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Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

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Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#221

Post by txutxu »

loxias wrote: post #97
jodoherty wrote: post #34

I live in a region with a lot of government contracting businesses, so Red Hat Enterprise Linux is something I have to maintain a working familiarity with. However, I use Debian for all of my personal projects and infrastructure. The reason? There's no for-profit corporate interest directly controlling the project. The project's organizational structure resembles a constitutional democracy: https://www.debian.org/int…

I've used exclusively Debian on all my servers and laptops for the last 20ish years. Can confirm, it will continue to keep working, however there might be some things that piss one off in a similar manner as Ubuntu's snaps. I hate systemd for example, but grudgingly accept it.

Fortunately, we can still use Debian without systemd. I'm forced to use systemd in many places, but for example this laptop were I'm writing runs Debian without systemd.

For me it's more to worry about: the influence that paid Ubuntu developers gain, year after year, inside Debian. Or the presence of ubuntu/canonical changes inside Debian packages.

Regarding Ubuntu... I'm forced to use it at work, and we use to "debianize" ubuntu servers... this is: remove snaps and snapd, remove netplan (for ifupdown), remove lot of dependencies that come with the minimal install (used only for their paid services), remove many services/packages (cloudinit, multipathd, polkit, motd-news, lxd, apport, etc)...

And the recommends of the recommends of the recommends of the recommends of all that.

In the last LTS, we we're forced to build our own installer at the end: a minimal live system + debootstrap + a couple of scripts (parted/mkfs/grub-install).

With the previous debian-based installer, we were able to fix most of the Canonical decisions via preseed... with the last version it was a pain until I did our own installer.

Still, for many people, being driven by ubuntu, is perfectly fine. They use to hate forced UI changes (i.e. my mum), but everything else is fine for them while "it works".

It's maybe just more technical people who are bothered by the underlying changes.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#222

Post by paulddraper »

loxias wrote: post #97
jodoherty wrote: post #34

I live in a region with a lot of government contracting businesses, so Red Hat Enterprise Linux is something I have to maintain a working familiarity with. However, I use Debian for all of my personal projects and infrastructure. The reason? There's no for-profit corporate interest directly controlling the project. The project's organizational structure resembles a constitutional democracy: https://www.debian.org/int…

I've used exclusively Debian on all my servers and laptops for the last 20ish years. Can confirm, it will continue to keep working, however there might be some things that piss one off in a similar manner as Ubuntu's snaps. I hate systemd for example, but grudgingly accept it.

> I hate systemd for example

Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but everytime I hear this, I have difficulty listening to the rest.

Systemd is 10x easier and more manageable than every alternative.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#224

Post by paulddraper »

loxias wrote: post #153
bleuuuu wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why the aversion to systemd?

I don't like the design at a fundamental level. It feels brittle, bloated, and not very unixy. I'd rather have my init system be a handful of microscopic executables, using text files or symlinks for configuration and text files for logging. I don't like everything depending on systemd it feels like too much complexity at the wrong part of the stack. It doesn't jive with my sense of architecture, it's not well design…

> text files or symlinks for configuration

Like...Systemd?

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#225

Post by nobody9999 »

tapoxi wrote: post #17
cmdlinecowboy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use Rocky Linux or Alma Linux it’s basically what Cent was. Unless you’re running anything super insanely mission critical CentOS stream would still be fine for your uses, and if you need something THAT highly available support might be worth while anyways in an enterprise environment.

Yeah if you're using it for a real server then Rocky/Alma/Stream/RHEL. For a personal server I find Fedora fine, since my local packages will match my server's.

>For a personal server I find Fedora fine, since my local packages will match my server's.

Absolutely. I also use Squid[0] as a proxy for updates[1] which, after initial download for one of the dozens of my Fedora boxes, caches the updates, reducing bandwidth usage and (more importantly) speeding up updates significantly.

[0] https://serverfault.com/questions/837291/squid-and-caching-o...

[1] https://linuxiac.com/how-to-use-yum-dnf-command-with-a-proxy...

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#226

Post by gaganyaan »

8jy89hui wrote: post #166
gaganyaan wrote: post #137

I'm liking NixOS thus far. I've got it installed on my personal laptop. It's got some rough edges, but the benefits for me outweigh the downsides. I really like affordances like "nix-shell -p foo" to just run a shell with the "foo" command in it for one-off usages, instead of slowly accumulating installed apt packages that I forgot why I installed them. Similarly, having any custom configuration inside of "configurat…

> It's got some rough edges I've recently been looking really hard at NixOS as a possible next-step. (I use Manjaro and am particularly interested in ways to keep my Laptop and Desktop in sync) I've heard that the documentation can be pretty lackluster at times. Are there any other rough edges I should know about?

I'd say it's really about the documentation, including "unofficial" documentation like bug reports and SO questions. Part of why Ubuntu is so popular is because there's enough of a community that whatever issue you hit, someone's probably already hit it before and asked about it on SO, where it has a highly upvoted answer that fixes the issue and explains it. That's also why NixOS seemed like a better choice than Guix to me.

One thing I ran into was setting up a Python project using poetry2nix. Mostly works great, but then you sometimes get inscrutable error messages. I had to copy this into a shell.nix file for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me (and I had to hunt it down from https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs myself instead of finding docs or a bug report):

    astunparse = super.astunparse.overridePythonAttrs
            (old: { buildInputs = old.buildInputs ++ [ self.wheel ]; });
One non-documentation issue I've hit is that even when using the stable channel, you live much closer to the bleeding edge than a distro like Ubuntu. I updated my system to the latest packages, and then my wifi wouldn't work after waking up from sleep. Turned out to be a kernel regression that was fixed a few days later in a patch update. Everything was fine again, but it's not something you'd run into with a more conservative distro. Similar issue with the latest Gnome breaking extensions for a while before they got updated.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#227

Post by yobbo »

loxias wrote: post #97
jodoherty wrote: post #34

I live in a region with a lot of government contracting businesses, so Red Hat Enterprise Linux is something I have to maintain a working familiarity with. However, I use Debian for all of my personal projects and infrastructure. The reason? There's no for-profit corporate interest directly controlling the project. The project's organizational structure resembles a constitutional democracy: https://www.debian.org/int…

I've used exclusively Debian on all my servers and laptops for the last 20ish years. Can confirm, it will continue to keep working, however there might be some things that piss one off in a similar manner as Ubuntu's snaps. I hate systemd for example, but grudgingly accept it.

Debian now works fine without systemd. The alternatives are sysvinit, openrc and runit. I've removed systemd from many working installations. The problem is rather the many random dependencies.

(Block systemd in a preference file with priority -1. apt install openrc (for example). Read the warnings. Reboot. apt purge systemd. Freedom.)

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#228

Post by bayindirh »

paulddraper wrote: post #222
loxias wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used exclusively Debian on all my servers and laptops for the last 20ish years. Can confirm, it will continue to keep working, however there might be some things that piss one off in a similar manner as Ubuntu's snaps. I hate systemd for example, but grudgingly accept it.

> I hate systemd for example Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but everytime I hear this, I have difficulty listening to the rest. Systemd is 10x easier and more manageable than every alternative.

No.

(As a sysadmin of 15 years, I can clearly say all of them have their advantages and disadvantages, but being easy and manageable is not an advantage of systemd, but a property of all of them)

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#229

Post by andrewshadura »

zh3 wrote: post #175
bleuuuu wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why the aversion to systemd?

Bugs and complexity is the usual reason. It seems to be a competence thing - experienced admins find it harder to debug and fix systemd issues, while regular users care less about being able to pop the hood and fix things themself.

Which issues? The last time I ran into a systemd issue was in 2016.
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