Long story short, I have a desktop with Fedora, lovely, fast, sleek and surprisingly reliable for a near rolling distro (it failed me only once back around Fedora 34 or something where it nuked Grub). Tried to install on a 2012 i7 MacBook Air… what a slog!!! Surprisingly Ubuntu runs very smooth on it. I have been bothering all my friends for years about moving to Fedora (back then it was because I hated Unity) but now… I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but… Christ, it does run well! In fairness all my VMs are running DietPi (a slimmed version of Ubuntu) and coming back to the APT world feels like coming back home.
On the other end forcing myself to be on Fedora allows me to stay on the DNF world that is compatible with Amazon Linux etc (which I use for work), it has updated packages, it is nice and clean…. Argh, don’t know how to decide!
Thoughts?
I am not in the mood for Debian. I like the Mint approach but I am not a fan of slow rolling releases and also would like to keep myself as close as upstream as possible, the Debian version is the only one that seems reliable enough but, again, it is Debian, the packages are “old”. Pop Os and similar are two hops away from upstream and so I’d rather not.
Is Snap really that bad?
Edit: thank you all for sharing your experience !
I avoid Ubuntu because Canonical has a history of going their own way alone rather than collaborating on universal standards. For instance, when the X devs decided the successor to X11 needed to be a complete redesign from scratch companies like RedHat, Collabora, Intel, Google, Samsung, and more collaborated to build Wayland. However, Canonical announced Mir, and they went their own way alone.
When Gnome3 came out it was very controversial and this spawned alternatives such as Cinnamin, MATE, and Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. Unity was the only Linux desktop, before or since, to include sponsored bloatware apps installed by default, and it also sold user search history to advertisers.
Then, there’s snap. While Flatpak matured and becoame the defacto standard distro-agnostic package system, Canonical once again went their own way alone by creating snap.
I’m not an expert on Ubuntu or the Linux community, I’ve just been around long enough to see Canonical stir up controversy over and over by going left when everyone else goes right, failing after a few years, and wasting thousands of worker hours in the process.
You’re not wrong, but there’s also value in exploring different ways to do similar things. That’s what’s great about Linux.
Some of Canonical’s efforts may lead to failure, but that doesn’t mean they are a waste.
One thing is to explore different ways to do things, like many projects do, but ubuntu goes further and FORCES people to use their experiments, as if they’re some sort of testing ground, not as if they’re the most used family of linux distros and the one a lot of people rely on.
Edit: Sorry if my tone was excessive, I think I’m getting grumpy with age.
Haha, I get it. No offense taken.
I don’t disagree. But for better or worse, most people don’t think that much about their software.
Folks like us who do? We can make informed decisions.
Folks who don’t? Canonical’s experiments are probably still better than dealing with Windows 11 or macOS.
Like snaps. They are different then flatpaks. You can use them for cli apps don’t think flatpaks can be.
Flatpaks can also be used to run CLI programs, but it requires using
flatpak run <package.name>instead of using the apps standard CLI command. But you can create an alias and should work mostly the same way.For example, I have neovim on my Debian laptop via flatpak. So in order to run it, you have to do
flatpak run io.neovim.nvimYou can create an alias for that command
alias nvim='flatpak run io.neovim.nvim'And then you can use the nvim command as normal
Pretty much this, they don’t deserve hate but i won’t recommend them either
To give credit where it’s due: Mir was pretty neat, actually. It had features that modern Wayland still lacks or has only recently gained. Ubuntu got an X replacement up and running in record time, but the rest of the ecosystem stuck with Wayland, so they cancelled their solution.
And you know what? Snap does solve some issues in interesting ways that Flatpak doesn’t. Unfortunately, the experience using Snap is rather inferior (and that goddamn lowercase snap folder in my home directory isn’t helping), but on a technical level I’m inclined to give this one to Snap.
Developing and maintaining Ubuntu costs money and unlike Red Hat, Canonical isn’t selling many support contracts. Their stupid Amazon scope and the focus on Snap are part of that, they just want to give businesses a reason to pay Canonical.
They’re trying very hard, but it just doesn’t seem to take off. Their latest move, pushing Ubuntu Pro to everyone, seems like a rather desperate move. I think Ubuntu is collapsing and I think Canonical doesn’t know how to stop it. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never paid for an Ubuntu license and I don’t know anyone who does, either.
People dont hate on ubuntu cause its inherently bad. They hate on it because its a corporate distro and they do some questionable stuff sometimes. The OS runs fine.
Why not debian unstable? Its better than ubuntu in pretty much every way imo. Somewhat less user friendly i guess.
Is Debian unstable really unstable or is just like… Ubuntu?
Debian unstable is not really unstable, but it’s also not as stable as Ubuntu. I’m told that when bugs appear they are fixed fast.
I ran Debian testing for years. That is a rolling release where package updates are a few weeks behind unstable. The delay gives unstable users time to hit bugs before they get into testing.
When I wanted certain packages to be really up-to-date I would pin those select packages to unstable or to experimental. But I never tried running full unstable myself so I didn’t get the experience to know whether that would be less trouble overall.
It’s unstable in the sense that it doesn’t stay the same for a long time. Stable is the release that will essentially stay the same until you install a different release.
Sid is the kid next door (Iirc) from Toy Story who would melt and mutilate toys for fun. He may have been a different kind of unstable.
Neither is unstable like an old windows pc.
Unstable is pretty damn stable, feels arch-y to me, and arch rarely has issues. If there are issues they’re fixed fast.
Testing is the middle ground. Tested for a bit by unstable peeps but thats it.Testing is the middle ground. Tested for a bit by unstable peeps but thats it.
IIRC packages have to be in unstable with no major bugs for 10 days before migrating to testing. It’s a good middle ground IMO.
Of course, you could always run unstable and be the one to report the bugs :)
It’s not actually unstable, more accurately it’s tested and verified as much as Debian stable, meaning it’s fine for desktop use but I wouldn’t use it for a server or critical system I plan on running 24/7 without interruption, both since it may have bugs that develop after long term use and gets more frequent updates which will be missed and render it out of date quickly if it’s running constantly.
It’s relatively alright for something that’s called unstable. There is also testing which is tested for at least 10 days. And you can mix and match, but that’s not recommended either.
I wouldn’t put it on my server. And I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who isn’t okay with fixing the occasional hiccup. But I’ve been using it for years and I like it.
However, mind that it’s not supported and they do not pay attention to security fixes.
I used to run Debian testing on my servers. These days I don’t have much free time to mess with them, so they’re all running the stable release with unattended-upgrades.
However, mind that it’s not supported and they do not pay attention to security fixes.
To be clear, it can still get security updates, but it’s the package maintainer’s responsibility to upload them. Some maintainers are very responsive while others take a while. On the other hand, Debian stable has a security team that quickly uploads patches to all officially supported packages (just the “main” repo, not contrib, non-free, or non-free-firmware).
Thanks for clarifying. Yeah I implied that but didn’t explain all the nuances. I’ve been scolded before for advertising the use of Debian testing. I’m quite happy with it. But since I’m not running any cutting edge things on my server and Docker etc have become quite stable… I don’t see any need to put testing on the server. I also use stable there and embrace the security fixes and stability / low maintenance. I however run testing/unstable on my laptop.
Use MX Linux instead, I will never go back to something else
What are the advantages in your opinion?
It’s a dumping ground for new packages. Nobody makes any guarantees about it. It’s supposed to be used only as a staging area by developers.
It may happen to work when you install it or it may crash constantly. You don’t know.
Side question on this, why are people suggesting Debian, a stable but “old” distro, but never mention RHEL / Rocky? They are on par with stability (and quite possibly RHEL wins on it). Did you know that you can get a free licence if you register as a developer?
If we pretend the issue is just the corporate aspects of Ubuntu/Canonical, Red Hat and RHEL have all of those and then some. People just try not to think about that because Fedora is so nice.
As for Rocky: The status of that is pretty much in massive flux since Redhat bounce between tolerating it and wanting it to be even deader than CentOS depending on the day.
The thing is R Hell can’t legally block rocky from using their source, unless they break GPL or stop publishing their images to iron bank.
Are we really back to the 00s? Are we going to start calling it Micro$hill next?
And “Legally it can’t be stopped” doesn’t really bode well for long term support in the context of contributors and so forth. It won’t prevent me from using Rocky (I actually really like it for servers I will likely re-image sooner than later) but it also means I am not going to recommend it to people looking for a distro.
When looking at the 8.x and 9.x releases Rocky is the most popular distro for enterprise Linux. Even more popular than R hell, and yes I’m still bitter about what they did to centos.
Technically they have to give the code to people who use their product. And the general public is not it. Except I guess the free license one would be problematic. Unless their is something in the license for your use.
You do not have to sign a licensing aggreement when you pull the image from Iron Bank, or spin up cloud VMs. In both of those cases you will get access to their source.
As the other reply said, Fedora and RHEL harbor the same problem as Ubuntu in terms of corporate backing.
They’re all as stable at it gets when it comes to linux distros; all those “server distributions”.I guess people recommend debian because that’s what they know. It’s got the biggest community, so the most support.
Nothing against Rocky, but i wont recommend it if i’ve never used it.
Doesn’t Debian still ship with X11 by default? For my desktop use, I can’t go back from wayland.
Havent installed debian with a desktop environment in a long time. If its still default then its just that, default… meaning you could change it
I prefer software with defaults that are in line with my preferences. I rather have sensible defaults and a nice OOTB experience, instead of fighting my distro and it’s packages.
Thats fair. I’ve jumped that ship a while back.
I checked and they seem to use wayland by default on gnome at least
Don’t think so. I mean it has X11 but I’m running Wayland can’t remember if it was installed by default though.
Snap has a locked and proprietary store, even if the client is FOSS. There is no reason to “hate” Ubuntu but there are better choices.
There is no reason to “hate” Ubuntu but there are better choices.
What are those better choices then (for those who currently use the non-LTS Ubuntu releases and don’t want to move to rolling releases or LTS-only releases)?
You pretty much described Fedora. Non-LTS stable 6-month release cycle with 1 year of support for each release.
Never touching Fedora again. It’s a corporate distribution. As much as people might say otherwise redhat has a lot of pull over it. Look at the lawyers getting involved over pulling out the codecs.
Your loss, it’s a great distribution and if you spent even a couple of minutes in our forums you’d see that the RedHat pull is due to them actually collaborating and being and active part in the community.
I was an Ubuntu person for a long time, and when reading criticism about the inability to upgrade versions, I realized that had been my entire experience. I decided to give a rolling release a chance, and it’s been amazing.
I use arch(installer)btw. 🐧 AURs are pretty ingenuous, which is just pulling and compiling a git. Maybe a little less secure, but look at what happened to the snap store this year.
If you want to try a rolling release but didn’t want to use Arch, there’s always Fedora, & OpenSuSE Tumbleweed.
Outside of that, for non Ubuntu distros you could do OpenSuSE regular, or for true LTS use Rocky. Or take the red pill and go with Hannah Montana’s Linux.
It’s pitched as a open source operation system, yet the snap store is closed source and vendor locked, one of the reasons some of us use Liniux is because we prefer open source (and there are rational justifications for that).
Hate is a strong word, but there is legitimate criticism, I also think the closed source nature of snap led to the fact that it has no volunteers and that eventually caused malware to appear on the snap store multiple time, it never happened on flathub as far as i know.
Today for beginner i think opensuse and linux mint are better.
Regarding debian having old packages , i use nix but it is fairly immature, flathub should also work.
Snaps are centralised packaging, a’la Apple App Store or Google Play. Now if someone forked snapd, added third party repo and made It so you could select which repo is the main one, that’d be a start.
But as long as Canonical commits to a centralised form of distribution with no third party support I’m going to advise desktop users to stay away from Ubuntu.
It’s more than just centralized control.
They have the ability to arbitrarily push out Snap updates.
That’s right! Your production server is getting patched without your knowledge or consent. Thankfully they magnanimously decided to let admins delay it by a few weeks.
Linux is about control. I decide what my machine does. When it updates. What it updates. The feedback from Canonical regarding Snaps was so tone dead and condescending it made Steve Balmer look sane. It boiled down to, don’t worry your pretty little head off. We know what’s best.
They have the ability to arbitrarily push out Snap updates.
That’s right! Your production server is getting patched without your knowledge or consent.
What deranged donkey is using snaps for infra?
If you run Ubuntu on a production server, you better having snapd disabled.
I wouldn’t call it hate, more like disapprobation with Canonical’s choices. No one have to use Ubuntu, we have tons of distro to choose. If someone wants LTS, you can always go pure Debian way, it’s not hard to install as it’s used to be (for beginners), or there is Linux Mint Debian Edition. You can easily use flatpaks with these and keep your software up-to-date.
disapprobation
TIL a new word. Thanks, stranger! 🙂
They’ve embraced Wayland, pipewire, gnome and what not, but snap is really questionable, particularly in the Linux ecosystem.
I gather it can be somewhat annoying to contend with (I.e. some apps on Ubuntu may only be available as snaps?)
Snap is a steaming pile of excrement. So much of the crap on the Snap Store is obsolete and out of date. Anyone and their monkey can post a snap on snapcraft, and… they do. Canonical is just as bad. They took it upon themselves to package up a lot of commercial-level open-source software 3 or 4 years ago… and then have done fuck all with it ever since. Zero updates to the original snaps they put there in the initial population of the Snap store (yes they do maintain a select few things, but only a small percentage of the flood of obsolete software in the Snap store). The result is people looking to install apps who poke the Snap store, go “oh hey, the application I want is there”, install it, and then get all pissy with the vendor… who looks about in surprise wondering how a potential customer managed to find such an old version (happened with at least 2 of my employers, and I’ve come across many more). Go search Reddit (or Google) for obsolete snap discussions. There’s no shortage people pointing at the same issue.
I wasn’t aware of this situation, that’s really good to know.
I’m not keen on the snaps being centralised behind a proprietary server. I don’t really get why anyone would put up with that in light of Flatpak.
This doesn’t seem to be a problem with snap. Canonical probably tried to show vendors a way how to distribute software commercially. But vendors are on the level of cavemen and don’t know shit about Linux even after serving a solution. Or they simply don’t care about building up a market opportunity.
I don’t want to defend Ubuntu. I don’t like Ubuntu especially, but it might be a simple explanation.
It’s a problem with Canonical. They stepped up and created the snaps and then abandoned them instead of maintaining them. They still maintain the core that they include with the distro… it’s all the extras they created to pad out the store… and then abandoned. “Look the snap store has so many packages”… yeah… no… it doesn’t.
Why would a company who makes a commercial level open source package want to add snaps to their already broad Linux offering? They typically already build RPM (covering RHEL, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, etc.) and DEB (covering Debian, Ubuntu, all Ubuntu derivatives, etc.)… and have a tar.gz to cover anything they missed. Why should they add the special snowflake snap just to cover Ubuntu which is already well covered by the DEB hey already make?
Sure, show vendors what’s possible, but if Canonical stepped up to make the snaps, then they should still be maintaining them. It’s not a business opportunity… its more bullshit from Canonical that no one wants.
I gave up on Ubuntu before the snaps became a thing. Here’s what I hated :
- ugly purple and orange theme
- Upgrades between lts never worked right for me: 14->16 fail and broke, 16->18 lots of problems, 18->20 still not great.
Upgrading between Ubuntu lts releases never fully worked for me either. Something always broke or went wrong…
I also used it and dropped it years ago because it tended to break a lot in updates.
That, their poor kde support, their constant reinventing the wheel (poorly) drove me away.
Now I run opensuse as a rolling distro that’s always up to date and just never breaks even when there are 6000 packages to update. It’s boring and safe.
I also have had trouble during upgrades in the past.
I’ll have to disagree about the purple and orange theme though. I’m personally a big fan.
Use whatever you want, why do you care about what feelings other people have towards Ubuntu?
Validation
Is Ubuntu deserving the hate?
Yes.
Debian version is the only one that seems reliable enough but, again, it is Debian, the packages are “old”.
Install Debian, then install all the software you might need using Flatpak. There you go, solid and stable OS with the latest of with little to no effort. Bonus extra security.
or, you know, use testing or sid. Or just stop lamenting for old packages and just enjoy stability while making something productive :)
Or just stop lamenting for old packages and just enjoy stability while making something productive
I’m not the one lamenting old packages, I run on stable perfectly happy. No issues there.
Ubuntu is a tough one. I don’t like it. I don’t like snaps, but more than that I don’t like their direction in general.
But I have some respect for them too. I think they played a pretty significant role in Linux being as popular (relatively speaking) as it is, and I don’t feel like they have any ill intent.
So I don’t personally care for it but I’m glad it’s around I guess is my point?
It’s because Ubuntu is a company-backed distro consistently wants to go their own way. Not just snap but they’ve done it before with Unity and Mir (and probably others idk).
Course Fedora does literally the same thing and doesn’t get any hate for it so idk. It’s just a meme.
Personally I don’t like Ubuntu because they didnt go far enough into their own ways but thats just me.
Course Fedora does literally the same thing and doesn’t get any hate for it so idk. It’s just a meme.
When have fedora gone their own way ¿? What have they shipped that is not standard on Linux¿? Closest thing I can think is using selinux and firewalld instead of Apparmour and ufw.
Well they also effectively control development of gnome. Not the exact same way Ubuntu did unity but still comparable.
Going for Wayland default is also another example (I can think of).
Fedora devs do listen to their users, tho.
I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but…
There is no “supposed to” when it comes to distro preferences. Use whatever you like, other people’s opinions do not dictate your behavior. If Ubuntu works for you, use that. If anything, that’s the freedom of FOSS. You can take other people’s views in to account when choosing a distro, but in the end it is your decision. I dislike Ubuntu for a few reasons, but I don’t get to dictate to anyone else what they use and why.
If you like rolling release, you could try Debian sid/unstable. I hear it’s quite stable and reliable and, of course, isn’t Ubuntu.
Dietpie is a lightweight debian not ubuntu. And debian is still one of the top choices (if not the) for servers.
Ubuntu is just debian with extra bad decisions.
Ubuntu attacted a lot of control freaks because Shuttleworth was originally splashing some money when it started and a bunch of nerds saw dollar signs. As a result they have a culture of “not invented here” syndrome where someone just has to reinvent the wheel in only the way they see it and they don’t work well with others or accept their input because they want all the credit.
Personally, I got sick of it having been pretty involved early on in the project. It’s easier and saner to just use a distro based on what everyone else is doing.
