newsoftheday

Agreed, this fixes it for me on my machines:

cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref

Package: snapd Pin: release a=* Pin-Priority: -10

Ubuntu (and Kubuntu) have never bricked all of machines after an update, Debian did, in recent years at that. So I will argue quality in favor of Ubuntu (and Kubuntu).

My opinion of the story is that it is over hyped, with my hunch being it's possibly to throw free advertising towards Anthropic, though I have no proof of that, just my personal intuition based on the handwavyness of the story.

My view is based on having used Ubuntu since 2006, Kubuntu since 2023 or so and a serious stint on Debian until they put out a patch via regular updates that bricked my machine's wifi (all of them). So my view is based on real world experience and your comment "Your view does not seem to match reality" doesn't seem to take my experience with Ubuntu and Debian into account.

I'm not too surprised, it feels more like a way to help promote Anthropic than what it tries to appear to be.

I keep Snap disabled on my systems:

cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref

Package: snapd Pin: release a=* Pin-Priority: -10

> Why anyone would prefer Ubuntu over Debian, which is a purer, higher quality, more mature distro, is beyond me.

For me, I view Ubuntu as the "higher quality, more mature distro" which I value over "purity".

Agreed, it also wouldn't give free advertising to the OP author or to Anthropic who he gives a generous nod to.

I used Debian on my machines (after I got past their ideological view on drivers and found I could get them separately and made it work) ... until a patch came out and WiFi was broken on my machines. I went back to Ubuntu, have not had issues like that. Ubuntu works reliably, from my experience, on real world machines.

According to Gemini, 35% to 40% of vehicles in the world today are manual transmission. While not most, it's higher than I realized.

> my main issue with these people is that they think

This reminds me of the torch lighters in a classic Frankenstein movie.

> all of computing has involved "offloading" effort/thought to computers.

Effort yes, thought no, not until recent years.

> I am very well interested in seeing how will people refusing to use AI fare

There are over 2 Billion people without Internet still and they survive.

https://www.weforum.org/stories/technological-innovation/2-5...

At my age of several decades, I lived several decades before the Internet even caught on and managed very well as did most people.

Questioning whether people might potentially not fare well by choosing to not use AI is what is truly puzzling to me about your comment.

On Ubuntu since 2006, Kubuntu the past several years on Dell, HP and Lenovo machines (multiple, home and work) and have not experienced what you're describing, odd. Wife too, complete non-techie, Ubuntu on 2 machines so far, no issues.

"Recent research shows that gravity and quantum information are deeply connected and that the shape of spacetime can be traced back to the way information is stored in quantum fields."

What I did was use usernames on those services that included a few chars to remind me which business I'd created it for. I was a software engineer bug changed jobs/contracts on average about once per year (that's a very, very rough average though).

> It works until it doesn't is the story.

No, that's not my story nor is it the story of the vast majority of Ubuntu/Kubuntu users.

> Too much variation in consumer hardware for linux to ever be reliable for majority.

That's a false statement, too many of us out here using Desktop Linux to try and make such a claim in 2026 (or even 20 years ago for that matter).

> I even bought lenovos officially linux supported laptop etc to try to fix the issues.

Tens of thousands of us developers in IBM used Desktop Linux on Thinkpads and later Lenovos for your statement to not ring true with me.

> I bent over backwards for ubuntu, suse, fedora over the years. Sometimes it would be years of stability in between, but it would always come back to bite me if i ever tried to trust it as my primary machine.

Those statements do not represent a truthful reality the majority of Desktop Linux users experience. This isn't 1996 in a random Linux IRC channel.

Hibernate and Suspend never worked well for me or my coworkers or relatives when we tried it on Windows.

In the mid to 2000's at IBM, many of us developers and even quite a few regular business people in marketing ran Desktop Linux on Thinkpads, it worked extremely well. I assume they still do.

> I'm a hardcore Linux user, but it's a fact of life that laptops are not very well supported.

No, that isn't a fact at all. I use Dell laptops and have run Desktop Linux on them (Ubuntu past years and more recent switched to Kubuntu) and all of the hardware has worked well, even for gaming, even for my laptop with nVidia built in.

Interesting take since Valve with Proton has done a lot to increase gaming on Desktop Linux also their console devices.

> We are talking about corporate PCs configured by an IT department that is completely oblivious to the needs of developers

I definitely agree with that part though I've not used Windows at home for many, many years...and I'm a gamer.

> Too many times even in the past I do an update the distro and then something stops working and then I have to spend a day fixing.

On Ubuntu starting in 2006 and Kubuntu the last several years, what you're describing doesn't and hasn't happened to me.

When I've tried other distros over the years, the issue you described has happened to me on:

    Red Hat Enterprise Linux
    Fedora
    SuSE
    Debian (yes, even Debian but it was with the unsupported drivers and the issue was in a WiFi driver)

But it has not happened on Ubuntu or Kubuntu since I started using them in 2006. We use desktop Linux on several machines here and have for a long time, from Dell to HP to Lenovo.

Completely agree, I use the cloud for one thing, to run Wireguard VPN to have a public point of presence but all hardware and services run right here where I'm looking at them right now and can put my hands on them.

SVN was better than CVS but no way I'd go back to SVN after git, former are centralized and latter is distributed. Having the repo local is amazing, being able to make a new branch in git even on a massive repo is lightening fast compared to svn.

About 10 years ago I realized how much I was spending on red wine and decided to stop and put that money into helping pay off the house.

> I wonder how many HNers recall life in Delhi even 20 years ago?

The only thing I know about India is from a Big Bang Theory episode where Raj's father said to Leonard when asked how's the weather, "It's hot, it's always hot in India!".

OK I do use AI in the browser but haven't tried anything like what you describe. I Googled telegram in case it wasn't what I was thinking, which was used in the 1800's but found their website. It's apparently another messaging platform. Thanks for the interesting view.

Not related but I think I finally know how it must have felt to the generation prior to mine, when we tried to explain computers to them; because even as a retired 30 year plus software engineer, I have no idea what the comment says.

I agree, Kubuntu here last 4 years, Ubuntu before that starting 2006.