Long story short, I have a desktop with Fedora, lovely, fast, sleek and surprisingly reliable for a near rolling distro (it failed me only once back around Fedora 34 or something where it nuked Grub). Tried to install on a 2012 i7 MacBook Air… what a slog!!! Surprisingly Ubuntu runs very smooth on it. I have been bothering all my friends for years about moving to Fedora (back then it was because I hated Unity) but now… I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but… Christ, it does run well! In fairness all my VMs are running DietPi (a slimmed version of Ubuntu) and coming back to the APT world feels like coming back home.
On the other end forcing myself to be on Fedora allows me to stay on the DNF world that is compatible with Amazon Linux etc (which I use for work), it has updated packages, it is nice and clean…. Argh, don’t know how to decide!
Thoughts?
I am not in the mood for Debian. I like the Mint approach but I am not a fan of slow rolling releases and also would like to keep myself as close as upstream as possible, the Debian version is the only one that seems reliable enough but, again, it is Debian, the packages are “old”. Pop Os and similar are two hops away from upstream and so I’d rather not.
Is Snap really that bad?
Edit: thank you all for sharing your experience !
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.
You’re not wrong, but there’s also value in exploring different ways to do similar things. That’s what’s great about Linux.
Some of Canonical’s efforts may lead to failure, but that doesn’t mean they are a waste.
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.
Haha, I get it. No offense taken.
I don’t disagree. But for better or worse, most people don’t think that much about their software.
Folks like us who do? We can make informed decisions.
Folks who don’t? Canonical’s experiments are probably still better than dealing with Windows 11 or macOS.
Like snaps. They are different then flatpaks. You can use them for cli apps don’t think flatpaks can be.
Flatpaks can also be used to run CLI programs, but it requires using
flatpak runinstead 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
flatpak run io.neovim.nvimYou can create an alias for that command
alias nvim='flatpak run io.neovim.nvim'And then you can use the nvim command as normal
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.