As a stepping stone out of Ubuntu, Pop_OS! has been pleasant and snap-free.

The thought of people going to Pop to escape snap has me crackling.

Tbf it doesn't default to the really slow snaps. Instead it defaults to the dreadfully slow flatpaks.

You made this sound like snap is faster than flatpak. It isn't, unless something changed this year. Did something change?

My understanding is that Pop uses Flatpak sparingly, whereas Canonical is pushing Snaps for an increasing amount of software.

That is, IIRC, you get (say) Firefox via Debs in Pop. Canonical wants to install it via Snap.

IMO Flatpak is a great option for a set of desktop software where packaging across distros may be problematic for some reason. I use the Firefox Flatpak on Fedora / RHEL because it doesn't disable the video codecs, for instance. The native package doesn't have some codecs enabled.

Canonical is (AIUI) pushing Snap for desktop and server software. And Canonical is the only source of Snaps, I believe? With Flatpak you get Flathub but AFAIK anybody could set up a repo of Flatpaks.

* * *

That gave me a chuckle while eating my morning cereal. Very good! :-)

For those who don't get the reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap,_Crackle_and_Pop

Took me a minute. Well done.

I have tried it, and reviewed it.

I kinda like the window tiling, but it's still GNOME and GNOME is still a pain.

As a cleaned-up Ubuntu, I like Zinc.

https://teejeetech.com/2022/05/07/zinc-22-04/

Ubuntu, with the smallest cleanest but richest desktop on Linux -- Xfce -- and neither Snap nor Flatpak. Instead, `deb-get` which finds and installs native DEB packages, configures the repos for you, manages updates and so on.

I was on KDE for a bit, love it on my ultrawide monitor with tiling. But on my laptop Gnome is so sweat. I have a 2nd hand HP ProBook and I swear, for the very first time ever in my Linux life the trackpad feels like my MacBook trackpad. 3 fingers swipe up, overview of windows, another swipe is app grid, swipe left right, move to other desktops. I really find the whole experience very smooth and I enjoy it a lot (all Wayland, on NixOS).

I have suspend/wake working well so far, USB-C charging + screen + all peripherals via 1 USB-C cable, all "media" buttons work. And this is still on 8 GB of ram (soon the 2x32 GB will arrive ;)), I haven't even heard the fans so far! I'm on Teams, camera works, nobody would even know I'm on Linux if it wasn't for my constant evangelizing!

I'm really impressed (yeah, I know, Linux people easily are when it comes to desktops, basically we're impressed if things work).

I did enable AppIndicator. Solaar, NextCloud and Tailscale all really require it to be considered functional. I don't understand why that is not a standard thing (it is on many distros though).

> Gnome is so sweat

... Sweet?

I don't like GNOME. I don't like GNOME accessories; I hate CSD and hamburger menus and that big empty wasted top panel. I want more things vertical, while GNOME is moving its vertical workspace-switcher to horizontal.

The Cosmic tiling is good. That's an improvement. GNOME's window management sucks, and this is better.

I also really don't like systemd-boot and it broke one of my laptops severely.

So, I am happy that it is good for you, but it is not something I'd choose.

Arg yeah sweet indeed, pronounciation is just no guide at all in English (neither in Dutch btw)...

...Seat, sweat, chaste, caste, Leigh, eight, height, Put, nut, granite, and unite. ... [0]

And I do agree on the very high amount of pixels wasted in the top panel, expecially on an ultrawide monitor, something MacOS does better. On a laptop screen it's ok for me.

[0] http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

:-D A wonderful poem. When I was a TEFL teacher, I sometimes tortured advanced students with it.

As for the panel... well, Dash-to-Panel tames it:

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/

... but it does not handle vertical mode well. E.g. Status icons should be in rows, not a single column.

Do you have a git repo somewhere with your configuration.nix?

Not yet, but it's fairly simple, I now have 1 week of NixOS experience ;) I installed with the graphical installer, choose Gnome, added some specific things like darkmode and many packages to the configuration.nix. Then I read about Home Manager and put packages under there.

OOTB the Gnome install was as good as can be. It's a nice way to play with Nix, batteries included.

Right now I need to deploy a server used for bioinformatics, and I need Conda... And that is a pain [0], so again I'm on the fence: Deploy Ubuntu or NixOS and persevere... I'm thinking Ubuntu, then perhaps later in the learning curve I go for Nix or perhaps just make a container to use on Nix.

[0] http://www.jaakkoluttinen.fi/blog/conda-on-nixos/

deploy ubuntu or fedora, and run nix with home-manager. that gives you devshells/devbox which you can migrate into at your own pace

Yes, I just did that, thanx for the tip :)

I will use them, at least for a while, when their currently in development Rust desktop env is out. Super curious how that pans out (as traditionally all popular GUI libs are very OO).

https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch

https://github.com/pop-os/libcosmic

https://github.com/iced-rs/iced

I had numerous issues with it, like the inputs would not focus in firefox-esr. Unfortunately I had to install Ubuntu 22.04 which works fine but has all sorts of annoyances like snaps and text ads in apt. Heh, Ubuntu didn't even set up grub right, it only worked after I did a manual grub install.

I switched to Debian 11 for the same reasons around Christmas. I also found out faster than Ubuntu 20.04 and the fan starts spinning less often. I've been on Ubuntu since 8.04.

When I can I'm creating servers with Debian too, personal ones and for customers. The only problem there is that Letsencrypt uses a snap to update the certificates, even on Debian [1]. Not all my servers need a web server but when they do I usually use ngnix. I'm investigating alternative update clients with no hurry. When that is solved, goodbye to Ubuntu.

[1] https://certbot.eff.org/instructions?ws=nginx&os=debianbuste...

If you pick "pip" instead of a specific Linux distro it gives you instructions without a snap.

I'm afraid that this is only a wrapper around the snap. I quote from that page

> If you have any Certbot packages installed using an OS package manager like apt, dnf, or yum, you should remove them before installing the Certbot snap to ensure that when you run the command certbot the snap is used rather than the installation from your OS package manager.

That doesn't mean the other means wrap snap. It just means in order to truly install via snap, you should remove the same package installed via other means before

That seems to be a doc issue. It certainly did not install a snap when I just tested this, and the certpot python package it installs explicitly checks to see whether it is running in a snap or not, which would make no sense if running it outside wasn't an option.

I like acme.sh

I switched to dehydrated after LetsEncrypt snapped their client.

certbot is available in classic apt repositories in Debian and Ubuntu. No need to install it from snap.

https://repology.org/project/certbot/versions

Haven't checked, but looking at version parity between these 2 I think both have the same maintaining team for Let's Encrypt.

I did the same by the time Jessie was released. I realised the XFCE version was good enough, and I could use a few tools from the vendor binaries plus a couple of things I could compile.

Yes, it is more work, but since then I've been upgrading Debian and it just gets better!

Did the same ubuntu > debian transition a while ago… but then got fed up with old packages and other stuff. Nowadays I’m on fedora (xfce spin) and it’s just perfect.

I'm in literally the same boat, on Debian now because of snaps. Their other homegrown stuff were mostly out of the way, like Unity or upstart, but snap was just really annoying with how it's integrated into the system.

On OpenSuSE Tumbleweed now because of Snap, rolling releases, best of class KDE support and pretty good testing of packages.

Sounds attractive. I quickly read up on it, and apparently gaming is also not a problem. Next time I install Linux, I'll give it a whirl!

They also started shipping LXD recently.

> My Ubuntu 18.04 machine somehow "rotted" in ways that previous installs didn't -- everything became slow and janky, sorta like Windows

Oh man, this reminds me of two years ago. During Covid lockdowns, I figured I'd try Ubuntu, see what's up with gnome. This was 20.04. I was pretty meh, but it was okay. Then I found out about Regolith [0], which is a "spin" or whatever it's called, that comes with i3 (like Kubuntu has KDE instead of Gnome).

I don't know exactly why, and I was too lazy to dig, but that thing was one of the most sluggish experiences I've ever had. At the time, I'd daily drive an i5-6500 with integrated graphics, and my regular Arch with i3 and light Picom effects (blurring for notifications and dimming inactive windows) worked great on the integrated GPU. Somehow, the Ubuntu version was worse on a newer i5-8500.

[0] https://regolith-desktop.com/