9 ms·

Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote Debs (Apparently)

61 points by mariuz 3y ago

voidr 3y ago
I used Ubuntu Desktop in the past, I think they had the right idea with Unity, however it felt like they didn't push hard enough. I was using Ubuntu Server everywhere, I stopped using it the moment they started forcing snaps. Snaps are inferior technology, I don't want to install a daemon just to install software on my server, I don't want an unpredictable auto upgrade technology and I don't want millions of mount points. DEB and RPM have been around since forever, I can deploy software using those technologies and expect it to work in 10 years, the same cannot be said for Snaps, there is nothing there to guaranty that it won't just end up like: Upstart, Mir and Unity. I can ship my software as a Docker container and have it work everywhere or I can put in a lot of work to ship a snap and have it only really work on Ubuntu, I don't even know what was Canonical thinking here. I don't care that I can install snapd on most distros, if it's not actively supported by the distro it does not count.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
Ok, so ubuntu is going south, but redhat is stopping to support rhel, will this affect fedora? I use ubuntu on personal and servers and fedora for work,so picture me concerned. I need a better distro for sure, because ubuntu lands with unattended upgrades enabled, which causes the server setup from my scripts to be unpredictable (sometimes is doing updates when booted the first time, but not always. Sometimes is also very fast). Recommendations for server distros that require minimal setup? I have only small applications running Then, I was already thinking of moving to fedora on personal too, with KDE, but I am now concerned. Any recommendations for personal desktop usage? I'd like low maintenance distros, so I'm not interested in massively recompiling things. And I have nvidia, which is why I chose ubuntu with kde and fedora where I would like to switch to kde. Gnome plugin policy is so bad that I don't upgrade fedora because of them
retrocryptid 3y ago
Just another reminder I need to move back to stock Debian or BSD.
- whalesalad 3y ago
  Come back to where the air is crisp - Debian 12 is glorious.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Debian remains OK (I use it on all of my machines), but worrying signs have been growing there as well.
    - bithaze 3y ago
      > worrying signs have been growing there as well Care to elaborate?
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        My comment was too harsh to Debian. Debian has been good to me, and is the best distro I've used. But their adoption of systemd is something that makes me worried for the future. It's still avoidable for now, but the writing is on the wall.
        whalesalad 3y ago
        systemd is great
        zokula 3y ago
        [dead]
        retrocryptid 3y ago
        Meh. SystemD makes me nervous. One system that does so much and can rewrite my BIOS. I may have to just go back to VMS.
  - jrockway 3y ago
    I've used Debian since the early 2000s and keep wondering why there are any other distributions of Linux.
srvmshr 3y ago
Often, great engineering products start out crisp and clean until the product manager, sales and marketing guys, growth managers and evangelists step in and start adding antipatterns. I am not surprised Ubuntu did it. I am surprised they did it so late. They were slow-cooking this for the last 5 years. And for anyone unwilling to see it: Ubuntu wasn't about building a solid engineering product like RHEL, Debian or Slackware. It was always cashing on making a fork (i.e Debian unstable) more usable. Their core interest is increasing number of installs everywhere, not bringing the next engineering marvel. Flatpak serves that cause beautifully. They only have to worry about sandbox & containers part for software others build. Ubuntu has tried bold moves - like trying to replace Xorg with Mir. That failed because Mir was raw. But this one might just. Making deb packages second class citizens in a Debian derived OS is so unfortunate.
- synergy20 3y ago
  we have Debian, which i'm going to use and replace all ubuntu stuff on the server side. on the desktop side, I really just need a browser and a vim editor for 99% of what I do, Debian should be perfectly fine too.
  - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
    And honestly, for desktops, Debian testing is plenty stable IME and stays quite up to date. It's what I've run on my laptop for years with absolutely no issues.
    - stavros 3y ago
      How up to date is it? That might be attractive after years of Ubuntu. How is the proprietary driver support?
      - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
        Pretty darn up to date. Tbh I think it's not unusual for it to be more to date than the current Ubuntu stable (which I thought started out as a snapshot of Sid). As for proprietary drivers, the non-free repos have traditionally carried everything I need.
jjice 3y ago
So why does Ubuntu push Snaps so hard? They've been doing this for year and I still have no idea, since pretty much everyone I know would rather a deb file (myself included). What's their gain?
- jcastro 3y ago
  The linux desktop is in the middle of moving to a zero trust model: https://www.ypsidanger.com/the-distribution-model-is-changing/ https://www.ypsidanger.com/the-distribution-model-is-changin...
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Damn, that was a depressing read. If that's how things are going, then it really is past time for me to stop using Linux entirely. This is feeling like the final straw in a series of things that have been pushing me away.
    - jcastro 3y ago
      What are your concerns?
      - abeyer 3y ago
        Personally mine are the fact that this isn't really "zero trust", but more "infinitely diffuse trust" where every user has to trust every application. None of the packaging alternatives I'm aware of seem to yet have their security story in line where they are either secure enough (without breaking most software) to not have to trust every application or provide some level of assurance themselves comparable to the debian maintainers.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        Oh, I have quite a few of them, from increased resource usage, proprietary aspects, through forced updating and more. The forced updating is particularly unacceptable. But, the 10,000 ft view is that they reduce the amount of control I have over my system. They offer restrictions I chafe at while giving me no benefit that I care about. I'm not going to sit here and say they shouldn't exist. That they're not to my taste doesn't mean that others who like them shouldn't have them. But they're not to my taste at all. After seeing systemd getting widely adopted (also not to my taste), if snaps (or flatpacks, although I am less allergic to those) join the party then that's just a clear indication that the Linux world and I have diverged too much and I need to move on.
awinter-py 3y ago
I have zero horse in this race other than every time I've tried snap firefox it has been unpleasant (slower, weird memory, weird hangs that sometimes OOM), so I install it in some silly manual way in theory I like that snaps have a permission model w/ default confinement, in practice I keep getting asked to install in 'classic' mode
- anonymousab 3y ago
  I have never understood why the pushed snaps so early and so hard as they have. Feature parity isn't always a necessity, but you'd think they would have made sure that Snap apps perform at least "ok".
  - awinter-py 3y ago
    I suspect it's easier for 3rd party orgs to own their own releases? but not sure
e63f67dd-065b 3y ago
In my mind, Ubuntu Desktop, and desktop linux in general, has always been a hobbyist project masquerading as a real production-ready environment. There's no money in building a desktop distro, so nobody really cares what happens there. The real power of Ubuntu has really always been as a server distro. I used to run desktop Ubuntu when I was younger and had more spare time to tinker with this nonsense, but nowadays I administer enough ubuntu servers at work, I don't need to do it at home too. Ubuntu server is great -- everything is very well-documented, LTS is stable, snaps are sometimes pretty useful (I recently had to quickly spin up redis temporarily for a project and it was a one-liner), and everything just works in general. I used to run CentOS (rip) servers, and Ubuntu, whilst noticeably worse, is still great to administer. It's not all sunshine and rainbows for sure, but things generally work the way you expect them to and things are generally sane.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
  How do you deal with init scripts that try to uninstall packages, but ubuntu having unattended upgrades immediately, so at times apt-get is locked at first boot?
- layer8 3y ago
  For server, Debian is the simpler and more stable solution.
  - lockhouse 3y ago
    FreeBSD is a great option on the server as well. Simple, stable, mature, and great documentation.
    - e63f67dd-065b 3y ago
      If I tried to run FreeBSD in prod I might have actually been fired. None of the BSDs are production ready: basically nothing is validated to work with them, there’s no commercial support, less available sysadmins, no software officially supports it, etc. It’s a hobby system, nothing more. It's theoretically possible to use it in prod; I know that some companies (Netflix?) do it. But it's certainly not common and takes a lot of engineering resources to make it work.
renewiltord 3y ago
I use Ubuntu Server. Should I be moving to Debian? I really like Ubuntu (user since Breezy Badger back when Mark Shuttleworth shipped CDs to everyone) but the whole snap thing has been a pain. They change around on you, don't work well (docker or something installed as a snap for me and failed in a strange way), and are quite slow (visually apparent load time). I really don't want to worry about this stuff on Ubuntu Server. Has anyone else moved to Debian?
- palata 3y ago
  I used Arch for 10 years and moved to Ubuntu 20.04 for work. I'm going back to Arch as soon as I can, and I certainly won't ever get to Ubuntu 22.04.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    Thank you. I liked Arch but the rolling release thing does make this less useful in my case (on-prem compute cloud). I want to maintain this thing as little as possible and I know from experience that if you let arch get too far ahead of you, pacman can fail to bring you up.
foobarbecue 3y ago
Wait, what? I thought I read recently that they were phasing out snap? Did I dream that? Edit: I'm talking about this https://news.itsfoss.com/ubuntu-ditch-snap/ https://news.itsfoss.com/ubuntu-ditch-snap/ Oh JEEZ it was april fools. It seemed so reasonable. I thought they were coming to their senses.
- rohfle 3y ago
  april fools? https://news.itsfoss.com/ubuntu-ditch-snap/ https://news.itsfoss.com/ubuntu-ditch-snap/
- SSLy 3y ago
  it was one of those april fools jokes that a lot of people wish would be real.
BasedAnon 3y ago
so as an ubuntu user how do i replace and disable all the snap garbage without doing a full wipe & install of Manjaro or Debian
- palata 3y ago
  I think you answered it: move to Arch or Debian
  - BasedAnon 3y ago
    Yeah but I don't want to reinstall
fb03 3y ago
I really really hate this forced push to snaps. I think I'll try Linux Mint out. Or maybe it's time to go back to my beloved Debian, which I abandoned because of Ubuntu when Ubuntu was still not too filled with crap.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  Try Manjaro. It's the best user desktop experience, together with Arch way better than any point release distro like Ubuntu or Mint in terms of new software availability, hardware support, and stability (yes, ironically, rolling release distros are more stable than point release ones). If you're running servers, stick to Debian.
dclaw 3y ago
Ubuntu died for me when I upgraded to a new LTS and they replaced my deb firefox install with a snap version that used some non-standard mouse cursor.... Only in firefox. It apparently took them ~2 weeks to fix it, but in that time I rage-wiped by ubuntu install and switched to linux mint, which I also regret, but is snap free.

61 points by mariuz 3y ago

I used Ubuntu Desktop in the past, I think they had the right idea with Unity, however it felt like they didn't push hard enough. I was using Ubuntu Server everywhere, I stopped using it the moment they started forcing snaps. Snaps are inferior technology, I don't want to install a daemon just to install software on my server, I don't want an unpredictable auto upgrade technology and I don't want millions of mount points. DEB and RPM have been around since forever, I can deploy software using those technologies and expect it to work in 10 years, the same cannot be said for Snaps, there is nothing there to guaranty that it won't just end up like: Upstart, Mir and Unity. I can ship my software as a Docker container and have it work everywhere or I can put in a lot of work to ship a snap and have it only really work on Ubuntu, I don't even know what was Canonical thinking here. I don't care that I can install snapd on most distros, if it's not actively supported by the distro it does not count.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago

Ok, so ubuntu is going south, but redhat is stopping to support rhel, will this affect fedora? I use ubuntu on personal and servers and fedora for work,so picture me concerned. I need a better distro for sure, because ubuntu lands with unattended upgrades enabled, which causes the server setup from my scripts to be unpredictable (sometimes is doing updates when booted the first time, but not always. Sometimes is also very fast). Recommendations for server distros that require minimal setup? I have only small applications running Then, I was already thinking of moving to fedora on personal too, with KDE, but I am now concerned. Any recommendations for personal desktop usage? I'd like low maintenance distros, so I'm not interested in massively recompiling things. And I have nvidia, which is why I chose ubuntu with kde and fedora where I would like to switch to kde. Gnome plugin policy is so bad that I don't upgrade fedora because of them

retrocryptid 3y ago

Just another reminder I need to move back to stock Debian or BSD.

whalesalad 3y ago
Come back to where the air is crisp - Debian 12 is glorious.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Debian remains OK (I use it on all of my machines), but worrying signs have been growing there as well.
  - bithaze 3y ago
    > worrying signs have been growing there as well Care to elaborate?
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      My comment was too harsh to Debian. Debian has been good to me, and is the best distro I've used. But their adoption of systemd is something that makes me worried for the future. It's still avoidable for now, but the writing is on the wall.
      - whalesalad 3y ago
        systemd is great
        zokula 3y ago
        [dead]
        retrocryptid 3y ago
        Meh. SystemD makes me nervous. One system that does so much and can rewrite my BIOS. I may have to just go back to VMS.
- jrockway 3y ago
  I've used Debian since the early 2000s and keep wondering why there are any other distributions of Linux.

srvmshr 3y ago

Often, great engineering products start out crisp and clean until the product manager, sales and marketing guys, growth managers and evangelists step in and start adding antipatterns. I am not surprised Ubuntu did it. I am surprised they did it so late. They were slow-cooking this for the last 5 years. And for anyone unwilling to see it: Ubuntu wasn't about building a solid engineering product like RHEL, Debian or Slackware. It was always cashing on making a fork (i.e Debian unstable) more usable. Their core interest is increasing number of installs everywhere, not bringing the next engineering marvel. Flatpak serves that cause beautifully. They only have to worry about sandbox & containers part for software others build. Ubuntu has tried bold moves - like trying to replace Xorg with Mir. That failed because Mir was raw. But this one might just. Making deb packages second class citizens in a Debian derived OS is so unfortunate.

synergy20 3y ago
we have Debian, which i'm going to use and replace all ubuntu stuff on the server side. on the desktop side, I really just need a browser and a vim editor for 99% of what I do, Debian should be perfectly fine too.
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
  And honestly, for desktops, Debian testing is plenty stable IME and stays quite up to date. It's what I've run on my laptop for years with absolutely no issues.
  - stavros 3y ago
    How up to date is it? That might be attractive after years of Ubuntu. How is the proprietary driver support?
    - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
      Pretty darn up to date. Tbh I think it's not unusual for it to be more to date than the current Ubuntu stable (which I thought started out as a snapshot of Sid). As for proprietary drivers, the non-free repos have traditionally carried everything I need.

jjice 3y ago

So why does Ubuntu push Snaps so hard? They've been doing this for year and I still have no idea, since pretty much everyone I know would rather a deb file (myself included). What's their gain?

jcastro 3y ago
The linux desktop is in the middle of moving to a zero trust model: https://www.ypsidanger.com/the-distribution-model-is-changing/ https://www.ypsidanger.com/the-distribution-model-is-changin...
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Damn, that was a depressing read. If that's how things are going, then it really is past time for me to stop using Linux entirely. This is feeling like the final straw in a series of things that have been pushing me away.
  - jcastro 3y ago
    What are your concerns?
    - abeyer 3y ago
      Personally mine are the fact that this isn't really "zero trust", but more "infinitely diffuse trust" where every user has to trust every application. None of the packaging alternatives I'm aware of seem to yet have their security story in line where they are either secure enough (without breaking most software) to not have to trust every application or provide some level of assurance themselves comparable to the debian maintainers.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Oh, I have quite a few of them, from increased resource usage, proprietary aspects, through forced updating and more. The forced updating is particularly unacceptable. But, the 10,000 ft view is that they reduce the amount of control I have over my system. They offer restrictions I chafe at while giving me no benefit that I care about. I'm not going to sit here and say they shouldn't exist. That they're not to my taste doesn't mean that others who like them shouldn't have them. But they're not to my taste at all. After seeing systemd getting widely adopted (also not to my taste), if snaps (or flatpacks, although I am less allergic to those) join the party then that's just a clear indication that the Linux world and I have diverged too much and I need to move on.

awinter-py 3y ago

I have zero horse in this race other than every time I've tried snap firefox it has been unpleasant (slower, weird memory, weird hangs that sometimes OOM), so I install it in some silly manual way in theory I like that snaps have a permission model w/ default confinement, in practice I keep getting asked to install in 'classic' mode

anonymousab 3y ago
I have never understood why the pushed snaps so early and so hard as they have. Feature parity isn't always a necessity, but you'd think they would have made sure that Snap apps perform at least "ok".
- awinter-py 3y ago
  I suspect it's easier for 3rd party orgs to own their own releases? but not sure

e63f67dd-065b 3y ago

In my mind, Ubuntu Desktop, and desktop linux in general, has always been a hobbyist project masquerading as a real production-ready environment. There's no money in building a desktop distro, so nobody really cares what happens there. The real power of Ubuntu has really always been as a server distro. I used to run desktop Ubuntu when I was younger and had more spare time to tinker with this nonsense, but nowadays I administer enough ubuntu servers at work, I don't need to do it at home too. Ubuntu server is great -- everything is very well-documented, LTS is stable, snaps are sometimes pretty useful (I recently had to quickly spin up redis temporarily for a project and it was a one-liner), and everything just works in general. I used to run CentOS (rip) servers, and Ubuntu, whilst noticeably worse, is still great to administer. It's not all sunshine and rainbows for sure, but things generally work the way you expect them to and things are generally sane.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
How do you deal with init scripts that try to uninstall packages, but ubuntu having unattended upgrades immediately, so at times apt-get is locked at first boot?
layer8 3y ago
For server, Debian is the simpler and more stable solution.
- lockhouse 3y ago
  FreeBSD is a great option on the server as well. Simple, stable, mature, and great documentation.
  - e63f67dd-065b 3y ago
    If I tried to run FreeBSD in prod I might have actually been fired. None of the BSDs are production ready: basically nothing is validated to work with them, there’s no commercial support, less available sysadmins, no software officially supports it, etc. It’s a hobby system, nothing more. It's theoretically possible to use it in prod; I know that some companies (Netflix?) do it. But it's certainly not common and takes a lot of engineering resources to make it work.

renewiltord 3y ago

I use Ubuntu Server. Should I be moving to Debian? I really like Ubuntu (user since Breezy Badger back when Mark Shuttleworth shipped CDs to everyone) but the whole snap thing has been a pain. They change around on you, don't work well (docker or something installed as a snap for me and failed in a strange way), and are quite slow (visually apparent load time). I really don't want to worry about this stuff on Ubuntu Server. Has anyone else moved to Debian?

palata 3y ago
I used Arch for 10 years and moved to Ubuntu 20.04 for work. I'm going back to Arch as soon as I can, and I certainly won't ever get to Ubuntu 22.04.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Thank you. I liked Arch but the rolling release thing does make this less useful in my case (on-prem compute cloud). I want to maintain this thing as little as possible and I know from experience that if you let arch get too far ahead of you, pacman can fail to bring you up.

foobarbecue 3y ago

Wait, what? I thought I read recently that they were phasing out snap? Did I dream that? Edit: I'm talking about this https://news.itsfoss.com/ubuntu-ditch-snap/ https://news.itsfoss.com/ubuntu-ditch-snap/ Oh JEEZ it was april fools. It seemed so reasonable. I thought they were coming to their senses.

rohfle 3y ago
april fools? https://news.itsfoss.com/ubuntu-ditch-snap/ https://news.itsfoss.com/ubuntu-ditch-snap/
SSLy 3y ago
it was one of those april fools jokes that a lot of people wish would be real.

BasedAnon 3y ago

so as an ubuntu user how do i replace and disable all the snap garbage without doing a full wipe & install of Manjaro or Debian

palata 3y ago
I think you answered it: move to Arch or Debian
- BasedAnon 3y ago
  Yeah but I don't want to reinstall

fb03 3y ago

I really really hate this forced push to snaps. I think I'll try Linux Mint out. Or maybe it's time to go back to my beloved Debian, which I abandoned because of Ubuntu when Ubuntu was still not too filled with crap.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
Try Manjaro. It's the best user desktop experience, together with Arch way better than any point release distro like Ubuntu or Mint in terms of new software availability, hardware support, and stability (yes, ironically, rolling release distros are more stable than point release ones). If you're running servers, stick to Debian.

dclaw 3y ago

Ubuntu died for me when I upgraded to a new LTS and they replaced my deb firefox install with a snap version that used some non-standard mouse cursor.... Only in firefox. It apparently took them ~2 weeks to fix it, but in that time I rage-wiped by ubuntu install and switched to linux mint, which I also regret, but is snap free.