Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#311

Post by jacooper » Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 2:26 PM UTC

Sunspark wrote: post #284

jacooper wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can enable it manually, like almost every other non-beginner friendly fedora quirk https://ask.fedoraproject.org/t/proprietary-video-codecs-are...

The nice thing about Windows and MacOS is that users aren't expected to jump through hoops to restore functionality.

I mean its not limited to macOS, you can just use Ubuntu or any other more user friendly distro.

Fedora isn't really noon friendly, and probably will never be, because of copyright limitations compared to the UK where Canonical is based.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#312

Post by jacooper » Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 2:27 PM UTC

e1g wrote: post #301

jacooper wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not rhel clones though, which are what most small scale people are going to use. Also still no auto kernal updates.

RHEL is free for up to 15 instances (including prod), and 9.1 has pleasantly current packages. It’s a solid choice for startups and small teams who need to minimize time spent on infrastructure.

I found the one year renewal thing annoying, but other than that it looks to be really good! Just the auto kernel update part is left

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#313

Post by rookderby » Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 2:52 PM UTC

For what it's worth, I've been using SUSE, openSUSE, and currently tumbleweed personally as a daily driver on-and-off for ~19 years. Occasionally I hop over to Fedora and come back. I also run a couple public-facing servers on Linnode using Suse's Leap. I haven't had any major issues (some minor annoyances along the way of course), but the software is very up-to-date. I see that you're concerned about corporate control, maybe I've just been getting lucky. I don't have much experience with Debian, but have been experimenting with FreeBSD (has a non-profit registered in colorado[0]) and NixOS (has a non-profit registered in Netherlands[1]).

[0]: https://freebsdfoundation.org/legal/ [1]: https://nixos.org/community/

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#314

Post by UK-AL » Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 2:54 PM UTC

asdfkjhasdfhuh wrote: post #277

bsg75 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eh? systemd unit files are tiny compared to the huge massive scripts that came before it. Often those scripts we're only understood by a few people as well.

I think this why a lot of people really hate systemd. Suddenly a bunch of arcane knowledge used to maintain specific scripts got made redundant.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#315

Post by cf100clunk » Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 4:25 PM UTC

andrewshadura wrote: post #290

cf100clunk wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> it was a group of experienced Debian folks No, it wasn't. There was only one ex-Debian person in their team.

I'd heard many times over the years that Roger Leigh was given a great deal of support by other Debian people, let alone across the Linux community. Maybe I misremembered.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#316

Post by cf100clunk » Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 4:31 PM UTC

Sunspark wrote: post #127

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.

Distrowatch rankings are based on clicks. If someone wanted Hannah Montana Linux to be #1 in the ranking, it could be done.

Clicks, yes, but the rest seems a bit murky, with a hint of ''then a miracle happens'':

https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#317

Post by e1g » Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 4:46 PM UTC

jacooper wrote: post #312

e1g wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RHEL is free for up to 15 instances (including prod), and 9.1 has pleasantly current packages. It’s a solid choice for startups and small teams who need to minimize time spent on infrastructure.

I found the one year renewal thing annoying, but other than that it looks to be really good! Just the auto kernel update part is left

Kernel live patching helps to guard against major security and bug issues and is fully automated in RHEL via kpatch.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#318

Post by EFreethought » Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 4:53 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #184

EFreethought wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of OP's issues is Ubuntu forcing snaps. I think Mint disables snap by default: https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.h... Another Ubuntu derivative that does not use snaps is System76's Pop!_OS

Isn’t one of the purposes of snaps to allow finer grained permissions? In non-snap systems, how do you prevent that weather app you just installed from accessing your camera and microphone?

The snap service tends to run when it wants and it can slow down a system when it runs. Also the snap binaries are a lot larger than with apt.

Honestly, I don't think a weather app would access a camera or microphone. That seems like a bad example. Honestly, I put a piece of tape over my camera. It looks like other posters in this thread have solutions.

Using more hard drive space than needed and not being able to control the service are show-stoppers for a lot of people, and it looks like the permissions issue has another solution.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#319

Post by fragmede » Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 6:00 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #251

fragmede wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a smarmy thing for that somebody to have said! They use the same package manager and many of the Ubuntu devs were originally Debian devs.

The same package manager, but different enough packages, PPAs, etc, and a different release process. Many different technical decisuons. A very different project governance. I'm not implying that these things are bad! But different enough they undeniably are. The fact that I can install .deb packages on my box using a port of apt does not make it Debian. (Saying this as a dedicated Debian user since 1998 and until th…

I realize the above comment took more effort than parroting someone else's 9-word statement. Thanks for putting the effort to expounding on the differences between milk and grass.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#320

Post by warrenm » Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 6:23 PM UTC

I switched from CentOS/RHEL to Ubuntu on my servers a couple years ago

While it was a little jarring to have things named and located differently (not much different, but different none-the-less), I was basically "Ubuntufied" within a couple weeks

20 years ago I ran SuSE almost exclusively

Prior I had Slackware (which is still around, and distinctly non "corporate"), RedHat, Mandrake, and a couple others

You wanting to avoid "being ruined by corporate interests" is likely impossible - unless you go with a single BDFL distro like Slackware

Ubuntu is "corporate"

RedHat is "corporate"

SLES is "corporate"

Debian is "corporate" (not as in a commercial entity, but definitely have their own very tight community (ie "corporate") rules as to the "right" and "wrong" ways of doing things)

I'm curious as to why you think Ubuntu (or Red Hat, or any of a number of other distros) which have been around "a long time" won't continue to be around for "a long time"?

Ubuntu's 18

Debian's 29

Red Hat is 30

Suse is 31

...what are you looking for, exactly, that you think isn't handled well-enough by the "big guys"?