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

In my reply I focused on why we need a bundled, sandboxed packaging format in the first place, since many people are sceptical just about that. So you're right in that I didn't go into any of the differences.

Snaps solve a bunch of problems that are out of scope of Flatpaks, such as CLI apps and the packaging of kernels and other hardware-level pieces. This allows for an entirely snap-based system that is immutable and atomically updated, which is essential for IoT devices to be reliable.

If you look at the history of snaps, they are an evolution of click packaging, which were created for the Ubuntu phone that is no more. But the history goes back further than that - back to Ubuntu's App Review Board and (deb based) third party app packaging system, which failed for exactly the reason that deb is an unsuitable packaging format for third party apps.

If you look at the history of Flatpaks, you'll find that their initial release was at a similar time to snaps. But given that they don't solve a bunch of problems that snaps do, what was/is Canonical supposed to do? Ditch snaps entirely and drop their IoT support? Integrate IoT support into Flatpaks? Do Flatpak upstream even want that? Look at the history of Canonical wanting to ehnance GNOME, and the history of how Unity began, to see how that doesn't seem like it would be a practical way of delivering functionality to users in a reasonable period of time.

Consider that it is Ubuntu that is at the centre of this third party app packaging problem. It's Ubuntu that everybody targets first with their third party debs. For the same underlying reason, it's Ubuntu that gets more user support requests because of bad third party debs than every other distribution. It makes sense that Ubuntu developers are best placed to understand the problem and develop a solution.

So yes, we've ended up with two parallel contenders. But I don't think it's reasonable for Canonical to have done anything differently in regard to Flatpak. It appeared at the same time while Canonical had already been working away at the problem for years, doesn't solve or even try to solve all the problems that snaps are designed to solve, and those problems appear to be out of the scope of Flatpak anyway. As much as critics frame them as like-for-like options that Canonical could just decide to switch over, they simply aren't and thus "simply switching" doesn't even make sense.

As for "another one already exists", that statement could just as well apply the other way round: look at the timelines!

What would you consider a "real production-ready environment" for the desktop?

I don't know if I'm just lucky, but my last 4 HP computers (3 laptops and a desktop) have all worked perfectly on Linux since day 1, whereas Windows has been a complete shitshow, having to wait as long as 1 year for some peripherals to be supported. In one case, I didn't care, since it was the webcam, which I never use. In the other, it was a PITA since it was something graphics-driver related, and I couldn't reliably use an external 4k screen without doing a plug-unplug-replug-just-right circus. Sleep is hit-and-miss, with one laptop being almost guaranteed to wake up and crash at night while left asleep. The desktop PC still has unreliable thunderbolt support.

Then there's the UI that lags like no tomorrow, the windows jumping around when switching virtual desktops, new browser windows never showing up where you expect them, windows seemingly in the foreground not getting input, inconsistent input field behavior, etc. Oh, and half the dialogs are still from the windows 95 era, so it's not even "prettier" or more "cohesive" than my i3 / gnome frankendesktop. Also, the start menu search, aside from being slow, has a good probability of not finding the app I'm looking for.

The way you've framed it? Yes.

The choices aren't some purist notion of "secure" versus "not secure".

Security is a spectrum of practical choices informed by threat models, and it's only one (certainly important!) aspect of the complex choice of selecting an operating system.

For example, I would absolutely advise my mother in law to write complex passwords on sticky notes. She's far more likely to fall victim to credential stuffing than to have her apartment broken into and her passwords stolen, and I accept that trying to get her to use a password manager would certainly fail and she'd just fall back on reusing simple passwords.

A security purist who thinks in terms of "secure" or "not secure" would scoff that this. Writing down passwords! That cannot be done!

But given the threat model and an acceptance of expected user behavior, it's a perfectly valid choice.

If I'm running a Linux desktop, I've already made a more secure choice by getting out of the firing line of typical untargeted malware.

With some additional basic security hygiene, the greatest threats are a) phishing/social engineering, for which zero days aren't the primary concern, or b) targeted attacks where clearly they are.

As I'm not a target of interest, I'm not too terribly worried about the latter. As for the former, distro choice doesn't make much of a difference.

So yeah, given that threat model, I'm comfortable waiting the few days it takes for security fixes to trickle down from sid to testing. And if I really cared, I'd follow the guidance mentioned in one of the links you posted, and just pull patches down from sid on an as-needed basis.

Switching to a completely different distro, by contrast, would be a ridiculous overreaction give the context and associated trade-offs.

Ubuntu died for me when I upgraded to a new LTS and they replaced my deb firefox install with a snap version that used some non-standard mouse cursor.... Only in firefox. It apparently took them ~2 weeks to fix it, but in that time I rage-wiped by ubuntu install and switched to linux mint, which I also regret, but is snap free.

Ok, so ubuntu is going south, but redhat is stopping to support rhel, will this affect fedora?

I use ubuntu on personal and servers and fedora for work,so picture me concerned.

I need a better distro for sure, because ubuntu lands with unattended upgrades enabled, which causes the server setup from my scripts to be unpredictable (sometimes is doing updates when booted the first time, but not always. Sometimes is also very fast). Recommendations for server distros that require minimal setup? I have only small applications running

Then, I was already thinking of moving to fedora on personal too, with KDE, but I am now concerned.

Any recommendations for personal desktop usage? I'd like low maintenance distros, so I'm not interested in massively recompiling things. And I have nvidia, which is why I chose ubuntu with kde and fedora where I would like to switch to kde. Gnome plugin policy is so bad that I don't upgrade fedora because of them