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Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

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Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#441
post #238

Wow they're still pushing snaps, the project with some the worst engineering I've ever seen. - Extremely slow at doing anything, even the most basic commands. - Ridiculous auto-update mechanism (you can't even disable it wtf). - Random, nonsense limitations (why can't I open dot files and dot directories???). So terrible that for most apps that I installed with snaps I end up installing the deb version later on. What…

My favorite experience with snaps is Firefox just closing in the middle of doing something because it wanted to update, and it didn't even bother to check if I was using it first.

I specifically moved away from Windows to get away from automatic behavior like that.

When will these system designers realize that the system shouldn't do anything observable without me telling it to?

Imagine if a kitchen oven decided to perform a self-clean without any human interaction "because it hadn't performed one in awhile".

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me a noob if you like, but I don't like hunting down drivers. Tried to go to debian on my last dev machine upgrade, but reverted straight back to ubuntu. I may be lazy, but I really don't want to hunt down drivers. I'll try debian again next cycle.

I run Mint on my primary desktop and it's fantastic. What Ubuntu LTS would've become if it had continued to focus on a good desktop experience and pushed Flatpak instead of Snap

I came here to say this too.

Ironically I was about to set up a new Linux Dev machine with Ubuntu and now I'm more inclined to go back to Mint since I never had a bad experience with it. I was fortunate to skip the Gnome 3 days and the Cinnamon and Xfce implementations have been very stable for a while now.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#443
post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never had the infamous 'Arch updates are unreliable' issue. Is it certain packages that are more prone to it, or something? Liferea is currently broken as of the latest update 5 days ago due to https://github.com/lwindolf/liferea/issues/1217 I also suffered from the grub issue mentioned here elsewhere, had to rescue my laptop after it became unbootable (though it was very simple to Google the problem and to fi…

Those are all upstream bugs, not Arch's. That's the trade off when you're running bleeding edge, but you can't blame Archlinux for packaging a buggy application.

I'm no really blaming anyone, I'm thankful for Arch, I love it, and I recommend it to other people who ask (well, at least those that can handle it :)).

> Those are all upstream bugs, not Arch's.

IIRC the grub issue was in the update script, so it may have been an Arch bug rather than an upstream bug?

Still, it would also be nice if a package is known to be broken due to an upstream bug it would get rolled back, so once the breakage is known, no one else will update into a broken state. That would save some time over each person individually updating to a broken state, debugging for a bit and then downgrading the broken package and then also paying attention not to reupdate it each time they update the system until the problem is resolved.

But again, not trying to complain or assign blame, I was just responding to a question in a parent comment.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to pop OS (after a brief stint with an arch distro) and have never been happier.

Pop really is a very pleasant experience, and probably the best I've had on a personal computer. 3/4 of my immediate family run it on Thinkpads; the only hold-out is a Gentoo teenager wanting to be "weird".

Hey man, sometimes you want a distro where you can really muck about with the internals. I started with redhat 6.2 and then went to slackware until I cared more about being productive than learning internals. It's good to explore as a teen.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I was using endeavoros which was basically vanilla arch with an installer at the time. https://old.reddit.com/r/EndeavourOS/comments/wygfds/full_tr...

That was the event that got me to stop using "Basically" arch (Endeavour, arco, etc) and just use arch itself.

iirc this also happened in arch itself, the endeavor team just happened to have the better writeup on it.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if you don't mind hugely increased start-up times, RAM usage and less curation and more crap, sure no need for package distribution. I personally do mind very much. Just the differences in startup times between apt and snap applications are huge and I would absolutely despise working with such a sluggish system. I would rather build everything myself from source if forced to.

Not to mention it introduces a single point of failure, that once compromised can start pushing malware directly to user. With maintainers in the loop, there is at least one more person that can notice something is fishy. Not to mention there is usually so time before packages are updated, so there is more time to notice an attack.

> With maintainers in the loop, there is at least one more person that can notice something is fishy

Also one more person who can inject malware or break something. How did that Debian keygen issue happen again? Oh right.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible to get an apt package, you have to jump through a few hoops but it can be done; I do it every time I install Ubuntu (frequently) because I won't touch that snap shite again. I can't move work off of Ubuntu; it's too embedded now, but I'm looking for something else for home. Switching distro-base isn't so easy when you've been using it for decades though; I tried NixOS but it wasn't comfortable (Nix is…

> Looking for a way to get a modern debian (something akin to non-LTS Ubuntu) Not exactly sure what you mean by modern, but I'd recommend debian "unstable" (also called "sid"). Despite its name it's pretty stable. Normal debian stable releases are LTS style, unstable is where newly built packages show up first—so it will generally have the latest version of stuff and not be stuck a year or 2 back. It's basically a ro…

By modern I made access to fairly new packages.

I don't want things breaking left, right and centre but I want access to later versions of tools and libraries I'm using.

For example, at work we were told to upgrade Wireshark and VirtualBox to major versions that aren't available in apt on 22.04 after an audit due to vulnerabilities in older versions.

What you're doing sounds like it'll work nicely for me, thanks.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#448
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At which point was nodejs five years older than the distro it shipped on? Not being facetious, genuinely curious.

> At which point was nodejs five years older than the distro it shipped on? https://askubuntu.com/questions/1259840/why-an-old-nodejs-ve... Nodejs v4.x was "new" when Ubuntu 16.04 LTS came out. It was added to its apt repos, LTS releases are supported for 5+ years, and LTS policy is not to update major versions of software within a release. So while nodejs was pumping out new major versions every 6-months, people run…

That is very much missing the point. They were not "stuck", they explicitly asked to keep using that version and get support for it. Same reason Windows ltsc exists and is popular with such customers.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! How does the ZFS upgrade "stop" the package upgrade process, I wonder? Might be worth reporting a bug, maybe pacman can handle that kind of failure better, or maybe the ZFS package could be changed to fail more gracefully. I think the pacman devs would agree leaving the system in a partial-upgrade state is a bad thing to do.

It's not a bug, it's intended behavior. The official release of ZFS on Linux I believe only supports kernel 5.x. Since arch is always on the cutting edge, the repo maintainers need to manually test the driver with each new kernel release before pushing it out to the world. They stop you from borking your system in the interim by having a strict version requirement for Linux on the zfs package. Pacman only does that c…

Ohhh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, that is a tricky corner case :-/

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#450
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible to get an apt package, you have to jump through a few hoops but it can be done; I do it every time I install Ubuntu (frequently) because I won't touch that snap shite again. I can't move work off of Ubuntu; it's too embedded now, but I'm looking for something else for home. Switching distro-base isn't so easy when you've been using it for decades though; I tried NixOS but it wasn't comfortable (Nix is…

I moved from Ubuntu to Fedora when Canonical started pushing snaps 4 years after the auto update debacle that's also mentioned elsewhere here. Couldn't be happier. Key differences I noticed: - apt vs dnf - Intalling on a new computer. Would totally recommend.

I've used fedora, I have no real issues with it, but I'm not sure if it's going to work for me. At work we target Debian/Ubuntu and I lead the backend team so I need to be on-point; that means not having to mentally switch "environment" all the time because I use something else at home.

Still undecided though; I'm too old (read; jaded) for distro hopping now, but maybe I'll try find a Debian setup as another commenter suggested that'll work.

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