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Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

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Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#261

Post by lucideer »

riku_iki wrote: post #246
lucideer wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have used mint on the desktop in the past. I'm Irish so I took interest fairly early on due to its provenance. It's cool if you like it's default DE setup, but I don't see any real advantage over Debian, & unless you're using LMDE, it's gonna suffer from all the disadvantages of modern Ubuntu. It's been hit just as hard by snaps - Debian is being hit too but not as hard as Mint or Ubuntu.

mint has debian based distro without any ubuntu dependencies.

Yup, it's called LMDE

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#262

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

amluto wrote: post #205
hyperpl wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think we'll get lucky with a systemd replacement similar to how pulseaudio has been deprecated by a much more reasonable implementation Pipewire?

In my copious free time, I have a vague idea of designing and implementing a mechanism called kpid1. Basically, a task running as pid 1 (including in a container) could call a new kpid1() syscall, which would cause the kernel to completely take it over. The kernel would take care of all the usual init work, and it would expose the minimal API (presumably using a new kind of fd) to allow a different task to give it in…

What benefit are you seeing in putting it in the kernel?

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#263

Post by bandrami »

hanniabu wrote: post #51
bloopernova wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now compare the two on Lynx

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#264

Post by bandrami »

timbit42 wrote: post #122
cf100clunk wrote: post #32

Distrowatch carries on after all these years, and (at the least) gives a fairly good catalogue of Linux and BSD distro capabilities in textual and tabular format. https://distrowatch.com/ Try some out as VMs before comitting to bare metal installs. EDIT: I see that MX Linux continues to reside as the "top" distro according to that site's methodology. MX has been on top there for a very long time.

It's methodology is page hits so it can be manipulated pretty easily. I see MX Linux at the top but I never see people talking about it on social media so it makes me wonder how it got to the top of the list.

I think both AV Linux and KX Studio recently rebased to MX so all the audio people now go there

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#265

Post by csdreamer7 »

txutxu wrote: post #221
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.

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…

> 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)...

> 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).

That is a lot of work. Why not use Debian itself? If you want that lts support you can use AlmaLinux in the RHEL clone camp. Not aware of any upsells in that system from my usage of it as a kiosk. The desktop is rough with some common packages missing from EL9, but the server would be excellent. Even CentOS Stream has longer free support than free Ubuntu LTS.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#266

Post by MarkSweep »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #262
amluto wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my copious free time, I have a vague idea of designing and implementing a mechanism called kpid1. Basically, a task running as pid 1 (including in a container) could call a new kpid1() syscall, which would cause the kernel to completely take it over. The kernel would take care of all the usual init work, and it would expose the minimal API (presumably using a new kind of fd) to allow a different task to give it in…

What benefit are you seeing in putting it in the kernel?

Not OP, but the whole business of PID 1 having to reap orphan PIDs seems like something the kernel should have to do. Is there a good reason for when a process exits that not other process is waiting on, that a user-mode PID 1 process has to observe that exit?

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#267

Post by csdreamer7 »

Lucasoato wrote: post #20
cmdlinecowboy wrote: post #8

Red Hat for enterprise use, Fedora for personal desktop use. One of the largest communities you’ll find. If you want Debian based maybe just straight Debian. The centos debacle was poorly handled but I think what red hat was /trying/ to do made sense. The community just wasn’t there to sustain it. Red Hat was paying to give away free RHEL basically lol. CentOS Stream should have just been called RHEL Stream. It’s bas…

Is there any specific reason to choose them over Linux Mint? I'm genuinely asking, I've never tried Red Hat or Fedora.

Fedora is a nice busy, but power user and developer experience: only rolling for the parts you would care about with a year of security support.

Fedora is especially useful for a new hardware workstation with that year of support. Any longer than that in my experience you tend to run into issues. For example: DXVK, for Windows games with Steam/Proton, just moved to requiring Mesa 22.0 as a minimum and Fedora 35 has Mesa 22.1 something. Similar issues with Ruby development in the past.

Updates are more limited, with a few select packages kept rolling compared to a true rolling distro like Arch. When a new kernel series is release (6.0 => 6.1) Fedora holds off for a few weeks to test until 6.0 goes EOL. Gnome is kept to it's major release with only minor versions to fix bugs. Mesa is updated until a Fedora is released. Firefox is kept up to date and I use the snap for VSCode and Chromium based browsers. Most other packages are not updated to major new versions, except for Vim (and Emacs if I remember).

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#269

Post by awill »

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 don't know about claiming Debian is free from corporate interest. As a packager, sure. And for its own stuff like APT, yes. But that's just a fraction of the overall Debian codebase.

Debian ultimately follows the OSS community for most stuff, and the 'community' is often corporation backed. Just look at systemd. A lot of distros didn't want it, but ultimately were stuck between maintaining masses of stuff themselves, or accepting Red Hat to maintain it for them. There are many other examples.

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