> Even on metered connections, snaps auto-update anyway after some time.

I recently switched back to linux myself, but there are certain utilities and conveniences and options in Windows that linux distros don't yet provide, and ubuntu definitely is not meant to be light weight in any sense of the term. Is switching to something else an option at this point?

An experienced user could probably find a nicely tuned arch / manjaro setup to work better for them than Ubuntu, but if someone is just first getting their toes wet and learning, Ubuntu isn't a bad recommendation for a first go-round.

Can I mark all my network connections as metered?

And I'm pretty sure NM lets you set all network connections metered, i.e.

  nmcli connection modify $CONNECTION connection.metered yes

Canonical should be up front about this type of information.

Except for the ones Microsoft thinks are really important to push to you.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4028458/windows-met...

I hope Canonical fixes this immediately. I'm not eager to spend time re-researching to market for a suitable OS.

Another huge differentiator for Ubuntu over Windows was that I didn't think the OS vendor was trying to seize control of my computer. Canonical jeopardized that trust with this choice. I truly hope they take steps to restore it. I don't want the added work of switching OSs.

I tried to disable it from systemd, but it had some weird way of relaunching itself.

just do a web search on disabling snapd to see how many people want to do this.

> GNOME Calculator was put on the ISO as a snap to help us test the whole “seeding snaps” process, not because it was a fast-moving, CVE-prone applications. Chromium, Firefox and LibreOffice fall more into that category.

Ok so the whole snap thing comes down to updating browsers. Is this for real? I want the web, not the browser to change daily, or to consume more bandwidth than my www usage :)

The problem is that there is no way to have a browser that only pushes updates for security fixes. They're always mixed in with changes to the UI that force people to re-learn workflows.

> If you don't want new features ("more free stuff!"), use an LTS version that only includes the security updates?

There is no such thing. I run Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on all my computers at home and I'm posting this on, IIRC, the fifth or sixth new version of Firefox I've had to accept (and that's only counting major version changes), because, as noted above, there was no way to just get the security updates and leave out the others.

Yes there is, it's called firefox esr.

At least when I encountered it a few years ago, if you go to Help -> About Firefox in the menu, it'll check for updates in the background, download the most recent version, and upgrade itself the next time you restarted the browser.

And yes, this was on Ubuntu.

So the capability is there, even if it's not on generally.

1. https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-...

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22972661

*Edited

Watching this snap thing play out, and in the past, watching Mir, Unity, and Amazon Lens, has provided steady confirmation that I've made the right decision to stay away from Ubuntu.

Time to check out Debian!

*Edited. I can't type on phones.

Pop! is Ubuntu-based, so no idea of the situation with all these other problems, but it intrigues me because they're doing tiling windows first-class.

My understanding of Void is that it doesn't use snaps or systemd, making the system as a whole significantly easier to understand, and simply sounds much much closer to what I want out of a computer (and much like 8.04 was when I first switched to Ubuntu).

I left Ubuntu almost ten years ago, after 5 years of using it, when they started using MIR instead of Gnome2 and I replaced it with Linux Mint and I haven't looked back. This whole snap thing looks like the new weird decision made by Canonical to make their faithful users leave :/

Debian's problem is that it's stodgy updating policy means 'Stable' is still on 4.19, things like Wireguard require a simple, but odd procedure to request apt pull packages from newer releases, and most of the copy/pasteable examples out there assume Ubuntu, and their versions/customization to critical infrastructure packages.

IMHO, the stodgy updates make it a perfect candidate for server based software. Personally, my Debian know-how makes it great for my desktop, and It has not failed for my use case: Development, Sysadmin, Browsers, Steam (or any other games releasing linux versions)

That's not a good idea, as it breaks the assurance that Debian Stable provides. Using the backports repository is the recommended approach if you need a newer version of some clearly-defined piece of software. It will pull the newer dependencies it requires from backports, while still relying on stock-provided packages as far as practicable.

I tried it. Long story short, now I'm on Sid.

It is true that the first-presented installer ISO images on Debian's downloads page lack the worst proprietary drivers, but another couple of clicks takes you to images with them included. So, worst case, you find that the image you have lacks such a needed driver, and you use another image. In practice, I just start with the latter, and have not encountered hardware not covered. For the absolute newest equipment, a "testing" installer may be the right version to use.

The Debian download pages provide installer images for all needs. I have not needed to look at secondary sites, which also exist for specialized needs.

On my older 2011-era laptop, that's the wifi and wired network that need those drivers. It's a bit of a pain.

Not really. Debian also offers one with all the firmware included but explicitly labels it "unofficial" (though very much official in practice and hosted on debian servers). The "pain" is thus literally to click on another download link.

I think it's an over-zealous position from Debian not to redistribute firmware. Even systems that are very strict about licensing, like OpenBSD, redistribute firmware, because they have some common sense.

OTOH I believe it's a position fully aligned with their ethical standpoint. Equating common sense with your personal preference isn't very gracious.

If you want something that's less zealous about respecting (and eschewing) stupid licensing, but is more zealous about randomly upgrading all your software packages unexpectedly, there's always Ubuntu.

What exactly do you achieve by refusing to load it? Are you more free in one case and not the other?

https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware

you could perhaps offer to update that page to remove the ambiguities you believe exist.

For all intents and purposes, firmware is like a key or a password you must supply to the device to make it work. The driver, which is indeed open-source, just says: "here, device, is the firmware you need". That's it. You are not achieving anything useful at all by making people go through some ceremony to download it separately. Maybe they just want to send the signal that people should buy devices where the firmware is already burned into ROM or ASIC or whatever?

Firmware is typically copyrighted, large, obfuscated, and executable on your system.

A password is a string that you can examine and offers no intrinsic threat - either exploit, or legal.

As per the link I provided to you, Debian's policy is that free firmware are shipped in the distribution -- non-free firmware requires you add the 'non-free' and/or 'contrib' parameters to your repository lists.

There is no need to wildly speculate about the motivations of the Debian team -- eg 'send a signal people should buy certain devices' -- when their motivation is explicitly stated.

The DFSG dictates non-free software will not part of the standard distribution. But they've made it easy to pull those files in (as above) via a one word addition to one line of your sources.list file.

Because if so, I'm sticking with 18.04.

Stability and predictability is their main strenght. Each release is supported for a veeeeery long time.

I mean... As long as you don't use EPEL, stability and predictability are pretty much granted.

I've been using epel on some machine and haven't had that many problems, though.

Not sure about win10, but macOS won't autoupdate apps if you turned it off.

If the app is not from an app store - it's up to the devs to have option to (auto) update. Most apps allow you to turn autoupdate off (in fact I can't think of single one without this option)

> I've used both Windows and OSX for my professional work and while Windows is the worst offender when it comes to automatic updates, OSX is pretty horrible as well. At least with Windows you can expect some sort of backwards compatibility, while on OSX, one day you have to upgrade your entire OS, otherwise Notes or some stupid application won't launch.

- capableweb

I used to run OS X some time ago. When even Windows supported turning off auto updates. These days I am seeing Github issues saying that they can't use brew, clang etc because there is a update. And most of the time the updates are just huge (even compared to Windows).

Is this not true? Can you put off OS updates for some time (a few hours is enough for me) and keep using XCode, brew etc?

I stayed on Mojave for months after Catalina was released and I had a MAS app that broke compatibility with the same companies own (abandoned) self-hosted server software so I just didn’t update it. I’ve since resorted to running that single app (and the abandoned server app) in a High Sierra VM.

The only version issues I know of that sound like what that other person referenced is:

If you update eg iOS to a new major version, sometimes iCloud-linked apps will say they need to upgrade something for new functionality (Notes specifically did this at least once in the last couple of years and iCloud Drive did it a few years ago).

But that is (a) not forced and (b) you’re told exactly what will happen (ie that older macs/iPhones won’t be able to use iCloud until they update too).

Some third party apps will set minimum required OS version (ie to use a new framework or api) but that doesn’t sound like what the other post was talking about?

Every MacOS app from Google auto-updates. You can turn it off iff you have hacker skills. The average user can't do it.

I'm currently on Debian with KDE, but I think I might need to move to a rolling release distro due to some issues with SMB/CIFS (that have already been fixed in newest builds of KDE) that probably won't be fixed in Debian until the next release.

Maybe I should start looking at distros in general-- but Ubuntu is definitely out of the picture.

Backwards compatibility is a positive as long as it's secure. This makes me hesitatant to what is going on. Auto updates good, no blocking not sure.

If this is of concern to you, why are you using snaps? And why Ubuntu? What's the value-add over Debian?

People will never buy linux but they might buy computers with linux at some point just like they have bought phones with it. Android had things that iphone didn't have and at a much cheaper price point thus linux based phones are everywhere. I wish steam boxes had taken off.

The idea that you "misjudged who actually uses Linux" was based on the assumption that you think a product should generally cater to its users. If instead you think most of the users should leave, then okay, that's a valid opinion, it's just surprising.

That said, I don't think Newbie friendly and power user friendly must be at odds with each other. If you can figure out what the sensible defaults are, and provide simple toggles to customize things, you can cater to newbies, average users, and power users alike.