25 ms·

Why we decided for and against Ubuntu Core

223 points by thefilmore 6y ago

xmichael99 6y ago
Devuan.
znpy 6y ago
Ubuntu is losing its shine as years go on. It once was a Debian that just worked, nowadays is some kind of a trap. As you start getting deeper you start to notice non-standard things that get in the way more than they should, besides being utterly non-standard. Things i noticed so far: - auto-update enabled by default. if I boot a vm it's going to be nearly unusable (can't install packages) because it's going to spend the first 30 minutes doing a full upgrade - netplan -- not sure why that's there - snaps. for everything. the last straw for me was realizing that gnome-calculator packaged as a snap. it took almost 20 seconds to show the f-ing calculator. every time an app is slow i suspect that's because it's packaged as a snap. - doing weird stuff with motd. why? At this point my next reinstall will be a good old Debian.
- moistbar 6y ago
  Snaps also can't be installed from anywhere besides Snapcraft. That's a huge red flag to me. I initially disliked Flatpak, but I've come around to it recently in light of where Snaps seem to be heading.
  - lawl 6y ago
    The more i look at snap, the more i dislike it. The same goes for flatpak too unfortunately. Currently I feel like AppImage, while kind of a hack, might just be the best solution.
    - bogwog 6y ago
      AppImage is the best, and I wish more developers would use it. At least for desktop/end-user software. Maybe Guix is a better choice for a server, though I don't have much experience with it.
      - VadimPR 6y ago
        I use it on https://mudlet.org https://mudlet.org and it's amazing. No Linux users are ever issues with them - it's an effectively solved distribution problem. The one drawback is that you need to use an ancient compiler, but for our purposes that ancient compiler supports C++17 so that is okay for the time being.
      - SilverRed 6y ago
        Appimage is basically a linux port of the windows workflow where you download an exe file from random sites and run it. No update mechanism, no discovery, no install/remove mechanisms no sandboxing. Appimage is super cool for being able to quickly test builds of stuff but for software you actually use its not great. I have been using Fedora Silverblue for a few months now and using flatpak to install every gui tool and its been excellent. I use a tool called flatseal which lets me tighten or loosen permissions for apps based on what I need which has been awesome. I can just flat out disable networking on apps if I don't need the networked parts.
        lawl 6y ago
        > Appimage is basically a linux port of the windows workflow where you download an exe file from random sites and run it. No update mechanism, no discovery, no install/remove mechanisms no sandboxing. Not 100% true. See e.g. https://github.com/probonopd/go-appimage/blob/master/src/appimaged/README.md https://github.com/probonopd/go-appimage/blob/master/src/app... Since the AppImage format is always the same and not just a random .exe it is possible to build tools around them.
    - kaba0 6y ago
      The funny thing is, that NixOS did actually solve the goddamn dependency hell problem in the best possible way and yet there are n different ways that try to do something, but fail. Linux should at least converge on this one actuall good solution.
  - galgalesh 6y ago
    Slight correction: you can easily download a Snap from a website and install it like you would do with a Deb package. It's the repository that's locked; Snap only supports a single repository; the "Snap Store".
    - SilverRed 6y ago
      While flatpak runs on the traditional repo model where you can add as many repo sources as you want. I can't see a single thing Snap has going for it when Flatpak is the same idea but better in every single way.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    It was a huge enough red flag that Mint removed snap store out of the box. https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.html https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.h...
- c7DJTLrn 6y ago
  Netplan on paper is a nice abstraction layer for various network configuration tools. In reality, it's a pain in the backside which may not yet support a config option you want to use for the chosen backend. These days my preference is to bypass the unnecessary abstraction and just use raw systemd-networkd instead.
- Jonnax 6y ago
  Can you explain to me why netplan is bad? When it came out in an LTS, I was impressed by being able to declaratively describe networking. And there's even a way to test a configuration with auto rollback. These are features that I find great in thing like juniper routers. But when I went online to see what people thought there just was annoyance. It made no sense to me.
  - znpy 6y ago
    > Can you explain to me why netplan is bad? I don't see the advantage over networkmanager, honestly. And now there's another thing I have to learn and support, with no real benefit.
    - Godel_unicode 6y ago
      I really think that netplan exists because "everyone knows" networkmanager is bad. Ironically, I think it's for the same reason that netplan is now bad; it's a leaky abstraction which doesn't always support the feature you want. I've worked with people who disable nm as a matter of muscle memory on new systems, and I wonder how long it'll be until netplan goes that route (hehe).
    - orwin 6y ago
      Well, unless you used to do bridges with nmcli (and if you did, i'm really impressed), netplan do have some advantages. And for all the swearing i did when i add to change the packer conf, then the ansible conf, i do think netplan is in fact easier to understand, read and change than brctl/bridge-utils. I hate snaps though.
      - znpy 6y ago
        Uhm, so far I've used network manager for wired and wireless ethernet, vpns via openvpn and fortinet, and network bonding (lacp etc). Yeah you have to look the details for the specific kind of configuration, but reading the fine manual is the norm, not the exception.
    - galgalesh 6y ago
- loloquwowndueo 6y ago
  “ if I boot a vm it's going to be nearly unusable (can't install packages) because it's going to spend the first 30 minutes doing a full upgrade” - wouldn’t be an issue if you install from the newest image. Also if your cloud provider is so crappy that it actually takes 30 minutes to apply a few updates maybe find a new one.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - orwin 6y ago
    I'm sorry but this is neither on point nor a good advice. I can't be bothered making a new packer image each time a new ubuntu image is up. And people to use USB keys to make their friend and family try Ubuntu (or you know, as a backup). Also, because even if your point is wrong, you're kinda right: you can disable autoupdate in the seed file or during install. And also, minimal image are a good idea/good practice and won't ever take 30 minute even if your image is really old.
- seany 6y ago
  Good christ snaps are horrible. I had been using ubuntu for nearly 14 years, and that was the thing that pushed me back to debian.
- dorfsmay 6y ago
  I went to Ubuntu years ago for the availability of packages. Snaps killed it for me. I moved my daily driver(s) on Fedora a few months after 20.04. It turns out, RPMfusion does have all the packages I want.
  - bogwog 6y ago
    Snaps pissed me off too, and I vowed to switch to another distro (probably Debian) when this installation stopped working. In particular, it annoys the hell out of me when they pull a bait-and-switch by automatically converting `apt install X` commands to `snap install X` for certain popular packages. ...but this Kubuntu system (my primary workstation) has been rock steady for the past ~5 years with no signs of problems. So as annoyed as I am, I gotta hand it to them for keeping things working smoothly.
    - john-shaffer 6y ago
      I'm really enjoying Pop! OS. It's Ubuntu (and I installed the default ubuntu-desktop over Pop's), but it has its own "store" with .debs and flatpaks, no snaps. It's still possible to accidentally install a snap, but it's also easy to revert that. It's also very nice how effortlessly the graphics drivers and full-disk encryption work. I haven't tried Debian on desktop, but it is great for servers.
- leephillips 6y ago
  When I have a new computer and want to install Linux on it, I reach for Ubuntu out of habit, because I have this vague idea that it will have the drivers that I might need for my screen, keyboard, WiFi, etc. to work. But, because of the issues you raise, I’d much rather install Debian. Is it practical to do so?
  - kop316 6y ago
    I have found it practical to do so. The one note I have seen is you may want the images with non-free firmware if you have devices dependent on that: https://cdimage.debian.org/images/unofficial/non-free/images-including-firmware/ https://cdimage.debian.org/images/unofficial/non-free/images...
    - leephillips 6y ago
      Thank you. In a few days I'll be installing Linux on a Lenovo mini desktop system, and I'll try it.
      - kop316 6y ago
        You're welcome! Depending on how new it is, you may need to use testing versus stable.
- alyandon 6y ago
  - auto-update enabled by default. if I boot a vm it's going to be nearly unusable (can't install packages) because it's going to spend the first 30 minutes doing a full upgrade There is something seriously wrong with the Ubuntu auto updater. It literally will run for hours at 100% cpu on a system that hasn't been updated in a few months vs an apt update && apt upgrade that can do the same work in a few minutes. It acts almost like some sort of O(n^x) behavior where x > 2. I just disabled it and moved on with my life as bugs like these in my experience get ignored forever when you report them.
- whalesalad 6y ago
  On all my home boxes I run vanilla Debian and it’s great. No fuss. I’ve started to dabble outside my comfort zone with a Fedora box and it’s also pretty great, despite the culture shock.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  Part of losing that "shine" is them abandoning Unity and other Ubuntu-specific things. Back when it first got popular one of its selling points was how easy it was to install the proprietary nvidia driver. It always had something a little extra compared to other distros. Now it's using the same stuff as everything else and meanwhile I've ditched nvidia a long time ago and now even Gentoo is as easy to install (for me at least) as Ubuntu was back then.
c7DJTLrn 6y ago
I work in a different industry and am responsible for maintaining a fleet of bare metal OSes (we currently use Ubuntu). Bare metal management really feels like an unsolved problem. Whilst everybody working with cloud environments is whisked away by the latest shiny tools like Docker and Ansible, those of us working with bare metal are still trying to find a way to keep machines up and running with an OS that doesn't get corrupted from unexpected poweroffs or permanently cut itself off from the network because of a bad config. The only existing candidate I've seen is Balena, but it only supports specific hardware and the cost is probably so high that we wouldn't be making a profit if we went with it. At my current employer we are building a custom flavor of Ubuntu and provision it with Puppet, but we still get failures, and it's far from the immutable haven that DevOps guys would be used to.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Bare metal for a reason? We found benefits from virtualizing on the same bare metal infrastructure and then running on VMs. Used VMWare for everything. However, the Docker-based strategy is far ahead.
  - flemhans 6y ago
    You'd still need to bootstrap the metal with a VM/container environment, anyway.
- nullify88 6y ago
  I'm running a few bare metal Fedora CoreOS nodes and its been a dream with IPMI, ignition files, containers, and ansible to orchestrate it all. Havent used Flatcar Linux but I have seen the experience is similar.
  - dgellow 6y ago
    A bit confused here. Isn't CoreOS deprecated since ~May 2020?
    - 6y ago
jonnelafin 6y ago
Good read!
imwillofficial 6y ago
They raise some good points. However I think it is absurd to expect a company to be blamed for having a feature wall for paid features. You’re trying to use a paid feature for free, that’s uncool. I see the point about long term support being deceptive, and also the mixed messaging being confusing.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
d1egoaz 6y ago
I got mixed feelings after reading this. Do they want all the "features" for free, I went to https://ubuntu.com/core https://ubuntu.com/core and it says 10 year security update commitment, it doesn't say it's going to be free, how Canonical will make money?
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  That used to be what an open source distro was, and there used to be several options for such, no?
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    No, there always was an explicit warranty disclaimer and few, if any, distros offered continuous 10-year security updates constrained to a base version. Usually, you had to keep upgrading to keep getting security updates. Source: spending my teenage years on installing various distros on my dad's computer, simultaneously pissing him off and ensuring I'd never have a girlfriend
    - d1egoaz 6y ago
      lmao :D
- mushufasa 6y ago
  I had that reaction as well. At the end of the article, though, they explain where Ubuntu Core makes sense and why their use case doesn't (it seems that the main reason is they don't have a subscription model, so they can't budget ongoing costs, or something like that). In my mind, I'm here wondering -- if you really need the features, spending your own dev time for self-maintenance has to cost more than $30k/year... what are they thinking?
  - 3np 6y ago
    > Accordingly, the risk for NextBox users would be that at some point in the future, Canonical would revoke this privilege from us, making NextBox un-updatable from one day to the next, or at worst, unusable. > In addition, it became apparent that we had not selected sufficiently strict according to open source criteria. Assuming Canonical would eventually cease to exist or discontinue Ubuntu Core, it would be nearly impossible with Ubuntu Core for the open-source community to ensure that NextBox would continue to be usable in a meaningful way. It's about more than the monetary costs over the coming couple of years. Canonical pulling a RedHat here would be much worse for Ubuntu Core users than it is/was for CentOS users.
mwcampbell 6y ago
If I were them, I'd go with something that provides an immutable root FS (or at least immutable /usr) and atomic whole-system updates, the way Chromium OS and Flatcar Linux (former CoreOS) do. IIRC, Balena does this for the base system, but adds containers on top.
JediPig 6y ago
hardware wise. use a bsd. FreeBSD. there are reasons why hardware vendors are almost 100% BSD based. Its rock solid and you can depend on it being engineered well. Snaps , docker, and various other solutions are symptoms of a problem not a solution. The problem is userland is in a complete mess in linux. Fix the kernel and userland together, and everything flows.
- sangnoir 6y ago
  > there are reasons why hardware vendors are almost 100% BSD based. 95% of those reasons are that it is not GPL licensed.
  - Proven 6y ago
    Another great benefit - permissive OSS!
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  I’m a newbie to this stuff - is BSD usable as a daily driver on a personal laptop?
  - lmm 6y ago
    For a laptop you're using as a luggable workstation, absolutely. For a laptop you're moving around with and unplugging frequently, you probably want a model that's popular with hackers (e.g. thinkpad) - getting suspend working is often fiddly, and there might be some models where it won't work at all. Most wifi chipsets are supported IME, but it might be worth checking that as well.
    - morpheos137 6y ago
      I have been using OpenBSD laptops for years. Everything I need works. My configuration is very lean and very fast even on an older machine. Thinkpads (older at least) are 100% hardware supported in my experience. Only thing I can think of that is not supported is hot swapping ultrabay drives. I am not sure if that is supported on Windows since I have not used Windows.
williesleg 6y ago
Debian doesn't have snaps. Debian++
bfrog 6y ago
Once again, NixOS would be an amazing solution in this scenario.
tyingq 6y ago
Seems like there's room for a vendor that takes something like Firecracker or Gvisor and tailors it for embedded devices.
snicker7 6y ago
Canonical's engineers are very talented. And Canonical provides some truly innovative solutions (MaaS and JuJu come to mind. Snaps to a lesser extent). However, as anecdotes like these show, their user/customer hostile attitude makes one very hesitant to adopt their tech.
tgp 6y ago
I would have loved to see a comparison of Ubuntu Core against openSUSE MicroOS (https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:MicroOS https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:MicroOS), I wonder whether it would be up for the task they had in mind. "In other words openSUSE MicroOS is an operating system you don't have to worry about. It's designed for but not limited to container hosts and edge devices. ... - Read-only root filesystem to avoid accidental modifications of the OS - Transactional Updates leveraging btrfs snapshots to apply updates without interfering with the running system - health-checker to verify the OS is operational after updates. Automatically rolls back in case of trouble. ..."
- moistbar 6y ago
  Not to mention, Suse is far more lenient when it comes to licensing in my experience. I remember them being extremely blase about one of my old jobs using a significantly higher number of licenses than had been purchased, with their sales team's response amounting to a particularly verbose "meh, you're good."
fomine3 6y ago
It seems that Ubuntu's 10 years support (ESM, provided by Ubuntu Advantage program) is $225/y for a server. I can't find price for Core, but I expect the same or cheaper. IMO it's fair price to maintain ancient distribution. For Desktop is $25/y, cheap! https://ubuntu.com/advantage/subscribe https://ubuntu.com/advantage/subscribe
xyzal 6y ago
> Nevertheless, we were able to build a comparably lean system with Debian: The base systems of both Ubuntu Core and Debian each have a total size of about 1 GB. This line made me somewhat sad. But it is possible that I am just being old and grumpy.
- em500 6y ago
  You can always opt for Alpine or Tiny Core or such if you're into minimalism. IIRC Debian and Ubuntu install lots of localizations by default, which takes up quite some space.
  - e12e 6y ago
    Minimalism? Minimalism is fitting the kernel and initrd on a single floppy ;) (to be fair, it was hard to get a full x11 in there.. Which was one reason the qnx demo floppy was so impressive) https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Software:QNX4_demofloppy https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Software:QNX4_demofloppy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux
pabs3 6y ago
The extended LTS offering by Freexian for Debian is a paid service, although cheaper than the Canonical Brand Store price: https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended
joseluisq 6y ago
Don't get me wrong but I don't really understand why for server stuff do you could prefer Ubuntu in favor of a rock-solid operating system like Debian? One number, Debian Buster for example is LTS until June 2024 + 2 yrs. Just to mention one strength, I don't tell you about the well-known ones such as large community, fully openness, among others.
- flemhans 6y ago
  Ubuntu has pretty good LTS too, actually. And up to 10 years "end of life" support.
domano 6y ago
I once spoke with a Canonical Sales guy and he asked me why i said that snaps were not good in the conversation we had prior. Somehow nobody at canonical thinks that snap performance is an issue at all, he was genuinely surprised. Snap is just unusable, full stop. If everything takes like 10x to open i can not work with my system anymore. I'd rather work with windows or a chalkboard instead.
- niemeyer 6y ago
  I don't know who you talked to, but I can tell the story is richer and more interesting than that. Saying that snaps have performance issues is similar to saying that containers have performance issues. They do affect performance because doing something is always more expensive than doing nothing, and snaps do something in addition to just running a bare executable on your machine. At the same time, the kind of operation that snaps perform should not have a significant impact on a modern computer to the point of making it slow or annoying, because most of the operations are relatively simple and happen at a low level, and computers are fast. At the same time, snaps are a new packaging format, and when you change the layout of applications to include things such as restrictions or making things read-only, suddenly all kinds of things can go wrong, and some of these can cause major performance impact. Two easy and real examples from the snap world: early on there was a bug where .pyc files would be out of date, and the filesystem was read-only. This meant every single time the application was opened Python would recompile the entire application and fail to write its cache files in every case. Major performance impact. That was fixed. Another one: fontconfig cache changed its format, and as a side effect applications running could not make use of the one in the system and had to rebuild their own copy every time. Extreme performance impact. That was fixed. And the list goes on. So the point is: snaps are not slow, because there's nothing fundamental happening there to make them slow. But snap applications can be slow, of course, potentially by orders of magnitude. These are bugs, and we fix them when we see them.
  - domano 6y ago
    Hey thanks for the detailed answer. In my experience everything i opened had significantly longer startup times - especially for VS Code this was a problem for me. I can not explain why, i just experienced the symptoms as did a few other people i talked to. So if it is just an app problem great, hopefully there will be a day when not every app with UI i try has that problem.

223 points by thefilmore 6y ago

Devuan.

znpy 6y ago

Ubuntu is losing its shine as years go on. It once was a Debian that just worked, nowadays is some kind of a trap. As you start getting deeper you start to notice non-standard things that get in the way more than they should, besides being utterly non-standard. Things i noticed so far: - auto-update enabled by default. if I boot a vm it's going to be nearly unusable (can't install packages) because it's going to spend the first 30 minutes doing a full upgrade - netplan -- not sure why that's there - snaps. for everything. the last straw for me was realizing that gnome-calculator packaged as a snap. it took almost 20 seconds to show the f-ing calculator. every time an app is slow i suspect that's because it's packaged as a snap. - doing weird stuff with motd. why? At this point my next reinstall will be a good old Debian.

moistbar 6y ago
Snaps also can't be installed from anywhere besides Snapcraft. That's a huge red flag to me. I initially disliked Flatpak, but I've come around to it recently in light of where Snaps seem to be heading.
- lawl 6y ago
  The more i look at snap, the more i dislike it. The same goes for flatpak too unfortunately. Currently I feel like AppImage, while kind of a hack, might just be the best solution.
  - bogwog 6y ago
    AppImage is the best, and I wish more developers would use it. At least for desktop/end-user software. Maybe Guix is a better choice for a server, though I don't have much experience with it.
    - VadimPR 6y ago
      I use it on https://mudlet.org https://mudlet.org and it's amazing. No Linux users are ever issues with them - it's an effectively solved distribution problem. The one drawback is that you need to use an ancient compiler, but for our purposes that ancient compiler supports C++17 so that is okay for the time being.
    - SilverRed 6y ago
      Appimage is basically a linux port of the windows workflow where you download an exe file from random sites and run it. No update mechanism, no discovery, no install/remove mechanisms no sandboxing. Appimage is super cool for being able to quickly test builds of stuff but for software you actually use its not great. I have been using Fedora Silverblue for a few months now and using flatpak to install every gui tool and its been excellent. I use a tool called flatseal which lets me tighten or loosen permissions for apps based on what I need which has been awesome. I can just flat out disable networking on apps if I don't need the networked parts.
      - lawl 6y ago
        > Appimage is basically a linux port of the windows workflow where you download an exe file from random sites and run it. No update mechanism, no discovery, no install/remove mechanisms no sandboxing. Not 100% true. See e.g. https://github.com/probonopd/go-appimage/blob/master/src/appimaged/README.md https://github.com/probonopd/go-appimage/blob/master/src/app... Since the AppImage format is always the same and not just a random .exe it is possible to build tools around them.
  - kaba0 6y ago
    The funny thing is, that NixOS did actually solve the goddamn dependency hell problem in the best possible way and yet there are n different ways that try to do something, but fail. Linux should at least converge on this one actuall good solution.
- galgalesh 6y ago
  Slight correction: you can easily download a Snap from a website and install it like you would do with a Deb package. It's the repository that's locked; Snap only supports a single repository; the "Snap Store".
  - SilverRed 6y ago
    While flatpak runs on the traditional repo model where you can add as many repo sources as you want. I can't see a single thing Snap has going for it when Flatpak is the same idea but better in every single way.
- int_19h 6y ago
  It was a huge enough red flag that Mint removed snap store out of the box. https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.html https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.h...
c7DJTLrn 6y ago
Netplan on paper is a nice abstraction layer for various network configuration tools. In reality, it's a pain in the backside which may not yet support a config option you want to use for the chosen backend. These days my preference is to bypass the unnecessary abstraction and just use raw systemd-networkd instead.
Jonnax 6y ago
Can you explain to me why netplan is bad? When it came out in an LTS, I was impressed by being able to declaratively describe networking. And there's even a way to test a configuration with auto rollback. These are features that I find great in thing like juniper routers. But when I went online to see what people thought there just was annoyance. It made no sense to me.
- znpy 6y ago
  > Can you explain to me why netplan is bad? I don't see the advantage over networkmanager, honestly. And now there's another thing I have to learn and support, with no real benefit.
  - Godel_unicode 6y ago
    I really think that netplan exists because "everyone knows" networkmanager is bad. Ironically, I think it's for the same reason that netplan is now bad; it's a leaky abstraction which doesn't always support the feature you want. I've worked with people who disable nm as a matter of muscle memory on new systems, and I wonder how long it'll be until netplan goes that route (hehe).
  - orwin 6y ago
    Well, unless you used to do bridges with nmcli (and if you did, i'm really impressed), netplan do have some advantages. And for all the swearing i did when i add to change the packer conf, then the ansible conf, i do think netplan is in fact easier to understand, read and change than brctl/bridge-utils. I hate snaps though.
    - znpy 6y ago
      Uhm, so far I've used network manager for wired and wireless ethernet, vpns via openvpn and fortinet, and network bonding (lacp etc). Yeah you have to look the details for the specific kind of configuration, but reading the fine manual is the norm, not the exception.
  - galgalesh 6y ago
loloquwowndueo 6y ago
“ if I boot a vm it's going to be nearly unusable (can't install packages) because it's going to spend the first 30 minutes doing a full upgrade” - wouldn’t be an issue if you install from the newest image. Also if your cloud provider is so crappy that it actually takes 30 minutes to apply a few updates maybe find a new one.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- orwin 6y ago
  I'm sorry but this is neither on point nor a good advice. I can't be bothered making a new packer image each time a new ubuntu image is up. And people to use USB keys to make their friend and family try Ubuntu (or you know, as a backup). Also, because even if your point is wrong, you're kinda right: you can disable autoupdate in the seed file or during install. And also, minimal image are a good idea/good practice and won't ever take 30 minute even if your image is really old.
seany 6y ago
Good christ snaps are horrible. I had been using ubuntu for nearly 14 years, and that was the thing that pushed me back to debian.
dorfsmay 6y ago
I went to Ubuntu years ago for the availability of packages. Snaps killed it for me. I moved my daily driver(s) on Fedora a few months after 20.04. It turns out, RPMfusion does have all the packages I want.
- bogwog 6y ago
  Snaps pissed me off too, and I vowed to switch to another distro (probably Debian) when this installation stopped working. In particular, it annoys the hell out of me when they pull a bait-and-switch by automatically converting `apt install X` commands to `snap install X` for certain popular packages. ...but this Kubuntu system (my primary workstation) has been rock steady for the past ~5 years with no signs of problems. So as annoyed as I am, I gotta hand it to them for keeping things working smoothly.
  - john-shaffer 6y ago
    I'm really enjoying Pop! OS. It's Ubuntu (and I installed the default ubuntu-desktop over Pop's), but it has its own "store" with .debs and flatpaks, no snaps. It's still possible to accidentally install a snap, but it's also easy to revert that. It's also very nice how effortlessly the graphics drivers and full-disk encryption work. I haven't tried Debian on desktop, but it is great for servers.
leephillips 6y ago
When I have a new computer and want to install Linux on it, I reach for Ubuntu out of habit, because I have this vague idea that it will have the drivers that I might need for my screen, keyboard, WiFi, etc. to work. But, because of the issues you raise, I’d much rather install Debian. Is it practical to do so?
- kop316 6y ago
  I have found it practical to do so. The one note I have seen is you may want the images with non-free firmware if you have devices dependent on that: https://cdimage.debian.org/images/unofficial/non-free/images-including-firmware/ https://cdimage.debian.org/images/unofficial/non-free/images...
  - leephillips 6y ago
    Thank you. In a few days I'll be installing Linux on a Lenovo mini desktop system, and I'll try it.
    - kop316 6y ago
      You're welcome! Depending on how new it is, you may need to use testing versus stable.
alyandon 6y ago
- auto-update enabled by default. if I boot a vm it's going to be nearly unusable (can't install packages) because it's going to spend the first 30 minutes doing a full upgrade There is something seriously wrong with the Ubuntu auto updater. It literally will run for hours at 100% cpu on a system that hasn't been updated in a few months vs an apt update && apt upgrade that can do the same work in a few minutes. It acts almost like some sort of O(n^x) behavior where x > 2. I just disabled it and moved on with my life as bugs like these in my experience get ignored forever when you report them.
whalesalad 6y ago
On all my home boxes I run vanilla Debian and it’s great. No fuss. I’ve started to dabble outside my comfort zone with a Fedora box and it’s also pretty great, despite the culture shock.
globular-toast 6y ago
Part of losing that "shine" is them abandoning Unity and other Ubuntu-specific things. Back when it first got popular one of its selling points was how easy it was to install the proprietary nvidia driver. It always had something a little extra compared to other distros. Now it's using the same stuff as everything else and meanwhile I've ditched nvidia a long time ago and now even Gentoo is as easy to install (for me at least) as Ubuntu was back then.

c7DJTLrn 6y ago

I work in a different industry and am responsible for maintaining a fleet of bare metal OSes (we currently use Ubuntu). Bare metal management really feels like an unsolved problem. Whilst everybody working with cloud environments is whisked away by the latest shiny tools like Docker and Ansible, those of us working with bare metal are still trying to find a way to keep machines up and running with an OS that doesn't get corrupted from unexpected poweroffs or permanently cut itself off from the network because of a bad config. The only existing candidate I've seen is Balena, but it only supports specific hardware and the cost is probably so high that we wouldn't be making a profit if we went with it. At my current employer we are building a custom flavor of Ubuntu and provision it with Puppet, but we still get failures, and it's far from the immutable haven that DevOps guys would be used to.

renewiltord 6y ago
Bare metal for a reason? We found benefits from virtualizing on the same bare metal infrastructure and then running on VMs. Used VMWare for everything. However, the Docker-based strategy is far ahead.
- flemhans 6y ago
  You'd still need to bootstrap the metal with a VM/container environment, anyway.
nullify88 6y ago
I'm running a few bare metal Fedora CoreOS nodes and its been a dream with IPMI, ignition files, containers, and ansible to orchestrate it all. Havent used Flatcar Linux but I have seen the experience is similar.
- dgellow 6y ago
  A bit confused here. Isn't CoreOS deprecated since ~May 2020?
  - 6y ago

jonnelafin 6y ago

Good read!

imwillofficial 6y ago

They raise some good points. However I think it is absurd to expect a company to be blamed for having a feature wall for paid features. You’re trying to use a paid feature for free, that’s uncool. I see the point about long term support being deceptive, and also the mixed messaging being confusing.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

d1egoaz 6y ago

I got mixed feelings after reading this. Do they want all the "features" for free, I went to https://ubuntu.com/core https://ubuntu.com/core and it says 10 year security update commitment, it doesn't say it's going to be free, how Canonical will make money?

jrochkind1 6y ago
That used to be what an open source distro was, and there used to be several options for such, no?
- renewiltord 6y ago
  No, there always was an explicit warranty disclaimer and few, if any, distros offered continuous 10-year security updates constrained to a base version. Usually, you had to keep upgrading to keep getting security updates. Source: spending my teenage years on installing various distros on my dad's computer, simultaneously pissing him off and ensuring I'd never have a girlfriend
  - d1egoaz 6y ago
    lmao :D
mushufasa 6y ago
I had that reaction as well. At the end of the article, though, they explain where Ubuntu Core makes sense and why their use case doesn't (it seems that the main reason is they don't have a subscription model, so they can't budget ongoing costs, or something like that). In my mind, I'm here wondering -- if you really need the features, spending your own dev time for self-maintenance has to cost more than $30k/year... what are they thinking?
- 3np 6y ago
  > Accordingly, the risk for NextBox users would be that at some point in the future, Canonical would revoke this privilege from us, making NextBox un-updatable from one day to the next, or at worst, unusable. > In addition, it became apparent that we had not selected sufficiently strict according to open source criteria. Assuming Canonical would eventually cease to exist or discontinue Ubuntu Core, it would be nearly impossible with Ubuntu Core for the open-source community to ensure that NextBox would continue to be usable in a meaningful way. It's about more than the monetary costs over the coming couple of years. Canonical pulling a RedHat here would be much worse for Ubuntu Core users than it is/was for CentOS users.

mwcampbell 6y ago

If I were them, I'd go with something that provides an immutable root FS (or at least immutable /usr) and atomic whole-system updates, the way Chromium OS and Flatcar Linux (former CoreOS) do. IIRC, Balena does this for the base system, but adds containers on top.

JediPig 6y ago

hardware wise. use a bsd. FreeBSD. there are reasons why hardware vendors are almost 100% BSD based. Its rock solid and you can depend on it being engineered well. Snaps , docker, and various other solutions are symptoms of a problem not a solution. The problem is userland is in a complete mess in linux. Fix the kernel and userland together, and everything flows.

sangnoir 6y ago
> there are reasons why hardware vendors are almost 100% BSD based. 95% of those reasons are that it is not GPL licensed.
- Proven 6y ago
  Another great benefit - permissive OSS!
throwawaysea 6y ago
I’m a newbie to this stuff - is BSD usable as a daily driver on a personal laptop?
- lmm 6y ago
  For a laptop you're using as a luggable workstation, absolutely. For a laptop you're moving around with and unplugging frequently, you probably want a model that's popular with hackers (e.g. thinkpad) - getting suspend working is often fiddly, and there might be some models where it won't work at all. Most wifi chipsets are supported IME, but it might be worth checking that as well.
  - morpheos137 6y ago
    I have been using OpenBSD laptops for years. Everything I need works. My configuration is very lean and very fast even on an older machine. Thinkpads (older at least) are 100% hardware supported in my experience. Only thing I can think of that is not supported is hot swapping ultrabay drives. I am not sure if that is supported on Windows since I have not used Windows.

williesleg 6y ago

Debian doesn't have snaps. Debian++

bfrog 6y ago

Once again, NixOS would be an amazing solution in this scenario.

tyingq 6y ago

Seems like there's room for a vendor that takes something like Firecracker or Gvisor and tailors it for embedded devices.

snicker7 6y ago

Canonical's engineers are very talented. And Canonical provides some truly innovative solutions (MaaS and JuJu come to mind. Snaps to a lesser extent). However, as anecdotes like these show, their user/customer hostile attitude makes one very hesitant to adopt their tech.

tgp 6y ago

I would have loved to see a comparison of Ubuntu Core against openSUSE MicroOS (https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:MicroOS https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:MicroOS), I wonder whether it would be up for the task they had in mind. "In other words openSUSE MicroOS is an operating system you don't have to worry about. It's designed for but not limited to container hosts and edge devices. ... - Read-only root filesystem to avoid accidental modifications of the OS - Transactional Updates leveraging btrfs snapshots to apply updates without interfering with the running system - health-checker to verify the OS is operational after updates. Automatically rolls back in case of trouble. ..."

moistbar 6y ago
Not to mention, Suse is far more lenient when it comes to licensing in my experience. I remember them being extremely blase about one of my old jobs using a significantly higher number of licenses than had been purchased, with their sales team's response amounting to a particularly verbose "meh, you're good."

fomine3 6y ago

It seems that Ubuntu's 10 years support (ESM, provided by Ubuntu Advantage program) is $225/y for a server. I can't find price for Core, but I expect the same or cheaper. IMO it's fair price to maintain ancient distribution. For Desktop is $25/y, cheap! https://ubuntu.com/advantage/subscribe https://ubuntu.com/advantage/subscribe

xyzal 6y ago

> Nevertheless, we were able to build a comparably lean system with Debian: The base systems of both Ubuntu Core and Debian each have a total size of about 1 GB. This line made me somewhat sad. But it is possible that I am just being old and grumpy.

em500 6y ago
You can always opt for Alpine or Tiny Core or such if you're into minimalism. IIRC Debian and Ubuntu install lots of localizations by default, which takes up quite some space.
- e12e 6y ago
  Minimalism? Minimalism is fitting the kernel and initrd on a single floppy ;) (to be fair, it was hard to get a full x11 in there.. Which was one reason the qnx demo floppy was so impressive) https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Software:QNX4_demofloppy https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Software:QNX4_demofloppy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux

pabs3 6y ago

The extended LTS offering by Freexian for Debian is a paid service, although cheaper than the Canonical Brand Store price: https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended

joseluisq 6y ago

Don't get me wrong but I don't really understand why for server stuff do you could prefer Ubuntu in favor of a rock-solid operating system like Debian? One number, Debian Buster for example is LTS until June 2024 + 2 yrs. Just to mention one strength, I don't tell you about the well-known ones such as large community, fully openness, among others.

flemhans 6y ago
Ubuntu has pretty good LTS too, actually. And up to 10 years "end of life" support.

domano 6y ago

I once spoke with a Canonical Sales guy and he asked me why i said that snaps were not good in the conversation we had prior. Somehow nobody at canonical thinks that snap performance is an issue at all, he was genuinely surprised. Snap is just unusable, full stop. If everything takes like 10x to open i can not work with my system anymore. I'd rather work with windows or a chalkboard instead.

niemeyer 6y ago
I don't know who you talked to, but I can tell the story is richer and more interesting than that. Saying that snaps have performance issues is similar to saying that containers have performance issues. They do affect performance because doing something is always more expensive than doing nothing, and snaps do something in addition to just running a bare executable on your machine. At the same time, the kind of operation that snaps perform should not have a significant impact on a modern computer to the point of making it slow or annoying, because most of the operations are relatively simple and happen at a low level, and computers are fast. At the same time, snaps are a new packaging format, and when you change the layout of applications to include things such as restrictions or making things read-only, suddenly all kinds of things can go wrong, and some of these can cause major performance impact. Two easy and real examples from the snap world: early on there was a bug where .pyc files would be out of date, and the filesystem was read-only. This meant every single time the application was opened Python would recompile the entire application and fail to write its cache files in every case. Major performance impact. That was fixed. Another one: fontconfig cache changed its format, and as a side effect applications running could not make use of the one in the system and had to rebuild their own copy every time. Extreme performance impact. That was fixed. And the list goes on. So the point is: snaps are not slow, because there's nothing fundamental happening there to make them slow. But snap applications can be slow, of course, potentially by orders of magnitude. These are bugs, and we fix them when we see them.
- domano 6y ago
  Hey thanks for the detailed answer. In my experience everything i opened had significantly longer startup times - especially for VS Code this was a problem for me. I can not explain why, i just experienced the symptoms as did a few other people i talked to. So if it is just an app problem great, hopefully there will be a day when not every app with UI i try has that problem.