• BitSound@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    You’re going to get a lot of comments about Ubuntu and snaps. Definitely one of the reasons I switched away from it.

    • PorkSoda@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      For the uninitiated, as someone who’s looking to move from Windows to Linux and Ubuntu is probably my first choice, can you share what’s not to like about this?

      Edit - insightful answers. Thank you

      • Freeman@lemmy.pub
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        1 year ago

        Snaps are technically foss but the server thst hosts them are proprietary to Ubuntu, when flatpak is perfectly reasonable. It’s a bit of a pattern of things they do, finding solutions to things they weren’t really problems (cough netplan cough)

      • BitingChaos@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Performance and functionality.

        When I click the Firefox icon, I expect Firefox to open. Like, right away.

        When Ubuntu switched it to a snap, there was a noticeable load time. I’d click the icon and wait. In the background the OS was mounting a snap as a virtual volume or something, and loading the sandboxed app from that. It turned my modern computer with SSD into an old computer with a HDD. Firefox gets frequent updates, so the snap would be updated frequently, requiring a remount/reload every update.

        Ubuntu tried this with many stock apps (like Calculator), but eventually rolled things back since so many people complained about the obvious performance issues.

        I’m talking about literally waiting 10X the time for something to load as a snap than it did compared to a “regular” app.

        The more apps you have as snaps, the more things have to be mounted/attached and slowly loaded. This also use to clutter up the output when listing mounted devices.

        The Micropolis (GPL SimCity) snap loads with read-only permissions. i.e., you cannot save. There are no permission controls for write access (its snap permissions are only for audio). Basically, the snap was configured wrong and you can never save your game.

        I had purged snapd from my system and added repos to get “normal” versions of software, but eventually some other package change would happen and snapd would get included with routine updates.

        I understand the benefits of something like Snaps and Flatpaks - but you cannot deny that there are negatives. I thought Linux was about choice. I’ve been administering a bunch of Ubuntu systems at work for well over a decade, and I don’t like what the platform has been becoming.

        Also, instead of going with an established solution (flatpak), Ubuntu decided to create a whole new problem (snap) and basically contributes to a splitting of the community. Which do you support? Which gets more developer focus to fix and improve things?

        You don’t have to take my word for any of this. A quick Google search will yield many similar complaints.

          • BitingChaos@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Oh! I forgot another one! Updates.

            You can’t really control when the updates of snaps are rolled out.

            For “regular” software, I have an “apt update” type of script that I can run when I choose to update everything on my system. On some systems, I have this in a weekly crontab. On other systems, there is no scheduled run. On those systems, it’s important to keep many apps as-is - so several packages are also locked, as well (“apt-mark hold”).

            With snap, you basically have no control. It updates as many times as it wants, when it wants. You can try to adjust some timers to change the window when forced updates are rolled out, but can never tell it to NOT update something. Broken package updated? Well, you can manually roll back that one. Broken update pushed again during the next forced update window? Just roll it back again! (and repeat, every day)

            These are the words direct from a snap developer on why you cannot lock an app: “You need to keep your software up to date.

            Yes, I understand that, but I also know it’s really important to not update some stuff, and I know that broken snaps sometimes get pushed.

            Basically, the snap developers have talked down to the users. THEY know better of what WE actually want and need, not us dumb users that actually administer things for a living.

            • mustkana@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              You basically have no control. It updates as many times as it wants, when it wants. You can try to adjust some timers to change the window when forced updates are rolled out, but can never tell it to NOT update something.

              This is incorrect:

              snap refresh --hold=forever

              In general, I’d advise you to do a bit of research beforehand when giving advice…

              Edit: Downvotes for factual information? Really?

              • Piranha Phish@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                The --hold feature was introduced with snapd v2.58 which was released as recently as Dec 1, so less than 9 months ago. So I would consider this a relatively new feature.

                Furthermore, as best as I can tell from the documentation, there isn’t even a way to configurably hold updates in general or for a specific package like can be done with apt-preferences; refresh.hold only allows 90 days out.

                I think it is a perfectly valid criticism that the snap developers didn’t implement this feature at all until well into the life of the product and then, even then, done begrudgingly at best evidenced by the minimal implementation.

                Now, I feel like I did my research, but feel free to let me know if there’s something I can do better or if you have any other general life advice for me.

                • mustkana@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  Thanks, this is a very good reply, and it would have been wonderful, when the original reply would have been similar.

      • carzian@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        For context:

        Snaps are a way to build applications so that they can run on any platform with one build method. It makes it easier for developers to publish their apps across multiple different Linux distro without having to worry about dependency issues.

        Snaps have been very poorly received by the community, one of the largest complaints is that a snap program with take 5-10 seconds to start, where as the same program without snap will start instantly.

        Ubuntu devs have been working for years to optimize them, but it’s a complex problem and while they’ve made some improvements, it’s slow going. While this has been going on, Ubuntu is slowly doubling down more and more on snaps, such as replacing default apps with their snap counterparts.

        On the other hand, other methods like flatpak exist, and are generally more liked by the community.

        This has led to a lot of Ubuntu users feeling unheard as their feedback is ignored.

      • vettnerk@lemmy.mlOP
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        1 year ago

        One word: snapd

        If you like the idea of ubuntu, but wish to avoid ubuntu, you might want to check out Linux Mint.

          • BitSound@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Also a great option. I like their tiling window manager and the other gnome extensions they’ve done. I’m also generally excited about the work they’re doing with Cosmic as a new DE.

          • BitingChaos@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            We know. I’ve just grown accustomed how Ubuntu is set up. Its defaults for many packages seem a little more configured “out of the box” compared to the same offerings like from Debian. I seem to recall installing LAMP stuff from both Debian and CentOS having a similar base config (basically just using the defaults from php, apache, mysql, etc), while the Ubuntu versions had some things already pre-configured that made it easier to get a multi-domain site up and running quicker.

            A fresh Ubuntu install, followed by a snapd purge and rolling back of its networking is usually easier for me than going with something like CentOS or Debian and manually configuring each and ever package with it.

            Then again, I’ve been using Ansible for a while, so my setups for CentOS and Debian have been getting easier and easier, so it’s possible that I may eventually drop Ubuntu if they end up changing their OS so much that I can no longer purge their junk.

      • HERRAX@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        You get a lot of recommendations for Mint here, but I’d like to toss in a recommendation for Pop!_OS. Also based on Ubuntu without all the crap. I would say the biggest difference between pop and mint is the UI, as Mint comes standard with cinnamon and pop with Gnome (soon cosmic) as their DE’s.

        Just take a look at those two and choose one of them, they are both great distros, and absolutely the two I would recommend to just about anyone. Easy to use and very straightforward for new people trying out Linux.

    • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’ve been using Ubuntu for a long time for its out-of-the-box zfs support, but the snap annoyances are getting harder to ignore.

      • cloudy1999@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Firefox is one of the worst snaps. It pops up an annoying notification everyday reminding you to restarted it. Then came the crashing. It got to a point where I couldn’t keep my browser running more than a few minutes at a time.

        I wanted to like snaps, and I’m not overall negative on Ubuntu, but keeping the web browser functional is minimum requirement. The Firefox PPA is much more reliable.

        • cloudy1999@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Follow-up: The icing on the cake was a release or so ago when apt started queueing the snap package’s installation instead. Very clever, but also a confusing user experience. It took a few iterations before I understood the snap was getting installed instead of the deb.

  • SomeBoyo@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Manjaro, because because the team behind it fuck’s up a bit to often for my tastes. And Ubuntu, because they force snap onto their users.

  • pH3ra@lemmy.ml
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    I spent the last 10 mins reading all the comments and I think we managed to shit on all the distros available.
    That’s the Linux community I love, good job people <3

    • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pub
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      Haven’t seen Santoku or Kali or several other special use-case distros (E: or Hannah Montana Linux hahahaha). But, yes, this is exactly the community I love and that extreme hate/love for specific distros is the reason I tried Linux in the first place (and the reason I stayed) hahaha

  • Stillhart@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Garuda. It feels like being inside a gaming rig full of blinking RGB lights. Way over the top with the “gamer aesthetic”.

    • vettnerk@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      Same reason but different vibe with Kali for me. I’m sure it’s good for its intended purpose, but I get the feeling that there are many who install it in an attempt at being a kewl h4x0r. I used used Parrotsec for work for a while, and it’s a lot less flamboyant about it.

  • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Ubuntu - It was my first distro and I loved it for many years after 6.06. However, it slowly shifted from a very community focused distro (“Linux for human beings” was the original slogan) to a very corporate distro with lots of in-house bullshit, CLAs, and partially-closed projects that seems to focus on profit and business over actual human beings. I correlate this move to around the time when it became purple rather than brown. Snap sucks, Mir sucks, Unity sucks, integrating Amazon and music store paid bullshit sucks. Just no. Move to Debian.

    Manjaro - It’s Arch, but with incompetence!

    Red Hat - Do you enjoy paying licensing fees for a Linux distro that very likely violates the open source licenses it uses? RHEL is for you! Just remember not to share the code! Sharing is most certainly NOT caring!

    • wim@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      How does Manjaro add incompetence? I’ve not used either for a while, buy Manjaro never failed me, while arch did manage to make my system nuke itself a couple times just running pacman -Syyu. Granted, this was a long time ago, but it’s the only distro to so this to me ever.

      • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        The project maintainers repeatedly forget to renew their certificates, causing package upgrades to fail.

        The project maintainers, in multiple past instances, have misconfigured their package manager resulting in essentially a DDoS of the AUR.

        The packages are out of date vs. the upstream Arch ones, which often causes AUR packages intended for upstream Arch to break on Manjaro. Yet they consider the AUR a supported resource.

        Project has had problems with mismanagement of funds in the past.

        Despite all this, they seem to heavily focus on marketing, merch, and trying to sell preinstalled systems. Manjaro is in it for profit, not to make an awesome distro.

        • silent_water [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          did they ever start backporting security patches? I know that was a major issue in the early days that really soured me on the competence of the project. you cannot take a rolling release distro, bless some package versions as “stable” and call it a day.

      • 20gramsWrench@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        it’s a reddit imported hate-train because they didn’t renew certificates twice in twenty years and a bug in pamac cause the aur to be ddosed for a few hours total, to tell you how much of an empty bandwagon it is, few years back, manjaro tried to push a closed source office suite in their base installers and none of the clowns parroting anti-manjaro mantras ever mention it, they didn’t think about adding it to the agreed list of accusations in the early days so their copy pasted opinions don’t feature it.

      • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        If that were true then none of this would be news. The CentOS Stream code is available to the public on git, but not the RHEL code. If the RHEL code was available to the public the outrage would have no reason to exist.

        Even if paying customers have access to the RHEL code via git, they are forbidden from redistributing it (which is allowed by the FOSS licenses that code is under) or else the customers lose their license. This does not qualify as the code being available in my opinion, and in the opinion of the vast majority of the FOSS community.

        Saying everything is fine and dandy in the RHEL world is FUD.

  • yum13241@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Manjaro, for its incompetence.

    I don’t hate Gentoo, but will never use it. I hate compiling.

      • I ran Gentoo for years. I run Arch now.

        You’re not wrong, lol.

        'Course, I was running Gentoo when hardware was slow enough that you could see the real-time performance improvement from tailored compiles. Now shit’s so fast that any gains are imperceptible by a human for day-to-day desktop usage. Arch can also be a bit of a time sink, I get it, especially setting it up takes time and thought. That’s also why I like it, and always come back to it: I can set it up exactly how I want it, and it’s really good at that. There’s always weird shit that seems to happen to me when I try to remove Gnome in Ubuntu or other crazy shit that, yeah, everyone would tell you not to do, but Arch doesn’t care. If I want combination of things, I can hunt for a distro that has it, or I can likely just set it up on Arch.

        After setup, though, it’s not any more effort to maintain than any other distro. shrug

        • NaoPb@beehaw.org
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          Removing things others tell you not to do. Yes, that sounds familiar. Maybe I should try Arch sometime.

          I’ve just finished my current version of my script to change ubuntu around to my liking. At 4:23 in the night/morning. I’m back on ubuntu because I can never seem to get the graphics working just right on other distro’s. There’s always that screen tearing happening whenever I play youtube videos in firefox. But in ubuntu it just works out of the box.

      • zagaberoo@beehaw.org
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        Binary speed is really the least reason to use Gentoo.

        There are a lot of thorny issues in package distribution that source builds completely sidestep.

        Install-it-yourself plus source updates are a lot to ask, but if you can get the hang of it the benefits are pretty sweet.

    • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      So what you’re actually saying is: you don’t like Arch because you don’t want to take the time to learn how to use Arch.

      (Which is fine)

        • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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          Fair. Though I will say (more for others who may see this in the future), that Arch’s new installer is great and definitely reduces the load on new users. That said, it’s never going to be explicitly designed for people who have no Linux experience.

    • Elw@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      Honestly… I don’t get this. It’s a bit more work than other distros but I think that Linux users often get to a point in their Linux journey where customizing a system with defaults is more difficult than just starting from a blank slate.

      • nik282000@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Customizing all-in-one distros is a shitty uphill battle that isn’t worth the trouble, so I get how Arch is worth the work there. But recommending a kit car when people are asking for a commuter just bugs me.

      • tokyo@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        It is definitely not a bit more work. It’s hours and hours of reading manuals, following video guides and configuring every last detail.

        This is a gross simplification

        • Elw@lemmy.sdf.org
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          I think reality lies somewhere in the middle. Yes you have to read and yes you have to configure things but the docs are all on the wiki. There’s a point where this is easier than figuring out how to undo the defaults on, say, Ubuntu and do your own thing without official documentation on it.

      • NaN@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        I don’t find this the case at all. I barely change the wallpaper, I’m not spending time removing a bunch of stuff I don’t use it just sits there unused. I did my time with Arch and Gentoo (before Arch existed) for years, but I would rather someone else do the work and I will use it as long as it has sane defaults, for my actual work that doesn’t care.

      • Octorine@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        It doesn’t. All the time you spent reading manuals and tweaking configs to get it to boot quicker does.

      • gian @lemmy.grys.it
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        1 year ago

        If booting quicker means to have less/older software or a bloated system once running…

    • tibi@lemmy.world
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      And also, I have work to do… I don’t like wasting my time tinkering with config files trying to get the optimum settings. I just want an OS that helps me do my work and gets out of the way.

      All the edgelord kids boasting about using Arch are also a big turn off.

  • LeFantome@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    Manjaro because it is a bait and switch trap. Seems really polished and user friendly. You will find out eventually it is a system destroying time-bomb and a poorly managed project.

    Ubuntu because snaps.

    The rest are all pros and cons that are different strokes for different folks.

    • moonsnotreal@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      Every time I have used manjaro on x86 it has been broken within a few months. Their Raspberry Pi 4 port is pretty stable though for some reason.

  • mister_monster@monero.town
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    Ubuntu, because of their shenanigans with ads in the OS, forcing snap and just generally demonstrating disdain for their userbase.

    Manjaro for their office suite debacle, and general instability.

    RHEL for their recent attempts to subvert GPL.

    Debian because packages are never, ever, ever up to date.

    Gentoo because any sane person would get sick of compiling.

    • vettnerk@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      I actually like Gentoo for the same reason you hate it. But I was a FreeBSD guy for around 10 years before migrating to linux, and I probably some long lasting damage still lingering from that era.

      • pedro@lemm.ee
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        Damn I’m contemplating going to FreeBSD. What made you go the other way? What do you miss from FreeBSD?

        • vettnerk@lemmy.mlOP
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          I miss /usr/ports. I could spend days just exploring its contents.

          I miss an /etc structure that wasn’t a complete mess.

          I miss UFS and its soft updates.

          I miss the stability of fBSD 3 and 4.

          I miss the ease of which you tweaked, compiled, and installed a new kernel.

          And just because of the hilarious legacy that was obsolete 20 years beforw I started with it, I miss the concept of font-servers.

          The main reason for my migration was the bigger userbase of linux where it was easier to find people who has resolved whatever issue I was having, plus nvidia drivers. Plus I’ve only needed to use fBSD once professionally.

          • pedro@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            From your experience I don’t see red flags for me so I’ll probably try for my next reinstall. Thanks for your honest opinion

      • mister_monster@monero.town
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        Well, I like gentoo for it’s top notch security and I see why you’d use it for extremely security sensitive applications, but people that use it as a desktop are nuts.

        • zagaberoo@beehaw.org
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          I’m not saying anyone is wrong for shying away from Gentoo, but using a comprehensive desktop environment, systemd, and gentoo-kernel gives a very non-fiddly experience.

          Combine that with running updates overnight or honestly just running them in the background while you work, and it’s not nearly as bad as its reputation.

          Still very much a commitment vs other distros, but not as bonkers as it can seem.

    • cmeerw@programming.dev
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      “they put ads in the terminal” isn’t really accurate.

      Their “ubuntu-advantage-tools” adds information to one of their other products to the output of apt. You can easily get rid of that by uninstalling/replacing “ubuntu-advantage-tools”. It’s definitely not like they are selling ad space in your terminal to third parties.

  • iopq@lemmy.world
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    Ubuntu: broke my LTS 20 by upgrading to LTS 22, pushes snaps and other ridiculous things over the years while offering relatively little value these days

  • conner5@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    Ubuntu, dont understand me wrong, the distro is nice but, canonical… My point because i dont like Ubuntu.

  • YⓄ乙 @aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    Wish Linux Devs help build and polish OS for Pinephone. I really want Linux to go mainstream. Tired of android and Apple.