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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

If you don't want Canonical's packages, you should probably just be using Debian rather than Ubuntu. It's not 2008 anymore, stock Debian is quite user-friendly.

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Worth noting is that in Debian experimental coreutils defaults to coreutils-from-uutils [0]. This came as a big surprise and as far as I can tell there's been no discussion. A Canonical developer seems to have unilaterally overwritten the coreutils package without discussing with the maintainer. All the package renames that are in Ubuntu aren't in Debian so you can't switch to GNU utils either without deep trickery in a separate recovery environment.

I'm used to running experimental software but I wasn't ready for my computer to not boot one day because of uutils. The `-Z` flag for `cp` wasn't implemented in the 9 month old version shipped in Debian at that time so initramfs creation failed...

[0] https://packages.debian.org/experimental/coreutils

that... seems newsworthy on its own merit.

It's in experimental only, not unstable or testing. That said I'm surprised it hasn't even propmpted discussion on debian-devel (sans [0]). I would've thought that at least enough Debian developers run experimental to have noticed and raise the issue, but no. I thought about starting a thread myself but couldn't be bothered.

[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/04/msg00004.html

Considering how Ubuntu seems to influence Debian development, this is only slightly surprising.

See: https://lists.debian.org/deity/2025/10/msg00071.html - Hard Rust requirements from May onward - by a Core Ubuntu Developer

Or Fedora.

I feel like Fedora has the same pragmatic approach (allows non-free drivers, packages, etc.) and is just as easy to use.

Or use a sane distribution like Arch or Gentoo instead of Ubuntu based systems.

Alpine Linux has a better shot at acceptable compile times.

Some FOSS software seems to maximize kernel IO last time I had a Gentoo.

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