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

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

#81

Post by renewiltord »

palata wrote: post #75
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.

Thank you. I liked Arch but the rolling release thing does make this less useful in my case (on-prem compute cloud). I want to maintain this thing as little as possible and I know from experience that if you let arch get too far ahead of you, pacman can fail to bring you up.

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

#82

Post by lockhouse »

e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #58
lockhouse wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeBSD is a great option on the server as well. Simple, stable, mature, and great documentation.

If I tried to run FreeBSD in prod I might have actually been fired. None of the BSDs are production ready: basically nothing is validated to work with them, there’s no commercial support, less available sysadmins, no software officially supports it, etc. It’s a hobby system, nothing more. It's theoretically possible to use it in prod; I know that some companies (Netflix?) do it. But it's certainly not common and take…

It definitely depends on your needs. FreeBSD absolutely does support production workloads. Netflix as you mentioned, WhatsApp (Meta), and several ISPs and hosting providers make use of it.

Any competent Linux sysadmin could learn to admin a BSD in no time. The FreeBSD handbook and the man pages are excellent. In my opinion they are far better quality than their Linux equivalents.

You also won't have any issues if your server runs on an open source stack such as Python, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Java (OpenJDK), NodeJS, etc.

You're absolutely right about FreeBSD not having first party commercial support. If you need that, you're basically stuck with RHEL, SUSE, Ubuntu, or Oracle.

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

#83

Post by e63f67dd-065b »

lockhouse wrote: post #82
e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I tried to run FreeBSD in prod I might have actually been fired. None of the BSDs are production ready: basically nothing is validated to work with them, there’s no commercial support, less available sysadmins, no software officially supports it, etc. It’s a hobby system, nothing more. It's theoretically possible to use it in prod; I know that some companies (Netflix?) do it. But it's certainly not common and take…

It definitely depends on your needs. FreeBSD absolutely does support production workloads. Netflix as you mentioned, WhatsApp (Meta), and several ISPs and hosting providers make use of it. Any competent Linux sysadmin could learn to admin a BSD in no time. The FreeBSD handbook and the man pages are excellent. In my opinion they are far better quality than their Linux equivalents. You also won't have any issues if you…

It's not just administration, it's everything else living on your server. It's the difference being surprised when package x doesn't support ubuntu and being pleasantly surprised when it does support BSD. It's the difference between being the most well-tested and well-supported configuration of all your tools and a niche thing that a couple volunteers got working.

Many of the things I did as a traditional university sysadmin long ago probably works on FreeBSD, and if you wanted to deploy a LAMP (FAMP?)/Django/Ruby on Rails/etc stack it would probably be good enough, but the world has moved on since then. Once you want k8s, ansible, distributed filesystems, HPC, scientific, etc. it starts to break down really quickly. Many of the things I listed above may work, but it's the less documented, less supported, more annoying, and more likely to break path. The extra time spent getting it to work on FreeBSD and maintaining it is not time well spent unless there's a very specific reason FreeBSD is better, just grab RHEL/SLES/Ubuntu and skip all the hassle.

FreeBSD has its place in very limited scenarios and where you have the engineering resources to deploy it, but it should not be the default choice for a production deployment.

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

#84

Post by awinter-py »

anonymousab wrote: post #42
awinter-py wrote: post #13

I 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

I have never understood why the pushed snaps so early and so hard as they have. Feature parity isn't always a necessity, but you'd think they would have made sure that Snap apps perform at least "ok".

I suspect it's easier for 3rd party orgs to own their own releases? but not sure

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

#85

Post by captn3m0 »

e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #57
layer8 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For server, Debian is the simpler and more stable solution.

Debian is not really an alternative. There’s no maintenance guarantee, no support contract, and is usually not validated to work with packages the way Ubuntu and RHEL is. These are the kinds of things that matter for production.

Freexian offers a support contract for Debian ELTS.

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

#86

Post by apple4ever »

layer8 wrote: post #29
e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #14

In 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…

For server, Debian is the simpler and more stable solution.

Problem is Debian is usually so far behind on software and it's harder to install new ones that are not from source. That was the great thing about Ubuntu. You could get an LTS and pick and choose what you wanted to have newer.

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

#87

Post by apple4ever »

rlpb wrote: post #50
JohnFen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tas…

> The forced updating is particularly unacceptable. Snaps allow you to hold updates indefinitely now: no forced updates any more. Use "snap refresh --hold ". See https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#heading--... .

Oh wow I missed they finally gave in and fixed that. When did that happen?

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

#88

Post by apple4ever »

jrockway wrote: post #72
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

It being out of date was annoying for server too.

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

#89

Post by zokula »

whalesalad wrote: post #51
JohnFen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My comment was too harsh to Debian. Debian has been good to me, and is the best distro I've used. But their adoption of systemd is something that makes me worried for the future. It's still avoidable for now, but the writing is on the wall.

systemd is great

[dead]

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

#90

Post by BasedAnon »

palata wrote: post #74
BasedAnon wrote: post #63

so as an ubuntu user how do i replace and disable all the snap garbage without doing a full wipe & install of Manjaro or Debian

I think you answered it: move to Arch or Debian

Yeah but I don't want to reinstall
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