Snap is just flatpak but worse for most cases (the only exception being cli apps). The fact canonical are pushing it so badly makes Linux more fragmented for no real reason.
Man, ubuntu has gotten so bad in past years. I wanted to hop a distro (a long time user) but couldn’t get the live environment load. Any other ubuntu derivative works just fine. But not ubuntu.
Compared to say arch, gentoo, lfs. ubuntu is easier to install, but I believe the point you wanted to make is that there are distros that are as easy if not easier to install than ubuntu
edit: I see now that this might have sounded more condescending than I had intended, and for that I’m sorry.
The point I wanted to make was that there are both better and worse installers out there. Which is something I enjoy about linux and the different distros. You have the option to install something easy and just use your computer as you see fit, or you can tinker and learn different ways your computer can be set up.
That is the most bad faith example you could have picked. You know I meant distros like Pop OS Fedora, Linux Mint, etc. You picked the uncommon outliers which are the most user unfriendly ones possible.
you can’t convince me that anyone is actually using lfs in 2023. tinkering with it maybe, and I can see someone doing alfs for specialized shit, but there’s no way in hell anyone is actually using it as their regular daily driven os on their personal computer. it just doesn’t make sense.
real people outside of the ubuntu space are using debian, fedora, manjaro, maybe something like pop os or mint. there’s no barrier to entry, performance difference is negligible if present at all, and you don’t have to spend a full day getting it ready
The only real difference I can think of is that Ubuntu’s installer is actually really nice and had the dual boot install option, which I don’t think any other distro has.
most distros that aren’t like slackware/gentoo/arch/etc. install with calamares these days, it handles dual boot configs simply and without issue. even doing like debian netinst, I don’t remember it having any trouble
You’re comparing apples and reactors. Ubuntu is one of the easy to use distros by design. Distros like that try to keep config file changes and things like that from the user. When that fails, the falling height for users is higher, as they now have to deal with a complex problem. The other ones are designed to be simple and require you to handle potential breaking changes manually by default, which means you’re taught to do these things and won’t be clueless when things get hairy.
You shouldn’t compare Ubuntu to Arch. Compare it to Mint, Pop_OS!, …
I was unfortunately forced back onto it for my latest laptop due to hardware issues. I tried to get mint and other distros to work, but I ended up just being a Linux failure and swallowed the Ubuntu pill… it keeps bugging me to this day, but too critical of a system to mess with now :(
Hey you’re on Linux and that’s all that matters in the end. That being said, there’s a bunch of Ubuntu derivatives you could swap to if you really care enough, but it’s really not a big deal.
Historical attachment in my case, coupled with “I need my PC and don’t have the time or spare machine to toy around with other distros”.
Don’t get me wrong, I want to try others, but that’s not currently a feasible option. VMs are suboptimal when you’re trying to see how games perform under those distros.
It’s as close to a “universal packaging system” as can get now.
There was a lot of talk back in time, when Ubuntu decided to forcefully shove snaps onto users. The thing is, Ubuntu could have embraced flatpaks like many other distros but it chose snaps which is not ideal for people who like an OS whose primary goals revolve around freedom and privacy. You see, it is the proprietary nature of snaps that gets them this hate.
Appimage and other packaging methods don’t get this hate because they are open source and users have a “choice”. What we are seeing against snaps is the result of forcing people to a choice, ofcourse the people in question are linux users - people who are famous about taking freedom of choice seriously. Yes, you can get ride of snaps on Ubuntu but you can get rid of lot of ads and stuff on windows with a lot of tinkering too - I think you see the point.
Many people tend to have a preference for flatpaks because they do basically what snaps do but better and ofcourse flatpaks fit into the “freedom and privacy” spirit of linux.
As far as I’m concerned Flatpak has won the “universal Linux package manager” war.
Snap is a non-starter because of its proprietary back end, appimage has no distribution or automation built in. Flatpak has its faults (why does it put things in /var of all places?) but it’s the best I’ve seen.
I’d like to add: I think it’s won not by being the best, but being the least worst. I would like to invite whoever came up with that com.flatpak.FlatPak bullshit to consider a career more suited to their skill set than computer programming, such as vagrancy.
I really like flatpak! But it has its limitations. Thats okay!
There is just a space for containerized images of desktop apps that are distro independent. Linus talks about this at a QA, but having a maintrainer for every app and every distro under the sun is just a waste (he used his diving app as an example). Flat park is a good solution for packaging up apps, and it makes sense for stand alone apps that have a lot of moving parts and don’t need to integrate with the rest your intro. Their are basically 5 apps that I use everyday that install through flatpak. Stuff like discord and Joplin.
At the same time, if something is supported through the distro package manager directly, I would rather install through that. Especially for core system components, but also for apps that aren’t really daily drivers for me. I definitely feel like I have to actively maintain flatpak installations, so if I can install without a flatpak, I would rather not. For small apps, especially simple command line apps, their probably isn’t that much maintenance work together them on the distro anyway.
Fedora is a great choice too, that’s where I point people who are coming from Ubuntu most of the time. I’m not the biggest redhat fan these days but Fedora strikes a good balance between stability and staying up to date.
Say you have a web browser, and to play videos it needs some codecs and a player, and to display pages it needs fonts, and to … on and on.
Before Snaps, when you installed the browser it would install the programs it needed at the same time, because the developer designed it to do so.
With Snaps, the program, and everything it needs, and everything they need, and they need, on down the chain all gets zipped together.
The good is that dependency management is easy, everything is in one place. The bad is that they’re slow to launch because of how everything is stored, and you now end up with many copies of the dependencies, and their dependencies, on your hard drive instead of 1.
The above is just representative, but those who prefer optimized systems do not like snaps. Those who like things tidy with easy dependencies are wrong. I mean, they like snaps.
Nothing in particular other than needing to update your builds when any single dependency has an important fix and still needing to build and maintain packaging for every single distro you support. For small applications shipping a static binary should be fine, but when you’re talking about something like Chrome or Firefox that’s a whole lot of overhead.
Please correct me if I’m off base (I don’t use snaps), but this is only true for in-memory mounted snaps, not for first-run or expired. Meaning you sacrifice RAM for speedy repeat starts.
Look up snap and flatpak, they’re both based on a distro agnostic image/packaging model that allows developers to package for multiple distros rather than building native packaging for every single one. Both systems also solve the problem of two softwares requiring separate versions of the same dependency which is a fiddly problem at best for native packages.
Personally I’m a fan of flatpak, snap is similar but wholly driven by Canonical and their business interests.
Both have features that provide a solidly good reason to use them, there isn’t a clear “better” system yet. I prefer Flatpak personally but snap still handles some cases (daemon software run by the system or as root) better than flatpak.
Because my work literally forces me to use Ubuntu Desktop on server VMs if I don’t want to use Windows. Yes, it sucks, yes, they don’t know what they are doing, no, they won’t give me other options.
Believe me, I have no freaking idea. I think someone in the company prepared an image with some security tools for them, and they keep using it since as a starting point.
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