51–60 of 112 posts
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> 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.
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…
That's an exaggeration. It's about as easy to install snap support for a non-Ubuntu as it is to install any other third party app on that platform. And the latter case is exactly what you're trying to achieve by trying to install a third party app on that platform in the first place, so by definition it can't be significantly harder than any alternative method.
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?
It’s a proprietary package management system (only the client part is open source, so it’s kinda MSFT-style open source). The obvious answer is: vendor lock in. Once Ubuntu is snap-only you won’t be able to host your own package repositories, since it’s their secret code.
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And honestly, for desktops, Debian testing is plenty stable IME and stays quite up to date. It's what I've run on my laptop for years with absolutely no issues.
How up to date is it? That might be attractive after years of Ubuntu. How is the proprietary driver support?
As for proprietary drivers, the non-free repos have traditionally carried everything I need.
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You say that like the "Linux desktop" is a monolith. What leads you to believe this is a widespread movement outside of RHEL and Canonical?
They're just catching up to Android, ChromeOS, and SteamOS. The market rejected traditional needs-a-sysadmin linuxes on client a long time ago.
And btw SteamOS is absolutely not a sandboxed environment. It just has a read-only OS filesystem so they can safely blow it away upon upgrade.
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.
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For server, Debian is the simpler and more stable solution.
FreeBSD is a great option on the server as well. Simple, stable, mature, and great documentation.
It's theoretically possible to use it in prod; I know that some companies (Netflix?) do it. But it's certainly not common and takes a lot of engineering resources to make it work.
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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--... .
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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--... .