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Debian is 30 years old for a reason.
Use whatever fits your use case. Hell build a LFS distro. That’s why it’s YOUR computer.
The penguin is the messiah of freedom.
i would like a Live For Speed distro
I understood that reference!
And Xenia is the messiah of…?
Ubuntu is just Debian with adware
Are the Ubuntu ads in the room with us right now? The only thing I remember is apt telling you about Ubuntu Pro. At that point Plasma is adware too for advertising their donation page.
remember when Canonical pushed Ads in Unity? That commentator remembers.
There was the Amazon thing in the launcher years ago
I remember that one. The applet that lead to amazon with their referral code. From what I heard from Alan Pope, it did bring in money, but even the manufacturers they worked with always blurred/removed it from their promotional materials. So it got removed for good.
Asking for a donation =/= charging money for security updates
I see you’ve got the spirit of this meme
In principle yes, as Ubuntu is derived from Debian Sid, but with modifications to make it stable. Thus, the sources they are built from are different and hence, not completely binary compatible, like e.g. *Ubuntu and Mint or Debian and LMDE are. The configuration settings different also here and there and thus, guides for Ubuntu are not 1:1 transferable to Debian and vice versa.
Saying “you can use Ubuntu pro” is not intrusive at all
yeah, messing with
aptjust to push a service really doesn’t sit well. And they don’t stop there, snaps are preferred over apt packages in Ubuntu Land.
Ubuntu forks that ditch snap > Ubuntu
I wouldn’t even mind snap so much but the day I found out apt would automatically use snaps instead for some packages with no easy opt out was a step too far.
Drop it, snaps are dead. All hail FlatPak.
Try using flatpak for command-line software, I dare you
I despise flatpak and snap equally
Not a single time have I used a program with them that worked properly
lol what are you talking about? One of my daily drivers is Kinoite and it works great. What flatpaks are you having issues with? Frankly, you must be being hyperbolic, because tons of people use tons of flatpaks without issue.
I mean, it’s great that it works for you.
But I’m not even kidding. Literally every single one.
I’ve now completely purged all snap and fp apps from my system and live a less angry life
Again: name them. Describe the failures.
I simply don’t believe that you have 100% incompatibility, and I say that because I use a decently broad selection across several devices without any serious issues. Sure, they’re not perfect, but they’re a damn sight better than snaps, and in my experience, decently reliable.
Back your claims with data, or be prepared to have people like me call bullshit.
I mean I find it hard to believe but this level of argumentativeness is silly and toxic. Why would they lie? Maybe they have some edge case or misconfiguration. Maybe they got unlucky and ran into some kind of breaking bug on their specific system. Shit happens.
I’ve stopped using them for over a year now.
Granted, most of the apps I used were snap based, but some of them were flatpack.
Most of them were single-use “use this tool with flatpack” tools via github, so I really can’t remember what those were when they just didn’t work.
The ones I looked into why it didn’t work were always some filesystem permission stuff. Configurable? Sure. Not something you should be needing to do on first launch if you want to just use the tool? Absolutely
The biggest issue I remember I had was with Vorta, a GUI for borg. Which also just had massive filesystem issues (plus some settings saving issues, which I assume also is a FS issue). Having problems reading your filesystem is quite a problem when you want to use a tool that, well, needs to read your filesystem.
I’m honestly not really interested in stacking a pile of tools up that just didn’t work for me.
If you like flatpack, go ahead. More power to the people who do.
It’s just not a tool that I had any luck with. And I don’t really see a point in trying again for the forseeable future
Interesting. I use an immutable distro (Fedora Kinoite) so basically everything I use outside of the apps bundled with the OS are flatpaks. Other than learning a few things about FlatPak permissions, file locations, etc, it’s been completely painless.
What I experienced is that Snaps/Flatpaks that contain X11 apps will behave very oddly in a Wayland sessions, at least with NVidia GPUs.
Using distros that still use X11, like Linux Mint, seems to help a lot.
One thing I will commend Snaps/Flatpak for however is bundling dependencies, especially deprecated ones. I spent DAYS trying to install an older version of .NET framework that’s no longer supported to get a game (Vintage Story), but to no avail. With the appropriate Snap/Flatpak it worked first try, well, once I found the distro that doesn’t have the X11 problem that was previously stated.
Snap should be reason enough that everyone should abandon Ubuntu, especially when Mint is right there. The last thing we need is to make Linux more like Android+Google Play.
Regular Mint (not LMDE) adds to the Ubuntu market share. Also remixing a 3rd party distribution by adding custom repositories on top can cause incompatibilities. That is the reason why regular Mint uses only Ubuntu LTS as base.
Putting Mint on an old iMac soon actually. Been a while since I got to use Linux.
I politely disagree. Try to look at Snaps this way: Canonical maintains 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, 22.04 and 24.04. Each with their own repos. Each has to be properly maintained. With snap they can release the package a single time, and it can be used across all of their releases. I think this is the main point of snap. Being able to use it across other systemd distros is just a bonus.
Some time ago, I tried Ubuntu for the first time. I was shocked that the preinstalled Firefox (snap package) took 10 seconds to launch, compared to 1-2 seconds on Windows.
You’re just describing flatpack.
Flatpak can’t run CLI apps. Also, they started around the same time. Flatpak in 2015 and Snap in 2016. This is like saying dnf shouldn’t exist because apt is a thing.
Why would Canonical abandon their own solution because some people online complain?
The question that I have to ask: what category of CLI apps (or even some examples) exist that are too complex to maintain a few versions simultaneously as native packages but are not complex enough to just use an OCI container for them instead?
Yes, they maintain a lot of LTS releases and want to minimize work. Which is their own problem entirely. So I’m going to go back to Debian next time I reinstall or build.
So offering 10 years of support for a release is a bad thing now. Got it.
No. But I’m not willing to trade convenience for vendor lock-in. Not that this matters in containerland anyway.
There is no way to install snaps from any source other than Canonical and the snap server software is closed-source.
Or just use flatpak or Appimage.
Yeah, exactly. I was about to say flatpak exists and isn’t proprietary.
Also, the snap for docker/compose is hot garbage.
Why do they need to disrespect their users rights to that though?
How does Canonical disrespect your rights?
They snap store is proprietary
So are the drivers your computer likely relies on. Are you willing to buy a thinkpad from 2005 and use a random FSF approved distro?
Silly whataboutism. When there are multiple Linux package management solutions to choose from that are functional, decentralized, and fully FOSS, including ones that work across distros, switching to the proprietary Canonical-controlled Snap Store is moving backward for no good reason.
I don’t see how this matters.
Let’s look at the very worst case possible scenario: Everyone abandons Flatpak and AppImage and moves to Snapcraft, and Canonical decides to make a decision that destroys the store.
You can still install FOSS apps from somewhere, at worst compile them.
All that would be lost if Snapcradt stopped existing are the proprietary apps, which you wouldn’t use anyways.
Ubuntu’s role in the ecosystem is important. They are good at first luring people into using linux. Then the users get pissed off of Ubuntu, because of Snap, ads, or whatever random crap they know from Windows. Finally, they move on to better options, be it Arch, Debian, or Puppy. Ubuntu ensures they don’t all stick to the same
Don’t forget mint, i started linux journey 2 months back and it’s going great with few mishaps.
Ubuntu’s role in the ecosystem is important.
I think it used to be. There’s still some inertia, but Canonical has used up a lot of goodwill through the years and other distributions have picked up the slack.
Nowadays I wouldn’t point a newcomer towards Ubuntu. It’s trash. Just use anything else.This.
I don’t mind Ubuntu server, though you’re right you need to clean it up a bit by uninstalling snap and killing the login ad of managed k8s, the LTS versions have been quite consistently easy to deal with and stable, but then again so has Debian.
Hasn’t Debian relaxed its stance and now allows you to fairly easily use nonfree software?
yes, I think the main thing is when the nonfree firmware was included (user can opt-out) as a default at install. So out of the box support for most common hardware became way better.
It was always pretty easy to add nonfree repositories, but having to manually sort out wifi firmware after an install was a pain.
Yes, but it’s significantly less automatic. Testing distros on an old laptop, Debian wouldn’t support the network card out of the box and I had to use USB tethering from my phone to get the necessary drivers off the internet. Ubuntu just had them in the image and installed them automatically.
Ubuntu supports a wider range of devices than Debian? Since when? I was under the impression that Debian supported all or nearly all architectures the Linux kernel supports, Ubuntu only a few popular ones?
Yer it’s nonsense. The first device I switched from Ubuntu to Debian on was the SheevaPlug because Ubuntu dropped support for it. Debian still supports it now well over a decade later.
AMD graphics drivers might be an example of this. They’re made by AMD for Ubuntu specifically, not Debian. They work* on LMDE, so I assume they will also work** on Debian, but they weren’t specifically developed for that platform.
Installing them was a bit hairy, but they’ve survived at least one kernel update so far, which is somewhat reassuring***.
* on my specific hardware.
** for some hardware combinations, including mine, if not all.
*** but not completely. FrankenDebian is the word I use for it.
Linux Mint Debian edition! 💪
The regular version uses a lot of Ubuntu resources but doesn’t have snaps either.
What is snaps?
That’s the proprietary app container system pushed by Canonical who maintains Ubuntu. That’s as opposed to something more widely accepted like flatpak. I’m not an expert on everything Canonical has done to piss of the FOSS community, but I think snaps are the biggest one.
And in regular old Linux Mint Cinnamon you don’t have to deal with that, and you can still lean on Ubuntu’s apt repositories.
Don’t forget that they’re buddy buddy with amazon, and have even included amazon sourced ads within the OS at one point.
Did ubuntu so that or mint? I can’t quite tell from your comment
Ahh OK. Thanks for the info. I used flatpak on cinnamon now. I prefer KDE but its just hard to beat Mint.
I’m good with cinnamon myself, but you can totally install KDE on mint instead. It is just Linux after all.
When I do a search for mint kde, this is the first result and has step by step instructions. It looks like it can be as simple as apt install kde-standard or kde-full.
https://linuxiac.com/how-to-install-kde-plasma-on-linux-mint-22/
I’m tempted, and I may mess with it some day, but honestly after tweaking some settings I’m pretty happy with how my cinnamon desktop performs.
Debian includes proprietary software just like Ubuntu does.
Ubuntu had (I don’t know if it still has) an additional contrib section in the
sources.listfor binary packages from “partners” without source code available, like e.g. Spotify.So does Debian
Sorry, I mixed that up. It was named Canonical partner or something like that and contained only binary packages. Debian
contribare free packages with dependencies innon-free. Whilenon-freeare packages with not DFSG compliant source code (but with source code).That is not correct. Nonfree has software that is proprietary but jot firmware. Nonfree-firmware has the proprietary firmware.
Yes, since Bookworm, there is also
non-free-firmwarewhich before was located innon-free. I’ve skipped that for simplicity, as both follow the same rules andnon-free-firmwarewas introduced basically for convenience.Do you know if either of the
non-freerepos contain binary files without having the source available?They do
OK, TY. I’ve thought, there were just downloader packages, containing scripts to download the firmware binary from the device manufacturer and install it on the system, like e.g. the one for the Broadcom wireless driver.
you do you. But ubuntu is the windows of linux from the perspective of telemetry, propertiary software and such. Like if ur gonna switch to linux might aswell “fully” switch
This is a flawed opinion. You can support a realistic approach of using proprietary software for usability’s sake without approving of things like ad profiles. (I say that instead of telemetry because benign things like crash reporting or reporting which features you use are technically also “telemetry”.)
Listen, I support foss as much as anyone here but there’s a reason SSPL didn’t get accepted as a foss license, and it’s because it’s impossible to have a fully 100% foss system. I’m not saying we shouldn’t push for or advocate for that, just saying we shouldn’t say someone isn’t fully embracing Linux just because they need to use a few pieces of proprietary software to get a working system that supports their individual needs.
It’s impossible to have a fully free system?
https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html
But more to your point, it’s a false dichotomy. Even before the latest changes to the Debian install media, for years it was maybe unintuitive but still easy enough to just choose the “nonfree” install iso. That one would automatically include all the proprietary bits that are necessary for a fully functional Linux system.
But now those nonfree parts are in the Debian install by default, so there really is just nothing that you get from Ubuntu that can’t just as easily work in Debian - especially since everyone is moving toward flatpaks, and appimages anyway.
I agree about that today, but it wasn’t always so easy to install linux for noobs as it is now.
It may be easy to forget, but Ubuntu was doing “easy jnstall” better than moat linux distros for a long time. I bet there are a lot of non-programmer-linux-daily-driver folks out there that got started on ubuntu. I’m one of them.
I agree about that today, but it wasn’t always so easy to install linux for noobs as it is now.
And yet we still did it. From floppies.
Nice.
This is not true.
I used to use Ubuntu in the past, and it wasn’t Unity, Upstart, Bazaar, Mir, Launchpad, Snap, Amazon ads integration etc. that convinced me to look elsewhere, it was that I found out how other, not commercial distributions, integrated and instrumented its user base into their development.
Instead of having to sign a CLAs when contributing and signing your right away to some corporation, you become part of the community. (Update: It seems they have switched from their Copyright assignment, so something not as invasive in 2011, which is good. But they still require you to sign a CLA.)
So always look who is developing the distribution first, are they individuals or is it one company. And don’t let yourself be bated into the dependency of one company, because then you will be the victim of enshittyfication eventually.
What if I want both? Is there a ububian? Or a debuntu?
Edit: /j
You could run one and use the other within a distrobox container I suppose
I’m sure this is a joke but Ubuntu is Debian at the core.
This is humor, yes. I mostly just wanted a reason to say those combination names
