As an operating system Ubuntu is great. It’s user friendly, has great hardware support and is up to date enough for most users. Canonical though… That’s where the real sore spot lies for a lot of die-hards.
I’m quite happy with Linux Mint Debian Edition. I think it is the future of Mint. It’s on a very recent kernel, and more and more software I use nowadays is in Flatpaks anyways. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on much new stuff, but maybe I’m just not aware.
How different is it from regular Debian? Like if I’m very experienced with Debian, does that equate to being able to easily use Mint Debian Edition too?
I found normal Debian to be a little unpolished for my liking. Even using the Cinnamon DE, it was lacking some niceties that Mint brings. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble using Mint.
Ubuntu is a tough one. I don’t like it. I don’t like snaps, but more than that I don’t like their direction in general.
But I have some respect for them too. I think they played a pretty significant role in Linux being as popular (relatively speaking) as it is, and I don’t feel like they have any ill intent.
So I don’t personally care for it but I’m glad it’s around I guess is my point?
I avoid Ubuntu because Canonical has a history of going their own way alone rather than collaborating on universal standards. For instance, when the X devs decided the successor to X11 needed to be a complete redesign from scratch companies like RedHat, Collabora, Intel, Google, Samsung, and more collaborated to build Wayland. However, Canonical announced Mir, and they went their own way alone.
When Gnome3 came out it was very controversial and this spawned alternatives such as Cinnamin, MATE, and Ubuntu's Unity desktop. Unity was the only Linux desktop, before or since, to include sponsored bloatware apps installed by default, and it also sold user search history to advertisers.
Then, there's snap. While Flatpak matured and becoame the defacto standard distro-agnostic package system, Canonical once again went their own way alone by creating snap.
I'm not an expert on Ubuntu or the Linux community, I've just been around long enough to see Canonical stir up controversy over and over by going left when everyone else goes right, failing after a few years, and wasting thousands of worker hours in the process.
One thing is to explore different ways to do things, like many projects do, but ubuntu goes further and FORCES people to use their experiments, as if they’re some sort of testing ground, not as if they’re the most used family of linux distros and the one a lot of people rely on.
Edit: Sorry if my tone was excessive, I think I’m getting grumpy with age.
Flatpaks can also be used to run CLI programs, but it requires using flatpak run <package.name> instead of using the apps standard CLI command. But you can create an alias and should work mostly the same way.
For example, I have neovim on my Debian laptop via flatpak. So in order to run it, you have to do
<span style="color:#323232;">flatpak run io.neovim.nvim
</span>
You can create an alias for that command
<span style="color:#323232;">alias nvim='flatpak run io.neovim.nvim'
</span>
To give credit where it’s due: Mir was pretty neat, actually. It had features that modern Wayland still lacks or has only recently gained. Ubuntu got an X replacement up and running in record time, but the rest of the ecosystem stuck with Wayland, so they cancelled their solution.
And you know what? Snap does solve some issues in interesting ways that Flatpak doesn’t. Unfortunately, the experience using Snap is rather inferior (and that goddamn lowercase snap folder in my home directory isn’t helping), but on a technical level I’m inclined to give this one to Snap.
Developing and maintaining Ubuntu costs money and unlike Red Hat, Canonical isn’t selling many support contracts. Their stupid Amazon scope and the focus on Snap are part of that, they just want to give businesses a reason to pay Canonical.
They’re trying very hard, but it just doesn’t seem to take off. Their latest move, pushing Ubuntu Pro to everyone, seems like a rather desperate move. I think Ubuntu is collapsing and I think Canonical doesn’t know how to stop it. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never paid for an Ubuntu license and I don’t know anyone who does, either.
What if you just use distrobox in the future? You can use debian/ubuntu with it on whatever system you use. On my fedora silverblue installation almost everything is seperated from the OS. I barely touch the OS. It doesn’t really matter if I’m on silverblue, microos or vanillaos. I want to switch to microos because it comes with firefox as a flatpak ootb and other minor things. It’s jist not worth it anymore to switch the distro
I’m pretty happy using Ubuntu. Its got a decent UI and works well enough with little fuss. As much as I enjoy tinkering, I use my Ubuntu machines for work and I really only need something simple that works out of the box.
I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but…
There is no “supposed to” when it comes to distro preferences. Use whatever you like, other people’s opinions do not dictate your behavior. If Ubuntu works for you, use that. If anything, that’s the freedom of FOSS. You can take other people’s views in to account when choosing a distro, but in the end it is your decision. I dislike Ubuntu for a few reasons, but I don’t get to dictate to anyone else what they use and why.
If you like rolling release, you could try Debian sid/unstable. I hear it’s quite stable and reliable and, of course, isn’t Ubuntu.
It’s pitched as a open source operation system, yet the snap store is closed source and vendor locked, one of the reasons some of us use Liniux is because we prefer open source (and there are rational justifications for that).
Hate is a strong word, but there is legitimate criticism, I also think the closed source nature of snap led to the fact that it has no volunteers and that eventually caused malware to appear on the snap store multiple time, it never happened on flathub as far as i know.
Today for beginner i think opensuse and linux mint are better.
Regarding debian having old packages , i use nix but it is fairly immature, flathub should also work.
I still think Ubuntu is the best option (particularly if you want to use the non-LTS releases)
Having said that I do hate snaps and also dislike flatpaks. So what I do is just use the Firefox deb package from the PPA and the chromium package from Linux Mint. Oh, and I have actually replaced ubuntu-advantage-tools with a no-op dummy package.
There is no reason to “hate” Ubuntu but there are better choices.
What are those better choices then (for those who currently use the non-LTS Ubuntu releases and don’t want to move to rolling releases or LTS-only releases)?
I was an Ubuntu person for a long time, and when reading criticism about the inability to upgrade versions, I realized that had been my entire experience. I decided to give a rolling release a chance, and it’s been amazing.
I use arch(installer)btw. 🐧 AURs are pretty ingenuous, which is just pulling and compiling a git. Maybe a little less secure, but look at what happened to the snap store this year.
If you want to try a rolling release but didn’t want to use Arch, there’s always Fedora, & OpenSuSE Tumbleweed.
Outside of that, for non Ubuntu distros you could do OpenSuSE regular, or for true LTS use Rocky. Or take the red pill and go with Hannah Montana’s Linux.
Never touching Fedora again. It’s a corporate distribution. As much as people might say otherwise redhat has a lot of pull over it. Look at the lawyers getting involved over pulling out the codecs.
Your loss, it’s a great distribution and if you spent even a couple of minutes in our forums you’d see that the RedHat pull is due to them actually collaborating and being and active part in the community.
IDF destroyed Israeli homes (with Israelis inside) when Hamas raided them on Oct 7, and now they are indiscriminantly bombing Gaza, including where the hostages might be. I don’t see the logic at all. It seems like they don’t care about Palestinian OR Israeli civilians.
EDIT: I just stumbled upon this video, which shows Israeli police arresting a (black) Israeli soldier for trying to cross the street. It seems racist af. I really can’t figure out who they are protecting.
That’s what bothers me most: the incidence shows how Israeli military treats civilians in general but at least where I live, media doesn’t talk about the implications. The coverage is more critical than at the beginning of the war but they still refuse to call it a genocide.
It’s a military force full of conscripts it’s not a surprise they operate at an amateur level. These guys aren’t trained to rescue hostages they are only trained to shoot. There is a reason why most countries have gotten rid of conscription. Conscripted soldiers are nowhere near the level of a vetted and trained volunteer
Take a look at this. It’s a bunch of testimoniess from IDF soldiers about what happened when theie military ran similar operations in 2014. Looks like this is generally how the IDF operates.
exactly. those pesky children are easy to be radicalized; they have barely spent time learning anything at school, so they can’t really tell the bluff.
watch al jazeera for instance (a qatari MSM): hamas propaganda 24/7. qataris probably have stakes in this too by reselling arms, so it helps to keep the flame alive ( they would spend hours rebroadcasting the death of this ‘hero’ journalist in the battlefield, while in fact its lucrative that such people die to always have exclusive material to broadcast, its like a Marvel movie, but with real casualties ).
arms production is a lucrative business right now.
Ubuntu is nice. Apt/DEB works as they should. Some default apps, mostly browsers, are snaps now, but this does not bother you at all. You were getting them from your distro anyway.
Flatpak and AppImages work just fine if you need them.
The Ubuntu desktop (any flavour) just works. Others are different, but nothing is bad about Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is trying new things, proprietary to their ecosystem, e.g. Unity or snap. On the big picture, those are experiment. Ubuntu is still Linux.
The community reaction to snap is overblown. So Canonical developed something you don’t like? Ignore it. This has mostly been a waste of time for them.
(Yes, maybe that dev time would be better spent on flatpak or open-source apps. But that’s their time. I’m not paying Ubuntu developers, so can I really complain?)
Well, I’d file this as innovation. Innovation is trying and failing. It’s an experiment. And I’m okay with this.
Is it wasteful to have KDE and Gnome? Why don’t they give up and merge with each other? Did we really need systemd? Or docker? And why Wayland when every single distro is on X and every single application is on X?
Ubuntu started as a Gnome-based distribution and it is was better than the competition on the desktop at the time. Or good enough. It got popular.
Personally, I wasn’t a big fan of Unity or Gnome 3, but it worked. I found snap totally weird and against how things should be on a Linux system. But snap updates (while still annoying) have solved problems with deb-based updates of browser (“Quit all running firefox or you’ll experience problems”).
Maybe I’d like Debian more. After all I came from Debian to Ubuntu. But it’s not worth to make a fuzz.
I don’t think it’s wasteful to have both KDE and Gnome. It’s healthy competition and as you say, innovation.
However the job of a distribution is to gather upstream software into a meaningful OS, and rewriting everything that should be an upstream software shared with other distributions is a distraction.
So Unity was unnecessary “not invented here” syndrome. Just like Snap is.
Even if there was, that wouldn’t excuse shooting first and asking questions never like the IDF did this time and every other of the thousands of times they’ve murdered civilians.
No, your question was itself a whataboutism (what about Hamas? Have they ever tried to trick IDF that way?).
I simply replied to the underlying assertion that, if they have, then the IDF are somehow the least bit justified in assuming that it was Hamas. Which they wouldn’t be.
One of them shouted “look! Terrorists!” and they just started shooting without ever considering that he might be wrong.
No, no it’s not. It’s a reasonable question to do with the actions of the ADF. I never even said I support the ADF. Really just a weird response at the end of the day, I can only deduce (because you’re refusing to go near any answer to my question) that they may have done it before. If they had never done that you could have confidently just said no. Hamas would never do such a thing but here we are still communicating while I get no closer to any information on whether or not Hamas have done that in the past
It’s a reasonable question to do with the actions of the ADF
It categorically isn’t. There are ways of verifying other than shooting them to bits and then identifying them afterwards. Also, it’s IDF.
I never even said I support the ADF.
All the more reason not to try to justify their murder. Also, it’s still IDF.
I can only deduce (because you’re refusing to go near any answer to my question) that they may have done it before.
I honestly have no idea. I haven’t checked because it makes no difference in whether the IDF were justified in their murder. They weren’t regardless.
If they had never done that you could have confidently just said no.
That would be lying, though, since I don’t know if they have.
here we are still communicating while I get no closer to any information on whether or not Hamas have done that in the past
Because I refuse to answer your irrelevant whataboutism question and you keep insisting I do. If you want to know, find out for yourself and THEN pretend that it justifies anything.
lemmy.ml
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