I guess when you become the dominant distro because of your choices - creating a distro is basically deciding a bunch of stuff to include / remove - you start thinking you're pretty good at making those choices, and I guess it's probably hard to not keep doing it.

oh god i just updated to ubuntu 22.04 and it’s a been a nightmare. i use firefox, and ubuntu want me to use the snap-based distribution now. it didn’t tell me that’d be a thing, so i was surprised when opening firefox that:

* it took ages to start up cold

* my window theming was ignored

* my bookmarks and extensions were just.. gone

* this was marketed as a benefit to me

infuriated, i added the mozilla PPA, and told apt to get firefox from there. that was fine, nothing was deleted, and it all worked again.

imagine my next surprise, when i go to use it the next day, and the snap variant was back! running ‘apt dist-upgrade’ fixed it again, but this happens every day. something is silently re-installing firefox every night, and i have run out of energy to find it and stop it.

when i next have the time, i’m dropping this distro and switching to arch or even perhaps gentoo again.

but hey, at least with linux i have the choice :)

oh, and whilst i’m here, wayland is still - unfortunately - not desktop ready.

Are you me? I started a job mid of last year and got a laptop with Ubuntu 22.04 and it was a shitshow, especially due to Snaps and wayland.

Imagine this, you install Firefox Snap, you install the Firefox Keypass extension, then you install the Keypass Snap, then you discover they don't work together because of the Snap containerization isolation. So you uninstall all that and start installing apt packages via the command line. And then screen sharing didn't work thanks to Wayland. Then I turned off Wayland but then I got screen tearing and lost touchpad gestures. Nice.

And Ubuntu is supposed to be THE Linux distro. The flasghip. The crown jewel. How are you supposed to be the Windows killer when basic stuff that works out of the box on Windows is horribly broken?

Yeah Snaps and Wayland sounded like a good idea in theory, but not when they break so much useful apps and functionality that we take for granted and need for work.

Does the Ubuntu dev team not dog-food their own product that they release such a broken mess? Or do they use it in a different way than us non Linux-dev plebs?

I guess Ubuntu devs use Debian or something. There is no way a Linux distro dev who can configure Debian in his sleep would put up with all this BS. Even if Ubuntu is enforced internally you should be able to de-Canonicalize it almost completely.

Or maybe the Canonical employees have remove-bs.sh script they keep up to date internally?

Here’s how to remove all snaps entirely and block snapd from being reinstalled via pinning.

https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2022/04/remove-snap-blo...

I run Ubuntu 22.04 on a Lenovo t460 and Windows on a w540. On the t460, I see none of the problems you report. It is a reliable, solid, and fast system. On the w540 running windows, I see many of the problems you reported. Are you sure you are not running Windows??

yep, Debian is fine and close enough.

Yeah it's not just canonical even. A lot of commercial vendors are constantly pushing their stuff. My windows box is constantly trying to push me to use edge and "the new outlook" and I had to jump through hoops to install it without a Microsoft account. My Mac keeps warning me I haven't signed up for Apple pay and am not logged in with an apple id. It keeps this passive-agressive red dot on the settings icon as a reminder to "finish setting up my Mac".

I wish vendors would just let me use my computer how I want.

Debian is more than fine. A Debian stable installation is "forgettable", and that's a good thing.

Then, you can upgrade to new version in 5-10 minutes, and forget it again, except occasional reboots for new kernels.

And if you want more recent packages, Debian testing is very stable as well.

I've been running a desktop/gaming Debian system with testing as a base, pulling some gaming-related packages from sid and a few (mostly Mesa and related packages) from experimental. I use apt Pinning for that.

This system has been running that way for months without a hitch.

You're right. I'm using Debian testing as my desktop for more than 10 years now.

I only reinstalled it once, because 32bit Kernel was unable to manage cache well with 16GB of RAM, and Debian had no way of migrating to 64bit cleanly. Other than that, I just moved the system between disks and systems over the years.

Just be cautious about sid and experimental. They sometimes go bang in spectacular ways.

I think part of this stability stems from the upstream repos being more stable themselves (cheaper and easier than ever to run CI, quality of tools, etc). It's not often that upstream packages break their stable releases, or heck even develop/master.

It also seems like the firehose of upgrades that is Sid/Experimental has slowed down a bit. Even Sid is still on nodejs 18 and not 20 or 21. The same version as both Testing and Stable.

I feel at home at home with Debian Testing, not as bleeding edge as Arch for sure, but I think that is more of a blessing than a curse. The Debian maintainers seem to know what they are doing and the distribution has a sense or maturity that some others lack. I just hope an update won't break GRUB on me :)

Only downsides to running Debian Testing is that it doesn't get security updates with the same speed as Sid or Stable, and third parties don't exactly put together and distribute pre-built packages for Testing specifically. I understand why, but it makes me wonder if things will break due some ABI compatibility issue down the line. Maybe once Debian 13 is released I'll just stick to stable.

You're absolutely right, but that's one side of the coin. Debian also has matured its processes a lot, and they have a much bigger infrastructure now, so they patch tons of packages invisibly, and reproducibly build them, and I think some maintainers do their own suite of tests.

Debian 12 release is relatively new. Also we're in fall now. Package upgrade speed will take up in the next 12 months, reaching its top speed in 8 months if they keep up the usual schedule. I already can run two upgrades in a day, and get ~400 package updates in a couple of weeks. So testing is rolling pretty solidly now.

It's a bummer that security service for testing is discontinued now, but it's only natural. The project got too big, and the attacks are evolving faster than ever, so security people have so much time and staff to handle this.

I didn't experience any ABI compatibility problems with closed source or external software with Debian testing. I'm running Pagico, InSync, StarUML, etc. which are Deb packages and all of them are built against Debian stable or Ubuntu. They work without any problems. Well, Pagico needs libjpeg, but that's another thing unrelated to ABI.

be warned that testing has weaker security update guarantees than stable or even unstable. testing tends to receive these patched packages a few days or sometimes weeks later.

Yes, but unless you're open to network directly, it's not a big problem.

Never use testing for servers, though.

high risk network dependent software like web browses are also affected by this. it is not only a problem for servers.

Firefox and Thunderbird is regularly updated at unstable branch, following upstream. It generally trails a day or two at most. You can pin it in apt to get it when it’s released.

I've moved from Ubuntu to Debian years ago, when they started pushing their shitty containers.

There’s nothing wrong with containers, in fact they are a great distribution of software, but the execution is just bad.

There's plenty wrong with containers.

> So I moved to mint which removes them.

Seconding this, Linux Mint with Cinnamon is really usable and a pleasant experience if you like DEB distros, I also use their XFCE variety on my netbook.

That said, Ubuntu LTS still seems like an okay choice for servers, much like Debian is (honestly, Debian on the desktop is also okay).

Na they are forcing that snap crap on servers now too.

That's fine. I wrote the article, and I don't use them either. ;-)

After more than 15 years of average default Ubuntu user, I also had to move, in my case I went to OpenSuse Tumbleweed (TW).

While there were a lot of Ubuntu changes over the years, that I managed to adapt to, this time I realised it was too much work on my side as a user:

- for snaps, since I have data spread across different mounts, I had to apply some bindfs cludge to address the hardcoded paths that snaps get access to.

- for Gnome I got tired of having to install all kinds of 3rd party extensions for basic UI features like right click actions.

Debian or derivative would have been my initial choice too, I went with OpenSuse because it's got a strong developer backing and very responsive update schedule, it's a rolling release which means that it has quite new packages but also if updates break it, you can quickly revert it with snapper. Some downsides to consider are that this is not a Debian derivate so, while most guides on the Internet can be 'ported' to OpenSuse it's a bit more involving. That said they also feature quite some good docs, so many common scenarios are covered.

PS I know you can get the same Gnome on OpenSuse, but the upside is that one has access to more recent alternative DEs, which can replace Gnome on rolling releases.

The fact that containers appear again and again hints at problems with the regular installs.