Just another reminder I need to move back to stock Debian or BSD.
Come back to where the air is crisp - Debian 12 is glorious.
Debian remains OK (I use it on all of my machines), but worrying signs have been growing there as well.
Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)
11–20 of 112 posts
Re: Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
The linux desktop is in the middle of moving to a zero trust model: https://www.ypsidanger.com/the-distribution-model-is-changin...
Damn, that was a depressing read. If that's how things are going, then it really is past time for me to stop using Linux entirely. This is feeling like the final straw in a series of things that have been pushing me away.
What are your concerns?
Re: Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)
#13I have zero horse in this race other than every time I've tried snap firefox it has been unpleasant (slower, weird memory, weird hangs that sometimes OOM), so I install it in some silly manual way
in theory I like that snaps have a permission model w/ default confinement, in practice I keep getting asked to install in 'classic' mode
Re: Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)
#14In my mind, Ubuntu Desktop, and desktop linux in general, has always been a hobbyist project masquerading as a real production-ready environment. There's no money in building a desktop distro, so nobody really cares what happens there.
The real power of Ubuntu has really always been as a server distro. I used to run desktop Ubuntu when I was younger and had more spare time to tinker with this nonsense, but nowadays I administer enough ubuntu servers at work, I don't need to do it at home too. Ubuntu server is great -- everything is very well-documented, LTS is stable, snaps are sometimes pretty useful (I recently had to quickly spin up redis temporarily for a project and it was a one-liner), and everything just works in general.
I used to run CentOS (rip) servers, and Ubuntu, whilst noticeably worse, is still great to administer. It's not all sunshine and rainbows for sure, but things generally work the way you expect them to and things are generally sane.
Re: Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)
#15Re: Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn, that was a depressing read. If that's how things are going, then it really is past time for me to stop using Linux entirely. This is feeling like the final straw in a series of things that have been pushing me away.
What are your concerns?
Personally mine are the fact that this isn't really "zero trust", but more "infinitely diffuse trust" where every user has to trust every application. None of the packaging alternatives I'm aware of seem to yet have their security story in line where they are either secure enough (without breaking most software) to not have to trust every application or provide some level of assurance themselves comparable to the debian maintainers.
Re: Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)
#17Re: Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn, that was a depressing read. If that's how things are going, then it really is past time for me to stop using Linux entirely. This is feeling like the final straw in a series of things that have been pushing me away.
What are your concerns?
Oh, I have quite a few of them, from increased resource usage, proprietary aspects, through forced updating and more. The forced updating is particularly unacceptable.
But, the 10,000 ft view is that they reduce the amount of control I have over my system. They offer restrictions I chafe at while giving me no benefit that I care about.
I'm not going to sit here and say they shouldn't exist. That they're not to my taste doesn't mean that others who like them shouldn't have them. But they're not to my taste at all.
After seeing systemd getting widely adopted (also not to my taste), if snaps (or flatpacks, although I am less allergic to those) join the party then that's just a clear indication that the Linux world and I have diverged too much and I need to move on.
Re: Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn, that was a depressing read. If that's how things are going, then it really is past time for me to stop using Linux entirely. This is feeling like the final straw in a series of things that have been pushing me away.
What are your concerns?
This model destroys any reason for software to be open source. What's the point of having source code if you just run the binary provided by some party?
Reminds me of the early days of the tensorflow where everyone used whatever binary package worked an no one could run anyone else's code because people kept getting stale binaries somewhere in the stack.
Re: Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)
#20So why does Ubuntu push Snaps so hard? They've been doing this for year and I still have no idea, since pretty much everyone I know would rather a deb file (myself included). What's their gain?
It’s a proprietary package management system (only the client part is open source, so it’s kinda MSFT-style open source).
The obvious answer is: vendor lock in. Once Ubuntu is snap-only you won’t be able to host your own package repositories, since it’s their secret code.