411–420 of 538 posts
Is it time to switch from Ubuntu to Mint? Does Mint have enough repositories that work? I'm at Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 20 seems to have a host of unwanted Canonical-oriented features. I'd appreciate comments.
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`curl | bash` gets a bad wrap. From a security perspective (assuming you trust web pki), it's 100% no different than a) downloading and running a script, b) downloading a package and and installing it, c) downloading a binary blob and executing it, etc. I actually find that piping an install script to an interpreter is the easiest to audit of all the options because I can see exactly the changes that will be made to…
> The only improvement is if you somehow directly exchange keys with the vendor out of band with no web pki intermediate step and then verify the signature on the software you're installing... yeah. Which is what Apt has done for 20+ years - packages are gpg-signed, developers sign with their individual keys (and have to have their identity verified by at least one other developer) and even someone who controls a roo…
AFAICT,debian packages themselves are not signed, just the repository release files are gpg-signed.
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Pop!_OS is another choice to consider. Apparently they are sticking with Ubuntu but are stripping the Snap stuff before pushing any updates.
I've been using Pop!_OS on a System76 laptop since February, and like it quite a bit. I use plasma desktop on all of my other systems, but left this one with the defaults.. so far I really like it, but I have a problem with gnome-shell leaking memory over time, since I tend to not shut down or log out over long periods of time. If I don't restart / log out, /usr/bin/gnome-shell eats up more and more memory (as the gd…
I just tried out Mint but it installs SO much rubbish. It installs mysql?!?
I don't mind it installing some useful software but Mint goes overboard.
With 20.04 I'm constantly sitting at 20-27gb of used memory when doing dev work.
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There is a big user issue on top of the philosophical and maintenance issues - snaps are SLOOOOOOW. I've only experienced them with two applications, and both took forever to startup compared to the apt-get installed versions I quickly replaced them with. OK, "forever" is hyperbole - it was probably about 5 seconds. But it was enough of an annoyance for me to figure out how to install a deb packaged version. And ever…
Im here to push you towards Mint. mint is cleaner ubuntu. the wifi drivers work. the UI is really good. it just works.
I can see that Mint could be nice though. On a desktop, running hardware a few years old.
If desktop Linux is ever going to be mainstream there needs to be an easy to use "app store" where users can use a GUI to install apps which need to be sandboxed like on a mobile phone with defined permissions. Snapcraft is way ahead of Flatpak on this and the current Ubuntu setup works well. On Ubuntu you can go to the Ubuntu software app (gui) search for software and it blends apt results with snap results. This re…
The iPhone launched without the AppStore. The AppStore was not the cause of Apple's success, Usability and Power were - in the sense that it allowed users to do more things (access the web from anywhere) with less effort (no booting times or ceremony). It was the first mainstream device that made it really easy to browse the web; that is what made it successful.
The AppStore was just a play to entrench that initial success by coopting third-party developers and ensure they could only sharecrop on Apple's land: "If you do anything serious with our platform, we get 30%". That's it. Nothing to do with usability. The AppStore is actually a terrible model from a usability perspective, because it collapses discovery so much that it does not scale. "Tap and run" could have been implemented as a web protocol without a centralized UI and it would have worked just fine.
The same is true of Snap. Linux does not need a centralized store, from Canonical or anyone else; that's just a play for them to get a pound of flesh from third-party developers. It has been tried so many times before in the Linux world, and it has never succeeded. Even Nokia threw a lot of money at it, and failed.
What Linux really needs, as you say yourself, is to make it easy for developers to guarantee integrity of their solutions once they reach the user. That's why Snap is getting some traction: because it promises to move power from packagers to developers and to make it easier to guarantee that a program will Just Work, without having to deal with the packaging vagaries of this or that distribution or risking that an overzealous maintainer will "improve" your stuff with crippling patches.
If Canonical were sincere in their attempts to make Linux succeed, they would concentrate on that side of things and drop the AppStore shenanigans. But that's not what they are really after.
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There is a big user issue on top of the philosophical and maintenance issues - snaps are SLOOOOOOW. I've only experienced them with two applications, and both took forever to startup compared to the apt-get installed versions I quickly replaced them with. OK, "forever" is hyperbole - it was probably about 5 seconds. But it was enough of an annoyance for me to figure out how to install a deb packaged version. And ever…
Sending some encouragement your way: try Debian. I bet money you won't even notice it's not Ubuntu. Or you will, because your software will launch when you ask it to. I'm super happy with Debian lately. I know it used to be the old neck beard slow and steady distro, but honestly these days packages get updates rather timely and it doesn't feel like the Debian of 10 years ago. And you can always run Debian testing wit…
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There is a big user issue on top of the philosophical and maintenance issues - snaps are SLOOOOOOW. I've only experienced them with two applications, and both took forever to startup compared to the apt-get installed versions I quickly replaced them with. OK, "forever" is hyperbole - it was probably about 5 seconds. But it was enough of an annoyance for me to figure out how to install a deb packaged version. And ever…
Im here to push you towards Mint. mint is cleaner ubuntu. the wifi drivers work. the UI is really good. it just works.
ArchLinux NOT Manjaro
Debian NOT Ubuntu etc
And so on, the 'originals' work always better in the long run.
Snaps are super laggy. GNOME calculator on Ubuntu runs in a snap and it is baffling that whoever made the decision to package it in a snap by default was OK with the fact that it takes 2 seconds to launch a basic calculator on a 2017 laptop (edit: re-tested, it took 5 seconds). To top it off, a couple months ago my calculator disappeared. For some reason I have been having problems with snap applications disappearing…
My calculator is now the plain Python interpreter
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There is a big user issue on top of the philosophical and maintenance issues - snaps are SLOOOOOOW. I've only experienced them with two applications, and both took forever to startup compared to the apt-get installed versions I quickly replaced them with. OK, "forever" is hyperbole - it was probably about 5 seconds. But it was enough of an annoyance for me to figure out how to install a deb packaged version. And ever…
Im here to push you towards Mint. mint is cleaner ubuntu. the wifi drivers work. the UI is really good. it just works.
For the longest time you couldn't dist-upgrade it, at all. The functionality wasn't there. When their web servers got hacked, they cleaned them, and got hacked again.
From a Debian user's perspective it is unclear why these small distros can't just be a Debian derivative or a Fedora spin. It's not scalable that every small distro invents their own infrastructure.
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All containerization is just the fever to the sickness that is the futureshock from extremely fast rate of development of major libs like c++$year, glibc (no matter what they say about having stable endpoints), and the like. You can't run a program written today on the system repo libraries from 5 years ago. Containers try to mitigate this problem but like a fever they often end up making things worse.
Wouldn't it just be simpler to statically link apps then?