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Comment by jnsgruk | Hacker News Reader

Earlier this year, Canonical’s Ubuntu Engineering organisation gained a new team, seeded with some of our most prolific contributors to Ubuntu. Debcrafters is a new team dedicated to the maintenance of the Ubuntu Archive.

The team’s primary goal is to maintain the health of the Ubuntu Archive, but its unique construction aims to attract a broad range of Linux distribution expertise; contributors to distributions like Debian, Arch Linux, NixOS and others are encouraged to join the team, and will even get paid to contribute one day per week to those projects to foster learning and idea sharing

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> others are encouraged to join the team

What are the requirements for joining? Will I be asked about my high-school grades? Pass a psychometric test?

Thanks.

One of the key requirement is high on sarcasm and low on contribution.

Maybe that's why they got rid of Stéphane Graber...too much good work done too earnestly and too quietly.

Yes, candidates for the team will still be expected to go through our usual hiring process.

Then the project is doomed.

Good luck with that.

Here's hoping Canonical leadership will some day finally accept how broken the process is.

Congratulations on making it through that crazy, unscientific process.

Does that mean they are reducing work on snaps?

Nope, they're still pushing it:

> In the coming weeks our Starcraft team (responsible for Snapcraft, Rockcraft 1, Charmcraft) will begin prototyping debcraft, which will (in time) become the de facto method for creating, testing and uploading packages to the Ubuntu archive.

I wish they would stop with snap, snaps have been nothing but a pain. Ubuntu keep pushing half-baked ideas into the wild - who asked for a system that would randomly kill apps without warning? It's like the Rust SSH thing, they are going to make it the default whether you like it or not, even though they know it is not 1:1 and probably never will be.

I'm currently having an issue with Firefox where it will not stop crashing all of the time, even whilst using Hackernews. Not a RAM or CPU issue, just buggy software pushed through a "move fast and break things" attitude.

Google “remove snaps Ubuntu 24.04” (or whichever version you’re on). I did so, nuked all snaps and replaced Firefox with an upstream Deb repository. Everything’s working fine so far.

May as well run Debian at that point

I’ve found that Ubuntu comes with more things set up out of the box than Debian, so it gets me up and running faster. Or could look into Mint. Sure, to each their own - as long as it has no snaps!

Try Mx Linux :)

On a server, 100% but on a desktop/laptop, Ubuntu does bring some conveniences (though Pop_OS! improves that balance, the good stuff minus the over-dependence on snaps).

Or Linux Mint..! :-D

Or run PopOS which is Ubuntu without the snaps.

I like using snap on my LTS servers, I can test new CLI tools there and see if the new version has soem fixes that I need or not, if the snap works better I can use it without messing around with installing some PPA to update the tool and it's dependencies.

What I dislike about snaps is the performance. Somehow they have managed to make them practically unusable on computers older than a few years.

It's like they saw RedHat and though "ah the reason people complain about that is because they're just not going fast enough."

> snaps have been nothing but a pain.

I remember being vocal about it being a bad solution to a problem nobody had while I was working for Canonical. That's probably one of the reasons it seems unlikely they'll ever hire me again.

No, this is an orthogonal effort.

We have two channels for distributing software in Ubuntu: the archive and the snap store. Each are suited to different scenarios.

Irrespective of any view on Snap as a packaging format, the workflow and developer experience is, in my opinion, much simpler to work with. The barrier to contribution is much lower.

The work on debcraft is to try and bring some of the lessons we've learned there to those developers working with debs - while also introducing new primitives that will allow for extended integration testing of the distribution using some of our existing (well tested) machinery.

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