Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

news.ycombinator.com

51–60 of 345 posts

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#51
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, if there's one thing open source projects are known for, it's dated websites

Could you be more specific? What exactly should Debian's website offer that it currently isn't?

More pleasing to the eyes and not from the 90s. A more attractive site wouldn't turn people off as soon as they visit it and would yield more users and support. Ubuntu's site for example looks nicer and only 0.1mb larger.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people view Ubuntu as a bit dirty Look even further at Devuan, made by people who conder Debian as a bit dirty. (I use both as needed, I'm just riffing on your comment)

Where Debian is a reputable distribution with a clear goal, the Devuan crew is solving a non-issue by means of almost religious levels of resistance toward systemd. If you want technological merit, chose Debian. If you want to join the conservatives of Linux, you should go for Devuan.

Even during Debian's systemd adoption wars I'd never seen any argument calling into question Devuan as ''disreputable''. After all, it was a group of experienced Debian folks that made a systemd-less version of Debian that compares almost exactly with Debian's status and capabilities. I hope in your case you have not been forced to use Devuan.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#53

I think Debian/Fedora(or RedHat if you're willing to pay) are fine on the enterprise side. For personal use... I fell in love with Arch. Between the Arch User Repository (AUR) and the quick upgrades, I really struggle to use anything else these days. Arch takes a bit more work to get online than some of the other distros, but I've been amazingly happy running it across all my personal machines (from desktops to lapto…

Arch isn't too difficult, but I've been using it since ~2005 or so.

Something that is hard to quantify - arch uses vanilla software, almost entirely. Very very few patches/configurations are deployed. This means you're actually learning about the upstream software, not the distro.

What you learn on Arch, generally applies to other distros as you know something about the upstream software. I don't know a thing about debian, but I can generally figure things out.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#54
It’s unclear to me what’s exactly wrong with Ubuntu. Can you please give some more explanations on what you mean with “ruined by corporate interests” or “snap”?

Why do people say it’s not pure? How does it affect me? So far everything seems nicely enough documented and works mostly conveniently out of the box.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where Debian is a reputable distribution with a clear goal, the Devuan crew is solving a non-issue by means of almost religious levels of resistance toward systemd. If you want technological merit, chose Debian. If you want to join the conservatives of Linux, you should go for Devuan.

Even during Debian's systemd adoption wars I'd never seen any argument calling into question Devuan as ''disreputable''. After all, it was a group of experienced Debian folks that made a systemd-less version of Debian that compares almost exactly with Debian's status and capabilities. I hope in your case you have not been forced to use Devuan.

Hit me up when you finally notice that enterprise and seniors embraced systemd years ago while you kept avoiding change.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people view Ubuntu as a bit dirty Look even further at Devuan, made by people who conder Debian as a bit dirty. (I use both as needed, I'm just riffing on your comment)

> I use both as needed In what case do you need to opt for a different init system than systemd? Genuinely curious, as I've been using debian with systemd for almost a decade now and haven't run into any issues regarding it.

Asking why/why not to use systemd is covering very old territory here at HN and not the point of my earlier comment - I was riffing on someone using the term ''a bit dirty'' in regards to a Linux distro.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#58
post #33

Look no further than Debian. After switching from Ubuntu I started to understand why people view Ubuntu as a bit dirty.

Ok, but which release channel? And can I convert an Ubuntu into a Debian by reinstalling it while keeping my home directory?

> Ok, but which release channel?

For home use, Debian testing is usually a good balance between things not breaking and things not being ancient.

For servers, Debian stable is probably a better choice.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#59
I've been running Debian stable on servers for like 8 years now.

Up until recently I had a server running Debian Jessie with 1,802 days of uptime. It served a decent amount of traffic. Services on there ran unattended for literally years and it was rock solid. I ended up decommissioning the server because for the same price I could get better hardware specs so I made a new server and put on Debian Bullseye (the latest stable release as of mid-2021).

With Docker being a thing now, Debian's older but more stable package versions for app level things (programming runtimes, databases, etc.) is less of an issue because you can run them in Docker. However you can get stable core system packages with Debian's impeccable track record. IMO I wouldn't run anything other than Debian on a server (including base Docker images).

For a personal distro, I think it gets more complicated. It's personal preference based on what you value. Using Debian's unstable channel could be an option for having the latest releases on things while still being stable even though it's labelled "unstable". Arch is another choice. There's many others.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#60

Stable? Debian or Fedora. For an end-user machine, I've found that rolling release is much better than point release (much newer, less buggy/crashy -- paradoxically -- versions of software and GPU drivers). (Although, surprisingly, Fedora seems to have very fast package updates despite being a point release.) For rolling, Manjaro is my top pick. Arch is a close second, assuming you've mastered the arcane art of its i…

> assuming you've mastered the arcane art of its installation.

Archinstall [1] exists, so there isn't much reason to use Manjaro anymore (which has a lot of its own issues anyways [2])

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall

[2] https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/

Post reply on HN