Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently) • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by fsflover » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 10:11 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #18

jcastro wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tas…

> the Linux world and I have diverged too much and I need to move on

I moved to Qubes OS and like it.

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

#22

Post by JohnFen » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 10:12 PM UTC

bithaze wrote: post #17

JohnFen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian remains OK (I use it on all of my machines), but worrying signs have been growing there as well.

> worrying signs have been growing there as well Care to elaborate?

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.

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

#23

Post by WhyNotHugo » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 10:13 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #18

jcastro wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tas…

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.

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

#24

Post by synergy20 » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 10:14 PM UTC

srvmshr wrote: post #5

Often, great engineering products start out crisp and clean until the product manager, sales and marketing guys, growth managers and evangelists step in and start adding antipatterns. I am not surprised Ubuntu did it. I am surprised they did it so late. They were slow-cooking this for the last 5 years. And for anyone unwilling to see it: Ubuntu wasn't about building a solid engineering product like RHEL, Debian or Sl…

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.

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

#25

Post by amelius » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 10:15 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #18

jcastro wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tas…

It's a quite powerful idea to run every package in its own container (sandbox).

However, it depends on the implementation and Snap just sucks.

(Note that the default Unix assumption is that no users can be trusted but all applications can be trusted, which is wrong imho. Containers provide a way out of this, but things get messy very fast.).

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

#26

Post by jeroenhd » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 10:16 PM UTC

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?

Canonical sells access to the snap store. It's part of their Ubuntu IoT strategy.

Uploading public applications is free. Uploading proprietary software is a business model.

It also pretty much locks Ubuntu users in, because no other project uses snaps, so if an app chooses snap for their distribution method (certbot, for example) it suddenly becomes a lot easier to just download Ubuntu than it is to install Snap for a foreign platform.

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

#27

Post by jcastro » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 10:21 PM UTC

srcthr wrote: post #19

jcastro wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The packaging format doesn't change source code availability or restrictions.

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

#28

Post by xdennis » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 10:21 PM UTC

whalesalad wrote: post #3

retrocryptid wrote: post #2

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.

Or come to Ubuntu without the nonsense: Linux Mint.

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

#29

Post by layer8 » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 10:23 PM UTC

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.

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

#30

Post by simion314 » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 10:24 PM UTC

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?

> since pretty much everyone I know would rather a deb file (myself included).

Not me, for programs that are not from the repos I do not like debs.

I needed to install dubious apps like Skype,Slack, Some Pdf Editor etc. With deb I would give them root , so I either find an app image or snap, or try to unpack the deb file and attempt to run the binaries without root.

I also installed one a server some CLI snaps, they did their job and I did not had to build them from source.

I agree from things that are in the repo I prefer the debs 99% of the time.