Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ubuntu 21.10

ubuntu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 295 posts

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#111

Post by the__alchemist »

rlpb wrote: post #97
generalizations wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems uncommon that those things would prevent upgrades. It sounds more like Ubuntu is beginning to suffer from an excess of complexity.

I think part of the problem is that third party apt repositories have become normalised as if they're a reasonable way to "add on" to your existing system. In reality they're a hack on a packaging system that was never designed for third party plugability in this way. They very often break future upgrades. Third party apt repositories fundamentally cannot express all the necessary metadata to allow for upgrades to wo…

This is at the core of why I've found Ubuntu (More broadly Linux?) to be frustrating to use. Installing programs or functionality beyond what it ships with leads to the system ending in a "hacked up", as you put it, state. Then reliability tanks.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#112

Post by the__alchemist »

capableweb wrote: post #40
rlpb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder why Ubuntu/Canonical can never get their upgrade game to work properly. Ubuntu developer here. Sounds like you have a really hacked up system there, and that it's your existing system that has issues. Under these circumstances, I don't think it's reasonable to expect an upgrade to be able to work smoothly. Scripts that handle upgrade paths necessarily need to make assumptions that what they are upgrading f…

I wouldn't expect nothing less than being blamed by Ubuntu developers for a hacked up system, even though I barely described anything. Thanks for giving me another reason to leave the Ubuntu ecosystem behind me. The condescending tone that your message has seems to be relatively popular in the Ubuntu/Canonical community as well, at least compared to NixOS.

On my my recent Ubuntu attempt about 2 years ago, a major usability problem was diagnosed as "Not using an LTS release".

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#113

Post by rakoo »

airstrike wrote: post #47

I loved Ubuntu around 2007-2009 or so. Nowdays it feels like there are plenty of alternative distros that "just work" without so many of the idiosyncratic stuff canonical keeps dumping into what used to be "debian for the masses" > As Linux evangelist Mark Pilgrim once quipped, Ubuntu "is an ancient African word meaning 'can't install Debian'". https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/16/debian_lenny_review/

As someone who left Ubuntu at Hardy Heron (8.04), what are the problems with Ubuntu these days ? I know they tried to do desktop differently but failed to convince other distros and projects to change paradigms but it seems to me they are back to more common infrastructure now.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#114

Post by dudus »

reilly3000 wrote: post #71
airstrike wrote: post #47

I loved Ubuntu around 2007-2009 or so. Nowdays it feels like there are plenty of alternative distros that "just work" without so many of the idiosyncratic stuff canonical keeps dumping into what used to be "debian for the masses" > As Linux evangelist Mark Pilgrim once quipped, Ubuntu "is an ancient African word meaning 'can't install Debian'". https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/16/debian_lenny_review/

I’m a long time Ubuntu user and haven’t really shopped for other distros. Any recommendations besides Debian?

Manjaro seems pretty popular now. It's based in Arch with rolling releases and everything but gives a good experience out of the box while Arch is a full time job to maintain

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#115

Post by josephg »

rlpb wrote: post #60
capableweb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't expect nothing less than being blamed by Ubuntu developers for a hacked up system, even though I barely described anything. Thanks for giving me another reason to leave the Ubuntu ecosystem behind me. The condescending tone that your message has seems to be relatively popular in the Ubuntu/Canonical community as well, at least compared to NixOS.

You described third party repositories and mismatching Python versions. That is a hacked up system, by definition.

I don’t know much about python, but for nodejs dev work I have about half a dozen versions of nodejs installed. It’s super handy having all those versions installed so I can test that a certain native nodejs package I develop builds and works properly. And to rule out nodejs itself when reproducing bugs. I use nvm (or fvm) or something to manage all that because the system package managers updated too slowly.

What are you saying here? That having multiple versions of python installed can put your whole OS into some sort of unrecoverable corrupted state, and that’s expected and ok? That’s a non starter for me.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#116

Post by the__alchemist »

rlpb wrote: post #67
V-2 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the freedom of "hacking" your system one of the main reasons for using Linux to begin with?

I'm not sure it's a main reason, but it is indeed a key property of having full control over your own system that you are welcome to do this. But this level of control also comes with a curse: if you break your system, then you get to keep the pieces. I find it quite upsetting to be blamed instead.

You are misassessing how people use Desktop/Laptop computers. Ie you're assuming people will install Ubuntu, and leave it in its default state, or only use package managers.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#117

Post by capableweb »

rlpb wrote: post #60
capableweb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't expect nothing less than being blamed by Ubuntu developers for a hacked up system, even though I barely described anything. Thanks for giving me another reason to leave the Ubuntu ecosystem behind me. The condescending tone that your message has seems to be relatively popular in the Ubuntu/Canonical community as well, at least compared to NixOS.

You described third party repositories and mismatching Python versions. That is a hacked up system, by definition.

Yes, because Ubuntu doesn't ship everything you need, third-party repositories are needed for my day-to-day job. None of the packages I get from that are overwriting existing software from official repositories, but still Ubuntu recommends turning those off, not sure how that should break an upgrade. On the other hand, my Arch installation runs with tons of custom software, with repositories and more added to it, but still somehow can handle upgrades 100 times better than Ubuntu.

Regarding the python, the error message was something like "python is gonna be python 3 after the upgrade, and we can't handle that so you should uninstall python before upgrading", or something similar.

I'm just using what Canonical/Ubuntu are providing me when it comes to Python, but still somehow it's up to me to remove/install stuff manually when it comes to upgrading.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#118

Post by app4soft »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #105
Chyzwar wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, Cannonical is aligning with mainstream in recent years: upstart -> systemd, unity -> gnome, mir -> wayland New things that are Canonical specific are netplan and snap. I think snap is solving software packaging in Linux. If anything, I wish that snap brand stores were more affordable.

Use flatpack

Use AppImage + firejail (optionally, to fully sandbox AppImage)

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#119

Post by NGRhodes »

JonathanBeuys wrote: post #59
airstrike wrote: post #47

I loved Ubuntu around 2007-2009 or so. Nowdays it feels like there are plenty of alternative distros that "just work" without so many of the idiosyncratic stuff canonical keeps dumping into what used to be "debian for the masses" > As Linux evangelist Mark Pilgrim once quipped, Ubuntu "is an ancient African word meaning 'can't install Debian'". https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/16/debian_lenny_review/

Debian has a strange approach to security these days. There are over 100 unpatched vurnurabilities in their version of Chromium for example: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/release/s... Because of this, I don't see debian as an option for the Desktop anymore. I hope they still fix the server software in their repos.

How many of those vulnerabilities have patches available ?

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#120

Post by lordofgibbons »

A lot of negativity in this thread.

I've been using Ubuntu for about 10 years and is my favorite distro after trying a few others. I went through the whole distro hoping thing and using Arch to set up everything just the way I wanted phase, and while very fun & educational, it isn't good for getting things done.

Ubuntu just works and let's me be productive with things I care about.

Thank you Ubuntu team!

Post reply on HN