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LXD is now under Canonical

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Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#161
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the thing people find offensive is that this is not the default

If the reason of snapping is that their preference isn't the default, life must be quite tough for them. If there's an option, live with it and change it. I can't see what's so destructive about snaps. It's probably another echo chamber when people find a common target to yell at.

Well, it depends. I liked upstart, I liked Unity (I still use them as long as I can!) and I didn't dislike Mir, although it never came to anything. But I don't thing snaps are good, at least for me. But what bothers me the most about snaps is not what I consider to be technical deficiencies or annoyances, but the fact that it's becoming the only way to install some software packages in Ubuntu, with no other alternative than leaving Ubuntu for good.

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#162
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a stepping stone out of Ubuntu, Pop_OS! has been pleasant and snap-free.

I have tried it, and reviewed it. I kinda like the window tiling, but it's still GNOME and GNOME is still a pain. As a cleaned-up Ubuntu, I like Zinc. https://teejeetech.com/2022/05/07/zinc-22-04/ Ubuntu, with the smallest cleanest but richest desktop on Linux -- Xfce -- and neither Snap nor Flatpak. Instead, `deb-get` which finds and installs native DEB packages, configures the repos for you, manages updates and so…

I was on KDE for a bit, love it on my ultrawide monitor with tiling. But on my laptop Gnome is so sweat. I have a 2nd hand HP ProBook and I swear, for the very first time ever in my Linux life the trackpad feels like my MacBook trackpad. 3 fingers swipe up, overview of windows, another swipe is app grid, swipe left right, move to other desktops. I really find the whole experience very smooth and I enjoy it a lot (all Wayland, on NixOS).

I have suspend/wake working well so far, USB-C charging + screen + all peripherals via 1 USB-C cable, all "media" buttons work. And this is still on 8 GB of ram (soon the 2x32 GB will arrive ;)), I haven't even heard the fans so far! I'm on Teams, camera works, nobody would even know I'm on Linux if it wasn't for my constant evangelizing!

I'm really impressed (yeah, I know, Linux people easily are when it comes to desktops, basically we're impressed if things work).

I did enable AppIndicator. Solaar, NextCloud and Tailscale all really require it to be considered functional. I don't understand why that is not a standard thing (it is on many distros though).

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#163
post #46
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm setting up a Debian 12 Bookworm machine right now after ~13 years of being an Ubuntu user So far it's very snappy! My Ubuntu 18.04 machine somehow "rotted" in ways that previous installs didn't -- everything became slow and janky, sorta like Windows And I specifically installed 18.04 in 2021, to avoid Snaps But now it looks like Debian will work great

As a stepping stone out of Ubuntu, Pop_OS! has been pleasant and snap-free.

I will use them, at least for a while, when their currently in development Rust desktop env is out. Super curious how that pans out (as traditionally all popular GUI libs are very OO).

https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch

https://github.com/pop-os/libcosmic

https://github.com/iced-rs/iced

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried it, and reviewed it. I kinda like the window tiling, but it's still GNOME and GNOME is still a pain. As a cleaned-up Ubuntu, I like Zinc. https://teejeetech.com/2022/05/07/zinc-22-04/ Ubuntu, with the smallest cleanest but richest desktop on Linux -- Xfce -- and neither Snap nor Flatpak. Instead, `deb-get` which finds and installs native DEB packages, configures the repos for you, manages updates and so…

I was on KDE for a bit, love it on my ultrawide monitor with tiling. But on my laptop Gnome is so sweat. I have a 2nd hand HP ProBook and I swear, for the very first time ever in my Linux life the trackpad feels like my MacBook trackpad. 3 fingers swipe up, overview of windows, another swipe is app grid, swipe left right, move to other desktops. I really find the whole experience very smooth and I enjoy it a lot (all…

> Gnome is so sweat

... Sweet?

I don't like GNOME. I don't like GNOME accessories; I hate CSD and hamburger menus and that big empty wasted top panel. I want more things vertical, while GNOME is moving its vertical workspace-switcher to horizontal.

The Cosmic tiling is good. That's an improvement. GNOME's window management sucks, and this is better.

I also really don't like systemd-boot and it broke one of my laptops severely.

So, I am happy that it is good for you, but it is not something I'd choose.

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on KDE for a bit, love it on my ultrawide monitor with tiling. But on my laptop Gnome is so sweat. I have a 2nd hand HP ProBook and I swear, for the very first time ever in my Linux life the trackpad feels like my MacBook trackpad. 3 fingers swipe up, overview of windows, another swipe is app grid, swipe left right, move to other desktops. I really find the whole experience very smooth and I enjoy it a lot (all…

> Gnome is so sweat ... Sweet? I don't like GNOME. I don't like GNOME accessories; I hate CSD and hamburger menus and that big empty wasted top panel. I want more things vertical, while GNOME is moving its vertical workspace-switcher to horizontal. The Cosmic tiling is good. That's an improvement. GNOME's window management sucks, and this is better. I also really don't like systemd-boot and it broke one of my laptops…

Arg yeah sweet indeed, pronounciation is just no guide at all in English (neither in Dutch btw)...

...Seat, sweat, chaste, caste, Leigh, eight, height, Put, nut, granite, and unite. ... [0]

And I do agree on the very high amount of pixels wasted in the top panel, expecially on an ultrawide monitor, something MacOS does better. On a laptop screen it's ok for me.

[0] http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#166
post #39

Very soon Microsoft will acquire Canonical for at least $40 billion. The reasons: * Ubuntu powers the overwhelming majority of Azure workloads (both customer and internal) * Nearly all Linux applications and tooling target Ubuntu first (or at the very least) * Github, VSCode. The missing piece is the actual runtime operating system. Ubuntu. * Canonical employs nearly all the remaining core enterprise open-source deve…

Lena Khan wouldn't let Microsoft acquire a paperclip manufacturing plant right now, do you think this merger would ever be allowed?

They can just wait a year. Either the Republicans will give them what they want, or the Biden Administration won't have to keep Khan around because they made it through the presidential election.

If Biden (or Newsom or whoever) squeaks in, they'll be looking to appeal to the right for the midterms, and lightly smearing and firing Khan might actually help them. The WSJ, in particular, has declared her enemy no.1, and the Biden WH has almost seemed embarrassed about the only person in their administration that could get them unambiguously good press, because they don't actually support her.

Why didn't they make Khan their "Dr. Fauci"? Why didn't they push social media companies to amplify accounts that supported her work, or to suppress accounts that spread misinformation or negativity about it?

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#167

Ubuntu is already the major contributor to LXD. What's peoples aversion to snaps in the thread? For me it makes for a stable system that allows me to run the latest version of apps in a confined space, it's actually perfect

My objection is that it's simply fragile and overcomplicated software. Operations that one would expect to be instant take a second to run. I attempted to reinstall snap recently so I could use lxd (which seems good itself), and was greeted with inscrutable error messages so gave up and moved it all over to libvirt.

Contrast with something like systemd that also has its haters, but it is solidly written software so seems to be accepted by a lot more people.

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#168

Very soon Microsoft will acquire Canonical for at least $40 billion. The reasons: * Ubuntu powers the overwhelming majority of Azure workloads (both customer and internal) * Nearly all Linux applications and tooling target Ubuntu first (or at the very least) * Github, VSCode. The missing piece is the actual runtime operating system. Ubuntu. * Canonical employs nearly all the remaining core enterprise open-source deve…

> Canonical employs nearly all the remaining core enterprise open-source developers after IBM acquired Red Hat

I'm sorry, but what? This is not even remotely close to being true. There's even a pretty good chance that Red Hat employs more "enterprise open source developers" now than in 2018.

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#169
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stéphane made snaps too ? I hate them. I strongly dislike lxd too. If he isn’t a core person behind snaps he sure advocates hard for it.

He works for Canonical so I'd imagine he had to get on board with snaps, like it or not.

Working at Canonical shouldn't mean the only supported way to use LXD should be via snaps. It almost violates the whole idea of Linux.

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#170
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the thing people find offensive is that this is not the default

If the reason of snapping is that their preference isn't the default, life must be quite tough for them. If there's an option, live with it and change it. I can't see what's so destructive about snaps. It's probably another echo chamber when people find a common target to yell at.

Professionally, the company I'm at ditched ubuntu in our CI builds because of snaps.

The packaging is very limiting, and I don't want to have to fight against the system to get a version of software installed that works.

I personally used to run MicroK8s (snap based). I finally gave up about 6 months ago. Were snaps the root cause? Eh... no, the root cause was dqlite synchronization problems that I was tired of dealing with, but snaps made the whole process so much worse. They're hard to automate, they're hard to interact with using normal tooling. They just aren't part of the system in the same way, and while I understand there's value there (hell - I'm running containers and microk8s for a reason) there's also pain. K8s was an okish trade on that front: I felt a lot of pain and gained a lot of value.

Snaps seem to be falling into the worst possible spot: I'm feeling a lot of pain and the product is usually not any better at all (and sometimes much worse).

HA Microk8s with snaps and nvidia-container-toolkit (The GPU addon) just isn't all that stable (I would consistently get hard lockups on some hardware). That same hardware running Arch and k3s is chugging away beautifully.

So maybe it is an echo chamber - but the echoes I keep hearing are system admins saying this is making life harder and they don't understand the upside, and Canonical pushing forward anyways.

---

So maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel somewhere for snaps. Maybe the grand vision will eventually come and folks will be fine with it. But my suspicion is that Ubuntu is being replaced at most orgs before then.

Steam is throwing weight behind Arch (LOTS of new linux users coming in here). Alpine is a strong contender in containers. Nix is interesting.

Both Flatpak and AppImage seem to achieve the "easy user installs" part without all the pain of snaps, and they're neutral on whether I use them or not.

Basically - if snaps were so good (even if they're only good in some cases) I would expect a conversation about snaps similar to that of SystemD - Strong arguments on both sides, real advocacy from the community for the product, even if it's painful to adopt, or doesn't meet all user needs.

Instead snaps are just "meh" all around. There's a steady stream of folks leaving, and no real advocates outside of Canonical. At most - you have neutral folks like yourself who just don't mind snaps.

To me - that's a bad sign. I bailed. It wasn't worth betting my personal projects on. I've been pretty happy with the decision too.

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