I never understood the point of Bitnami. Every time I tried one of their image / package, it's a complicated mess full of custom and strange stuff, really hard to work with.
Instead of a simple package of the software based on some familiar base, you get some weird enterprise garbage that follows strange conventions and a nightmare when you need to customize anything.
100% agreed. I don’t understand the point of throwing all conventions out the window and building their own brittle scripts on top of it. All their images require docs to configure because none of the upstream documentation applies.
I've used them as a quick way to get rootless configured base images. Not sure if official repos provide those now, but it used to be a big hassle to get things like postgres images running without root in their containers. Although I often had to read through their dockerfiles to figure out the uid setup, where configs live, etc because they were not consistent between the various bitnami images.
Back in the day, Bitnami was a way to run Wordpress on Windows. They packaged it nicely so that you could install it on Windows Server. Nowdays that could get you fired, but back then Linux was not so widespread.
What are some resources for these conventions? As far as I can tell everyone else rolls their own bespoke images based off of of a projects image in order to customize the configuration.
This won't stop any app store spammers, if they can spam the app store it's no problem for them to get 20 fake devices and bypass this.
Again it's the genuine indie developers getting punished.
Apple was able to break the CUDA lock-in with their Metal computing api (MPS), in no time at all. Within months, now the major AI libraries like Pytorch and Tensorflow all support Apple GPU without a hitch.
What's taking AMD so long? They just can't do software I guess?
I have an 8GB, and I am considering two more 8GB, it should I get a single 16GB? The 8GB card was donated, and we need some pipelining... I have 10~15 2GB quadro cards... Apparently useless.
Trying to understand how the 86 billions of neurons in humans achieve consciousness is like trying to understand how the billions of weights in ChatGPT interact with each other.
Basically impossible impossibility. For a system which derives its behavior from complex interactions between those billion components, you can only understand its origins how it was tuned, and some high-level concepts of its workings. (Which we already achieved both for human brain and ANN).
Not sure what the neuroscientists are even researching at this point, has there been any major findings from neuroscience in the last 10 years? (With similar kind of impact as Transformers in 2017?)
>... trying to understand how the billions of weights in ChatGPT interact with each other.
Isn't that just a computational problem? In theory, couldn't every expression and result be debug.print and followed? Indeed, in theory couldn't a second chatGPT process follow the debug.print process of the first chatGPT process and then explain to humans how the result of the first process was derived?
World models are meant to be for simulating environments. If this was something like testing if a game agent with llm can form thoughts as it play through some game it would be very interesting. Maybe someone on HN can do this?
Yeah Godot editor is snappy and smooth, unlike Unity and Unreal.
However Godot's 3D and physics implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Not sure if Godot 4 solves those issues.
Yes, I understand the content of the database is supposed to be on disk. But for the database to function and do its thing, it needs space in RAM. Like page swap and cache.
True, 90% of doctor diagnosis are garbage and maybe even worse than ChatGPT. The 10% is for when you have a visible problem that can be cured with a surgery, they are pretty good at that.
A doctor with GPT-4 could be way better than one without.
They already have diagnosis flowcharts where it’s a game it follow the symptom. It would have to be considerably better than the tools they already have to be appropriate.
My favorite experience with snaps is Firefox just closing in the middle of doing something because it wanted to update, and it didn't even bother to check if I was using it first.
Everyone's done with Ubuntu. It's just not good. Its got a stereotype at this point for being the easy noob distro but that's not even true. Its top to bottom awful and has been for many years.
Call me a noob if you like, but I don't like hunting down drivers. Tried to go to debian on my last dev machine upgrade, but reverted straight back to ubuntu. I may be lazy, but I really don't want to hunt down drivers. I'll try debian again next cycle.
I feel like hunting down drivers hasn't been an issue on Linux for any relatively modern machine I've run in over 10 years.
If it really is something that you have had problems with, maybe try PopOS instead of Debian. The restricting non-free repos by default out of principle with Debian can sometimes get annoying when you need to install certain non-free drivers (looking at you Nvidia), but PopOS is a really well-polished ootb experience that is trivial to install. Second to PopOS for a set it and forget it experience, OpenSUSE is a rock-solid distro that does not seem to get much praise.
>I feel like hunting down drivers hasn't been an issue on Linux for any relatively modern machine I've run in over 10 years.
Try installing any Debian flavor on an Intel Mac. Keyboard, mouse, bluetooth, wifi drivers all incredibly hard to get working. Need to perform some voodoo extracting the drivers from a MacOS image then making them available during boot.
That probably depends on what vintage machine you're trying to install it on. I'm typing this on a "late 2009" 27" iMac running just that, Debian. I did not have to hunt down any drivers or slaughter any black cockerels to get things working, the only "special" thing I did was install rEFInd [1] to deal with the EFI bootloader. That's it, nothing more. A simple network install later I had Debian running on the thing, sound and network and Bluetooth and wifi and accelerated graphics and all. The "iSight" camera works, the "remote control sensor" works, I can control the screen backlight, things... just work. With 16 GB of RAM and the standard 2TB hybrid drive the thing has years of life left in it as long as I can keep the graphics card running - it has been baked in the oven once to get it back to life, no complaints from me since I got the machine for free because of the broken graphics...
Or another recommendation. If you want all the drivers and you want to run Debian, use the non-free image which I believe they just decided to make it easier to find?
I've tried non-free KDebian last month. It still booted without wi-fi. But what's most frustrating - it didn't detect any partitions on my drive. The KDE installer I mean. lsblk showed everything just fine. Same with Neon live.
And guess what? It works in KUbuntu. But ubuntu is just SO slow now. ( And I couldn't install it of my current dual-boot anyway because it does NOT have option to NOT TO install new bootloader. :-/ I love Linux (lie).
Didn't know that was an option! Thank you! If I only had a time machine to 3 weeks ago. Oh well. Thanks anyways. I'll try that again in a couple of years.
I haven't had trouble with drivers using Fedora in years. RPM fusion handles Nvidia drivers just fine. It's a far cleaner and "noob friendly" distro in my opinion, so long as you're able to google "how to install nvidia drivers fedora"
This is mostly just a Debian problem, due to their "no non-free software" philosophy, which extends to device drivers. I have never in my days booted a Debian install that worked with wifi out of the box, and I suspect I never will, due to that philosophy.. For that reason, I've stopped trying and I default to Ubuntu (-based) distros instead. All it takes to get rid of snaps forever is `sudo apt purge snapd`.
Use the moment to replace ubuntu-server with Debian and you'll be glad you did when Canonical decides on its next move to ensnare users. Even when I used Ubuntu - back in the early brown-desktop days when they sent out free CD-ROMs to anyone who wanted one - I never felt tempted to use it on a server since it was never clear to me what it offered that Debian could not deliver while it was clear that keeping Debian up to date was (and is) far easier than doing the same with Ubuntu.
Ubuntu had its place in popularising Linux but they jumped the shark a long time ago, now they are just another player jostling for their own niche.
In the past you could use the images from here [0] to get installs with wifi firmware, but future versions will have it included in the official images. They've worked out of the box on almost all recent (last 5-10 years) systems I've tried it with.
I run Mint on my primary desktop and it's fantastic. What Ubuntu LTS would've become if it had continued to focus on a good desktop experience and pushed Flatpak instead of Snap
Ironically I was about to set up a new Linux Dev machine with Ubuntu and now I'm more inclined to go back to Mint since I never had a bad experience with it. I was fortunate to skip the Gnome 3 days and the Cinnamon and Xfce implementations have been very stable for a while now.
Give OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a shot. Better than Ubuntu (in my experience) when it comes to drivers. They have the MacBook Pro 2015 facetimehd webcam (which Ubuntu doesn't have) and my brand new Asus Zenbook S13 OLED was perfect right out of the box. It's a rolling release so you get extremely recent packages. And its KDE is amazing (I switched from XFCE, it was so good). I love it.
You know what distro I had the most experience of hunting down drivers? Ubuntu.
I've given-up on Debian-like systems on a laptop, because the drivers were never good, just decide one last try with bare Debian, and have everything work out of the box. In my experience, Ubuntu never works, and when you suddenly get most things to work, they break down again in a week or two.
This was my last straw. I installed some 6 month old LTS release, and it had to go through a 2-5 second timeout step on the initial lookup of each new dns name. Then, it would populate a local cache, and work well until the TTL expired or whatever.
Anyway, if you are looking for a noob distro, I recommend manjaro. (The AUR packages are extremely unstable, but other than that, it’s pretty competitive with what Ubuntu was 10-15 years ago.)
I personally have had them ship out WIP patches not meant for production, which has wasted a lot of my (volunteer) time chasing down phantom bugs in software I maintain. This has personally happened to me on at least four different occasions. A lot of other FOSS maintainers I know have similar stories.
Is Manjaro really that noob-friendly? All I know about Manjaro is that it's based on Arch, which I always understood as being the LEAST noob-friendly distro besides LFS.
Arch isn't really noob unfriendly, it just requires an intimidating procedure to begin setup, which manjaro used to just do automatically for you, that was basically it's selling point, "arch without manually installing all your software."
Now it's just adware and unstable crap, not near as bad as Ubuntu but I won't recommend Manjaro anymore.
There are several less noob friendly distributions than Arch, I'd say NixOS, Void and Alpine probably top that list. Theyre great distros but they deviate significantly from what you'd expect from mainstream Linux.
It's middle-of-the-road IME. Arch with good (but not amazing) defaults and a team that has had a number of controversies that kinda give them a shady vibe overall.
Canonical makes decisions based on their own self interest. Not for their users and not for the benefit of the greater community. That's what drove everyone away.
I have meager needs so I haven't run into (m)any of the issues here, but what's a deb based alternative that isn't meant for absolute stability at the expense of anything modern?
(I ask with actual curiosity; I'm ignorant to most distros.)
FWIW I’ve been using Linux Mint for years and have never had a major issue. Most minor issues are with out of date repository packages which can usually be installed by other means.
Not only does it include Flatpak support, but as of 21.1 it can even handle Flatpak updates through the GUI Update Manager alongside .deb packages from standard repos/PPAs.[1]
Ubuntu can be a bit easier to get a laptop running than Debian (although I personally use Debian).
But whenever I see someone running Ubuntu on a server I think that there is a very real competence issue. Ubuntu should be kept as far from the server room, data centre or cloud as possible.
yes, I tried Ubuntu briefly in 2006 before switching to the Fedora/EL ecosystem since then. Fedora seems to have won every "battle" so far (systemd vs upstart, gnome-shell vs. unity, etc.)
It is possible to get an apt package, you have to jump through a few hoops but it can be done; I do it every time I install Ubuntu (frequently) because I won't touch that snap shite again.
I can't move work off of Ubuntu; it's too embedded now, but I'm looking for something else for home. Switching distro-base isn't so easy when you've been using it for decades though; I tried NixOS but it wasn't comfortable (Nix is a steep learning curve), though their community is top notch, and everything I do is deb based.
Looking for a way to get a modern debian (something akin to non-LTS Ubuntu) or just go all out and switch to something Arch based like EndeavourOS.
> Looking for a way to get a modern debian (something akin to non-LTS Ubuntu)
Not exactly sure what you mean by modern, but I'd recommend debian "unstable" (also called "sid"). Despite its name it's pretty stable. Normal debian stable releases are LTS style, unstable is where newly built packages show up first—so it will generally have the latest version of stuff and not be stuck a year or 2 back. It's basically a rolling-release style thing—I put in a little cron-job that does `aptitude safe-upgrade -y` every night to keep me up-to-date.
You can also use debian "testing", which one step back from "unstable"—packages are promoted from "unstable" to "testing" when if they've gone 2 weeks without a bug report of some particular severity (that I can't remember off the top of my head).
What's nice is you can have both testing and unstable in your apt sources—on my machine I set the priority on my testing higher than unstable so I generally get the testing packages, but I can grab unstable if I need to. I've been running this way for about 20 years now, and it seems the right balance of new but consistent.
I don't want things breaking left, right and centre but I want access to later versions of tools and libraries I'm using.
For example, at work we were told to upgrade Wireshark and VirtualBox to major versions that aren't available in apt on 22.04 after an audit due to vulnerabilities in older versions.
What you're doing sounds like it'll work nicely for me, thanks.
I moved from Ubuntu to Fedora when Canonical started pushing snaps 4 years after the auto update debacle that's also mentioned elsewhere here. Couldn't be happier.
I've used fedora, I have no real issues with it, but I'm not sure if it's going to work for me. At work we target Debian/Ubuntu and I lead the backend team so I need to be on-point; that means not having to mentally switch "environment" all the time because I use something else at home.
Still undecided though; I'm too old (read; jaded) for distro hopping now, but maybe I'll try find a Debian setup as another commenter suggested that'll work.
Just be aware that Fedora's got a six-month release cycle rather than whatever Ubuntu's LTS lifetime is (4 years?), and Fedora only supports current release and one back. So realistically, you've got a year a month to upgrade your workstation.
I've had Fedora for over five years and I've never had my laptop get completely borked by an upgrade, but I've had just enough things break between releases in the past that I still get get the sweats every time I've gotta do the restart upgrade, whether it will come up completely and just work or whether my WiFi is now broken because resolve-d changed to systemd-resolved.
Actually regarding upgrades Fedora Silverblue - which I currently use - may be better.
Key benefits:
- Applications through flatpak don't depend explicitly on system libs so there's less chance of breakage.
- If upgrading to new fedora version breaks anything, switching back is just one command away (rpm-ostree rollback). I don't think going back is so easy on normal fedora.
Would you be interested in a session for me to better understand (and hopefully eventually fix) why Nix was not comfortable? Not looking to evangelize, but to learn about the experience from your perspective.
I really enjoyed the results of NixOS with flakes but a couple of things were a little more challenging than I have time for to switch it into my daily driver.
It was that steep curve that stopped me going back to date; I liked everything about it, the community was very welcoming and helpful, the declarative nature, and ability to define my machines' states in Git, the documentation, no complaints except the time I'd need to feel as proficient as I am elsewhere.
I ran Manjaro on my gaming desktop for a couple of years but I hated KDE, it felt so clunky, always misbehaving compared to Gnome where I've had relatively few issues.
You can choose the desktop before install time: Gnome, XFCE, and KDE have official support; just download the appropriate ISO from https://manjaro.org/download/
That sounds more like Canonical marketing-speak, than Mozilla. My guess would be that it is Canonical who approached Mozilla for snap support, and Mozilla said yes.
Meanwhile, Mozilla still maintains ppa (mozillateam) with apt version. There's also Flatpak version, which delivers what snap promised.
If someone (Ubuntu) wants to package and distribute free software (Firefox) in their own format (Snap), the upstream maintainers (Mozilla) shouldn't hinder it no matter how bad the format is - it's not their job.
People are free to distribute Firefox however they want... Without the logo and Firefox branding. If they want to distribute it _as_ Firefox they have to meet Mozilla's conditions
I had to do this, after an update installed the snap version. I had crashes, UI that wouldn't render, all sorts of deal breaking bugs. And I don't really care how I have to install something, as long as it's painless. No idea why the snap copy had those issues but 0 issues with the apt.
I can't recommend EndeavourOS enough. You get all the good parts of Arch with an easy to use graphical installer, XFCE or another DE + great Nvidia support out of the box.
It's not really what I would want on the desktop, but I did mess around with it a little and it's pretty interesting. Next time I need to set up a server for something I think I'll probably use it.
This happened to me and since I had to immediately stop what I was doing, I used the opportunity to take snap off my system completely and reinstall Firefox properly.
If you're moving away from Windows, why not go all the way and install Manjaro or something? Snaps are meant to emulate the Windows ease of use, including the automatic behavior that you dislike (but many users like).
> When will these system designers realize that the system shouldn't do anything observable without me telling it to?
My vehicle changes gears without asking me. If someone makes a broad statement like "when are these vehicle designers going to realize that a vehicle shouldn't do anything observable without me telling it to?" I'm just going to laugh at them.
My snap version of Firefox on Ubuntu kept bugging out my plasma taskbar too. Consistently reproducible, and annoying until I figured it out. I uninstalled the snap and manually added it through apt.
Canonical seems to be trying to push users off of Ubuntu. I switched to Arch from Ubuntu about 6 years ago after seeing how aggressively Ubuntu would auto-update, and because of Zeitgeist. I would never look back.
Arch is customizable, simple (in the sense that there are no surprises; things work as expected), and has a great community. Folks here can argue about snaps or flatpaks, and I can happily use AUR to install nearly anything. If it’s not there, I can publish it.
I’m not forced to adopt whatever GUI Canonical thinks is best for me in a given year or whatever their trendy new craze is. I can enjoy i3, tmux, vim, and ignore the rest.
I also switched to arch for a bit, but then I was left with an unbootable system after the arch devs shipped grub's master branch as stable. The arch devs were completely unapologetic and told me 'well maybe you shouldn't use arch if you can't recover a system who won't boot'
Immediately formatted and switched to pop OS and I've never been happier.
Yeah, Arch is definitely geared toward a more technically proficient user base. Their users, myself included, are typically willing to wrestle with changes like that. Recovering a system that won’t boot is almost a rite of passage in the community, since there’s an expectation that you probably built up the entire boot process by yourself, so you ought to know what it’s doing. For some users, that’s simply not true.
For future reference, if you ever decide to switch back, breaking changes or ones which require manual intervention are usually announced on archlinux.org.
Gnome keeps me off of pop. I look forward to the popos team are ready to ship cosmic as the default desktop.
Have you tried OpenSuse Tumbleweed or Gecko Linux? Tumbleweed is a rolling distro but the maintainers apparently test all of the updates they push. OpenSuse can feel a but clunky (it asks for passwords for “everything” for instance), but theres Gecko, which acts a bit as a wrapper of a distro to make OpenSuse a bit more user friendly.
I avoid it because I find it hard to use and hard-or-impossible to configure adequately. It takes a "my way or the highway" approach. If you like how it does things, it's great. If you don't, you're better off using a different DE, which is what I do.
Regarding gnome, I personally don’t like that you have to install browser extensions to change settings on the ui.
I’ve tried adding desktop environments to a pop installation, but I really don’t like having all of the apps included with other desktop environments cluttering the taskbar menu and the like.
Yeah this is what keeps me off arch personally. The community that instantly goes 'just get good' when you have an issue. While I never needed any help, I didn't like how the community treated other newbies. I know it's not always meant in a bad way, there's some tough love 'don't give a man a fish but teach him how to fish' sentiment there that makes sense. But the elitism is pretty strong too in my experience.
Also I wanted a distro without systemd and the init system is the one thing you can't choose or change on arch. I tried it but didn't like arch, in the end I moved my stuff to alpine which still runs my docker server.
In the end I chose FreeBSD which has a really nice combo of stable OS but rolling packages which is not common on Linux at all. And the community is much nicer IMO.
> Canonical seems to be trying to push users off of Ubuntu.
I'm on Ubuntu for now because Snaps can be disabled but it does make me wonder since they also dumped Unity Desktop a few years back. It almost seems like they don't care about Linux Desktop users any more.
In my case Debian’s old package versions can often be awkward because I’m not using Linux exclusively… my macOS and Windows boxes are running latest releases of most things which can cause problems with e.g. sync features.
I usually run Fedora rather than Arch though, because in my limited experience with Arch it really doesn’t like to not be booted into for extended periods of time — if you do that the piled up updates are much more likely to break somehow or things like required config changes will slip through the cracks, whereas I have yet to experience this with Fedora.
For my use case, the details of the userland CLI is mostly irrelevant (particularly since I maintain a FreeBSD server, which means I’m reasonably familiar with both BSD and GNU styles of these tools). Most of the time it just needs to exist, not be any particular version, and exceptions are handled well by Homebrew. Third party apps with UIs being up to date is more important.
the AUR is user supported, no claims are made, but AURs are built off of short scripts called PKGBUILDs so it's easy to audit, you're gonna want to look for the line that links to a tar archive or git repository.
It’s pretty much a meme at this point, but yeah. Snaps just finally did it in for me.
I’ve switched all my laptops and workstations from Ubuntu to Arch.
There are rough edges here too, but on overall I’m much happier. I feel like I know how my machine works again. Ubuntu lately has been giving me that windowsy feeling with lots of things running for god knows what reason.
Also in arch the repos seems to not only contain more current versions of things. They seem to bundle more things altogether.
What wifi chip are you using? Debian by default has no unfree wifi drivers included, so that can cause issues with them. If you have a good wifi adapter by a vendor that pushes drivers upstream like Mediatek, it should work just fine out of the box.
Yes I was using the non-free version. It was working fine until I'd set the machines to auto-update then one day found out they had zero connectivity after an update. I thought about going around to each machine and manually trying to revert back whatever was in the updates that broke it and just decided to wipe and install Ubuntu back on them.
Same here. I used to use it coz it was one of the better debugged distributions that "just worked" and I didn't want to futz with deep config files like I would with arch or gentoo or deal with some confusing "nonfree" workarounds like with Debian.
These days it's looking like Fedora holds that crown.
Pop really is a very pleasant experience, and probably the best I've had on a personal computer. 3/4 of my immediate family run it on Thinkpads; the only hold-out is a Gentoo teenager wanting to be "weird".
Hey man, sometimes you want a distro where you can really muck about with the internals. I started with redhat 6.2 and then went to slackware until I cared more about being productive than learning internals. It's good to explore as a teen.
There were a few things wrt to clustering (which I don't need) and storage pool management that tripped me up at first, but not too bad. However, it made me worry about the fact that I might not be the target audience for the LXD project (I just need simple lightweight machines with snapshots, nothing more).
When they decided to stop officially distributing debs, and promote Snap as distribution channel, that was the final straw. I don't understand what's their target audience anymore. Desktop users? My machines are sensitive about reboots, but pretty much sealed off the internet. Upgrades are tested, and happen in scheduled windows. Yet Snap auto-update insists on restarts, whenever it sees fit.
Sure, I can find workarounds [0], but the complete disregard on this issue and the reason that they probably forced the LXD project to promote the dumpster fire that is Snap just didn't sit well with me. I'm gone for good.
Clustering/storage pools are very optional, defaults are rather sane to my taste (I don't use clustering, may be yet, but use storage pool to define LXD stuff should reside on btrfs which has dedicated LV for that).
Auto update happens and I can understand your pain here with sealed machines/testing updates. Most small to medium companies around don't care though (from what I see) and probably have unattended upgrades on anyways.
Bit more on autoupdates - just to align yourself with how people care on keeping versions, you can imagine and check yourself of how many dockerfiles contain `latest` or no any specification of versions of pulled images. Many, many, not giving a shit.
In practice, though, autoupdates are not bringing VEs/VMs down and I find update happened after my `lxc shell some-ve` sessions are disconnected from time to time (I tend to keep those in tmux and it could be attached for weeks or even months).
As for use cases and audience - both Desktop/Server works for me - on desktop I use LXD under my WSL (it has systemd support for ~ 6 months now) to quickly play around with something and on servers to split one big machine into smaller ones/limit access to system for other users. Even had the case using it in CI/CD - custom Linux software to be packaged and doing basic installation test for centos6/7/8, Ubuntu 16/18/20.04 and so on. Package installs were done via dynamic creation of fresh VE each time, to ensure system is "clean".
Same, my next OS reinstall will be Fedora and I've been a loyal Ubuntu user for the last 20 years. It takes around 20 seconds to start a silly Spotify client on my dual Xeon workstation with 64 GB of RAM. Numerous users reporting slow startup times but Canonical just pretend the problem doesn't exist and proceed to shove snap down everyone's throats like their lives depend on it.
My father in law has been driven mad by the snap notification that say you have to close an application within the next 30 days in order for it to be updateable.
LXD is a legit product. Too bad they only ship it as snaps. I think Debian finally has packages for it but I haven't tested it. I actually stopped using it because I don't want to use an Ubuntu stewarded project. More and more it's getting harder to use plain lxc. Almost all resources are talking about it in an lxd context nowadays.
Same as on Desktop. They are terribly slow, resource hungry, update automatically.
On a bit older desktop I have seen it take 5-10 seconds just to start Chromium. And not the initial start after fresh install, it happens every single time. Meanwhile Flatpak or local packages start instantly on the same machine.
Sounds like a SRE nightmare. Updates happening when you didn't expect them guarantees problems. I'm starting to get a clearer picture of Canonical now.
That said, if they are working very hard to ensure that the updates don't break anything, then this is perfectly fine. Are they doing that? Has anyone been bitten by a bad Linux daemon update? Unless things are breaking in reality, it's foolish to dismiss snaps on the server outright.
Well snaps are supposed to be this great server feature because you can install whatever great program from whatever other distro ecosystem using snaps… or something
They take bizarre risks and insist on reinventing things badly.
Security, infrastructure ecosystem integration, and defaults that don't work with reality.
The advantage of RHEL/Cent and sometimes Fedora server-side is it's boringly-reliable. The kernel especially.
For development, the userland isn't great and the desktop is mediocre.
Qubes is interesting for security, containerization, and running apps isolation where Fedora, Cent, and Debian (possibly Ubuntu and Windows) are all side-by-side choices as app substrates.
Canonical makes a server OS and also releases a desktop version for nostalgia reasons (my guess). They should just deprecate Ubuntu Desktop already and be done with it.
The file limitations kill my productivity. For permission reasons Firefox won't open local html file on my machine. My work VPN loads a loval file to log in.
I've been using ubuntu server for I don't even know how long, but am going to be moving all my stuff to debian when I rebuild my hardware here soon.
I should've done it a long time ago but until recently Ubuntu has been "debian but with some nice little extra bits of effort here and there to help make it smoother". Now it's "debian but with a lot of spicy canonical opinions dumped on it".
I hate snaps, doubly so when they appeared on a LTS release and some /dev/random sillyness broke simple things like booting.
However this seems pretty silly when what actually changed is the default OS installs will not have flatpak installed. Easily fixed with "apt install flatpak". It's just a default they are changing, not purging flatpaks or preventing them from working well.
I like the security features of Snaps would accept some trade-offs for that benefit, but Canonical started shipping a Snap of a browser with known issues like breaking media keys.
Security improvements are welcome, but that was a feature that seemed important and reasonable to keep working. (Maybe it works now, but based on that experience, I gave up on Snaps until I heard more positive reports).
I've started using Ubuntu in Warthog times, when their value prop was refreshing and sorely needed: an out of the box usable Linux distro. It was my distro until 2020, when I realized they were going in a direction I don't care for (you could argue a direction opposite their original mission), and that other distros have reached and exceeded Ubuntus level of polish. Basically, take your pick, and it's gonna be at least as good.
I ended up with Debian because I like stable but not ancient (CentOS?) and it comes with a release cadence similar to Ubuntu LTS.
We've been here before, of course - they pushed their own DE (the original Unity, not the current GNOME theme) for a while as a competitor to GNOME, and they also pushed Upstart over systemd. There are probably other cases I'm missing.
Eventually they gave up on those pet projects for pragmatic reasons, but Snaps seem to be the hill they want to die on (presumably for internal political reasons and/or some weak attempt at lockin).
This is bone-headed NIH move from Canonical, but I don't think either of those are good examples. Both Unity and Upstart were released prior to Gnome 3.0 and Systemd respectively and had a quite a significant investment in development time from developers and Canonical as well as an existing base of regular users and corporate users.
The original Unity DE was released in 2010 prior to the release of Gnome 3.0 in 2011. Upstart was originally included in Ubuntu in 2006 to replace sysvinit, and writing upstart scripts was a huge breath of fresh air. Systemd was released in 2010.
As a developer and user, I hate snaps _and_ flatpak. Both are user-hostile and constant source of problems requiring hours of Googling (especially the Flatpak sandbox!). I ended up purging both from my system a month ago and have been much happier since.
I do the same, pin snap. For Firefox I just download it, it lets me update it from its Help menu then offers to restart itself. I don't use Chromium, use Chrome. It does seem like Canonical is trying to push away all but corporate users, perhaps even all Desktop users.
This is the kind of attitude that holds Linux back. Nothing is ever good enough, but "doing nothing" is considered just fine. Snaps aren't perfect, but adding "the ability to edit dotfiles" later on is a whole heck of a lot easier than whatever you're a fan of.
> it is a devil that's hurting the Linux desktop everyday
Don't you just remove it if you're using Ubuntu, never install it if you use Debian/Fedora/Arch, and pretend it doesn't exist? I've never run into an app I want that is only packaged for Snap.
Some apps chose to distribute with snaps first, past and present. And without snaps they might've pushed a more unified or better experience with something better.
Canonical has money to do lots of good, too bad they waste it on terrible engineers and terrible projects.
snaps just create so many weird sandboxing issues with the environment. If I run "firefox" with it already open it will not create a new window, it will wait 30 seconds and generate "firefox is already running".
I tried about 10 times to get mysql workbench running, but it depends on some key store backend through dbus, I haven't be able to get the conncetions working through snap so i cannot access a database since, for whatever reason, it has to go through the keystore.
The failure message? 'dbus-launch' does not exist.
Instead of a simple package of the software based on some familiar base, you get some weird enterprise garbage that follows strange conventions and a nightmare when you need to customize anything.