I never understood why people run Ubuntu on servers. It’s madness. Ubuntu is a fork of unstable Debian packages. You don’t want unstable on your server!

Ubuntu on Desktop I can understand. Back in the days the Debian release was really long so much software was a tad outdated after a couple of years. But Debian had a much faster release cycle now, and had pretty much incorporated all the good stuff from Ubuntu and left the bad behind.

I gave up Ubuntu when they switched Firefox to a snap

There are reasons why Flatpaks are better, both technical and social.

On the technical side, Snaps add to boot up time, as all of them are mounted on boot, which can make the machine several seconds slower to boot in my experience. I don’t need Thunderbird before I’ve logged into my account, yet Thunderbird is already mounted and partially decompressed the moment I see a login prompt.

On the social side, you can easily host your own Flatpak server. Don’t trust flathub? Set up your own website! Users can add your repo with one command and you’re good. Users even get a prompt on package conflicts so they can pick which repo to use. On Snap, there are no alternative stores. The backend is hardcoded to use Canonical’s infrastructure, the alternative repos need to be installed as Snaps, and Oracle charges a hefty sum to those wanting to maintain a repo.

I wouldn’t be very upset if Canonical migrated to snaps had they implemented their system in a reasonably open design. There are advantages to Snaps over APT packages, for sure, and even though I’d rather see them use Flatpaks instead, a fully integrated Snap environment seems to be working just as well.

Canonical did a lot of things right. Mir was a good idea, for instance. AppArmor is much better than the SELinux tooling that Red Hat ships. They have some excellent dev tools for things like k8s (running on Snap, ironically). Plus, they have one of the best server distros out there.

@babara@lemmy.ml
The difference with Fedora Atomic, which I think you refer to, is that it’s totally open. For example, people started using the OCI containers differently than Fedora intended, which resulted in uBlue and stuff like Bazzite.

Also, no one forces you to use Flatpak. You can still use Distrobox and use Pacman/ APT/ DNF/ whatever you prefer and export your apps that way. It’s just that Flatpak “won” and doesn’t have many drawbacks, and is very convenient. I mostly like them.

And, most importantly, Fedora is the fronteer of innovation.
There were many projects and ideas that failed, but many more succedded (Wayland, image based distros, etc.), and Project Atomic is just one more “testing ground” that is well thought out imo. Therefore people are expecting to “test out” new generation Linux stuff, it’s just part of Fedora. If you don’t like that, use Debian instead.

I can recommend you to give Fedora Atomic a chance, it’s an extremely nice family of distros (e.g. Bluefin/ Aurora, Bazzite, etc.)!

Edit: one more thing is that Fedora is, in contrast to Ubuntu, not controlled by a company. RedHat doesn’t have nearly as much influence as people think, it’s mainly community driven, and therefore choices aren’t (in theory) influenced by $$$

Well there is immutable, which you probably refer to with Fedoras new distro, and then there is Canonical pushing their shitty snap format, and kinda non-sideloading. Can’t wait for the day when apt only ever allows to install snap packages.

Fedora Silverblue is in an entirely different ball game. You can’t use dnf because it’s an immutable image based system where you can’t make direct changes to the Root system without making use of the rpm-ostree & VCS mechanisms. You’re making a conscious choice by using Fedora Silverblue, and the pros out way the cons for most people making that choice.
In contrast Fedora Workstation allows you to use dnf just as normal because it’s not an immutable image based system.
Ubuntu doesn’t make use of any such system so their reliance on containerized user-space apps isn’t a technical one.

It is absolutely a different situation if it is opt-in. If Ubuntu made Snaps opt-in, people might not like them but it’d be a minor critique instead of fleeing the distro.

People love using flatpaks instead (yes I know of all the shortcomings, but you can always choose another install method for that broken package).

Not on Ubuntu nor Fedora, but yes: If a “larger” package breaks on update and there is no fix available and I use that application on a pretty much daily basis, then I remove it and install the Flatpak variant.

Flatpaks are slower, do not work super well with Wayland (especially scaling, some applications have GIANT text, some have 5 pixels large text, but fortunately I was able to circumvent those issues for most applications I use via Flatpak), and you need to run another system for updates and updates are friggin slow.

flatpak-update () { 
    LATEST_NVIDIA=$(flatpak list | grep "GL.nvidia" | cut -f2 | cut -d '.' -f5)
    flatpak update
    flatpak remove --unused --delete-data
    flatpak list | grep org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia- | cut -f2 | grep -v "$LATEST_NVIDIA" | xargs -o flatpak uninstall
    flatpak repair
    flatpak update
}

On the other hand, the applications provided via Flatpak just work.

And messing with 32 bits multilib dependency hell for Steam or installing pretty much half of Kde just for Kdenlive simply isn’t something I want.

I do wonder what kind of gardware you have… And if it’s maybe defective?

I took a similar path but eventually ended up on openSUSE for my desktop. I’ve been pretty happy with it. I can’t think of a single issue that I wasn’t able to quickly resolve. I even got CUDA installed and working in under an hour.

But even if it is, it shouldn’t prevent installing released debs you find for example on GitHub repositories.

A lot of software wont be distributed with a PPA to add.

Additionally, debs are useful for offline installations, with apt you’re able to recursively download a package and all of it’s dependencies as deb files, then transfer those over to the offline machine and install in bulk.

That being said I’ve never had great luck with the software center, it’s always felt broken. I’ll typically just dpkg -I <pkg>.

Some things we would want to install aren’t in the official repos. Downloading the deb file is a solution to that for newer users.

You should try MX, it’s Debian based, and they have their own repo full of .deb, up to date, never break

deleted by creator

It’s about not being able to install .deb packages through the installation GUI.

The whole snap issue is hardly a pet peeve. Let alone in an LTS release.

giving me something for free

What are you talking about? It is not even “for free”, they get a lot value from the community.

They’re nothing without the users, it’s not that they would be making it if nobody uses it anyways. Users used to love them, they trusted them, they went on spreading their system, reported issues, created tutorials, flavors, videos, tools, and so on, they helped Cannonical become what it is now.

I don’t think they’re giving us anything “for free.”

The software is broken in an obvious way, even though it used to work and they could just roll it back for the release.

They are actively trying to harm the community to somehow “force” users into snaps.

Even apt is deliberately broken:

“[If] You use ‘sudo apt install chromium’, you get a Snap package of Chromium instead of Debian”

Canonical even patched apt a bit so it prefers to install snaps first.

It is about installing .deb that you manually downloaded from somewhere. You can’t install them by double clicking on them, you have to install from command line.

How dare people complain about something they don’t like!

That aside, the article is shitty lol

Does Linux Mint count as an “Ubuntu variant”?