Live data from Hacker News

Ubuntu 21.10

ubuntu.com

161–170 of 295 posts

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a 'chromium is not a priority because google' ? Or maybe lack of resources and the maintainer needs help.

Probably google. Chromium has made the decision to bundle all their dependencies instead of play nice with system libraries. Which means you either need to re-roll all of chromium when something is found, or you need to undo google's efforts. I don't blame distributions for refusing to give chromium poor support - it is intentionally not playing nice.

Is that the case for all distros? For Arch I see only libEGL/libGLESv2 are bundled, every other library is an external dependancy: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/chromium/

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#162
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the problem is that third party apt repositories have become normalised as if they're a reasonable way to "add on" to your existing system. In reality they're a hack on a packaging system that was never designed for third party plugability in this way. They very often break future upgrades. Third party apt repositories fundamentally cannot express all the necessary metadata to allow for upgrades to wo…

So, what should I do if you don't decide to include critical release of a package that was out there for 6 months? https://github.com/swaywm/sway/releases

Here's some further information on sway specifically. Looks like it couldn't be updated because depending packages weren't ready for the switch: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/phoc/+bug/1938404

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#163

I loved Ubuntu around 2007-2009 or so. Nowdays it feels like there are plenty of alternative distros that "just work" without so many of the idiosyncratic stuff canonical keeps dumping into what used to be "debian for the masses" > As Linux evangelist Mark Pilgrim once quipped, Ubuntu "is an ancient African word meaning 'can't install Debian'". https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/16/debian_lenny_review/

Assuming I don't really give a crap about what mechanism is used to update Firefox, and just want a browser that works, what am I missing out on by sticking with Ubuntu?

It's always been my OS of choice because I don't really care about my OS. Is there another distro that is similarly easy for me to get up and running With current versions of Firefox, chrome, vscode, and docker, and on whatever random hardware I happen to have available?

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#164
post #48
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had been with Ubuntu for so long but some problems with snaps finally drove me away from it. For now, I'm using Mint due to familiarity without snaps but flirted with "user friendly" Arch derivatives (had problems with both) and NixOS (got tired of specializing in a programming language just to use my OS and ran into some problems I couldn't find a solution to.)

I had no issues with snaps. If anything, I wish more userspace software is provided via snap packages.

The problem with snap is not the software selection, but how obnoxious it is on the system.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get annoyed when I see posts like this with revisionist history. I can't comment on everything but: > Unity (abandoned) You probably don't recall how bad Gnome 3 was initially, and how much better Unity was over Gnome 2. Sure it also had its issues in the beginning, but it took a really long time for Gnome 3 to catch up. > snap (flatpak, done differently, not yet abandoned :). I am pretty sure flatpak didn't exist…

> You probably don't recall how bad Gnome 3 was initially I do, and I have never seen its face again since then and the huge upsetting of ruining what worked well, and to create something perverse. And unless it was fixed very recently, it still is, because I just tried `gnome-font-viewer` and there are fades in the interface that cannot seem to be disabled. Unjustifiable. Not just the desktop manager: the paradigm.…

> I am still wondering what caused that stroke of lunacy - at the time

Power users have privilege and need to be hobbled; their complaints ignored. The needs of users with the least privilege, the computer illiterate, should be prioritized.

Or something like that.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#166
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't expect nothing less than being blamed by Ubuntu developers for a hacked up system, even though I barely described anything. Thanks for giving me another reason to leave the Ubuntu ecosystem behind me. The condescending tone that your message has seems to be relatively popular in the Ubuntu/Canonical community as well, at least compared to NixOS.

Isn't the freedom of "hacking" your system one of the main reasons for using Linux to begin with?

You're free to "hack" it as much as you wish, but when you break it(if you don't know what you're doing) you get to keep all the pieces. And the blame.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#167

I loved Ubuntu around 2007-2009 or so. Nowdays it feels like there are plenty of alternative distros that "just work" without so many of the idiosyncratic stuff canonical keeps dumping into what used to be "debian for the masses" > As Linux evangelist Mark Pilgrim once quipped, Ubuntu "is an ancient African word meaning 'can't install Debian'". https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/16/debian_lenny_review/

I’ve seen that quote so many times used in forums and I find it annoyingly condescending. Actually I think that kind of attitudes are one of the worst things in the linux community in general. Anyways, I used to stupidly joke back saying that “Debian is a code word that means: no relevant contribution to the linux ecosystem for the last 15 years”.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#168
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like you have a really hacked up system there Some people would call this 'a system that's actually being used to do something'. Don't blame users unless it's clear they are doing something egregious with the system. Installing a different Python version shouldn't break installers, but here we are. Ubuntu should have taken a page from CoreOS, NixOS and even Arch. CoreOS with their immutable system partitions…

Obviously you put the effort into the Arch one to set up everything with Nix, and didn't do that in Ubuntu. A fairer comparison would be "a system that's actually being used to do something" in just Arch to Ubuntu or Nix on both. I'm not a heavy linux user but I know 3 guys who use Arch at work and one of them had an upgrade issue that caused them half a day to fix, this was circa 2016. I know plenty of people who us…

> And I don't know if arch has this by default?

What do you mean by default? :) Arch doesn't have an automated installer that does partitioning for you. You extract some files to whatever partitioning setup you've dreamed up for yourself, setup a bootloader and reboot.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian has a strange approach to security these days. There are over 100 unpatched vurnurabilities in their version of Chromium for example: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/release/s... Because of this, I don't see debian as an option for the Desktop anymore. I hope they still fix the server software in their repos.

How many of those vulnerabilities have patches available ?

From what I can tell, the problem with these packages is that the security fixes need to be backported into earlier versions of packages because upstream fixed them in major version releases.

Chromium 90 does not contain all security fixes found in Chromium 93 so there are tons of CVEs open on Debian systems still rocking Chromium 90.

Most packages have fixes available but Debian doesn't have the manpower to backport every single security fix for every single package. This is a result of the way their project is structured: they guarantee that no major software updates happen within Debian releases, helping you get a completely stable system, but that comes at the cost of an incredible amount of work for the Debian maintainers.

Debian chooses to modify or repackage upstream versions for compatibility or branding purposes (to the ire of many open source developers, like notably that guy that made XScreenSaver. I'd link to his rant about it, but his website shows some angry rant when HN is in the referer header...) That means that maintainers still need to do manual work even when upstream has already provided them with a fix for the latest version supported in Debian.

This is why I prefer to run packages from repositories maintained by the developers themselves rather than relying on Debian's maintainers. The risk of needing to update config or check for breaking changes is much higher, but the security risk and patch cycle length is much lower. Even for browsers that release actively-abused 0day patches it can take up to a day or longer for some distributions to update their packages.

Post reply on HN