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Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)

omgubuntu.co.uk

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Re: Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)

#71

Post by shrimp_emoji »

fb03 wrote: post #66

I really really hate this forced push to snaps. I think I'll try Linux Mint out. Or maybe it's time to go back to my beloved Debian, which I abandoned because of Ubuntu when Ubuntu was still not too filled with crap.

Try Manjaro. It's the best user desktop experience, together with Arch way better than any point release distro like Ubuntu or Mint in terms of new software availability, hardware support, and stability (yes, ironically, rolling release distros are more stable than point release ones). If you're running servers, stick to Debian.

Re: Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)

#72

Post by jrockway »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #33
jrockway wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Debian since the early 2000s and keep wondering why there are any other distributions of Linux.

Debian fell out of favor because stable is too damned stale and ubuntu had a lot of small polish and quality of life improvements that debian didn't have at the time. I used ubuntu for years, but finally gave up on it when they started pushing snaps hard. I'm on PopOS now now but I'll go to mint debian edition or something else if I have to.

Right, stable being a couple years out of date near the end of the lifecycle is somewhat annoying. I feel like the Docker world probably made people care less about this; it's rarely the Linux kernel that prevents your application from running (but Node/Python runtimes are a huge problem). But for desktop stuff people read a blog post about some new feature and want it today, which is a problem when the priority is stability. So I can see that being annoying for the average end user that's not looking for a server OS.

I compromise and install most of the software I use on a daily basis from Homebrew. So I have some crufty version of `ls`, but the latest version of Emacs.

Re: Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)

#73

Post by subsection1h »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #32
synergy20 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we have Debian, which i'm going to use and replace all ubuntu stuff on the server side. on the desktop side, I really just need a browser and a vim editor for 99% of what I do, Debian should be perfectly fine too.

And honestly, for desktops, Debian testing is plenty stable IME and stays quite up to date. It's what I've run on my laptop for years with absolutely no issues.

Debian Testing is the least secure Debian distribution:

- "Please note that security updates for 'testing' distribution are not yet managed by the security team. Hence, 'testing' does not get security updates in a timely manner."[1]

- "Compared to stable and unstable, next-stable testing has the worst security update speed. Don't prefer testing if security is a concern."[2]

- "[Testing's] security updates are irregular and unreliable."[3]

Most Debian users should use Stable. If a user wants a newer version of some software, they should write a Bash script to install it from source. When I used Debian Stable on the desktop, my installers allowed me to have the latest versions of all of the software of which I wanted the latest versions.

If a Debian user wants up-to-date software but they don't want to write their own installers, they should consider using Fedora instead.

[1] https://www.debian.org/releases/testing/

[2] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting

[3] https://release.debian.org/

Re: Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)

#75

Post by palata »

renewiltord wrote: post #35

I use Ubuntu Server. Should I be moving to Debian? I really like Ubuntu (user since Breezy Badger back when Mark Shuttleworth shipped CDs to everyone) but the whole snap thing has been a pain. They change around on you, don't work well (docker or something installed as a snap for me and failed in a strange way), and are quite slow (visually apparent load time). I really don't want to worry about this stuff on Ubuntu…

I used Arch for 10 years and moved to Ubuntu 20.04 for work. I'm going back to Arch as soon as I can, and I certainly won't ever get to Ubuntu 22.04.

Re: Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)

#77

Post by BaseballPhysics »

subsection1h wrote: post #73
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And honestly, for desktops, Debian testing is plenty stable IME and stays quite up to date. It's what I've run on my laptop for years with absolutely no issues.

Debian Testing is the least secure Debian distribution: - "Please note that security updates for 'testing' distribution are not yet managed by the security team. Hence, 'testing' does not get security updates in a timely manner."[1] - "Compared to stable and unstable, next-stable testing has the worst security update speed. Don't prefer testing if security is a concern."[2] - "[Testing's] security updates are irregul…

Yes. I know. For a desktop, bluntly, no, security is not a primary concern (I've also turned off spectre mitigations and so forth), and stable is waaaay too stable for desktop usage.

Frankly, this kind of purist ideology--to the point of suggesting people use a different distribution--is simply ridiculous.

For servers I'm running on the open internet, yes, you are absolutely right. But in that case I just run stable.

Re: Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)

#78

Post by wing-_-nuts »

stavros wrote: post #47
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or popOS

Is Pop!OS a viable alternative to Ubuntu? I don't like Snaps but I like the fact that all my hardware (even my nVidia GPU) is supported. I think rolling release would be better, though, even if stuff breaks once in a while.

Yeah, popOS is basically ubuntu without snaps, with the latest nvidia drivers, and a scheduler that gives better gaming performance (gaming on linux has really come a long way since the steam deck has been released).

Before this, I used arch, until a simple update rendered my system unbootable. When I asked an arch dev why they were shipping a master branch grub build, I was told that if I couldn't easily recover a corrupted grub install I should consider another distro. I installed pop the next day. I've been very happy with it from that point forward. If I had to use something else it'd probably be mint.

Re: Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)

#79

Post by Aerbil313 »

JohnFen wrote: post #68
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alpine feels a lot like a BSD to me, and I’m very happy with it. But this bloatification is happening all over the place. Firefox is starting to have more and more dependency on flatpak’s daemons, even if you don’t use flatpak. These daemons are becoming the de facto standard for some interfaces too sadly. This also means that a lot of software is a lot less portable.

I'm just going to move to BSD entirely, I think. I'm saddened to hear that FF has dependencies on flatpack daemons, but I'm not surprised by it. The direction Linux is going seems very clear to me, and I expect more of that sort of thing as time goes on.

Meh. There’s just too much technical debt all over the place. Not even BSDs suffice from the POV of what an OS can be. A new modern OS written today with lessons taken from the past would solve the inherent pains of all existing ones. My dream is to do that. Just a dream rn tho.

Re: Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)

#80

Post by Aerbil313 »

rlpb wrote: post #48
jjice wrote: post #7

So 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?

Debs work really well when they are shipped as part of the distribution deb archive itself. They work really badly when third parties try to use them to provide add-on software to an existing distribution release. The main problem that Snaps solve is this latter case: when third parties are trying to ship directly into someone's distribution installation[1]. Often third party debs appear to work OK, but then break fu…

> Nix only partially solves the problem by better supporting concurrent installation of multiple versions of those dependencies. But those concurrent versions would still each have to be maintained

How so? Every dependency of every dependency is in the nix store and they’re all immutable. A nix package installed will work forever because its environment can’t change. Am I not right?

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