I’ve been an Ubuntu user for a long time, but I’m moving to Fedora for my laptops and CentOS Stream for my servers. Canonical was great and added a lot of nice things to Ubuntu and contributes a lot with upstream Debian, but my patience with things like snaps has limits.
Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
231–240 of 345 posts
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#232Earlier 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.
Can you provide example of what makes it easier than alternatives?
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#233I 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…
Ubuntu exists because Debian stable releases were inconveniently outdated, and Debian unstable was occasionally broken. Ubuntu also explicitly compromised "software freedom" in favor of utility, particularly by making non-free video and wifi drivers easy to install; in contradiction to Debian's pro-copyleft design. This situation has not changed.
I suspect OP is considering a change from Ubuntu because Ubuntu itself has diverged so far from its original identity as a reasonably stable Debian-unstable fork.
It was several years ago that I abandoned Ubuntu in favor of Archlinux for that very reason. These days, I'm almost exclusively using NixOS, but can't recommend it to impatient or non-technical users. NixOS is incredibly stable, very fresh/up-to-date, and incredibly chaotic to use. Someday, I expect, there will exist something of a "distribution" of NixOS that - much like Ubuntu did circa 2008 - caters to the average user. I hope that day comes soon.
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#234I'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…
I think NixOS is what the future should be. Searching and resolving packages still seems slow, and things like flakes are still evolving to address rough edges, but having completely declarative definitions of the entire OS installation is amazing.
Spinning up native development environments as an extension of production environments is nice too.
I worry that tools like pyinfra and Ansible combined with Docker containers and traditional distributions might be good enough to prevent critical mass in terms of user adoption.
Even so, it’s worth daily driving for a while just to get a sense of what the world could be like. Kind of like Erlang OTP versus Kubernetes and containerized microservices.
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Systemd does use "text files or symlinks for configuration" — those being the unit files in /lib/systemd and /etc/systemd. `systemctl enable` just makes a symlink from /lib/systemd into /etc/systemd, even. What would you point to to claim that it does otherwise? > text files for logging ...just sucks, on both embedded systems and production servers. (I.e. anywhere where you aren't debugging the machine on the machine…
> (Text files for logging) ...just sucks, on both embedded systems and production servers.
Ehrm, no. Managing a sizeable fleet, with a central logging server for 1.5 decades, and we never had the problems you mentioned:
> and so fills up your disk the first time it goes haywire.
This is a bug of the program or configuration mistake or your monitoring is not working as intended.
Funnily, we're seeing more disk pressure from systemd journals. Go, figure.
Just remembered: syslog daemons have rate-suppression mechanisms to prevent big lines repeating too fast and preventing your disk from filling up. So even your program enters an infinite loop, a well configured syslog daemon (rsyslog, syslog-ng, whatnot), should note "X similar errors have been supressed.", where X can be anything from 2 to 1000 (or even more).
> or it implements its own log rotation and compression
Which you can disable 99% of the time and just delegate the stuff to logrotate.
> it must be specifically wired to work with syslog APIs in order to use rsyslog
rsyslog is just a syslog daemon. syslog is kernel plumbing at this level. You can terminate this pipe with anything.
> Journald, meanwhile, just sits on the other side of the pipe from any systemd service-unit's stdout + stderr; manages log rotation...
And provides nothing new when compared to syslog plumbing. A binary log, some tooling around that, and that's it. It even makes per daemon log monitoring harder by blinding syslog-aware monitoring and automation tools, hence we need to enable rsyslog on the system too. Now we have two journals. Neat.
> venerable Unix/Linux line-printer (lp) subsystem
Which only handles "line-printer" subsystem, and yes, it's more UNIXy. It doesn't get the text output, bashes into a binary data structure, and doesn't try to replace anything and everything from boot to logs to time sync to user login to tap water temperature.
It just stores its state in binary file. Which almost every UNIX daemon does. Incl, but not limited to X11 & CUPS.
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#236Earlier 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.
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 "debi…
Do you mean your laptop runs Devuan? I get that is nearly the same as Debian, but does it include the Debian social contract and community? Isn't it a separate project?
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#237For end user workstations, my favorite Linux distros have converged on either Pop!_OS or Arch Linux (and Manjaro). Pop!_OS is a remarkably stable and usable Linux distro. At least from a UX and aesthetics standpoint I find it competitive with macOS (I am also a longtime mac user, though macOS has lost its edge in recent years on the UX front). Overall I would say it's my favorite Linux distro these days. I am a big f…
I’ve been running Pop!_OS for about two years now and I still love it. Use it for both work and home. No plans to change.
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
My main gripe with RHEL based distros is the lack of support for in-place upgrades. I know you shouldn't do it, etc but for small servers that can benefit from newer kernel versions, its annoying. Also dnf-autoupdate doesn't support auto restarts to update the kernel.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports in-place upgrades: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... Here “supports” means “does not result in itself in a loss of support coverage”. It's been possible to do it in an unsupported fashion before.
Not rhel clones though, which are what most small scale people are going to use.
Also still no auto kernal updates.
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#239macOS has been breaking my heart lately. Some of it is a consequence of being on ARM instead of x86, but some of it is the OS- for example, I don’t have to tell this group Docker on macOS is the worst (versus Linux and Windows). The theory behind getting a Mac is that it lasts ~5 years before I really feel the need to buy another Mac, but this time, my 2020 M1 MacBook has only made it about 2 years before I’m now trying to unload it. 16GB just isn’t enough for Docker and the IDEs and other apps I have running. It sucks because I followed the “max out the Mac because you can’t upgrade later” rule. 16GB was as high as I could go, and hell 16GB was enough for my 2015 Intel MacBook.
Anyway, because of the above and the lack of Nvidia/CUDA support for ML/NLP stuff that I do for work, I built a desktop and run Linux on it. I’ve been jumping around distros over the last few months and here’s what I’ve learned:
Ubuntu Desktop has always been on the buggy side for me, going all the way back to 10.04 LTS. I guess taking Debian and GNOME and plastering your own brand on top will do that. The most-stable desktop experience has been Fedora Workstation, which uses pure GNOME as the desktop environment. I wanted a distro with a stable desktop environment (most of my woes pertain to having a 5K display), that supports fractional scaling (200% is too big for a 4K/5K display IMO), and runs all the stuff I want to run. Also rolling release would be nice, because I’m tired of running into issues where a guide I’m following works for Ubuntu 20.04 but not 21.04 for example, or a package (like AWS VPN Client) is made for 20.04 but doesn’t work out of the box with any newer version of Ubuntu.
So brass tacks, stable (and modern-looking) desktop environment out of the box, plus rolling release = Manjaro (Arch) and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, both with KDE Plasma. There are other distros that meet this criteria, but they’re niche or having been around for very long.
I’ve had a good experience with both Manjaro and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, but OpenSUSE had some annoying UI bugs that I don’t experience with Manjaro, so… I’m just sticking with Manjaro + KDE Plasma.
The only downside is that as packages go, everyone makes DEBs but Arch you’ll often have to download a DEB or RPM and convert it and hope it works without any further action on your part. This also means that you can’t have apps auto-update like those that live in APT or Yum. Arch’s AUR technically supports updating the apps you have installed, however for unofficial packages (eg those that someone just converted from DEB or RPM and uploaded to AUR), you’ll be left behind the latest version until someone/the maintainer of that package in AUR manually updates it with the new DEB/RPM they converted for AUR. I think this is an acceptable trade off considering I’m free from Ubuntu and get a rolling release for the OS/desktop environment. Heck, what’s the point in having your apps auto-upgrade if the OS and DE only get updates a couple times a year?
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#240Just putting in two cents for OpenSUSE. They have one of the best rolling release distros along with regular releases. I used it for a while after Manjaro ate itself. It’s been around almost as long as RedHat so they’ve managed to survive.