21 ms·

Ubuntu Pro Shenanigans

118 points by mikece 3y ago

repelsteeltje 3y ago
> Ubuntu Pro is available for free for personal use, but it requires you to attach a unique license key to your Ubuntu installation, which will be tracked by Canonical. Let the enshittification commence...
- nicolaslem 3y ago
  I don't want to sound too cynical but the enshittification of Ubuntu started way before that.
  - repelsteeltje 3y ago
    +1 touché
- pipo234 3y ago
  It's nice that there is a work-around. This time. And the next time. I for one use System76' Pop!OS derivative (which is great!), but that might ultimately play out like a RHEL <-> CentOS/Rocky/Alma drama. It will take another while, but it looks like Debian is our last hope for community linux (in apt ecosystem).
  - Filligree 3y ago
    Arch, Gentoo and NixOS also exist…
    - krylon 3y ago
      True, but the GP wrote "community linux (in apt ecosystem)" Arch, Gentoo, and NixOS don't use apt. However, neither does OpenSUSE, which is probably a better choice for non-technical users.
    - mikepurvis 3y ago
      Normally when people talk about pro/enterprise/premium, what they're really talking about is long term support for a "stable" release, since that the thankless backporting work that you need to pay people to do. And those are all rolling distros, so I don't think they're a fit for anyone with that class of enterprise needs. NixOS has supported releases, but as far as I'm aware, each one gets less than a year— 22.11 was just deprecated in favour of the current 23.05 and the upcoming 23.11.
      - bravetraveler 3y ago
        In this case it's even more LTS -- ESM. It's LTS for LTS, life support beyond the initial release timeline It can be useful for very slow to move businesses like my employer
    - type0 3y ago
      I know that some people run Arch on servers, why they do it is complete mystery to me. At least Gentoo and especially NixOS has some legitimate reasons to exist on servers.
- waynesonfire 3y ago
  I switched to freebsd long time ago. Like a fine wine gets better with age.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >Let the enshittification commence. My feelings on the direction of present day Ubuntu: "You were supposed to destroy The Sith (aka Windows), not join them!"
- m463 3y ago
  come on, they've been doing this kind of stuff for years. The system search used to go to amazon. There is lots of messy forced upgrade stuff in the os. If you try to apt-get remove ubuntu-advantage-tools, it will cripple your system. the motd-news system does a lot of silly stuff under the covers, with plenty of contact with canonical's servers.
Etheryte 3y ago
> [We] recommend Ubuntu for OSINT virtual machines [...] > We feel that Ubuntu is being aggressively misleading with the rollout of Ubuntu Pro, and we do not recommend any OSINT users attach this service to their investigative VMs. Or, you know, you could stop recommending Ubuntu as the preferred distro of choice. This is clearly user-hostile and there are numerous good alternatives available.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Disable ads, don’t forget to click “no, do not spy on me”, disable this crap, disable snap… Doesn’t take much of that before it’s easier to just use a different distro.
  - donkeybeer 3y ago
    Ads? Has ubuntu started giving ads, when did that happen? And what about the do not spy thing?
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      1) I haven’t used it on desktop in some time, but not that far back they had Amazon ads in Gnome. Plus motd ads for Ubuntu stuff (like Pro, in fact). And now ads in apt output. 2) Spying is opt-in, to their credit, and only at install, so you just have to make sure you aren’t auto-piloting your way through the installation and enable it by accident, but that’s still another thing to worry about that may not exist in other distros. Not much of an issue in automated-deployment situations.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  I think it’s really smart for projects like Linux Mint to keep actively maintained distros off of Ubuntu or Gnome or whatever. Give the user the option, but have a fallback. I’m not optimistic canonical is going to just turn back from this path of Snaps and DRM.
znpy 3y ago
Ubuntu is crap nowadays fedora is the way to go.
- synergy20 3y ago
  why is that, 15 years Ubuntu user here looking for alternative, Debian seems a natural one though it's LTS is only 2 years by default
  - McAtNite 3y ago
    Those are two very different philosophies to Linux. Fedora is much more bleeding edge than Debian (by a lot) so the question really comes down to which you prefer. I absolutely love Fedora and run it on my main desktop. That being said I also cut my teeth on CentOS so I’ve always had a soft spot for the RHEL approach to Linux. As for the bleeding edge aspect, I’ve rarely encountered issues with the latest updates. I had to do a bit of troubleshooting with pipewire and my HDMI output, and once a Gnome update caused the hertz setting on my monitor to bug out and cause a black screen. None of it was really traumatizing though, and I have my system set to run a DNF update automatically on every login since I like to run as up to date as possible, and generally trust the packages won’t be overly buggy by the time they get pushed live. ————————— After looking at your profile I realize you probably already are familiar with the philosophical differences of the two. Leaving the above for the potential benefit of anyone else who isn’t familiar.
  - tapoxi 3y ago
    Fedora has the release cycle of Ubuntu with the large development and QA team of Red Hat. It is upstream of RHEL, so they give a shit about quality and it shows. They also do things open whenever possible when Ubuntu will either keep things closed (Snap Store) or behind a CLA.
    - trinsic2 3y ago
      I am an independent IT contractor that games on his off time. Recently, I switched to Linux from Windows and it has been a good experience so far. I went with POPos because of how they integrated steam and the video drivers into the distro. It works great except shit breaks like booting and other things some times when they release major updates. I actually really like way Arch is designed. I was thinking of switching to Manjaro for stability reasons and I dont want to rip my hair out trying to get gaming to work in other distros. Im really looking for release stability with the ability to keep my gaming environment working. Any suggestions?
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
Years ago when I was a teenager, I was subcontracted to add a "stateful packet-inspecting firewall" to some office NAT gateways. Since the gateway was Linux, I just wrote a handful of IPTables rules. But the contractor wanted to charge more money for the upgrade, so they asked me to make a splash screen and progress bar to advertise the firewall changes. The actual rules were about 8 lines, so I had to add some extra stuff and some fake status messages. In the end it looked like it was doing a lot and took about 10 seconds to finish the progress. Funny to see Ubuntu offering "upgraded services" in the same vein.
- whalesalad 3y ago
  Hilarious that this happens. Oftentimes when you do something in a traditional IT environment it takes ages to install software (ie, configuring a Windows server with AD and all the related stuff), requires multiple reboots after setting hostname etc. It truly takes ages, lots of progress bars and waiting and making coffee. Meanwhile in an OSS/Linux environment a lot of things are truly trivial and instantaneous to a point where sometimes you gotta ask yourself "was that it?" Perception of value is an interesting thing.
  - Alupis 3y ago
    This is mostly caused by the Windows-induced impression of what "installing" software means. Most normal users would not describe unpacking a Zip into a directory as "installing" - yet that's exactly what it is everywhere except Windows. Sometimes the unpacking isn't even necessary...
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - woleium 3y ago
      Windows packages usually also require strange and disparate updates to the registry database.
      - 3y ago
walteweiss 3y ago
Oh, I see they have OSINT book there. Clicked to check. Wow >An e-book version of this release is not currently available. This is due to many reasons, including rampant piracy, counterfeit prints, Kindle tracking, exclusivity requirements, and unpredictable content removal from Amazon. We believe this book is better served as a printed reference manual. What a bullshit excuse. I don’t read printed books, as I like ebooks way more. Cannot believe anyone technological try to persuade me I want to have a real book on my desk.
- notpushkin 3y ago
  I bet there is a pirate EPUB somewhere already.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    Just checked, yep, pdf and epub on libgen, 10th (current) edition. Though the epub’s probably auto-generated from the pdf and likely sucks (did not verify). Guess that’s your only option if the product you want is an ebook.
    - notpushkin 3y ago
      Yep. That's a pretty funny thing about piracy: the harder it is to get a legitimate copy of your product, the more people will just go get it from torrents or libgen.
- Grimblewald 3y ago
  The good news is theyre telling us that you dont need to pay $5 for an ebook, you can easily get it for free through pirates. Seems weird to me to take that stance because i wouldn't hesistate if buying ebook was easier tham pirating it. That being said, maybe theyre locked into a crappy publisher deal and are too embaressed to admit it.
nottorp 3y ago
Hah. Enterprise pricing again. Once in a while I think of giving them some money. Every time I look into paying them for my home server, every time I see it's enterprisely priced and totally out of the question. Yeah I have the free ESM enabled. Still, they could let people pay 25/year for server updates for up to 3 machines or something.
- pengaru 3y ago
  > Yeah I have the free ESM enabled. Still, they could let people pay 25/year for server updates for up to 3 machines or something. Free tier can rightfully pound sand in the support expectations department. Perhaps a nearly-free tier wouldn't bring in enough revenue to offset the increased expectations there.
  - donmcronald 3y ago
    > Perhaps a nearly-free tier wouldn't bring in enough revenue to offset the increased expectations there. They could have a no-support or per-incident support tier that’s only a license. IMO the reason that doesn’t happen is because everyone only wants billionaire customers where all costs get passed to the end consumer without question. A little profit isn’t enough anymore. All these companies want massive margins and profits and won’t settle for less. I think a total collapse in tech might actually be good for the long term health of the industry.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    I don’t understand putting security updates behind a subscription. At least, creating a distro which is designed to be user-friendly, and then just letting devices sit on the internet unsecured seem basically unethical. It is inviting people who don’t know what they are doing to contribute to botnets and other attacks. It isn’t an expectation that a free user will be supported, just an expectation that a responsible company won’t create a cybersecurity attractive nuisance. Ubuntu is open source, they are supposed to be on the good team. But, they could reasonably just shut the free tier machines off when they fell out of their automatic update lifespan. Or they could find their value-add elsewhere.
lasermike026 3y ago
Are we Debian users now?
- Koshkin 3y ago
  Why not? What does Ubuntu bring to the table (for home users, anyway)?
  - helpfulContrib 3y ago
    [dead]
  - MikusR 3y ago
    10 years of LTS.
  - no_time 3y ago
    They tame GNOME into being borderline usable with their default plugins/patches Their default typeface is my favorite in the libre world Some time ago they were the only ones with a patched freetype that didn't make your eyes bleed. Before the snap fiasco they were all upside with no downside. I understand that they still are for a decent chunk of people.
- doubled112 3y ago
  At home? I sure am. No other OS gives me the ability to set up a machine and forget about it other than updates like Debian does.
- tilsammans 3y ago
  Fedora
vasdae 3y ago
https://inteltechniques.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Image-2-1.png https://inteltechniques.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Image-2-... Capitalising the first letter of each package name makes it look jarring.
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  I prefer that to what often happens with the GUI updater on my machine, where the name given is the first line of the package's description. e.g. "small, powerful, scalable web/proxy server" rather than "nginx" I have to click on the line to see the actual package name in the more info section.
shepherdjerred 3y ago
What's up with all of the Ubuntu hate in the comments? Ubuntu is my default choice. It's very easy to use, polished and doesn't require tweaking. I just installed Ubuntu Server earlier this week on my home server, and I was surprised at how nice the installer has gotten.
- donmcronald 3y ago
  > I was surprised at how nice the installer has gotten. It’s pretty good, but adding two ESP devices gives the impression you’re getting boot redundancy and you’re not. Only one of them will end up with GRUB. Then, once you fix that, only the primary device will have an entry in fstab and SystemD will have a nervous breakdown if you try to boot off the secondary with the primary missing. Good luck supplying the root password for emergency mode because you probably don’t have one.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > It’s pretty good, but adding two ESP devices gives the impression you’re getting boot redundancy and you’re not. Only one of them will end up with GRUB. Then, once you fix that, only the primary device will have an entry in fstab and SystemD will have a nervous breakdown if you try to boot off the secondary with the primary missing. How do you do that? The only way I know of is to use mdadm to RAID1 the partitions[0], but I wouldn't expect that to break the way you've described. [0] This is also a bit fiddly; IME you have to pick a specific configuration so the firmware will read the result.
- calamari4065 3y ago
  Because Canonical is starting to smell like enshittification. Nags and ads and withholding patches trying to goad you into buying premium. They aren't content to just make a good product, it has to be disgustingly profitable. Once a company starts down that path, it's only a matter of time until the end user experience becomes completely intolerable. We've seen it happen so many times we had to coin the word enshittification to describe it. Apart from very specific complaints like snaps, the hate is not for Ubuntu, the hate is for Canonical the company. People obviously still like and use Ubuntu, it's one of the pillars of the Linux community. Canonical has forgotten that in their plays for more money. Really, Canonical has been going downhill for a long time. It just hasn't been bad enough to provoke this kind of outcry until the premium ads in the apt package manager. If Canonical continues what they're doing, they'll see a prodigious loss of free users. That won't hurt them directly, but it will begin a slow and steady decline in enterprise usage. If it's so unpleasant to use Ubuntu at home, why would you use it at work if given the option? Ubuntu will stick around for a good long while and slowly get worse and worse as Canonical becomes more and more desperate. Canonical as a whole has some very serious problems and I really don't expect them to survive long term. I'm not sure it's possible to fix a company once they're in that state. Oh well, at least we have ten thousand other Linux distros to choose from.
buildbot 3y ago
Not so fun fact - ESM patches are picked up by stuff like Qualys scans, and then you get flagged for not having the patches...that you need to pay Ubuntu for ... Or setup infinite fake personal accounts to enable Ubuntu pro, for any VM you use.
vegabook 3y ago
After 10 years of loyal Ubuntu usage on all my servers, I have gone with NixOS and I have to say that it's not nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. Home Manager and graphical apps can be a pain, but server side stuff is much, easier IMO and this is now my go-to server distro, where it's available. Postgres, NGINX, HaPROXY, even tougher stuff like Yggdrasil Network, all really easy to configure, though I haven't done any containerisation workloads (yet).
- w0m 3y ago
  rolling release on servers o.0 Brave.
  - tripdout 3y ago
    Nixpkgs has a stable channel. Plus, it just depends when you update your channel / flake input.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  Nix would probably be my first choice if I was going to use an "enthusiast" distro. I tried it, I liked it(Unlike everything else non-debian/Ubuntu I've tried) but it seems unnecessarily powerful. Ubuntu provides an opinionated workflow with self contained packages, with less work and more of an ecosystem, and more or less uses only concepts familiar to apt users already. Nix still hasn't completed the Flakes transition, and it's not immediately clear at first glance what's declarative and what's not. Snap is a lot simpler of a model. Include almost everything, except the base snap stuff, in a single package file, like an old school video game cartridge, rather than the UNIXy idea of software as part of the OS, carefully configured as part of a unique hand maintained system instance where all the parts have to work together perfectly. NixOS has better reproducibility, because config files as well as apps are part of their declarative one file to rule them all system, but Ubuntu is easier to make changes on. It's the first disto that doesn't feel like it's still built for the era of instances that would be maintained by a dedicated sysadmin for decades.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
zokier 3y ago
> This confirms that our machine is receiving all updates until 2027 I believe the author is mistaken here; they are receiving updates only for "main" repository, and not for "universe". The example "ffmpeg" package belongs to "universe". The UI seems bit confusing because it doesn't seem to show what the version available through ESM/Ubuntu Pro would be, but exploring the repository manually shows that for example for ffmpeg there is "Version: 7:4.4.2-0ubuntu0.22.04.1+esm2" available, a different version than what is available in the standard repositories.
- rlpb 3y ago
  Indeed, and you can see for example something that is fixed by that version here: https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2022-48434 https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2022-48434
- imurray 3y ago
  As a reward for installing ESM/Ubuntu Pro, that version of ffmpeg will break vlc: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ffmpeg/+bug/2042743 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ffmpeg/+bug/204274... Manually upgrading the source .deb to the (ABI compatible) ffmpeg 4.4.4 and compiling gets all the security fixes and seems to work. It looks like backporting just the security fixes was done incorrectly in Ubuntu's ESM release. My main concern with ESM/Ubuntu Pro is that patches don't get as much community scrutiny and help as other updates. In this case it's broken a fairly major piece of software on what's supposed to be a super-stable LTS release.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
_8j50 3y ago
Ran into this the other week, the problem is vuln scan tools like nessus will flag it as a missing update but if you don't pay for ESM you don't get the patch even on LTS. I wish they didn't use security as a money making tool, this is exactly why I despise Azure. If the only option is to pay, why pay a company that is using security to profit? Just get redhat and get it over with if you have to haggle with corporate purchasing, legal,etc... anyways. When a package is available in any distro's maintained/mainline repo, users should expect security patches will be available as soon as humany possible for that package. If there was a premium repo, I get charging for that. But right now it is any packages and arbitrary CVE's, very upredictable.
- bravetraveler 3y ago
  This is a rather frustrating distinction on packages. Canonical says: "Here, enjoy these packages in our base repositories" Many of those packages are completely third party/somehow qualify for 'universe', and such, no longer get security updates. Why rebuild/test only a subset for the upsell? They've taken stewardship by offering them at all, in my opinion. On the other hand: Red Hat will support everything they offer during the lifetime of a release. They don't really pick and choose as far as I'm aware. Caveat: EPEL et al They do have a limited lifetime release problem... but at least they support the whole release.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > On the other hand: Red Hat will support everything they offer during the lifetime of a release. They don't really pick and choose as far as I'm aware. Caveat: EPEL et al I mean, that's the distinction; Ubuntu just includes their EPEL equivalent in the default repos. If you leave out EPEL, then RHEL has far less packages (or did last time I was in that ecosystem), because RH does their pick-and-choose at the repo level.
    - bravetraveler 3y ago
      What makes it frustrating is how Canonical handled it. Not offering something at all is far more 'honest' than building it once and never again
sunshine-o 3y ago
If Redhat/CentOS/Fedora was making this move people would be rioting in the streets.
- Spivak 3y ago
  What do you mean, this is carbon-copy RHEL's business model. - 10 years maintenance - first dibs on critical patches - s/landscape/satellite - cve information in the package stream They're trying to make it easy to switch from RHEL by providing the same stuff.
personomas 3y ago
I would say the four best Linux distros for Programmers (not for servers but personal use / business use) in no particular order: - Linux Mint (which is based off Debian) - Debian - Fedora - Gentoo Thoughts? Ubuntu since a while would no longer make this list (in my opinion).
- AnonymousPlanet 3y ago
  Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, not Debian. It's unclear to me whether it's affected in the same way as Ubuntu non-Pro.
  - personomas 3y ago
    Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. Also, Linux Mint offers a "Debian Edition": https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
    - AnonymousPlanet 3y ago
      Your post read as if the normal Mint edition is directly based on Debian and therefore not affected by Ubuntu policies, which isn't the case. The download for their Debian Edition is hidden away under "other editions" as "LMDE". If you click on "recommended" you will get to the main download page which doesn't even mention the Debian Edition: https://linuxmint.com/download.php https://linuxmint.com/download.php
      - personomas 3y ago
        > Your post read as if the normal Mint edition is directly based on Debian and therefore not affected by Ubuntu policies, which isn't the case. Ok, good addition
sonicanatidae 3y ago
Amusingly, I was just about to pick a distro to install. Hello Debian.

118 points by mikece 3y ago

> Ubuntu Pro is available for free for personal use, but it requires you to attach a unique license key to your Ubuntu installation, which will be tracked by Canonical. Let the enshittification commence...

nicolaslem 3y ago
I don't want to sound too cynical but the enshittification of Ubuntu started way before that.
- repelsteeltje 3y ago
  +1 touché
pipo234 3y ago
It's nice that there is a work-around. This time. And the next time. I for one use System76' Pop!OS derivative (which is great!), but that might ultimately play out like a RHEL <-> CentOS/Rocky/Alma drama. It will take another while, but it looks like Debian is our last hope for community linux (in apt ecosystem).
- Filligree 3y ago
  Arch, Gentoo and NixOS also exist…
  - krylon 3y ago
    True, but the GP wrote "community linux (in apt ecosystem)" Arch, Gentoo, and NixOS don't use apt. However, neither does OpenSUSE, which is probably a better choice for non-technical users.
  - mikepurvis 3y ago
    Normally when people talk about pro/enterprise/premium, what they're really talking about is long term support for a "stable" release, since that the thankless backporting work that you need to pay people to do. And those are all rolling distros, so I don't think they're a fit for anyone with that class of enterprise needs. NixOS has supported releases, but as far as I'm aware, each one gets less than a year— 22.11 was just deprecated in favour of the current 23.05 and the upcoming 23.11.
    - bravetraveler 3y ago
      In this case it's even more LTS -- ESM. It's LTS for LTS, life support beyond the initial release timeline It can be useful for very slow to move businesses like my employer
  - type0 3y ago
    I know that some people run Arch on servers, why they do it is complete mystery to me. At least Gentoo and especially NixOS has some legitimate reasons to exist on servers.
waynesonfire 3y ago
I switched to freebsd long time ago. Like a fine wine gets better with age.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>Let the enshittification commence. My feelings on the direction of present day Ubuntu: "You were supposed to destroy The Sith (aka Windows), not join them!"
m463 3y ago
come on, they've been doing this kind of stuff for years. The system search used to go to amazon. There is lots of messy forced upgrade stuff in the os. If you try to apt-get remove ubuntu-advantage-tools, it will cripple your system. the motd-news system does a lot of silly stuff under the covers, with plenty of contact with canonical's servers.

Etheryte 3y ago

> [We] recommend Ubuntu for OSINT virtual machines [...] > We feel that Ubuntu is being aggressively misleading with the rollout of Ubuntu Pro, and we do not recommend any OSINT users attach this service to their investigative VMs. Or, you know, you could stop recommending Ubuntu as the preferred distro of choice. This is clearly user-hostile and there are numerous good alternatives available.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hotnfresh 3y ago
Disable ads, don’t forget to click “no, do not spy on me”, disable this crap, disable snap… Doesn’t take much of that before it’s easier to just use a different distro.
- donkeybeer 3y ago
  Ads? Has ubuntu started giving ads, when did that happen? And what about the do not spy thing?
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    1) I haven’t used it on desktop in some time, but not that far back they had Amazon ads in Gnome. Plus motd ads for Ubuntu stuff (like Pro, in fact). And now ads in apt output. 2) Spying is opt-in, to their credit, and only at install, so you just have to make sure you aren’t auto-piloting your way through the installation and enable it by accident, but that’s still another thing to worry about that may not exist in other distros. Not much of an issue in automated-deployment situations.
SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
I think it’s really smart for projects like Linux Mint to keep actively maintained distros off of Ubuntu or Gnome or whatever. Give the user the option, but have a fallback. I’m not optimistic canonical is going to just turn back from this path of Snaps and DRM.

znpy 3y ago

Ubuntu is crap nowadays fedora is the way to go.

synergy20 3y ago
why is that, 15 years Ubuntu user here looking for alternative, Debian seems a natural one though it's LTS is only 2 years by default
- McAtNite 3y ago
  Those are two very different philosophies to Linux. Fedora is much more bleeding edge than Debian (by a lot) so the question really comes down to which you prefer. I absolutely love Fedora and run it on my main desktop. That being said I also cut my teeth on CentOS so I’ve always had a soft spot for the RHEL approach to Linux. As for the bleeding edge aspect, I’ve rarely encountered issues with the latest updates. I had to do a bit of troubleshooting with pipewire and my HDMI output, and once a Gnome update caused the hertz setting on my monitor to bug out and cause a black screen. None of it was really traumatizing though, and I have my system set to run a DNF update automatically on every login since I like to run as up to date as possible, and generally trust the packages won’t be overly buggy by the time they get pushed live. ————————— After looking at your profile I realize you probably already are familiar with the philosophical differences of the two. Leaving the above for the potential benefit of anyone else who isn’t familiar.
- tapoxi 3y ago
  Fedora has the release cycle of Ubuntu with the large development and QA team of Red Hat. It is upstream of RHEL, so they give a shit about quality and it shows. They also do things open whenever possible when Ubuntu will either keep things closed (Snap Store) or behind a CLA.
  - trinsic2 3y ago
    I am an independent IT contractor that games on his off time. Recently, I switched to Linux from Windows and it has been a good experience so far. I went with POPos because of how they integrated steam and the video drivers into the distro. It works great except shit breaks like booting and other things some times when they release major updates. I actually really like way Arch is designed. I was thinking of switching to Manjaro for stability reasons and I dont want to rip my hair out trying to get gaming to work in other distros. Im really looking for release stability with the ability to keep my gaming environment working. Any suggestions?

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

Years ago when I was a teenager, I was subcontracted to add a "stateful packet-inspecting firewall" to some office NAT gateways. Since the gateway was Linux, I just wrote a handful of IPTables rules. But the contractor wanted to charge more money for the upgrade, so they asked me to make a splash screen and progress bar to advertise the firewall changes. The actual rules were about 8 lines, so I had to add some extra stuff and some fake status messages. In the end it looked like it was doing a lot and took about 10 seconds to finish the progress. Funny to see Ubuntu offering "upgraded services" in the same vein.

whalesalad 3y ago
Hilarious that this happens. Oftentimes when you do something in a traditional IT environment it takes ages to install software (ie, configuring a Windows server with AD and all the related stuff), requires multiple reboots after setting hostname etc. It truly takes ages, lots of progress bars and waiting and making coffee. Meanwhile in an OSS/Linux environment a lot of things are truly trivial and instantaneous to a point where sometimes you gotta ask yourself "was that it?" Perception of value is an interesting thing.
- Alupis 3y ago
  This is mostly caused by the Windows-induced impression of what "installing" software means. Most normal users would not describe unpacking a Zip into a directory as "installing" - yet that's exactly what it is everywhere except Windows. Sometimes the unpacking isn't even necessary...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - woleium 3y ago
    Windows packages usually also require strange and disparate updates to the registry database.
    - 3y ago

walteweiss 3y ago

Oh, I see they have OSINT book there. Clicked to check. Wow >An e-book version of this release is not currently available. This is due to many reasons, including rampant piracy, counterfeit prints, Kindle tracking, exclusivity requirements, and unpredictable content removal from Amazon. We believe this book is better served as a printed reference manual. What a bullshit excuse. I don’t read printed books, as I like ebooks way more. Cannot believe anyone technological try to persuade me I want to have a real book on my desk.

notpushkin 3y ago
I bet there is a pirate EPUB somewhere already.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Just checked, yep, pdf and epub on libgen, 10th (current) edition. Though the epub’s probably auto-generated from the pdf and likely sucks (did not verify). Guess that’s your only option if the product you want is an ebook.
  - notpushkin 3y ago
    Yep. That's a pretty funny thing about piracy: the harder it is to get a legitimate copy of your product, the more people will just go get it from torrents or libgen.
Grimblewald 3y ago
The good news is theyre telling us that you dont need to pay $5 for an ebook, you can easily get it for free through pirates. Seems weird to me to take that stance because i wouldn't hesistate if buying ebook was easier tham pirating it. That being said, maybe theyre locked into a crappy publisher deal and are too embaressed to admit it.

nottorp 3y ago

Hah. Enterprise pricing again. Once in a while I think of giving them some money. Every time I look into paying them for my home server, every time I see it's enterprisely priced and totally out of the question. Yeah I have the free ESM enabled. Still, they could let people pay 25/year for server updates for up to 3 machines or something.

pengaru 3y ago
> Yeah I have the free ESM enabled. Still, they could let people pay 25/year for server updates for up to 3 machines or something. Free tier can rightfully pound sand in the support expectations department. Perhaps a nearly-free tier wouldn't bring in enough revenue to offset the increased expectations there.
- donmcronald 3y ago
  > Perhaps a nearly-free tier wouldn't bring in enough revenue to offset the increased expectations there. They could have a no-support or per-incident support tier that’s only a license. IMO the reason that doesn’t happen is because everyone only wants billionaire customers where all costs get passed to the end consumer without question. A little profit isn’t enough anymore. All these companies want massive margins and profits and won’t settle for less. I think a total collapse in tech might actually be good for the long term health of the industry.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I don’t understand putting security updates behind a subscription. At least, creating a distro which is designed to be user-friendly, and then just letting devices sit on the internet unsecured seem basically unethical. It is inviting people who don’t know what they are doing to contribute to botnets and other attacks. It isn’t an expectation that a free user will be supported, just an expectation that a responsible company won’t create a cybersecurity attractive nuisance. Ubuntu is open source, they are supposed to be on the good team. But, they could reasonably just shut the free tier machines off when they fell out of their automatic update lifespan. Or they could find their value-add elsewhere.

lasermike026 3y ago

Are we Debian users now?

Koshkin 3y ago
Why not? What does Ubuntu bring to the table (for home users, anyway)?
- helpfulContrib 3y ago
  [dead]
- MikusR 3y ago
  10 years of LTS.
- no_time 3y ago
  They tame GNOME into being borderline usable with their default plugins/patches Their default typeface is my favorite in the libre world Some time ago they were the only ones with a patched freetype that didn't make your eyes bleed. Before the snap fiasco they were all upside with no downside. I understand that they still are for a decent chunk of people.
doubled112 3y ago
At home? I sure am. No other OS gives me the ability to set up a machine and forget about it other than updates like Debian does.
tilsammans 3y ago
Fedora

vasdae 3y ago

https://inteltechniques.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Image-2-1.png https://inteltechniques.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Image-2-... Capitalising the first letter of each package name makes it look jarring.

extraduder_ire 3y ago
I prefer that to what often happens with the GUI updater on my machine, where the name given is the first line of the package's description. e.g. "small, powerful, scalable web/proxy server" rather than "nginx" I have to click on the line to see the actual package name in the more info section.

shepherdjerred 3y ago

What's up with all of the Ubuntu hate in the comments? Ubuntu is my default choice. It's very easy to use, polished and doesn't require tweaking. I just installed Ubuntu Server earlier this week on my home server, and I was surprised at how nice the installer has gotten.

donmcronald 3y ago
> I was surprised at how nice the installer has gotten. It’s pretty good, but adding two ESP devices gives the impression you’re getting boot redundancy and you’re not. Only one of them will end up with GRUB. Then, once you fix that, only the primary device will have an entry in fstab and SystemD will have a nervous breakdown if you try to boot off the secondary with the primary missing. Good luck supplying the root password for emergency mode because you probably don’t have one.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > It’s pretty good, but adding two ESP devices gives the impression you’re getting boot redundancy and you’re not. Only one of them will end up with GRUB. Then, once you fix that, only the primary device will have an entry in fstab and SystemD will have a nervous breakdown if you try to boot off the secondary with the primary missing. How do you do that? The only way I know of is to use mdadm to RAID1 the partitions[0], but I wouldn't expect that to break the way you've described. [0] This is also a bit fiddly; IME you have to pick a specific configuration so the firmware will read the result.
calamari4065 3y ago
Because Canonical is starting to smell like enshittification. Nags and ads and withholding patches trying to goad you into buying premium. They aren't content to just make a good product, it has to be disgustingly profitable. Once a company starts down that path, it's only a matter of time until the end user experience becomes completely intolerable. We've seen it happen so many times we had to coin the word enshittification to describe it. Apart from very specific complaints like snaps, the hate is not for Ubuntu, the hate is for Canonical the company. People obviously still like and use Ubuntu, it's one of the pillars of the Linux community. Canonical has forgotten that in their plays for more money. Really, Canonical has been going downhill for a long time. It just hasn't been bad enough to provoke this kind of outcry until the premium ads in the apt package manager. If Canonical continues what they're doing, they'll see a prodigious loss of free users. That won't hurt them directly, but it will begin a slow and steady decline in enterprise usage. If it's so unpleasant to use Ubuntu at home, why would you use it at work if given the option? Ubuntu will stick around for a good long while and slowly get worse and worse as Canonical becomes more and more desperate. Canonical as a whole has some very serious problems and I really don't expect them to survive long term. I'm not sure it's possible to fix a company once they're in that state. Oh well, at least we have ten thousand other Linux distros to choose from.

buildbot 3y ago

Not so fun fact - ESM patches are picked up by stuff like Qualys scans, and then you get flagged for not having the patches...that you need to pay Ubuntu for ... Or setup infinite fake personal accounts to enable Ubuntu pro, for any VM you use.

vegabook 3y ago

After 10 years of loyal Ubuntu usage on all my servers, I have gone with NixOS and I have to say that it's not nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. Home Manager and graphical apps can be a pain, but server side stuff is much, easier IMO and this is now my go-to server distro, where it's available. Postgres, NGINX, HaPROXY, even tougher stuff like Yggdrasil Network, all really easy to configure, though I haven't done any containerisation workloads (yet).

w0m 3y ago
rolling release on servers o.0 Brave.
- tripdout 3y ago
  Nixpkgs has a stable channel. Plus, it just depends when you update your channel / flake input.
eternityforest 3y ago
Nix would probably be my first choice if I was going to use an "enthusiast" distro. I tried it, I liked it(Unlike everything else non-debian/Ubuntu I've tried) but it seems unnecessarily powerful. Ubuntu provides an opinionated workflow with self contained packages, with less work and more of an ecosystem, and more or less uses only concepts familiar to apt users already. Nix still hasn't completed the Flakes transition, and it's not immediately clear at first glance what's declarative and what's not. Snap is a lot simpler of a model. Include almost everything, except the base snap stuff, in a single package file, like an old school video game cartridge, rather than the UNIXy idea of software as part of the OS, carefully configured as part of a unique hand maintained system instance where all the parts have to work together perfectly. NixOS has better reproducibility, because config files as well as apps are part of their declarative one file to rule them all system, but Ubuntu is easier to make changes on. It's the first disto that doesn't feel like it's still built for the era of instances that would be maintained by a dedicated sysadmin for decades.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

zokier 3y ago

> This confirms that our machine is receiving all updates until 2027 I believe the author is mistaken here; they are receiving updates only for "main" repository, and not for "universe". The example "ffmpeg" package belongs to "universe". The UI seems bit confusing because it doesn't seem to show what the version available through ESM/Ubuntu Pro would be, but exploring the repository manually shows that for example for ffmpeg there is "Version: 7:4.4.2-0ubuntu0.22.04.1+esm2" available, a different version than what is available in the standard repositories.

rlpb 3y ago
Indeed, and you can see for example something that is fixed by that version here: https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2022-48434 https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2022-48434
imurray 3y ago
As a reward for installing ESM/Ubuntu Pro, that version of ffmpeg will break vlc: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ffmpeg/+bug/2042743 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ffmpeg/+bug/204274... Manually upgrading the source .deb to the (ABI compatible) ffmpeg 4.4.4 and compiling gets all the security fixes and seems to work. It looks like backporting just the security fixes was done incorrectly in Ubuntu's ESM release. My main concern with ESM/Ubuntu Pro is that patches don't get as much community scrutiny and help as other updates. In this case it's broken a fairly major piece of software on what's supposed to be a super-stable LTS release.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

_8j50 3y ago

Ran into this the other week, the problem is vuln scan tools like nessus will flag it as a missing update but if you don't pay for ESM you don't get the patch even on LTS. I wish they didn't use security as a money making tool, this is exactly why I despise Azure. If the only option is to pay, why pay a company that is using security to profit? Just get redhat and get it over with if you have to haggle with corporate purchasing, legal,etc... anyways. When a package is available in any distro's maintained/mainline repo, users should expect security patches will be available as soon as humany possible for that package. If there was a premium repo, I get charging for that. But right now it is any packages and arbitrary CVE's, very upredictable.

bravetraveler 3y ago
This is a rather frustrating distinction on packages. Canonical says: "Here, enjoy these packages in our base repositories" Many of those packages are completely third party/somehow qualify for 'universe', and such, no longer get security updates. Why rebuild/test only a subset for the upsell? They've taken stewardship by offering them at all, in my opinion. On the other hand: Red Hat will support everything they offer during the lifetime of a release. They don't really pick and choose as far as I'm aware. Caveat: EPEL et al They do have a limited lifetime release problem... but at least they support the whole release.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > On the other hand: Red Hat will support everything they offer during the lifetime of a release. They don't really pick and choose as far as I'm aware. Caveat: EPEL et al I mean, that's the distinction; Ubuntu just includes their EPEL equivalent in the default repos. If you leave out EPEL, then RHEL has far less packages (or did last time I was in that ecosystem), because RH does their pick-and-choose at the repo level.
  - bravetraveler 3y ago
    What makes it frustrating is how Canonical handled it. Not offering something at all is far more 'honest' than building it once and never again

sunshine-o 3y ago

If Redhat/CentOS/Fedora was making this move people would be rioting in the streets.

Spivak 3y ago
What do you mean, this is carbon-copy RHEL's business model. - 10 years maintenance - first dibs on critical patches - s/landscape/satellite - cve information in the package stream They're trying to make it easy to switch from RHEL by providing the same stuff.

personomas 3y ago

I would say the four best Linux distros for Programmers (not for servers but personal use / business use) in no particular order: - Linux Mint (which is based off Debian) - Debian - Fedora - Gentoo Thoughts? Ubuntu since a while would no longer make this list (in my opinion).

AnonymousPlanet 3y ago
Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, not Debian. It's unclear to me whether it's affected in the same way as Ubuntu non-Pro.
- personomas 3y ago
  Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. Also, Linux Mint offers a "Debian Edition": https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
  - AnonymousPlanet 3y ago
    Your post read as if the normal Mint edition is directly based on Debian and therefore not affected by Ubuntu policies, which isn't the case. The download for their Debian Edition is hidden away under "other editions" as "LMDE". If you click on "recommended" you will get to the main download page which doesn't even mention the Debian Edition: https://linuxmint.com/download.php https://linuxmint.com/download.php
    - personomas 3y ago
      > Your post read as if the normal Mint edition is directly based on Debian and therefore not affected by Ubuntu policies, which isn't the case. Ok, good addition

sonicanatidae 3y ago

Amusingly, I was just about to pick a distro to install. Hello Debian.