Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 345 posts

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#271

Post by BrotherBisquick »

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.

I never thought i'd meet the guy who actually likes web bloat, and on HN of all places.

I thought you were just a legend, like Kayser Soeze.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#272

Post by hansvm »

Gentoo solved literally all my problems with Ubuntu. There's a bit of a learning curve to use it properly on a server farm, but it's worth it, especially if you have any even slightly atypical performance constraints.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#273

Post by plaguepilled »

I'm going to slightly subvert the spirit of your question, because I think this is exactly what you referred to when you said "ruined by corporate interests", but Fedora Desktop would be my go-to Ubuntu replacement. Red Hat are very hands-off (I really don't think the analogy of it being a testbed for RHEL is accurate) and the stability is excellent. Additionally, SELinux is preconfigured, and flatpaks allow a very basic sandbox implementation via GUI (though it is far from perfect).

OTOH, if you don't give a shit about security (SELinux and AppArmor in particular) then try NixOS. Extremely powerful, idempotent system config. You can do Gnu Guix if you prefer but I have yet to be convinced by the Guix crowd it is superior, and since it has less apps I'm generally Nix-oriented.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#274

Post by andreareina »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #265
txutxu wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

It sounds like they have a top-down directive to use Ubuntu.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#275

Post by nextos »

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?

It's not trivial to package/run stuff that isn't prepackaged (unusual given that NixPkgs is enormous).

But not too hard either, I authored several official packages within a few days of migrating to Nix. It's only difficult if the build process is a bit uncommon or ugly.

The hardest part about NixOS is figuring out what to learn, and in what order.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#277

Post by asdfkjhasdfhuh »

bsg75 wrote: post #232
paulddraper wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

systemd is "easier" for people used to cisco/microsoft/etc.

The huge list of services with not-for-human names so your job can look complicated and essential.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#278

Post by asdfkjhasdfhuh »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #233
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…

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…

slightly wrong. Ubuntu succeed in part because of what you mention, plus lots of marketing money. debian have caught up now. and most people seriously wanting up to date is over at gentoo or arch.

But back to the "ubuntu exists" premise you started, it is because a rich guy wanted to take over debian and sell an enterprise solution based on it.

remember at the time enterprise was all the rave. google was pushing their enterprise suite, and there was ton of startups (zoho, etc) it was a crowded space then and red hat, suze were completely fumbling with their linuxes.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#279

Post by paulddraper »

bsg75 wrote: post #232
paulddraper wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Like...everything?

Create a service that starts on boot:

    cat > /etc/systemd/example.service
And the harder things get, the bigger the advantage. Like if you want to mount a disk, create a socket, and then afterward start unprivileged service...all very simple.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#280

Post by aeuropean12 »

I would suggest Debian (for ease of migration) or Red Hat Linux (for industries that are heavily regulated by compliance).

However, with Red Hat you will most likely run into the "corporate interests" factor again.

Maybe you can think of a medium-term and a long-term solution. Begin with Debian, and then look into the feasibility of using FreeBSD. That powers some of the largest services, such as Netflix and Whatsapp.

However, FreeBSD does not use Bash but tsch, so you will want to ease the migration and administrative pains by looking into transitioning any OPS scripts and the like, but FreeBSD does provide a package management solution that holds it ground against apt/aptitude.

This is by no means a comprehensive comparison, just a few insights that might serve as starting points.

Post reply on HN