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I used to love ubuntu and have been a xubuntu promoter between friends for quite a while, but now I am considering moving away from it, given that they are more

by fb03 4y ago

I used to love ubuntu and have been a xubuntu promoter between friends for quite a while, but now I am considering moving away from it, given that they are more and more aggressively pushing people to use their halfbaked binary store solution, which sounds insane, given we already have a pretty "apt" package manager which can install and solve a dependency graph just fine. People that moved away from Ubuntu because of the same crap, what are you using now? What other distros can I use without getting too crazy on configuring shit? My use case is booting a Linux box to develop Python/Rust apps, maybe a docker/docker compose in there and that's it. Don't get me wrong, I love what distros like Nix are doing, but I don't have 16 years anymore and all the free time in the world to tweak my environment to oblivion. I just want to boot an environment which is somewhat standard, run Pycharm, VSCode, and code my shit on. Thanks in advance.

rstat1 4y ago
I moved to using Fedora and its been pretty solid. Recently started using the Silverblue variant which is pretty well suited to do things in containers due to the readonly nature of its root filesystem. There are some aspects that are annoying (like installing software) but that not something I do frequently so its fine. And if you're not a GNOME fan, there's a KDE version of Silverblue called Kinoite or something similar that's basically the same thing but with KDE instead of GNOME. My reasons weren't necessarily because of Snaps because Fedora has Flatpaks which are the same useless crap from my perspective. It was mostly just because I wanted things to be closer to current releases. Otherwise its been solid.
nine_k 4y ago
Something like Pop! OS, maybe? (I personally went radical and run Void Linux. It has no systemd, basically every package is just built from upstream sources nightly, etc. Surprisingly, it's about as fiddly as a Debian box.)
foresto 4y ago
> what are you using now? I switched to Debian. The core of my system is now Debian Stable. For the handful of packages that I want to be newer, I either pull from Debian backports or backport the Debian Unstable package myself (just a simple rebuild in most cases). Flatpak is my last resort for one or two apps that aren't yet available in Debian. Since I don't trust the flathub/pypi/npm "accept software from anyone" model, I try to mitigate the additional risk with a few extra steps: I'm choosy about which flatpaks I'm willing to use, I scrutinize the permissions they try to grant themselves, and I install them only after rebuilding them myself with any unwanted components or overreaching permissions stripped out. (Flatpak's permissions model is broken in my view, but I think it could be fixed, and it is at least a starting place for working toward decent app isolation.) I'll miss some of Ubuntu's Launchpad services (free multi-architecture build farm, free package hosting, user-friendly bug tracker) but I don't value those conveniences as much as I value the benefits of traditional packaging for my core tools. Overall, I'm happy with the switch.

by fb03 4y ago

rstat1 4y ago

I moved to using Fedora and its been pretty solid. Recently started using the Silverblue variant which is pretty well suited to do things in containers due to the readonly nature of its root filesystem. There are some aspects that are annoying (like installing software) but that not something I do frequently so its fine. And if you're not a GNOME fan, there's a KDE version of Silverblue called Kinoite or something similar that's basically the same thing but with KDE instead of GNOME. My reasons weren't necessarily because of Snaps because Fedora has Flatpaks which are the same useless crap from my perspective. It was mostly just because I wanted things to be closer to current releases. Otherwise its been solid.

nine_k 4y ago

Something like Pop! OS, maybe? (I personally went radical and run Void Linux. It has no systemd, basically every package is just built from upstream sources nightly, etc. Surprisingly, it's about as fiddly as a Debian box.)

foresto 4y ago

> what are you using now? I switched to Debian. The core of my system is now Debian Stable. For the handful of packages that I want to be newer, I either pull from Debian backports or backport the Debian Unstable package myself (just a simple rebuild in most cases). Flatpak is my last resort for one or two apps that aren't yet available in Debian. Since I don't trust the flathub/pypi/npm "accept software from anyone" model, I try to mitigate the additional risk with a few extra steps: I'm choosy about which flatpaks I'm willing to use, I scrutinize the permissions they try to grant themselves, and I install them only after rebuilding them myself with any unwanted components or overreaching permissions stripped out. (Flatpak's permissions model is broken in my view, but I think it could be fixed, and it is at least a starting place for working toward decent app isolation.) I'll miss some of Ubuntu's Launchpad services (free multi-architecture build farm, free package hosting, user-friendly bug tracker) but I don't value those conveniences as much as I value the benefits of traditional packaging for my core tools. Overall, I'm happy with the switch.