5 ms·

> after Ubuntu went way downhill and haven't had cause to regret it. In what way Ubuntu went downhill?

by zvmaz 1y ago

happymellon 1y ago
Snaps? Proprietary package managers are never great.
- mmcnl 1y ago
  I don't really understand why this is such a big problem. You don't have to use snaps.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    Yes you do. Some packages aren't available anymore in apt
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    You really have to work to avoid them; ex. `apt install firefox` will install the snap
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    You're right. You don't have to use snaps. Ubuntu migrates packages slowly in behalf of you. Using apt to install some packages installs snap plumbing and downloads the package as a snap automatically. You don't have to install it manually. There's no malicious intent though, it's made to "impose a positive pressure on the snap team to produce better work and keep their quality high" (paraphrased, but this was the official answer).
    - hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
      And one of these migrations broke my workflow substantially enough that a dist-upgrade turned into a complete system reformat to Debian and cost hours that I couldn’t afford. Debian has been a safe haven since.
    - ants_everywhere 1y ago
      Installing the inferior snap packages when you apt get is one of the worst cases of a Linux distro refusing to respect the user's intent that I've experienced.
      - splatter9859 1y ago
        Preach. This has got to be the most user-blind self-imposed preference in a modern operating system outside of Microsoft's BS. If you're going to use an OSS operating system, the control of what is placed on the system should be inherently with the user. If the developer has a question if a new package should be added or is required, throw a prompt and ask -- with a default to not use application containers and the default packaging system. Really not hard.
  - LeoPanthera 1y ago
    You sort of do. It's really hard to avoid them, because they've modified "apt" to install snaps by default without asking.
  - npteljes 1y ago
    Defaults matter a lot, and snaps are the default in Ubuntu. The topic is not whether snaps are avoidable or not, but the Ubuntu is going downhill. And snaps are purported to be part of that downhill, which would be Ubuntu's NIH syndrome. As far as I know, Ubuntu's only successful development is Ubuntu itself - the other projects have all failed over the years, and snap, while ongoing, is not winning any popularity contests either.
    - Santosh83 1y ago
      Snaps per se are no better or worse than flatpak. Canonical's mistake, IMO, was to make their store the only place snaps can be hosted. That is the "proprietary" bit everyone keeps talking about. But in practice even for flatpak the only realistic place you can publish your flatpak if you want any traction at all would be flathub, so both formats have only one store right now. But flatpak allows a custom store while for some strange reason Canonical decided not to allow snap that freedom.
      - bayindirh 1y ago
        Another problem is, Canonical promised to release server components and enable alternative stores, and just forgot that they made that pledge. Also, rugpulling users and migrating things to snaps without asking their users in order to "create a positive pressure on snap team to keep their quality high" didn't sit well with the users. > But in practice even for flatpak the only realistic place you can publish your flatpak if you want any traction at all would be flathub But, for any size of fleet from homelab to an enterprise client farm, I can host my local flathub and install my personal special-purpose flatpaks without paying anyone and thinking whether my packages will be there next morning. Freedom matters, esp. it that's the norm in that ecosystem. I was neutral-ish about Ubuntu, but I flat out avoid them now, and migrate any remaining Ubuntu server to Debian in shortest way possible. I'm using Debian for the last 20 years or so, BTW.
        npteljes 1y ago
        Yes, same. I started with Ubuntu back in the day, because the server I inherited ran Ubuntu, and it was just natural after that for me to run it on the desktop as well. I grew to dislike their NIH over the years, tried distro hopping, and settled on Debian.
  - tasuki 1y ago
    I'm with my neighbor comments. How do you use Ubuntu without snaps? The base Ubuntu install already comes with several snaps. Installing random things through apt leads to snaps. I personally do not know how to avoid snaps on Ubuntu.
    - justinclift 1y ago
      I made this snap "alternative" to solve this exact problem: https://github.com/justinclift https://github.com/justinclift Packaged as: https://github.com/justinclift/snapd-empty/releases/download/v0.1/snapd-empty-0.1.deb https://github.com/justinclift/snapd-empty/releases/download... It's just an empty package that tells the system snap is installed, to stop the broken dependency chains you otherwise get from force uninstalling snap. It's been working fine on a handful of Ubuntu 24.04 systems I've been handed and can't change the OS of, for about half a year now.
      - justinclift 1y ago
        Ugh, I somehow managed to paste an incorrect repo url in my comment above. It should be this: https://github.com/justinclift/snapd-empty/ https://github.com/justinclift/snapd-empty/
    - mkesper 1y ago
      You migrate to Debian. Everything else is a bandaid that can be rug pulled any time Canonical feels like doing so.
      - tasuki 1y ago
        I've done that some years ago and couldn't be happier.
    - L3viathan 1y ago
      You uninstall all snaps, uninstall snapd, and block it from being installed via APT. Then you add e.g. the mozilla PPA such that its firefox package gets installed instead.
  - superb_dev 1y ago
    If you use Ubuntu, yes you do. It’s why I ditched Ubuntu
- Santosh83 1y ago
  As I understand it, snap the package format is not proprietary. Its as open source as say flatpak. What is proprietary is Canonical official snap store, and they patch their version of snap to only use that store. It'd be the same as flatpak being tied to only flathub. Of course that goes against the spirit of FOSS, but there's a bit more nuance there than simply saying "snaps are proprietary".
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    Did they release the server components for hosting your own snap repositories, yet? I can't seem to find it. Any pointers would be helpful, so at least I can know the latest state of this thing.
    - curt15 1y ago
      Snapd still hardcodes Canonical's snap store signing key and provides no mechanism to add your own keys. Any other snap repos will be treated as second class citizens.
    - dismalaf 1y ago
      No, but it's trivial to implement since Snap is open source so you know exactly what sort of payload it wants.
  - tannhaeuser 1y ago
    Snaps don't just suck from an ideological but also practical perspective, as described for Thunderbird. Firefox on Ubuntu has also serious permission issues with webcam support OOTB even experts are struggling with (involving AppArmor, pipewire, snap, and FF device config). and has become unusable for things like browser-only MS Teams on mainstream notebooks. Containers, popular as they may be on servers, can only add breakage and overhead to desktops, especially for an established and already much better organized system like Debian's apt. There just haven't been any new desktop apps for way over a decade that would warrant yet another level of indirection.
    - 1y ago
yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
Snaps, and ads in the motd
- bayindirh 1y ago
  Plus reduced support duration to increase adoption of Ubuntu Pro. Changing some packages ever slightly so they behave a little differently. Switch to sudo-rs, uu-coreutils (rust based stuff), etc., etc. It's not a Debian derivative anymore. It's something else. Was not my cup of tea before, it's even more not my cup of tea now.
  - john01dav 1y ago
    Switching to rust-based system software is very different from the clearly profit seeking (or control seeking which is just long term profit seeking) changes like ads and snap (with massive friction to not using snap).
    - bayindirh 1y ago
      Yes, but I prefer glibc + GNU Coreutils based systems in my installations. They're additional nails on top of the (fatal) ones like snap, Ubuntu Pro and MOTD ads.
Eduard 1y ago
all the weird proprietary Canonical stuff they try to put into vanilla Debian and have it replace common stuff. snap, lxd (not lxc!), mir, upstart, ufw. It's neverending, and it's always failing.
- rahen 1y ago
  LXD was forked as Incus, and it’s an absolute delight. Seamless LXC and virtual machine management with clustering, a clean API, YAML templates and a built-in load balancer, it's like Kubernetes for stateful workloads.
  - JFingleton 1y ago
    Incus is fantastic. I think Proxmox is where everyone is migrating to after the VMWare/Broadcom fiasco, but people should seriously consider Incus as well.
nextos 1y ago
IMHO, it also became too complex, with too many things installed by default and too much upstream patching. This made it more fragile. It was really nice in the late 2000s, but gradually became worse.
kev009 1y ago
The alternative question to ask is: in what way has it gone uphill versus just using Debian? In the early days it had a differing and usually better aligned release schedule for the critical graphics stack. As a function of time, you are increasingly likely to get rug pulled once Shuttleworth decides to collect his next ransom.
- homebrewer 1y ago
  > in what way has it gone uphill versus just using Debian? Their lawyers' willingness to risk shipping pre-built zfs kernel modules (that are always in sync with the kernel). Pretty important if you're into that sort of thing, it's easier to remove cruft once post-install than to keep an eye on DKMS for years (making sure that it hasn't disassembled itself and continues working).
doublepg23 1y ago
I forget the exact context but I recall an Ubuntu dev stating they have more users of the Firefox snap alone than trendy distros have entire users. I think it’s worth keeping that in mind with all the hate Ubuntu gets. Most users are just silently getting their work done on an LTS they update every two years.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  Well, I don't know which trendy distro the dev is referring, but Debian is complete opposite of Trendy. It's a bedrock distro silently running almost everywhere in some form or shape. Most of the Linux-based (enterprise and/or embedded) appliances are built upon Debian, for example. P.S.: The total number of Debian installations and their derivatives are unknown BTW. Debian installations and infra do not collect such information. You can install "popularity-contest", but the question defaults to "no" during installation, so most people do not send in package selection lists, unlike Canonical's tracking of snap installations.
- Arrowmaster 1y ago
  They have also had more malware on the snap store than all other distros have had in their official repos combined.
ACS_Solver 1y ago
For me, it was a combination of Ubuntu breaking upstream and introducing its own unnecessary systems. I had a few issues caused by Ubuntu that weren't upstream. One was Tracker somehow eating up lots of CPU power and slowing the system down. Another was with input methods, I need to type in a pretty rare language and that was just broken on Ubuntu one day. Not upstream. The bigger problem was Ubuntu adding stuff before it was ready. The Unity desktop, which is now fine, was initially missing lots of basic features and wasn't a good experience. Then there was the short-lived but pretty disastrous attempt to replace Xorg with Mir. My non-tech parents are still on Ubuntu, have been for some twenty years, and it's mostly fine there. I wouldn't recommend it if you know your way around a Linux system but for non-tech, Ubuntu works well. Still, just a few months ago I was astonished by another Ubuntu change. My mom's most important program is Thunderbird, with her long-running email archive. The Thunderbird profile has effortlessly moved across several PCs as it's just a copy of the folder. Suddenly, Ubuntu migrated to the snap version of Thunderbird, so after a software update she found herself with a new version and an empty profile. Because of course the new profile is somewhere under ~/snap and the update didn't in any way try to link to the old profile. Then there were stupid things like Amazon search results in the Unity dash search when looking for your files or programs. Nah. Ubuntu isn't terrible by any means but for a number of years now, I'd recommend Linux Mint as the friendly Debian derivative.
28304283409234 1y ago
Oh....snap.
ocdtrekkie 1y ago
Minutes to start Firefox on one of my machines.
spauldo 1y ago
I'm an old-school user so I'm not exactly Ubuntu's target audience, but for Ubuntu was bad about a lot of the older, lesser-used bits of Linux. The two things I can remember were problems with NFS out of the box (outside having to install nfs-common, which I'm fine with) and apt-cache not displaying descriptions of packages. There were lots of other, minor annoyances that affected people like me but wouldn't affect someone who got into Linux desktops after, say, 2010. My memory sucks though so those are the two I remember. Yes, there were bug reports filed and yes, they sat in the tracker for years with no attention from Ubuntu. I wound up back on Debian once I got old enough that I didn't care about being behind the times a couple years.
tmtvl 1y ago
Amazon ads in the Unity application menu (what was it called, 'lenses' or something?).

> after Ubuntu went way downhill and haven't had cause to regret it. In what way Ubuntu went downhill?

by zvmaz 1y ago

> after Ubuntu went way downhill and haven't had cause to regret it. In what way Ubuntu went downhill?

happymellon 1y ago

Snaps? Proprietary package managers are never great.

mmcnl 1y ago
I don't really understand why this is such a big problem. You don't have to use snaps.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  Yes you do. Some packages aren't available anymore in apt
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  You really have to work to avoid them; ex. `apt install firefox` will install the snap
- bayindirh 1y ago
  You're right. You don't have to use snaps. Ubuntu migrates packages slowly in behalf of you. Using apt to install some packages installs snap plumbing and downloads the package as a snap automatically. You don't have to install it manually. There's no malicious intent though, it's made to "impose a positive pressure on the snap team to produce better work and keep their quality high" (paraphrased, but this was the official answer).
  - hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
    And one of these migrations broke my workflow substantially enough that a dist-upgrade turned into a complete system reformat to Debian and cost hours that I couldn’t afford. Debian has been a safe haven since.
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    Installing the inferior snap packages when you apt get is one of the worst cases of a Linux distro refusing to respect the user's intent that I've experienced.
    - splatter9859 1y ago
      Preach. This has got to be the most user-blind self-imposed preference in a modern operating system outside of Microsoft's BS. If you're going to use an OSS operating system, the control of what is placed on the system should be inherently with the user. If the developer has a question if a new package should be added or is required, throw a prompt and ask -- with a default to not use application containers and the default packaging system. Really not hard.
- LeoPanthera 1y ago
  You sort of do. It's really hard to avoid them, because they've modified "apt" to install snaps by default without asking.
- npteljes 1y ago
  Defaults matter a lot, and snaps are the default in Ubuntu. The topic is not whether snaps are avoidable or not, but the Ubuntu is going downhill. And snaps are purported to be part of that downhill, which would be Ubuntu's NIH syndrome. As far as I know, Ubuntu's only successful development is Ubuntu itself - the other projects have all failed over the years, and snap, while ongoing, is not winning any popularity contests either.
  - Santosh83 1y ago
    Snaps per se are no better or worse than flatpak. Canonical's mistake, IMO, was to make their store the only place snaps can be hosted. That is the "proprietary" bit everyone keeps talking about. But in practice even for flatpak the only realistic place you can publish your flatpak if you want any traction at all would be flathub, so both formats have only one store right now. But flatpak allows a custom store while for some strange reason Canonical decided not to allow snap that freedom.
    - bayindirh 1y ago
      Another problem is, Canonical promised to release server components and enable alternative stores, and just forgot that they made that pledge. Also, rugpulling users and migrating things to snaps without asking their users in order to "create a positive pressure on snap team to keep their quality high" didn't sit well with the users. > But in practice even for flatpak the only realistic place you can publish your flatpak if you want any traction at all would be flathub But, for any size of fleet from homelab to an enterprise client farm, I can host my local flathub and install my personal special-purpose flatpaks without paying anyone and thinking whether my packages will be there next morning. Freedom matters, esp. it that's the norm in that ecosystem. I was neutral-ish about Ubuntu, but I flat out avoid them now, and migrate any remaining Ubuntu server to Debian in shortest way possible. I'm using Debian for the last 20 years or so, BTW.
      - npteljes 1y ago
        Yes, same. I started with Ubuntu back in the day, because the server I inherited ran Ubuntu, and it was just natural after that for me to run it on the desktop as well. I grew to dislike their NIH over the years, tried distro hopping, and settled on Debian.
- tasuki 1y ago
  I'm with my neighbor comments. How do you use Ubuntu without snaps? The base Ubuntu install already comes with several snaps. Installing random things through apt leads to snaps. I personally do not know how to avoid snaps on Ubuntu.
  - justinclift 1y ago
    I made this snap "alternative" to solve this exact problem: https://github.com/justinclift https://github.com/justinclift Packaged as: https://github.com/justinclift/snapd-empty/releases/download/v0.1/snapd-empty-0.1.deb https://github.com/justinclift/snapd-empty/releases/download... It's just an empty package that tells the system snap is installed, to stop the broken dependency chains you otherwise get from force uninstalling snap. It's been working fine on a handful of Ubuntu 24.04 systems I've been handed and can't change the OS of, for about half a year now.
    - justinclift 1y ago
      Ugh, I somehow managed to paste an incorrect repo url in my comment above. It should be this: https://github.com/justinclift/snapd-empty/ https://github.com/justinclift/snapd-empty/
  - mkesper 1y ago
    You migrate to Debian. Everything else is a bandaid that can be rug pulled any time Canonical feels like doing so.
    - tasuki 1y ago
      I've done that some years ago and couldn't be happier.
  - L3viathan 1y ago
    You uninstall all snaps, uninstall snapd, and block it from being installed via APT. Then you add e.g. the mozilla PPA such that its firefox package gets installed instead.
- superb_dev 1y ago
  If you use Ubuntu, yes you do. It’s why I ditched Ubuntu
Santosh83 1y ago
As I understand it, snap the package format is not proprietary. Its as open source as say flatpak. What is proprietary is Canonical official snap store, and they patch their version of snap to only use that store. It'd be the same as flatpak being tied to only flathub. Of course that goes against the spirit of FOSS, but there's a bit more nuance there than simply saying "snaps are proprietary".
- bayindirh 1y ago
  Did they release the server components for hosting your own snap repositories, yet? I can't seem to find it. Any pointers would be helpful, so at least I can know the latest state of this thing.
  - curt15 1y ago
    Snapd still hardcodes Canonical's snap store signing key and provides no mechanism to add your own keys. Any other snap repos will be treated as second class citizens.
  - dismalaf 1y ago
    No, but it's trivial to implement since Snap is open source so you know exactly what sort of payload it wants.
- tannhaeuser 1y ago
  Snaps don't just suck from an ideological but also practical perspective, as described for Thunderbird. Firefox on Ubuntu has also serious permission issues with webcam support OOTB even experts are struggling with (involving AppArmor, pipewire, snap, and FF device config). and has become unusable for things like browser-only MS Teams on mainstream notebooks. Containers, popular as they may be on servers, can only add breakage and overhead to desktops, especially for an established and already much better organized system like Debian's apt. There just haven't been any new desktop apps for way over a decade that would warrant yet another level of indirection.
  - 1y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago

Snaps, and ads in the motd

bayindirh 1y ago
Plus reduced support duration to increase adoption of Ubuntu Pro. Changing some packages ever slightly so they behave a little differently. Switch to sudo-rs, uu-coreutils (rust based stuff), etc., etc. It's not a Debian derivative anymore. It's something else. Was not my cup of tea before, it's even more not my cup of tea now.
- john01dav 1y ago
  Switching to rust-based system software is very different from the clearly profit seeking (or control seeking which is just long term profit seeking) changes like ads and snap (with massive friction to not using snap).
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    Yes, but I prefer glibc + GNU Coreutils based systems in my installations. They're additional nails on top of the (fatal) ones like snap, Ubuntu Pro and MOTD ads.

Eduard 1y ago

all the weird proprietary Canonical stuff they try to put into vanilla Debian and have it replace common stuff. snap, lxd (not lxc!), mir, upstart, ufw. It's neverending, and it's always failing.

rahen 1y ago
LXD was forked as Incus, and it’s an absolute delight. Seamless LXC and virtual machine management with clustering, a clean API, YAML templates and a built-in load balancer, it's like Kubernetes for stateful workloads.
- JFingleton 1y ago
  Incus is fantastic. I think Proxmox is where everyone is migrating to after the VMWare/Broadcom fiasco, but people should seriously consider Incus as well.

nextos 1y ago

IMHO, it also became too complex, with too many things installed by default and too much upstream patching. This made it more fragile. It was really nice in the late 2000s, but gradually became worse.

kev009 1y ago

The alternative question to ask is: in what way has it gone uphill versus just using Debian? In the early days it had a differing and usually better aligned release schedule for the critical graphics stack. As a function of time, you are increasingly likely to get rug pulled once Shuttleworth decides to collect his next ransom.

homebrewer 1y ago
> in what way has it gone uphill versus just using Debian? Their lawyers' willingness to risk shipping pre-built zfs kernel modules (that are always in sync with the kernel). Pretty important if you're into that sort of thing, it's easier to remove cruft once post-install than to keep an eye on DKMS for years (making sure that it hasn't disassembled itself and continues working).

doublepg23 1y ago

I forget the exact context but I recall an Ubuntu dev stating they have more users of the Firefox snap alone than trendy distros have entire users. I think it’s worth keeping that in mind with all the hate Ubuntu gets. Most users are just silently getting their work done on an LTS they update every two years.

bayindirh 1y ago
Well, I don't know which trendy distro the dev is referring, but Debian is complete opposite of Trendy. It's a bedrock distro silently running almost everywhere in some form or shape. Most of the Linux-based (enterprise and/or embedded) appliances are built upon Debian, for example. P.S.: The total number of Debian installations and their derivatives are unknown BTW. Debian installations and infra do not collect such information. You can install "popularity-contest", but the question defaults to "no" during installation, so most people do not send in package selection lists, unlike Canonical's tracking of snap installations.
Arrowmaster 1y ago
They have also had more malware on the snap store than all other distros have had in their official repos combined.

ACS_Solver 1y ago

For me, it was a combination of Ubuntu breaking upstream and introducing its own unnecessary systems. I had a few issues caused by Ubuntu that weren't upstream. One was Tracker somehow eating up lots of CPU power and slowing the system down. Another was with input methods, I need to type in a pretty rare language and that was just broken on Ubuntu one day. Not upstream. The bigger problem was Ubuntu adding stuff before it was ready. The Unity desktop, which is now fine, was initially missing lots of basic features and wasn't a good experience. Then there was the short-lived but pretty disastrous attempt to replace Xorg with Mir. My non-tech parents are still on Ubuntu, have been for some twenty years, and it's mostly fine there. I wouldn't recommend it if you know your way around a Linux system but for non-tech, Ubuntu works well. Still, just a few months ago I was astonished by another Ubuntu change. My mom's most important program is Thunderbird, with her long-running email archive. The Thunderbird profile has effortlessly moved across several PCs as it's just a copy of the folder. Suddenly, Ubuntu migrated to the snap version of Thunderbird, so after a software update she found herself with a new version and an empty profile. Because of course the new profile is somewhere under ~/snap and the update didn't in any way try to link to the old profile. Then there were stupid things like Amazon search results in the Unity dash search when looking for your files or programs. Nah. Ubuntu isn't terrible by any means but for a number of years now, I'd recommend Linux Mint as the friendly Debian derivative.

28304283409234 1y ago

Oh....snap.

ocdtrekkie 1y ago

Minutes to start Firefox on one of my machines.

spauldo 1y ago

I'm an old-school user so I'm not exactly Ubuntu's target audience, but for Ubuntu was bad about a lot of the older, lesser-used bits of Linux. The two things I can remember were problems with NFS out of the box (outside having to install nfs-common, which I'm fine with) and apt-cache not displaying descriptions of packages. There were lots of other, minor annoyances that affected people like me but wouldn't affect someone who got into Linux desktops after, say, 2010. My memory sucks though so those are the two I remember. Yes, there were bug reports filed and yes, they sat in the tracker for years with no attention from Ubuntu. I wound up back on Debian once I got old enough that I didn't care about being behind the times a couple years.

tmtvl 1y ago

Amazon ads in the Unity application menu (what was it called, 'lenses' or something?).