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Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

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Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#121

I upgraded from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 recently, and am experiencing issues where Firefox feels sluggish and X hangs for a second when I type in the terminal too quickly. Makes me wanna move away from Ubuntu. Also the idea of these major updates where the package manager mutates half the filesystem for 30 minutes straight sounds like a super brittle procedure, and snaps seem to address this, except that it feels wrong…

If you look only at the new nix command and flakes and disregard all the “legacy” commands nix is very simple and the learning curve isn’t much steeper than jumping to any other distro. The documentation around flakes is also much more complete and much higher quality on top of the NixOS discord being happy to help or point to where you can find the answers.

Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#122
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because more and more things are only packaged as snaps.

Only Firefox is shipped as snap on default install. But Firefox packaged by Ubuntu was always gimped as they didn't enable certain optimizations like PGO/LTO so official tar.gz from Mozilla was superior anyway. (They fixed this recently for snap). I think it's similar for Chromium. So I didn't use snaps and I never been in situation that I needed to use snap.

Firefox isn't the only thing that has been switched off .deb and to a snap. LXD, for example, has been shipping as a only a snap for years.

But even if it were only firefox, telling people they should download tarballs instead of having their distro ship packages is really missing the point.

Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#123

I used to use Ubuntu for everything and was very happy in the massive Ubuntu ecosystem with a .deb for everything till I was forced to use Snap a few releases ago for installing even some basic utils I used on a daily basis. I then had Snap constantly hang on installs and just break for no apparent reason and waste my time debugging it. It didn't "just work" anymore. Swapped to Arch and haven't looked back yet, Arch…

Maybe you would like Pop!_OS? It's mostly Ubuntu but with a lot of user friendliness considerations like the removal of snap.

Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#124
After years of ubuntu... I went back to Debian.

For the few packages where I need a newest version I use flatpak.

Ubuntu was basically unusable with their constant push of snap and other dumb solutions looking for a problem.

Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#125
post #73
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft will buy Canonical before the decade is out is my thought. Then shall there be two distros of IBM and Microsoft, grinning at each other across a dead land filled with rottenness.

> Microsoft will buy Canonical before the decade is out is my thought. People have said this for a decade and it still hasn't happened... IMO it won't either. It's privately owned and even if they do go public it's doubtful they'll give away so many shares that they can be taken over... It's Mark Shuttleworth's baby and he doesn't seem to want to sell it.

I think the ship sailed. Prime opportunity was when Ubuntu for Windows was launched.

Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe I should give Pop OS a try... I'm a big fan: it's like Ubuntu, but with much of Canonical's divisive changes reverted, and with a few other improvements. I switched from Ubuntu to Pop!_OS a few releases back when I got a System76 computer. (I also use it on my Lenovo laptop.)

Does System76 have a sustainable business? My concern would be putting time invested into their tech, then later finding support gone wrong.

Well they've been in business for over a decade, so that's something. Does that translate into maintaining PopOS indefinitely? Eh....

Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to defend snap with the idea that it makes sense for some apps, i.e. "firefox" where updating firefox while its running is bad news. Except, snap can't update applications while they are running! i.e. try to do a snap refresh while firefox is running, nothing to update, because its running, quit it wait for all processes to die and then refresh, and it will update and cause you to wait 30-60s while it does it,…

> one of the primary points of containerization is the ability to have multiple copies of an application running in parallel using different "application images". One should be able to upgrade (i.e. install a new image in parallel to the old one) without disrupting existing execution environments. Would you like to run a completely new Firefox with a completely new profile whenever you update it? You do know that you…

They're not asking for multiple uses of the same profile. Assuming one profile, then the old image would keep being used until firefox shuts down entirely, and once that happens the new image would be used the next time firefox is opened.

You don't need to serialize or reload anything.

Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to defend snap with the idea that it makes sense for some apps, i.e. "firefox" where updating firefox while its running is bad news. Except, snap can't update applications while they are running! i.e. try to do a snap refresh while firefox is running, nothing to update, because its running, quit it wait for all processes to die and then refresh, and it will update and cause you to wait 30-60s while it does it,…

> one of the primary points of containerization is the ability to have multiple copies of an application running in parallel using different "application images". One should be able to upgrade (i.e. install a new image in parallel to the old one) without disrupting existing execution environments. Would you like to run a completely new Firefox with a completely new profile whenever you update it? You do know that you…

No, but the issue here seems to be a problem with the underlying snap system, not with the concept. It should be possible to have multiple containers that, when run, access the same persistent data. So the workflow would be:

1. Install and start Firefox. There is one container and one directory full of profiles.

2. Start the upgrade. This creates a second Firefox installation (container) sharing the same profile directory.

3. Try to run Firefox without quitting the old one. Does nothing because the runtime is smart enough to know that the old one is running. Maybe pop up a message suggesting restarting Firefox.

4. Quit Firefox. Start it again. The new one runs. All the data is still there.

5. The old installation goes away.

The runtime has plenty of flexibility in how to make this work. There could be multiple containers. There could be one container with multiple parallel versions. There could be one container with a staged upgrade that can swap in essentially instantaneously once the container is idle (although this may fall apart on multi-user systems or where the containerized program regularly has multiple running copies of itself at once, e.g. a program like bash).

But the fact that snap apparently has trouble with this seems a bit embarrassing.

Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to defend snap with the idea that it makes sense for some apps, i.e. "firefox" where updating firefox while its running is bad news. Except, snap can't update applications while they are running! i.e. try to do a snap refresh while firefox is running, nothing to update, because its running, quit it wait for all processes to die and then refresh, and it will update and cause you to wait 30-60s while it does it,…

> one of the primary points of containerization is the ability to have multiple copies of an application running in parallel using different "application images". One should be able to upgrade (i.e. install a new image in parallel to the old one) without disrupting existing execution environments. Would you like to run a completely new Firefox with a completely new profile whenever you update it? You do know that you…

Almost like copy on write hasnt been invented yet. Just copy the profile on creation of a new instance
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