this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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173
Ubuntu turns 20: 'Oracular Oriole' shows this old bird's still got plenty of flight (www.theregister.com)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Ubuntu was once an okay-ish distribution, many many years ago. Then Canonical got rogue, made some very sketchy and irritating decisions (walled garden, snap, advertisements with Amazon, now advertisements in their package manager, ...... so much more)

Ubuntu is the bane of Linux. Use upstream Debian if you like apt; Linux Mint for an easy entry; Arch, if you're quick of wits and want to widen your knowledge and skillset.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

Fedora if you want a pretty stable RPM distro with pretty new packages, openSUSE if you want a traditional distro (Leap) or a bleeding edge distro (Tumbleweed), and Void if you want something spicy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

I still love Ubuntu, but I understand people who hate it. Ubuntu definitely ain't for everyone.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Until it's wings "Snaps".

Ubuntu does so much good, this is one thing I wish they would abandon.

Or at minimum, not have it as the default option.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Even without Snaps, Ubuntu isn't good anymore.
It's buggy as hell, and never manages to do a release upgrade without breaking.

And every time you do an apt update, it fucking tells you that there are more updates available if you upgrade to Ubuntu Pro.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Not completely free Ubuntu Pro!

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Been using it as my daily driver for the last couple of years and I am very happy with it.

When there are issues they are solvable, and the options for getting software, via apt, snap, flatpak, etc. Means that I can really pick and choose how I use my machine.

Even gaming is so much better than it used to be. A lot of things just work.

Very happy with it, and the latest update was quite a nice little refresh of the UI.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago

Until you realise that apt on ubuntu installs snap stuff

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

My absolute favourite part of the update is being able to save things to "Starred" files directly from the download window. I didn't realize how much it bothered me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Y'all making me want to try Ubuntu again. It was go to whenever I dual booted, but finally made the full time switch to fedora a while back. Maybe I should dual boot fedora/Ubuntu for the fun of it. Haha.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Don't. I just set up a Linux Mint system for someone. I had a hell of a time trying to figure out the convoluted network and dns systems.

I use Windows on the desktop right now, but if I switched to Linux, it would probably be Fedora. I'd suggest sticking with that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't do anything in depth enough for those things to really impact me. I'm mostly a browser and Google docs person. Honestly, my biggest gripe with fedora isn't even a fedora problem, it's just that anytime I look up how to do something, it gives Debian based instructions and I get a little lost trying to figure out how to do it on fedora.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Usually it's not that different, though substitute dnf for apt, and package names might be slightly different. If you find instructions for Fedora, Red Hat, CentOS, Rocky, or Alma they're usually all compatible since they're all derived from the same source.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Linux mint is fantastic breh. You're doing something wrong.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Probably. But it shouldn't be that difficult to just set the damn DNS servers. Used to be you just edited resolv.conf and that was it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Idk I've never needed to do that in a personal setting.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Insert witty comment on how Snap is apparently the worst thing on Earth

(I don't use Linux. Why's it so hated?)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I used Ubuntu at work a couple of years ago. When they announced the switch to snaps I didn't really care, but when they switched Firefox to the snap version it had quite a few issues like really slow startup, inconsistent theming, and problems with some extensions. So I uninstalled the snap, installed the standard DEB and went on with my work.

But then the issues came back, and it took me some time to figure out they had replaced the actual DEB package with an unholy shim which just installed the snap. THAT really pissed me off, so when I got a new laptop I just installed Arch and my only regret was not doing it sooner.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I don’t use Linux either, but a quick bit of research tells me it’s like an App Store and software that is specific to Linux. It allows for ease of installing/uninstalling programs but it can can run slow, seems redundant to what flatpaks already does, and isn’t fully fleshed out which leads to weird errors.

I’m guessing it’s because Linux is more hands on and this takes some agency away from users who feel like it might hurt privacy?

That’s what I’m reading anyway. Someone who is more familiar can correct me if I am off base.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 days ago (3 children)

The issues are twofold: Linux distros historically update software through a package manager. Something that was working fine for everyone, however it was causing a lot of work for maintainers. They got together and designed a packaging format for software that works across all Linux distributions called 'flatpak'. However, Ubuntu decided to create an alternative called Snap, which solves the same problem, except it's not used by anyone else.

Also, there's some implementation details that make it look messy in your system (every application is mounted as it's own filesystem, so if you use tools to list your disk's there's a bunch of weird spammy looking drives and things like that).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Awesome! Thank you for this explanation. So it’s mostly just because it’s a redundancy and specific to a certain distro (Ubuntu in this case)?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago

Specific to Ubuntu, not very open for collaboration, and operated by the company who owns the Ubuntu trademarks. Additionally they've made it unnecessarily difficult to install non-snap versions of many popular packages. (they removed non-snap versions from upstream Debian repositories).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

No, redundancy is fine. It’s the proprietary backend and Ubuntu forcing it on users that people don’t like.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Didn't it also used to be noticeably slower than apt installed apps? This was one of the reasons I got rid of it at the time, Ive heard it has better performance now but not tried it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I think that's mostly solved, but yeah, some of the sandbox stuff affected performance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Native package managers were not "working fine for everyone", the software and libraries in them are often very outdated and contain custom patches that don't come from the original software authors.

So you often end up dealing with bugs that were already fixed and the fixes released months ago.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

That sounds like the maintainer's problem, not a problem with apt/dnf/whatever. We've had automated build processes for decades. If you want stable, use a stable distro; if you want the latest, use a rolling release like Arch or something.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

That's one of the main reasons I use a rolling release distro. I used Arch for years, and now I use Tumbleweed.

With packaged apps (like flatpak, snap, etc), you can end up with outdated dependencies in those apps because they bundle everything together. So instead of fixing bugs once for everyone, you have to pester each individual package maintainer to update the dependencies. However, this is mitigated by having these apps be somewhat containerized and limiting impact of a breach on other apps, so YMMV depending on what kind of sandboxing you use.

I'm not really decided here, and I use both flatpaks and distro packages. I don't touch snaps though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Other distros were faster with updating packages, or for Ubuntu specifically you had PPAs or repositories maintained by the vendor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

One of the things missing from other comments is the architecture of it, why it use to be slow, and how the binaries were handled. Canonical started Snap as a server oriented application deployment system, that has been adapted to desktop use with some technological debt. The differences between it and Flatpak as far as configurability, dependencies, bundled binaries, etc are somewhat nuanced. They dealt with the application speed opening issue by allowing decompressed executables and different hooks to be used.

The other main point of contention aside from technological debt inherited by a server-first development principle is how they closed sourced their Snap server backend. It's proprietary, while the Snap client is open source, how the actual Snap server runs is a mystery.

Flatpak (and by extension Flathub) are all open sourced, which aligns more with the philosophy that users tend to prefer. It was covered in other comments that everyone else uses Flatpak, and this really isn't so much as a debate between package managers vs Flatpak, but moreso of application deployment overall. The community prefers Flatpak, and Snap is pushed as a means of lock-in and sunk cost fallacy on the side of Canonical.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

Oracular Oriole sounds like it's just a few letters away from a PornHub search term.
Also, Ubuntu used to be good 16 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Wait.....Ubuntu is only 20? What's the first linux? I thought ubuntu was older.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Suse Linux, Debian and slackware are way older than Ubuntu.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Red Hat

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 days ago

SLS and Yggdrasil came out in '92; Slackware in '93; Red Hat in '95.

The Debian project started in '93, but the first stable release wasn't until '96, along with Linux kernel version 2.0.

Ubuntu didn't come along until 2004.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago (1 children)

According to this, the first was Boot-Root from Torvalds himself in 1991. The oldest that are still around are Slackware (July 1993) and Debian (Aug 1993).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I wonder if someone could still install boot root? I'm not a techy person, but I'd watch the hell out of that YouTube video!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Dang, that would have been a cool one to see!

I'd love to see what those looked like back in the day. I love computer history, even if I don't fully understand it. Haha

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 days ago (4 children)

The fact that Ubuntu is derived from Debian logically means it wasn't the first Linux-based OS.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

Slackware was the first real distro, which means you could reasonably expect to get to a bootable state by following the manual, and have a useful system out of the box.
And it's the oldest that's still around.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

Tried both Ubuntu 24.10 and Kubuntu 24.10 and original flavour ubuntu lost to both kubuntu's performance and customizability.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Better to use Kubuntu edition, much better desktop and less crap that is nowdays in Ubuntu.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

My daily driver was 6.06 up to 8.x I think. Only had minor encounters with it since. And here I am still fooling myself into thinking „I’m pretty familiar with Ubuntu“ 😅

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