so simple, it's even got "elementary" in the name. Very simple experience for people who want something macOS-like.
However... they never figured out how to get distribution upgrades working. So, they never did it. Whenever a new version comes out, reinstall the OS is the official guidance. The most elementary task in the world, even for technically minded people.
Ironically, that Linux distribution is the ultimate example of form over function, more than any other OS.
> get frustrated with lack of compatible games
I have no issue playing whichever modern game I want in Linux on Steam (I don't play competitive games with anticheat features though, but things like Cyberpunk 2077, Satisfactory, Age of Mythology, ... all work. Haven't tried Starfield yet but it's 'gold' on protondb)
I don't play any games besides https://play-cs.com/
But AFAIK Linux users use something called Steam to play games? No?
TLDR Valve, the company that makes Steam, works on getting games to work on Linux, but they have been kind of all over the place.
There are WAY more Linux-compatible games than Mac-compatible games, and that's just talking about native builds. With Proton, you basically only won't be able to play games with kernel-level anticheat. Everything else works great.
I'm not doubting that you have had some bad experiences with Linux, but the lack of gaming options is really not a modern issue. Just don't use Wayland (for now) if that is a priority.
Any issue that comes up has been a means to fix with Linux with downgrading a package or editing a config file. Problem with Windows often requires a re-install with the tight integration with registry and buggy drivers that lock up development VMs.
My work laptop has become a space heater controlled by Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry, consumes 1/3 of the CPU, and their Antimalware Service Executable, consumes 4/5 of the CPU for days.
No way will I let Windows bare metal on my personal computers and you have to pay me to use such bad quality software.
PS. Any that says Windows has good backwards capability, that capability is subjective. Still cannot run "Slave Zero" on NT kernel, only Win32.
At $dayjob the corporate issued Macs are locked down (for good solid compliance reasons so there's no point fighting that) but run a variety of incredibly shitty DLP and virus-checking borderline-malware. The developer experience is horrible.
Worse, because they're locked down so tight you can't install any of those myriad utilities that Mac people tell you about whenever you complain how poor the desktop experience is compared to Linux! - I'm not even able to install uBlock Origin on my browser so any web browsing is eye-opening.
Don't get me started on the MITM SSL certs that the DLP software requires us to have set up for everything - it's pretty amazing how terrible the devX is at times.
... What on earth. What are you doing to the poor machine?