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Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri)

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Re: Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri)

#71
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an alternative source for non-snap Firefox? snapd is the first thing I nuke on fresh installs. I would like to stay with Ubuntu, if possible.

You can also use the Flatpak version: https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.mozilla.firefox

When installing distro, I usually remove some included packages and install newest Firefox, LibreOffice, Gimp, Inkscape etc from Flatpak, because Flatpak has newest versions. Many packages do not update .deb anymore, they have moved to Flatpak.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri)

#72
post #26
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's pros and cons. It helps developers because they aren't restricted to the distro's shipped library versions, they can build against what they need. It also confines the app to a sandbox. The downsides are that the packages end up larger because they ship with all of the necessary bundled libraries (which can also increase memory usage of the application because it can't share the libraries loaded in RAM by the…

Also I think snap is an Ubuntu thing vs flatpak and appimage which are more distro agnostic. That's my issue with it/Ubuntu. They are doing good things, but at the same time I don't feel they are as "open" as other linux distros. Also, snapd is installed by default on their servers and it's not as to remove as it should be. This is one of the reason that I will always choose a different distro if I have the choice.

Snap is available for many distros https://snapcraft.io/docs/installing-snapd

It's great Canonical pays all the huge costs of Snap servers and bandwidth. I could not afford to host all that myself.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri)

#73
post #8
post #6

And Firefox is a snap package now; the .deb will go away next release. Canonical finally managed to make me switch back to Debian.

Is there an alternative source for non-snap Firefox? snapd is the first thing I nuke on fresh installs. I would like to stay with Ubuntu, if possible.

[deleted]

Re: Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri)

#74
post #52

Canonical has been doing some great work with Ubuntu. Though now I wonder if the desktop Linux is dead. With WSL rapidly improving with each release, how many devs really want to deal with the configuration of a Linux system?

Obviously, if a developer sees it as "deal with the configuration" then no, go with macOS, Windows or any other zero-config operating systems. But many see that part as a feature, not something to "deal with", and for those Linux is rescue in a sea of the infantilization Apple and Microsoft engage with.

Oh, I really wish macOS and Windows were more zero-config.

On Linux, I can install many dev tools at once. It's easiest to dev on Linux. Harder on Windows. Hardest on macOS. Yes, I did spend many hours debugging macOS to show local website at work.

macOS and Windows shows all kinds of extra confirmation questions if I try to run executeable I compiled.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri)

#75
post #14
post #6

And Firefox is a snap package now; the .deb will go away next release. Canonical finally managed to make me switch back to Debian.

As someone whose only experience with linux is servers and Raspberry Pi, can you tell me what's wrong with snaps? I've only used them on a self-hosted NextCloud and my experience with them has been decent, but I see a lot of dislike for them on HN.

My complaints (not looked real recently though):

Snaps are Ubuntu specific and the server side/repo is closed source.

Snaps pollute the df/mount points with per snap lines.

They rolled out in a LTS release with minimal testing. Caused quite a few problems like not being able to boot as multiple snaps drained /dev/random (instead of /dev/urandom) and waited on more entropy, which was god awful slow since the boot hadn't finished.

There was no automatic cleanup of older snaps.

Generally it just seemed like a silly proprietary setup that Canocial tried to claim had wide industry support, despite not having that support. I'm not against the ideas, but why not docker? Flatpak? AppImages?

Re: Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri)

#76
post #52

Canonical has been doing some great work with Ubuntu. Though now I wonder if the desktop Linux is dead. With WSL rapidly improving with each release, how many devs really want to deal with the configuration of a Linux system?

I will sooner give up computers forever than be either locked into a linux VM on Windows, or locked into expensive hardware with the other one

When was the last time you used WSL? Also, what's your dev tool chain?

Re: Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri)

#77
post #63
post #52

Canonical has been doing some great work with Ubuntu. Though now I wonder if the desktop Linux is dead. With WSL rapidly improving with each release, how many devs really want to deal with the configuration of a Linux system?

I think the linux marketshare among devs is still increasing, even with WSL available. WSL is in fact one of Microsoft's attempts to lure back developers to their OS, or never make them switch. For some folks, like you, this might actually work. But they've lost me as a user since more than a decade and I doubt I'll come back out of my own volition. Even with WSL, Windows is full of bloat, slowness, and I am fully ex…

Maybe, I'm a minority on HN, but I want my OS to be as transparent as possible while I do my work. Each time I login, I don't want to be greeted with Audio doesn't work, or your email client broke because Outlook Server changed something. My hunch is low code or no code users are also similar, if someone uses Python for some data wrangling tasks, they don't want to deal with a full fledged Linux installation.

My developer tool chain generally involves writing backend services. I made a toy project using WSL and VSCode's remote extension and the experience was almost seamless. I was able to get Docker to work, installed GoLang, built my services, use the terminal to push code.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri)

#78
post #72
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also I think snap is an Ubuntu thing vs flatpak and appimage which are more distro agnostic. That's my issue with it/Ubuntu. They are doing good things, but at the same time I don't feel they are as "open" as other linux distros. Also, snapd is installed by default on their servers and it's not as to remove as it should be. This is one of the reason that I will always choose a different distro if I have the choice.

Snap is available for many distros https://snapcraft.io/docs/installing-snapd It's great Canonical pays all the huge costs of Snap servers and bandwidth. I could not afford to host all that myself.

Does its sandbox work yet on distros that don't use apparmor? Last time I checked, snap apps were essentially unconfined on Fedora, and sandboxing is one of snap's most important selling points.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri)

#79
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Background daemon that takes up CPU, proprietary store, slow startup, and automatic updates in the background. Flatpak is much better if you need some sort of sandboxing, or updates outside what your distro can provide.

Automatic updates are great, when I release security fixes like new Node.js version to Wekan https://wekan.github.io . It has worked well for me for many years. Update install is very fast, with very small downtime, automatic database schema upgrades, etc. Sandboxing is great, code can not write outside of app's own writeable directory. Does Flatpak have any kind of automatic update ability? Or is there any automatic…

Automatic updates are great until they kill your running app [1]. Flatpaks can be updated automatically through gnome-software or a cron job, but the user can decide whether to enable automatic updates. Snaps will forcibly update after 60 days even on metered connections.

[1] https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...

Re: Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri)

#80
post #75
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone whose only experience with linux is servers and Raspberry Pi, can you tell me what's wrong with snaps? I've only used them on a self-hosted NextCloud and my experience with them has been decent, but I see a lot of dislike for them on HN.

My complaints (not looked real recently though): Snaps are Ubuntu specific and the server side/repo is closed source. Snaps pollute the df/mount points with per snap lines. They rolled out in a LTS release with minimal testing. Caused quite a few problems like not being able to boot as multiple snaps drained /dev/random (instead of /dev/urandom) and waited on more entropy, which was god awful slow since the boot hadn…

> Snaps pollute the df/mount points with per snap lines.

My biggest complaint

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