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This sounds exactly like Canonical's doing these days. Recently found I was asked to teach a workshop to help student use Kenya's KENET vlab, it is a vm platfo

This sounds exactly like Canonical's doing these days. Recently found I was asked to teach a workshop to help student use Kenya's KENET vlab, it is a vm platform from Kenya's education network, to run our program. Their system have some prebuild image for us to use including Ubuntu. Probably because of lacking of fund, their vms are low-performance QEMU-based machines. I fired up Ubuntu vm and find: 1. `snapd` running constantly in the background and eating up a lot of memory. So the first thing I have to do is to stop snapd. 2. `unattended-upgrades` keep running. I guess is their internet not good so it seems it runs for a long time and keep eating bandwidth and cpu. Things like these keep making me loosing faith on Ubuntu. I remember the name Ubuntu borrowed its root from African language, but it seems their system are not so friendly to the users (including students, educators) from African countries.

user3939382 4y ago
I've been away from Linux for a while and was looking at Ubuntu the other day. Huge download size, huge minimum resources, background processes phoning home constantly. IMHO this is what Linux is there to fight. The system should be reasonably knowable and controllable by the user, especially a technical one like myself. If I want a byzantine labyrinth of processes phoning home and eating up all my system resources I'll use macOS or Windows.
JonChesterfield 4y ago
Unattended upgrades holds a lock that apt uses while downloading. Shouldn't, does. So a really common experience is turn on a machine, apt install foo, blocked by the updates, anger. Helps a little that apt now tells me what is holding the lock, but it's always unattended upgrades. Which somehow has come back to life after attempts to disable it.
rightbyte 4y ago
This is the problem with user hostile systems that think they know better than the user. You have no control and can't get a stable system. And since things change automatically you have no clue what made stuff broken. I can vision the condescending and smug guy on Canonical forcing auto updates (remote code execution) by default as some "security" measure.
- alpaca128 4y ago
  Yes, forced updates are just insane. It forces an unknown schedule on the users for no reason. Implying the tiniest, most meaningless update is more important than anything the user might do with their computer.
  - justinclift 4y ago
    "It works for Microsoft, so we should copy their approach!" :(

user3939382 4y ago

I've been away from Linux for a while and was looking at Ubuntu the other day. Huge download size, huge minimum resources, background processes phoning home constantly. IMHO this is what Linux is there to fight. The system should be reasonably knowable and controllable by the user, especially a technical one like myself. If I want a byzantine labyrinth of processes phoning home and eating up all my system resources I'll use macOS or Windows.

JonChesterfield 4y ago

Unattended upgrades holds a lock that apt uses while downloading. Shouldn't, does. So a really common experience is turn on a machine, apt install foo, blocked by the updates, anger. Helps a little that apt now tells me what is holding the lock, but it's always unattended upgrades. Which somehow has come back to life after attempts to disable it.

rightbyte 4y ago

This is the problem with user hostile systems that think they know better than the user. You have no control and can't get a stable system. And since things change automatically you have no clue what made stuff broken. I can vision the condescending and smug guy on Canonical forcing auto updates (remote code execution) by default as some "security" measure.

alpaca128 4y ago
Yes, forced updates are just insane. It forces an unknown schedule on the users for no reason. Implying the tiniest, most meaningless update is more important than anything the user might do with their computer.
- justinclift 4y ago
  "It works for Microsoft, so we should copy their approach!" :(