211–220 of 297 posts
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Just use Debian. Ubuntu is quite literally Debian+bullshit.
NVidia's CUDA only supports Fedora, OpenSUSE, RHEL, CentOS, SLES and Ubuntu, see [1]. So I suppose that rules out Debian (?) [1] https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads?target_os=Linux&...
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Debian testing is basically my distro of choice: if sid is the rolling release, and stable is the LTS version, testing is roughly equivalent to non-LTS Ubuntu: the packages have been tested so you don’t usually get breakage, but they aren’t stale.
The packages are somewhat tested, but "you are participating in the development of Debian when you are tracking testing or unstable" [1]. My feeling is Debian testing is a little less stable than non-LTS Ubuntu. See, I'd like to use LXDE, and right now I use Lubuntu. I'm interested in switching to Debian, but then I read someone say Debian testing is "more stable than the name would suggest, as long as you follow a f…
At least a few years ago, Ubuntu's LTS releases were derived from Debian Testing, while Ubuntu's standard releases were derived from Debian Unstable.
Snaps are a poor solution for the problem apt already solved years ago.
"apt" packages are handmade. And they depend on hand-made dependencies. It becomes increasingly difficult to maintain packages like chromium, because they have too many dependencies, that have to be packaged individually. The "universe" repository has tens of thousands of packages. Do you know that a majority of them are not maintained because it is too much effort and not many helping hands?
And we "solve" it by allowing the inclusion of different, incompatible, versions of packages into even bigger packages. Sorry, but that's not a solution. It's the technical debt equivalent to payday lenders.
> Mint never shipped snapd, Snap's daemon program or any snaps, but moving ahead, in Linux Mint 20, "Chromium won't be an empty package which installs snapd behind your back. It will be an empty package, which tells you why it's empty and tells you where to look to get Chromium yourself." Further, APT will forbid snapd from installing. Can't they just replace the Chromimum package with the one in Debian?
Not sure if they could, but: Then they would need to review all Ubuntu packages for snap injection and overlay them. Sure that might be doable automatically but is a bit brittle. It also means the user wouldn't learn what is going on.
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> How can "sudo apt install chromium-browser" not install the apt package but install instead a snap? Simple: they decided that maintaining the chromium .deb takes too much effort, and that snap is making that easier. So they moved it to Snap. But there are many users out there with existing installations who have selected chromium as one of their installed packages. And so as not to keep said users without updates,…
> Simple: they decided that maintaining the chromium .deb takes too much effort, and that snap is making that easier. So they moves it to Snap. Their whole distribution is copied from Debian. Is it too much effort to just copy and distribute the upstream package, like they have been doing from the very start?
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> You trusted the app developers as soon as you installed that app on your computer with full privileges. No, I don't. First, most apps' code won't run as root. Only install scripts, written my distribution's maintainers, run as root (except for core applications, of course). And secondly, I trust app developers to write their app properly (to a certain extent), but not to write install scripts that won't mess with m…
On a personal computer, you are giving a whole lot of trust to anything you run un-sandboxed as your normal user - it will likely have access to your most interesting files, browser cookies, maybe saved passwords. XKCD covered it years back: https://xkcd.com/1200/ This brings up another drawback of deb/rpm packaging, though: you need root access to install anything. I'm not sure about Snap, but Flatpaks can be instal…
echo 'alias sudo="sudo touch /evil && sudo' >> ~/.bashrc
I can understand Canonical pushing for snaps. It's their product and they want it to succeed. That said I hate their dirty ways. I find it even morally wrong. How can "sudo apt install chromium-browser" not install the apt package but install instead a snap? How I, as a user and also as a professional, trust Ubuntu if when I use their package manager I'm being tricked? I don't use Windows for a reason, more than one…
This happens for a technical reason: without it, an upgrade from the older Debian that shipped MySQL will not transition you to MariaDB, but leave your database broken because Debian no longer ships MySQL. The package was adjusted to provide the upgrade path. apt provides no alternative. This mechanism is called a "transitional package".
I'm providing the MySQL/MariaDB example not because I think it's wrong, but because hopefully you'll see that it's the same pattern being used by an entity you perhaps better trust, and that might give you some confidence that it's technically the best approach available.
The same is going on here. Users who have Chromium installed on Bionic, upgrading to Focal, expect to still have Chromium. This is why installing "chromium-browser" in apt results in the snap being installed.
It's not a dirty way, and it's not morally wrong. It's being done for a purpose.
When you install Ubuntu you are consenting to receive the choices that Ubuntu has made for you.
If you insist on using Ubuntu but never using a snap, you can configure apt to never install snapd. See apt_preferences(5).