8 ms·

Ubuntu Plans to Ditch Its ‘Minimal’ Install Option

43 points by mariuz 3y ago

jrm4 3y ago
Ubuntu, the distro for desktops and laptops, is DEAD and has been for sometime, Ubuntu is now Microsoft's lapdog. (For better or worse, I don't think it's super evil, but let's just all be honest here) Linux Mint or MX Linux are the way to go here. Time to move on.
- brian_herman 3y ago
  I started on Debian and I will die using Debian. I have used Ubuntu before, and I admit it is a good way for Debian to get new features like an upstream or something.
  - jimrob4 3y ago
    Ditto. Toyed with RH and Mandrake back in the day, but quickly moved to Debian and have been there since. Played with Ubuntu and a couple smaller niche distros, but always came back to good ol' Deborah.
    - timbit42 3y ago
      ...and Ian.
  - tensor 3y ago
    I'll try debian again when they move to a yearly release. Using nearly two year old software in the worst case really sucks for some use cases.
    - tguvot 3y ago
      there is always testing and unstable - if you want something fresher. i personally run unstable for past 20 years. i think i had serious breakage only once
- NoRelToEmber 3y ago
  > Ubuntu is now Microsoft's lapdog. Could you elaborate?
  - doublerabbit 3y ago
    What Microsoft does, Canonical will follow in the Linux realm? This does read like something Microsoft would do.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    on AWS in go-go years, Ubuntu with easy defaults and permissive licenses became the number one installed VM .. by a very large margin. The numbers were not even close.. like 15x more daily volume of VMs on AWS than the next closest three or whatever.. look for yourself. That in turn begat the very hot breath of MSFT upon Ubuntu-Canonical, which shows in the boot signing keys for Ubuntu, the MSFT-private partition type in the disk installer, and the WSL. MSFT influences can be seen in the push for always-on snap with libc and unattended-upgrades phone home and the like.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Gordonjcp 3y ago
  > Linux Mint or MX Linux are the way to go here So, Ubuntu, but with a slightly reskinned UI?
  - pjerem 3y ago
    idk about MX Linux but Linux Mint is Ubuntu without any Snap, with additional official apt repos, Flatpack support out of the box and, last but not least, its own house made desktop environment. To me it’s as far from Ubuntu as Ubuntu is far from Debian.
    - Gordonjcp 3y ago
      Okay, but it's all just Linux. There's no real difference between any of them.
      - jrm4 3y ago
        This is 90% true, but also the 10% matters in terms of "onboarding people to the desktop," which I think still is very important (and actually going reasonably well, IMHO)
        Gordonjcp 3y ago
        Right, but that's all taken care of. Chromebooks outsell everything else, and Android phones outsell everything else, and Steam Decks haven't quite got there yet but it's early days. Linux is 100% of one market segment, broadband routers. No matter how staunch a Windows zealot someone is, there's a bunch of stuff they depend on that cannot be done with Windows at all, not no-how.
  - jrm4 3y ago
    And without the new Ubuntu crap, yes. That's the point.
    - Gordonjcp 3y ago
      Hm. And how long have you been using Linux, exactly?
andrewstuart 3y ago
So it’s now default minimal?
- Levitating 3y ago
  It's default by default
- ryaneager 3y ago
  That is how i understood it. Then during install you’re promoted if you want to install additional software with probably a list that’s is the equivalent of today’s full install, easily selectable.
damnesian 3y ago
I was hardcore Ubuntu devotee for many years and at one point just got tired of having to undo all of the terrible choices being made for users. Minimal install saved the time of having to undo before doing things the way I wanted. It's this kind of messing around with package and desktop managers that finally sent me to other distros.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  The way I read it, it’s now default minimal. Am I reading it wrong?
  - donmcronald 3y ago
    Yeah, but more likely is that they want a single install option so they can ensure you install whatever bloatware they want to add.
- Levitating 3y ago
  Have you tried Mint? What's your opinion on that?
  - Gordonjcp 3y ago
    It's a reskinned version of Ubuntu, that has some slightly questionable packaging choices.
    - Levitating 3y ago
      I really wouldn't call it a reskin of Ubuntu. It uses the Ubuntu repositories sure, but it also has many of its own packages and there is the LMDE version which bases on Debian instead of Ubuntu (in case they ever want to become independant of ubuntu). Mint has none of the crap Ubuntu comes with and won't inexplicitly install snaps. Mint develops their own desktop environment cinnamon (based on gnome 2). If a distro is a reskin one should be able to convert an install of the original distro to the reskinned version. Mint comes with heaps of its own software, for managing software installation, software upgrades, managing kernels, managing release upgrades and of course its own DE.
activiation 3y ago
Just go with Arch if you want minimal
- stevebro 3y ago
  Agreed
- skrause 3y ago
  Or just Debian if you don't want to learn a new package manager. debfoster (https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/debfoster https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/debfoster) is my favorite tool to keep my Debian installations as small as possible.
- jmclnx 3y ago
  Never tried arch, but that should be a good option too. I would like to toss out OpenBSD and NetBSD to the minimal list. I doubt nothing is a minimal as these :)
- weberer 3y ago
  Arch is a bit too minimal for the people who were previously using Ubuntu's minimal install. You don't even have a desktop environment out of the box.
  - BillyTheMage 3y ago
    Ubuntu Minimal didn't have a desktop environment out of the box either, did it ?
- pengaru 3y ago
  Arch's package management tooling is a bit of an unconsolidated inconsistent mess. As someone who used Debian for decades before experimenting with Arch on my laptop for a few years now, Debian is far more polished and ergonomic in the package tooling.
  - activiation 3y ago
    Not sure why you are saying that... What is the issue exactly?
cocodill 3y ago
fun fact: "minimal install" was a full install with a bunch of "apt purge" afterwards.
- SahAssar 3y ago
  Source? That sounds very backwards but also like something that ubuntu would do...
  - srvmshr 3y ago
    Just follow the installer log. It does the Ubuntu standard installation followed by removal of non-essential packages (office utilities, AV utilities etc.)
  - cocodill 3y ago
    On the installer image is a directory casper, there is another image filesystem.squashfs, I suspect that it is simply unpacked to the hard disk during installation. System deployment is really fast this way. Also in casper directory are two more interesting files: filesystem.manifest-minimal-remove and filesystem.manifest-remove with a bunch of packages names. And of course you should have a look at the log during the installation process, all the "apt purge" things show up there.
    - jbicha 3y ago
      That is no longer the case with the new default Desktop subiquity installer in 23.04. Instead of a single squashfs, there are separate squashfs files so the minimal install is faster than default in 23.04.
jbs55 3y ago
[flagged]
zzzbra 3y ago
quick, somebody fork Ubuntu before they remove it!
Animats 3y ago
Oh, crap. What do I install on the little laptops I use for single-purpose stuff. Is there still going to be XUbuntu? Can I get something that never "phones home"?
- c7DJTLrn 3y ago
  If you have the time and know-how, you can build your own system off of Ubuntu Base[0]. It's as barebones you can get with Ubuntu - doesn't have snap or any other crap the "minimal" ISO does. You'd need to chroot into it to install the kernel, and you'd probably want to generate an initrd image. I have an example of how to do this on GitHub that you can steal from[1]. [0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Base https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Base [1] https://github.com/cedws/concrete-ubuntu https://github.com/cedws/concrete-ubuntu
  - Animats 3y ago
    I don't want to be a career system administrator. I did that once.
    - c7DJTLrn 3y ago
      You're welcome. If you're going to be picky you'll probably find nothing meets all of your requirements.
smeagull 3y ago
Powered by the snap store? That's the kind of bullshit that you purge in your "Fix Ubuntu" script.
e8gy3 3y ago
Hi all I’m Tim the Director of Engineering for the Ubuntu Desktop. I think the headline here may have embellished my original post, so if you’re interested, you can find it here [1]. Ubuntu is (almost) 20 years young! As I am sure you can appreciate that means a long history of technical changes. We’re looking to modernise the desktop. We started with 23.04 when we moved from Ubiquity to Subiquity, the Ubuntu Server installer, unifying our tech stack to create a more coherent installation experience across Ubuntu Server and Desktop. We also moved the installer UI from GTK to Flutter to make iterating the interface much easier (Flutter tooling is excellent). Still, we need to be bolder. In fact we shouldn’t be talking about the installer nearly so much; it's a tool not the destination. I want to improve the installation through the first boot experience so we can move onto more interesting things. We’re exploring a range of changes to get this part right: from declarative configs to answering the question “what does security by default” mean in 2023? In the context of this headline, and to make our intentions clear, we are looking to minimise the default installation. So the plan is to have one lean installation option. It's late in the UK so I’m going to sign off and be back at this in the morning. We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on what an awesome out-of-box-experience could look like (either here or in the original discourse post). Best, Tim [1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/rethinking-ubuntu-desktop-a-more-thoughtful-default-installation/36736/23 https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/rethinking-ubuntu-desktop-a-m...
- Shawnj2 3y ago
  I’m in an interesting scenario because I actually use a Linux desktop at work (working on Linux platform devices so having your desktop be able to run buildroot and/or the software directly is useful and IT likes Ubuntu) and it’s honestly a very good OOB experience as is atm, the main changes I would make for casual users would be fleshing out the store more and removing reliance on snaps, apt auto installing snaps has caused me way more problems than it has solved and while I think snap is fine it shouldn’t do things unless I try to use it directly because it doesn’t play very nicely with apt. Also I think you’re overestimating how much people actually want bold changes, we’re using Ubuntu 20.04 because 22.04 changed too many things and many packages we use don’t work.
- abrookewood 3y ago
johnea 3y ago
Just another reason to not use ubuntu...
teleforce 3y ago
Please check DietPi where you can install lean and minimal Debian, headless or desktop, for SBC (Arm, x86, RISC-V): https://dietpi.com/ https://dietpi.com/ https://dietpi.com/docs/software/desktop/ https://dietpi.com/docs/software/desktop/ "DietPi is an extremely lightweight Debian OS, highly optimised for minimal CPU and RAM resource usage, ensuring your SBC always runs at its maximum potential".
CSSer 3y ago
I recently upgraded a Linode Ubuntu VPS to the latest (server) LTS version. After the upgrade, it started shutting down every 15-20 minutes like clockwork. I looked everywhere. I thought perhaps it could be some errant kernel configuration that was incompatible with the new version of the distro. I must’ve overlooked the actual problem at least a dozen times before I finally got a hint from /var/log/syslog. A lack of display/network activity had been detected, so the system was going to sleep. After the upgrade, that must’ve been the new default. I still don’t understand how this made sense for a server edition. How does the new default handle situations like these?

43 points by mariuz 3y ago

jrm4 3y ago

Ubuntu, the distro for desktops and laptops, is DEAD and has been for sometime, Ubuntu is now Microsoft's lapdog. (For better or worse, I don't think it's super evil, but let's just all be honest here) Linux Mint or MX Linux are the way to go here. Time to move on.

brian_herman 3y ago
I started on Debian and I will die using Debian. I have used Ubuntu before, and I admit it is a good way for Debian to get new features like an upstream or something.
- jimrob4 3y ago
  Ditto. Toyed with RH and Mandrake back in the day, but quickly moved to Debian and have been there since. Played with Ubuntu and a couple smaller niche distros, but always came back to good ol' Deborah.
  - timbit42 3y ago
    ...and Ian.
- tensor 3y ago
  I'll try debian again when they move to a yearly release. Using nearly two year old software in the worst case really sucks for some use cases.
  - tguvot 3y ago
    there is always testing and unstable - if you want something fresher. i personally run unstable for past 20 years. i think i had serious breakage only once
NoRelToEmber 3y ago
> Ubuntu is now Microsoft's lapdog. Could you elaborate?
- doublerabbit 3y ago
  What Microsoft does, Canonical will follow in the Linux realm? This does read like something Microsoft would do.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  on AWS in go-go years, Ubuntu with easy defaults and permissive licenses became the number one installed VM .. by a very large margin. The numbers were not even close.. like 15x more daily volume of VMs on AWS than the next closest three or whatever.. look for yourself. That in turn begat the very hot breath of MSFT upon Ubuntu-Canonical, which shows in the boot signing keys for Ubuntu, the MSFT-private partition type in the disk installer, and the WSL. MSFT influences can be seen in the push for always-on snap with libc and unattended-upgrades phone home and the like.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Gordonjcp 3y ago
> Linux Mint or MX Linux are the way to go here So, Ubuntu, but with a slightly reskinned UI?
- pjerem 3y ago
  idk about MX Linux but Linux Mint is Ubuntu without any Snap, with additional official apt repos, Flatpack support out of the box and, last but not least, its own house made desktop environment. To me it’s as far from Ubuntu as Ubuntu is far from Debian.
  - Gordonjcp 3y ago
    Okay, but it's all just Linux. There's no real difference between any of them.
    - jrm4 3y ago
      This is 90% true, but also the 10% matters in terms of "onboarding people to the desktop," which I think still is very important (and actually going reasonably well, IMHO)
      - Gordonjcp 3y ago
        Right, but that's all taken care of. Chromebooks outsell everything else, and Android phones outsell everything else, and Steam Decks haven't quite got there yet but it's early days. Linux is 100% of one market segment, broadband routers. No matter how staunch a Windows zealot someone is, there's a bunch of stuff they depend on that cannot be done with Windows at all, not no-how.
- jrm4 3y ago
  And without the new Ubuntu crap, yes. That's the point.
  - Gordonjcp 3y ago
    Hm. And how long have you been using Linux, exactly?

andrewstuart 3y ago

So it’s now default minimal?

Levitating 3y ago
It's default by default
ryaneager 3y ago
That is how i understood it. Then during install you’re promoted if you want to install additional software with probably a list that’s is the equivalent of today’s full install, easily selectable.

damnesian 3y ago

I was hardcore Ubuntu devotee for many years and at one point just got tired of having to undo all of the terrible choices being made for users. Minimal install saved the time of having to undo before doing things the way I wanted. It's this kind of messing around with package and desktop managers that finally sent me to other distros.

andrewstuart 3y ago
The way I read it, it’s now default minimal. Am I reading it wrong?
- donmcronald 3y ago
  Yeah, but more likely is that they want a single install option so they can ensure you install whatever bloatware they want to add.
Levitating 3y ago
Have you tried Mint? What's your opinion on that?
- Gordonjcp 3y ago
  It's a reskinned version of Ubuntu, that has some slightly questionable packaging choices.
  - Levitating 3y ago
    I really wouldn't call it a reskin of Ubuntu. It uses the Ubuntu repositories sure, but it also has many of its own packages and there is the LMDE version which bases on Debian instead of Ubuntu (in case they ever want to become independant of ubuntu). Mint has none of the crap Ubuntu comes with and won't inexplicitly install snaps. Mint develops their own desktop environment cinnamon (based on gnome 2). If a distro is a reskin one should be able to convert an install of the original distro to the reskinned version. Mint comes with heaps of its own software, for managing software installation, software upgrades, managing kernels, managing release upgrades and of course its own DE.

activiation 3y ago

Just go with Arch if you want minimal

stevebro 3y ago
Agreed
skrause 3y ago
Or just Debian if you don't want to learn a new package manager. debfoster (https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/debfoster https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/debfoster) is my favorite tool to keep my Debian installations as small as possible.
jmclnx 3y ago
Never tried arch, but that should be a good option too. I would like to toss out OpenBSD and NetBSD to the minimal list. I doubt nothing is a minimal as these :)
weberer 3y ago
Arch is a bit too minimal for the people who were previously using Ubuntu's minimal install. You don't even have a desktop environment out of the box.
- BillyTheMage 3y ago
  Ubuntu Minimal didn't have a desktop environment out of the box either, did it ?
pengaru 3y ago
Arch's package management tooling is a bit of an unconsolidated inconsistent mess. As someone who used Debian for decades before experimenting with Arch on my laptop for a few years now, Debian is far more polished and ergonomic in the package tooling.
- activiation 3y ago
  Not sure why you are saying that... What is the issue exactly?

cocodill 3y ago

fun fact: "minimal install" was a full install with a bunch of "apt purge" afterwards.

SahAssar 3y ago
Source? That sounds very backwards but also like something that ubuntu would do...
- srvmshr 3y ago
  Just follow the installer log. It does the Ubuntu standard installation followed by removal of non-essential packages (office utilities, AV utilities etc.)
- cocodill 3y ago
  On the installer image is a directory casper, there is another image filesystem.squashfs, I suspect that it is simply unpacked to the hard disk during installation. System deployment is really fast this way. Also in casper directory are two more interesting files: filesystem.manifest-minimal-remove and filesystem.manifest-remove with a bunch of packages names. And of course you should have a look at the log during the installation process, all the "apt purge" things show up there.
  - jbicha 3y ago
    That is no longer the case with the new default Desktop subiquity installer in 23.04. Instead of a single squashfs, there are separate squashfs files so the minimal install is faster than default in 23.04.

jbs55 3y ago

[flagged]

zzzbra 3y ago

quick, somebody fork Ubuntu before they remove it!

Animats 3y ago

Oh, crap. What do I install on the little laptops I use for single-purpose stuff. Is there still going to be XUbuntu? Can I get something that never "phones home"?

c7DJTLrn 3y ago
If you have the time and know-how, you can build your own system off of Ubuntu Base[0]. It's as barebones you can get with Ubuntu - doesn't have snap or any other crap the "minimal" ISO does. You'd need to chroot into it to install the kernel, and you'd probably want to generate an initrd image. I have an example of how to do this on GitHub that you can steal from[1]. [0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Base https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Base [1] https://github.com/cedws/concrete-ubuntu https://github.com/cedws/concrete-ubuntu
- Animats 3y ago
  I don't want to be a career system administrator. I did that once.
  - c7DJTLrn 3y ago
    You're welcome. If you're going to be picky you'll probably find nothing meets all of your requirements.

smeagull 3y ago

e8gy3 3y ago

Hi all I’m Tim the Director of Engineering for the Ubuntu Desktop. I think the headline here may have embellished my original post, so if you’re interested, you can find it here [1]. Ubuntu is (almost) 20 years young! As I am sure you can appreciate that means a long history of technical changes. We’re looking to modernise the desktop. We started with 23.04 when we moved from Ubiquity to Subiquity, the Ubuntu Server installer, unifying our tech stack to create a more coherent installation experience across Ubuntu Server and Desktop. We also moved the installer UI from GTK to Flutter to make iterating the interface much easier (Flutter tooling is excellent). Still, we need to be bolder. In fact we shouldn’t be talking about the installer nearly so much; it's a tool not the destination. I want to improve the installation through the first boot experience so we can move onto more interesting things. We’re exploring a range of changes to get this part right: from declarative configs to answering the question “what does security by default” mean in 2023? In the context of this headline, and to make our intentions clear, we are looking to minimise the default installation. So the plan is to have one lean installation option. It's late in the UK so I’m going to sign off and be back at this in the morning. We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on what an awesome out-of-box-experience could look like (either here or in the original discourse post). Best, Tim [1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/rethinking-ubuntu-desktop-a-more-thoughtful-default-installation/36736/23 https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/rethinking-ubuntu-desktop-a-m...

Shawnj2 3y ago
I’m in an interesting scenario because I actually use a Linux desktop at work (working on Linux platform devices so having your desktop be able to run buildroot and/or the software directly is useful and IT likes Ubuntu) and it’s honestly a very good OOB experience as is atm, the main changes I would make for casual users would be fleshing out the store more and removing reliance on snaps, apt auto installing snaps has caused me way more problems than it has solved and while I think snap is fine it shouldn’t do things unless I try to use it directly because it doesn’t play very nicely with apt. Also I think you’re overestimating how much people actually want bold changes, we’re using Ubuntu 20.04 because 22.04 changed too many things and many packages we use don’t work.
abrookewood 3y ago

johnea 3y ago

Just another reason to not use ubuntu...

teleforce 3y ago

Please check DietPi where you can install lean and minimal Debian, headless or desktop, for SBC (Arm, x86, RISC-V): https://dietpi.com/ https://dietpi.com/ https://dietpi.com/docs/software/desktop/ https://dietpi.com/docs/software/desktop/ "DietPi is an extremely lightweight Debian OS, highly optimised for minimal CPU and RAM resource usage, ensuring your SBC always runs at its maximum potential".

CSSer 3y ago

I recently upgraded a Linode Ubuntu VPS to the latest (server) LTS version. After the upgrade, it started shutting down every 15-20 minutes like clockwork. I looked everywhere. I thought perhaps it could be some errant kernel configuration that was incompatible with the new version of the distro. I must’ve overlooked the actual problem at least a dozen times before I finally got a hint from /var/log/syslog. A lack of display/network activity had been detected, so the system was going to sleep. After the upgrade, that must’ve been the new default. I still don’t understand how this made sense for a server edition. How does the new default handle situations like these?