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Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

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Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#251
post #81

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…

I don't why people make so much fuss about snap. Just purge snap and stop complaining. I did this when I run Ubuntu. Ubuntu still is offers pretty polished and reliable OS that is easy to install and has most third-party support.

The problem is when you instruct a colleague to check something using nmap, they install nmap using snap and are surprised it doesn't work, while you are left wondering what the hell is wrong with their computer, oblivious to the footgun Canonical put into their distro; until you remember again after a decade+ of not using Ubuntu. Canonical shouldn't push out broken things like that. It's supposed to be a distro where stuff Just Works(TM).

Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#252

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…

I've loved ubuntu for a while as well, but snaps are making me want something new - any suggestions for a "I'm middle aged with children so I need an it just works distro"?

Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#253

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…

I've loved ubuntu for a while as well, but snaps are making me want something new - any suggestions for a "I'm middle aged with children so I need an it just works distro"?

I was in the same boat and switched to Fedora 6 months ago on desktop and laptop, the Cinnamon spin. It gets out of the way and up until now has just worked. No hardware issues except for the fingerprint reader.

Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#254

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…

I've loved ubuntu for a while as well, but snaps are making me want something new - any suggestions for a "I'm middle aged with children so I need an it just works distro"?

> any suggestions for a "I'm middle aged with children so I need an it just works distro"?

The latest and greatest recommendation is now openSUSE Tumbleweed (rolling yet stable). Fedora was the recommendation of 2021. Manjaro was the recommendation of 2020. Try one and see if it works on your hardware. If not, pick the next one. :)

Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#255
post #148

I'm not sure precisely why, but when I first saw ads in Apt(8) I decided I wouldn't be using Ubuntu for any more personal projects. On one hand they obviously need to keep the project alive. On the other hand, putting your own ads on top of something that fundamental to the system just felt ... weird/narsty? Reading state information... Done Calculating upgrade... Done Try Ubuntu Pro beta with a free personal subscri…

Jump to Debian. It has always worked towards users' interests, and probably will continue doing that because pretty much all developers are volunteers and are running a democratically driven development process. I never understood why Ubuntu is so popular because it's 99.99% Debian, and only gives you a handful of things on top of that: predictable release schedule (which is a two-edged sword if you think about it),…

Isn't it still unsupported to upgrade from one stable Debian version to another? I mean I know you can hack your way around it, just change the apt repos to point at the new release, run apt update, upgrade and dist-upgrade, and hope that not too much stuff breaks. But the nice thing about Ubuntu, especially for less technical people, is that the system will just prompt you to update when it's time, and the upgrade process is supported and well-tested.

Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snap makes sense, but it'll take time for the dust to settle. Just like Unity / Wayland. Applications like Firefox, IntelliJ, Chromium, etc. shouldn't be tied to system dependencies managed by apt. They should be entirely monolithic and hermetic. Long term this deb vs snap approach will make sense and be good for Desktop Linux.

> it'll take time for the dust to settle. Just like Unity / Wayland There's a particular irony to this statement. Before adopting Wayland, Canonical tried to do their own thing with Mir[1]. Years later they gave up and reluctantly adopted Wayland. Their investment in Snap rhymes with this. Snap is an inferior competitor to Flatpak, and in the end it's likely the dust will settle for Snap the same way it did for Mir—i…

I don't think Snap is an inferior solution, as much as Canonical is trying to put Snap where it doesn't belong.

AFAICT, Snap is a pretty good solution for server side apps. This is pure speculation (and I don't even know if the timelines line up), but I suspect Canonical developed Snap for server apps, but something made it economically non viable (maybe the popularity of Docker?) and so they now needed to generate money through it some other way and they decided to do it by using it as a workstation app distribution mechanism, and by locking it down for enterprise.

Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#257
post #211

Lot of people here with opinions about using Ubuntu as a desktop OS. Seemingly nobody here with opinions about Ubuntu as a server OS. Strange for a bunch of startup people who ship their SaaS backends on Linux servers.

I use Ubuntu Server on all my headless stuff. It's boring, in the best way possible. I install it and set it up, run `apt-get update && apt-get upgrade` occasionally (I should enable unattended upgrades but I haven't), and otherwise don't have to think about it at all until it's time to upgrade to another LTS 2 years later.

Those LTS to LTS upgrades are kinda painful, but not unexpectedly so, considering you're catching up to the past 2 years of evolution in the whole ecosystem at once. On personal computers, I hate that model, but on servers, I'd much rather spend up to a day or two fixing stuff at a time of my own choosing once every two years, than spend less time fixing random issues which crop up at random intervals during a routine apt-get upgrade.

Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is a particularly interesting case because it has a bunch of issues that only exist when it's installed via snap. I just recently ripped out the default snap version and installed via the official PPA, and Firefox seems to be running much smoother now. For basically any app I use that's installed via snap, I eventually run into a gamebreaking issue and have to remove the snap version and find a normal .deb to…

Snap makes sense, but it'll take time for the dust to settle. Just like Unity / Wayland. Applications like Firefox, IntelliJ, Chromium, etc. shouldn't be tied to system dependencies managed by apt. They should be entirely monolithic and hermetic. Long term this deb vs snap approach will make sense and be good for Desktop Linux.

> Snap makes sense, but it'll take time for the dust to settle. Just like Unity / Wayland.

That comparison is not helping to sell it.

Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#259

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…

I second this. I understand how hard it may be to maintain software these days, and that’s the whole point of snap, but the way it is implemented seems broken. It can simply break the whole system, it is like it uses one huge semaphore for all ‘transactions’ it commits in the ‘snap database’ (whatever it is) and if the transaction doesn’t complete, the whole system stalls. Only recourse is reboot. Don’t get me wrong,…

> I understand how hard it may be to maintain software these days ...*

I can't see it being harder than during the forming years with ever-changing libs and tools. Haven't seen a new end-user desktop app on Linux for over a decade either.

Re: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snap makes sense, but it'll take time for the dust to settle. Just like Unity / Wayland. Applications like Firefox, IntelliJ, Chromium, etc. shouldn't be tied to system dependencies managed by apt. They should be entirely monolithic and hermetic. Long term this deb vs snap approach will make sense and be good for Desktop Linux.

Actually brings up a good question of why can't dpkg/.deb just support having multiple library versions? My understanding is that it is not support, but if it was, then couldn't that obviate the need for snap?

Many people are unaware that "so naming" [0] solves multiple versions of the same library problem.

My Debian installation regularly has two or three versions of the same library (e.g. libx264) installed while packages update and start to use newer versions of the same library.

[0]: https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO/shared-librarie...

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