7 ms·

The snap thing makes me want to switch distro (for work) from ubuntu. Unfortunately we have some benefits from using ubuntu as the common platform for less dive

The snap thing makes me want to switch distro (for work) from ubuntu. Unfortunately we have some benefits from using ubuntu as the common platform for less divergence from each other

jjgreen 5y ago
Maybe look at Mint?
canadaduane 5y ago
Pop!_OS is a solid Ubuntu-based distro that uses Flatpak in place of Snap (among many other great decisions).
- duped 5y ago
  This is why I don't use it anymore: https://support.system76.com/articles/enable-hibernation/ https://support.system76.com/articles/enable-hibernation/
  - cmeacham98 5y ago
    Because they support hibernation? I assume the answer here has to be "because it's a PITA to enable", but as far as I know no distro does this correctly by default on an encrypted drive.
    - duped 5y ago
      Because it's a pain in the ass for what should be the default, especially if you want to use it on a laptop and not have the battery die overnight.
      - striking 5y ago
        Some argue full disk encryption should be the default. Others argue hibernation should be the default. Here they appear to be in conflict, and that the former was prioritized.
        vladvasiliu 5y ago
        But they're not. You can very well have the swap on top of LVM on top of LUKS. And the root and other partitions share that same LVM and LUKS. So now you have FDE and the kernel will know how to assemble it all. The only difference with the default pop OS install is that the swap key isn't changed on every boot. But since the other partitions holding the actual data use persistent keys, that doesn't look like much of an issue to me. Plus, if you're OK with using a TPM, you can also get waking up from hibernation without having to enter type in your password. Source: been doing exactly that (without the TPM part) on a laptop for a few years, and it just worked like a charm. No hoop-jumping involved or anything.
        Brian_K_White 5y ago
        If I wanted full disk encryption, my memory state in swap would sure as hell be one of the things I wanted encrypted.
        vladvasiliu 5y ago
        Of course, you would. And it is. All the partitions, including swap, are on top of a LUKS volume.
        Brian_K_White 5y ago
        ah, ok. Apologies.
    - vladvasiliu 5y ago
      > because it's a PITA to enable I went over the blog post, and it looks like it's a PITA to enable because they went out of their way to make it so by using a weird partition scheme. I've never installed pop OS, but according to that blog they're using LVM on LUKS, which should work fairly well. > but as far as I know no distro does this correctly by default on an encrypted drive. What does "correctly" mean here? On my previous laptop I had arch installed on ext4 on LVM on LUKS. Therefore, the swap was on the same LVM. Aside from having to manually set the "resume" kernel parameter, I never had to do anything, and it just worked.
  - kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
    I really liked my System76 laptop until the AC adapter died. I looked around on their site to buy accessories and it wasn't there. Eventually I found you have to open a support ticket to get a replacement. Not only did it take multiple days for them to respond (me without laptop), their resolution was to attach an invoice for one despite me asking for two. I didn't want to open a new ticket so I just looked online for an AC that had the same voltage/amp/etc and head, then ordered three. I have multiple desks... The three arrived approximately a week before the one they sent out. Also, you can't actually open these the way they've glued them shut inside by attaching the heatsink to the outer case. Might be a manufacturing defect but definitely can't open mine after unscrewing the bottom. Never buying a System76 laptop again after this thing dies.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    That's fine, but my system boots so fast that hibernate is slower. Pop_OS is a very nice distro, particularly the LTS.
bamboozled 5y ago
We switched over to Fedora, way better
- polski-g 5y ago
  I'm switching to debian my next install. It's similar enough internally
  - mananaysiempre 5y ago
    For a personal desktop, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re willing to run sid, because while the outdated software collection is no big deal most of the time, it’s a tremendous pain when you really do need a new version of something, and you ultimately just give up and instal the whole thing from source into /usr/local, which in a half-dozen years predictably evolves into a mess. Running sid is an option, but the amount of fiddly Debian magic you end up needing to learn when it breaks is IME not smaller than the effort of setting up a mostly-unpatched rolling-release like Arch (and I’m sure there are other options). Given that e.g. Arch’s packaging is simple enough it’s no big deal to package even your personal collection of handy scripts (and so the system does not develop funny-looking mold and bits of mystery food all over the place), I don’t really see the point. Just don’t update it when you’re on a deadline. You can see that my arguments here are to a great extent a matter of preference and personal circumstances, though: do you have a reliable Internet connection for troubleshooting? do you prefer a more solid system that you have to fight and that fails badly but rarely or a less solid one that fails more often but in small ways? does getting locked out of the graphical environment every couple of years count as small? (Offer not applicable on machines with cursed hardware like nVidia or Broadcom.)
    - khimaros 5y ago
      personally I recommend debian "rolling testing" (rather than pinning to a specific release name) with security updates from sid. this prevents all but the most subtle bugs from reaching you and you still get the new hotness within a few weeks of sid. there is a release freeze for a few months prior to the each stable release, but I've had no major issues from that. the other subtlety is that security updates come later to testing than they do to either stable or sid, but this can be mitigated: https://gist.github.com/khimaros/21db936fa7885360f7bfe7f116b78daf https://gist.github.com/khimaros/21db936fa7885360f7bfe7f116b...
brianshaler 5y ago
I personally use ubuntu and have used snap enough to get thoroughly burned and annoyed by it. Slow starts, no auto-update controls with bad defaults corrupting running programs, spammed mount points... (edit: see comment below for some limited controls to reduce the frequency of auto-updates) But, unless I'm missing something about latest or future releases, isn't it still optional? Can't you use apt instead and uninstall snapd altogether? I'd agree that needing to uninstall instead of opt-in is an annoyance, and that user-hostile actions tend to be a slippery slope..
- spaniard89277 5y ago
  Firefox is only available as snap now. I gues it's bthe same for other apps. For VSCode I managed to download a deb from their site IIRC, but from apt it only suggests to download from snap.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    flatpak is a great alternative and it works well on ubuntu. Although I've just moved wholesale over to pop_os with flatpaks and LTS version.
  - brianshaler 5y ago
    Interesting. Firefox on snap was an absolute nightmare. Not only would New Tab break after an update, fonts would break as they may be (re-)loaded from disk which becomes missing when the app gets remounted at a new mount point after an update. I forget which hoops I had to jump through, but I did finally find a non-snap method that allows me to manually update (or dismiss prompt) to get around these issues while staying up to date (~1 day) VScode wasn't as bad, as it usually seemed to work (but maybe flaky plugins were actually caused by snap?) but it was certainly annoying to lose the ability to switch between windows of the same app (alt+~, I think this was a custom setting to resemble mac) if the latest window/project was opened as a new version of the app (alt+tab)
    - Brian_K_White 5y ago
selfhifive 5y ago
If you're a programmer I'd say Arch or Debian then configure as per your needs. As long as you don't do things blindly it will be very stable and blazing fast.
- mbrudd 5y ago
  In my experience, Manjaro is a great, user-friendly version of Arch. YMMV, but I highly recommend it!
  - peachy_no_pie 5y ago
    Second this!
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I used to be a pretty hardcore Manjaro evangelist (and I still recommend it to people who want to quit distro-hopping), but I've been burned a handful of times by it. Arch is obviously a notoriously unstable distro, but Manjaro in particular can lead to some nasty issues. Especially if you're mix-and-matching AUR packages with the Manjaro repository ones; I've had at least 3 or 4 systems get entirely borked because of an untracked dependency or something being too far behind in the Manjaro repo.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    I think manjaro suffers breakage too much. These days I tell people to look into endeavour since they still use (mostly) arch repos and thus cause much less breaking with the using AUR packages if you're into those.
amelius 5y ago
I would love to switch to something else (e.g. NixOS) but Ubuntu is the required OS for NVidia's Jetson family of hardware.
- raffraffraff 5y ago
  You can use the Jetson with Docker! It's a total pain in the ass though. Their drivers and software are horrible.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Ok, thanks. Does it give access to the GPU?
    - raffraffraff 5y ago
      Yes, if you run the container with the right options. This is a little out of date and may not even be required any more, but it gives you the full SDK manager gui in Docker. https://github.com/raffraffraff/nvidia-sdkmanager https://github.com/raffraffraff/nvidia-sdkmanager
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Try one of the variants like Pop_OS! they use flatpaks as a replacement for snaps and it works well. I've moved all my ubuntu systems over to it without any issues. The KDE version is nearly as nice as the stock version (looks-wise) if you're a KDE person, which I am.

The snap thing makes me want to switch distro (for work) from ubuntu. Unfortunately we have some benefits from using ubuntu as the common platform for less divergence from each other

jjgreen 5y ago

Maybe look at Mint?

canadaduane 5y ago

Pop!_OS is a solid Ubuntu-based distro that uses Flatpak in place of Snap (among many other great decisions).

duped 5y ago
This is why I don't use it anymore: https://support.system76.com/articles/enable-hibernation/ https://support.system76.com/articles/enable-hibernation/
- cmeacham98 5y ago
  Because they support hibernation? I assume the answer here has to be "because it's a PITA to enable", but as far as I know no distro does this correctly by default on an encrypted drive.
  - duped 5y ago
    Because it's a pain in the ass for what should be the default, especially if you want to use it on a laptop and not have the battery die overnight.
    - striking 5y ago
      Some argue full disk encryption should be the default. Others argue hibernation should be the default. Here they appear to be in conflict, and that the former was prioritized.
      - vladvasiliu 5y ago
        But they're not. You can very well have the swap on top of LVM on top of LUKS. And the root and other partitions share that same LVM and LUKS. So now you have FDE and the kernel will know how to assemble it all. The only difference with the default pop OS install is that the swap key isn't changed on every boot. But since the other partitions holding the actual data use persistent keys, that doesn't look like much of an issue to me. Plus, if you're OK with using a TPM, you can also get waking up from hibernation without having to enter type in your password. Source: been doing exactly that (without the TPM part) on a laptop for a few years, and it just worked like a charm. No hoop-jumping involved or anything.
        Brian_K_White 5y ago
        If I wanted full disk encryption, my memory state in swap would sure as hell be one of the things I wanted encrypted.
        vladvasiliu 5y ago
        Of course, you would. And it is. All the partitions, including swap, are on top of a LUKS volume.
        Brian_K_White 5y ago
        ah, ok. Apologies.
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    > because it's a PITA to enable I went over the blog post, and it looks like it's a PITA to enable because they went out of their way to make it so by using a weird partition scheme. I've never installed pop OS, but according to that blog they're using LVM on LUKS, which should work fairly well. > but as far as I know no distro does this correctly by default on an encrypted drive. What does "correctly" mean here? On my previous laptop I had arch installed on ext4 on LVM on LUKS. Therefore, the swap was on the same LVM. Aside from having to manually set the "resume" kernel parameter, I never had to do anything, and it just worked.
- kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
  I really liked my System76 laptop until the AC adapter died. I looked around on their site to buy accessories and it wasn't there. Eventually I found you have to open a support ticket to get a replacement. Not only did it take multiple days for them to respond (me without laptop), their resolution was to attach an invoice for one despite me asking for two. I didn't want to open a new ticket so I just looked online for an AC that had the same voltage/amp/etc and head, then ordered three. I have multiple desks... The three arrived approximately a week before the one they sent out. Also, you can't actually open these the way they've glued them shut inside by attaching the heatsink to the outer case. Might be a manufacturing defect but definitely can't open mine after unscrewing the bottom. Never buying a System76 laptop again after this thing dies.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  That's fine, but my system boots so fast that hibernate is slower. Pop_OS is a very nice distro, particularly the LTS.

bamboozled 5y ago

We switched over to Fedora, way better

polski-g 5y ago
I'm switching to debian my next install. It's similar enough internally
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  For a personal desktop, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re willing to run sid, because while the outdated software collection is no big deal most of the time, it’s a tremendous pain when you really do need a new version of something, and you ultimately just give up and instal the whole thing from source into /usr/local, which in a half-dozen years predictably evolves into a mess. Running sid is an option, but the amount of fiddly Debian magic you end up needing to learn when it breaks is IME not smaller than the effort of setting up a mostly-unpatched rolling-release like Arch (and I’m sure there are other options). Given that e.g. Arch’s packaging is simple enough it’s no big deal to package even your personal collection of handy scripts (and so the system does not develop funny-looking mold and bits of mystery food all over the place), I don’t really see the point. Just don’t update it when you’re on a deadline. You can see that my arguments here are to a great extent a matter of preference and personal circumstances, though: do you have a reliable Internet connection for troubleshooting? do you prefer a more solid system that you have to fight and that fails badly but rarely or a less solid one that fails more often but in small ways? does getting locked out of the graphical environment every couple of years count as small? (Offer not applicable on machines with cursed hardware like nVidia or Broadcom.)
  - khimaros 5y ago
    personally I recommend debian "rolling testing" (rather than pinning to a specific release name) with security updates from sid. this prevents all but the most subtle bugs from reaching you and you still get the new hotness within a few weeks of sid. there is a release freeze for a few months prior to the each stable release, but I've had no major issues from that. the other subtlety is that security updates come later to testing than they do to either stable or sid, but this can be mitigated: https://gist.github.com/khimaros/21db936fa7885360f7bfe7f116b78daf https://gist.github.com/khimaros/21db936fa7885360f7bfe7f116b...

brianshaler 5y ago

I personally use ubuntu and have used snap enough to get thoroughly burned and annoyed by it. Slow starts, no auto-update controls with bad defaults corrupting running programs, spammed mount points... (edit: see comment below for some limited controls to reduce the frequency of auto-updates) But, unless I'm missing something about latest or future releases, isn't it still optional? Can't you use apt instead and uninstall snapd altogether? I'd agree that needing to uninstall instead of opt-in is an annoyance, and that user-hostile actions tend to be a slippery slope..

spaniard89277 5y ago
Firefox is only available as snap now. I gues it's bthe same for other apps. For VSCode I managed to download a deb from their site IIRC, but from apt it only suggests to download from snap.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  flatpak is a great alternative and it works well on ubuntu. Although I've just moved wholesale over to pop_os with flatpaks and LTS version.
- brianshaler 5y ago
  Interesting. Firefox on snap was an absolute nightmare. Not only would New Tab break after an update, fonts would break as they may be (re-)loaded from disk which becomes missing when the app gets remounted at a new mount point after an update. I forget which hoops I had to jump through, but I did finally find a non-snap method that allows me to manually update (or dismiss prompt) to get around these issues while staying up to date (~1 day) VScode wasn't as bad, as it usually seemed to work (but maybe flaky plugins were actually caused by snap?) but it was certainly annoying to lose the ability to switch between windows of the same app (alt+~, I think this was a custom setting to resemble mac) if the latest window/project was opened as a new version of the app (alt+tab)
  - Brian_K_White 5y ago

selfhifive 5y ago

If you're a programmer I'd say Arch or Debian then configure as per your needs. As long as you don't do things blindly it will be very stable and blazing fast.

mbrudd 5y ago
In my experience, Manjaro is a great, user-friendly version of Arch. YMMV, but I highly recommend it!
- peachy_no_pie 5y ago
  Second this!
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I used to be a pretty hardcore Manjaro evangelist (and I still recommend it to people who want to quit distro-hopping), but I've been burned a handful of times by it. Arch is obviously a notoriously unstable distro, but Manjaro in particular can lead to some nasty issues. Especially if you're mix-and-matching AUR packages with the Manjaro repository ones; I've had at least 3 or 4 systems get entirely borked because of an untracked dependency or something being too far behind in the Manjaro repo.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I think manjaro suffers breakage too much. These days I tell people to look into endeavour since they still use (mostly) arch repos and thus cause much less breaking with the using AUR packages if you're into those.

amelius 5y ago

I would love to switch to something else (e.g. NixOS) but Ubuntu is the required OS for NVidia's Jetson family of hardware.

raffraffraff 5y ago
You can use the Jetson with Docker! It's a total pain in the ass though. Their drivers and software are horrible.
- amelius 5y ago
  Ok, thanks. Does it give access to the GPU?
  - raffraffraff 5y ago
    Yes, if you run the container with the right options. This is a little out of date and may not even be required any more, but it gives you the full SDK manager gui in Docker. https://github.com/raffraffraff/nvidia-sdkmanager https://github.com/raffraffraff/nvidia-sdkmanager

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Try one of the variants like Pop_OS! they use flatpaks as a replacement for snaps and it works well. I've moved all my ubuntu systems over to it without any issues. The KDE version is nearly as nice as the stock version (looks-wise) if you're a KDE person, which I am.