[coleifer]

Canonical always has tried to differentiate themselves, and they just can't execute. Remember Unity, Mir, Juju, upstart and all the other failed shit they've come out with? Snap is just more of the same. I don't want to run that garbage on my desktop. I don't need more daemons and forced auto-updates and all the baggage.

I strongly recommend anyone similarly frustrated to check out debian, which is a fantastic distro. Thanks to Kevin for posting this, but if you're using Ubuntu and disabling snap, you're fighting against the current and I have to imagine it's going to be increasingly difficult with subsequent releases.

[sneak]

I recently hit the wall with Ubuntu too. I'll still run -server in the cloud, but each time over the last 5-7 years I did point-samples of "is Linux viable as a desktop other than ChromeOS", it was always Ubuntu/Gnome. It turns out that that was my problem all along!

I tossed Gentoo and KDE (this is not a Gentoo endorsement, it was just a "hey I wonder what Gentoo's been up to in the last dozen years since I last used it") on a spare laptop. It turns out that KDE is amazing now. It's seriously the best DE I've ever used, and I'm a Mac user! (Half of the utilities I install out of the box on a fresh macOS are built in, and the annoying stuff that used to be editing arcane files is now easy preference settings. It's actually great.)

What the hell are Ubuntu doing shipping Gnome (with the ugliest custom theme known to man, to boot)? Admittedly it was my own ignorance, for which they are not responsible, but their mindshare and bad choice tainted my whole view of the state of the art for a long time.

[useragent86]

> Half of the utilities I install out of the box on a fresh macOS are built in, and the annoying stuff that used to be editing arcane files is now easy preference settings

That's been the case with KDE for 15-20 years now. KDE 3.5 was a great environment (and Trinity (TDE) is a modernized fork of it).

Note that, this year, KDE added telemetry to their Plasma desktop environment. Of course, it's opt-in, so it must be acceptable, right? Well, of course, users who objected to the telemetry found bugs that caused data to be recorded even when disabled.

KDE's response was to ban said users from reddit.com/r/kde and call them "paranoid schizos." (The mods there are KDE members wearing "KDE developer" flair, not random Redditors.)

So, despite using and recommending KDE for almost 2 decades, it's hard for me to do so any longer. I wholeheartedly recommend checking out TDE instead.

[sneak]

Thanks for letting me know. It looks like the telemetry (kuserfeedback) isn’t even a dep of the Gentoo plasma-meta metapackage, so I don’t think it was even built on my system (but will double check when not on mobile).

If I dabble with debian or kubuntu I will make sure to mitigate it, thank you for making it known, keep up this kind of good work!

It’s a real shame that they found it necessary to even build a telemetry client. I switched to free software after years on macOS (I remember upgrading to System 7) because of all the phone-home that Catalina STILL does even with iCloud, Siri, analytics/crashes, Screen Time, iMessage/FaceTime, Location Services, ntp, App Store, and software update all disabled.

iOS apps in the App Store are all allowed to phone-home like mad, too, and Apple permits this on the basis of you “opting in” to it in the App Store TOS, as if we have any sort of choice on iPhones. It’s totally endemic, and entirely undermines the credibility of Apple’s claims to caring about user privacy.

Seems like spying on users is getting heavily normalized these days. :(

[emilsedgh]

The grandparent is overreacting.

1. KDE's telemetry is opt-in (as you mentioned)

2. All data is anonymized

3. You can select which information you're comfortable to share

4. If you have it turned off, the data is recorded on your hard disk.

5. That data was always recorded in order to enable other features like "Recently used documents".

Here's some explanation:

https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/fmgyy9/kuserfeedback/

Honestly, KDE has been one of the most open, privacy aware and idealistic communities out there. The criticism is quite unfair.

(I used to be a KDE contributor)

[kirubakaran]

Are you able to address this point that comment made?

> users who objected to the telemetry found bugs that caused data to be recorded even when disabled.

> KDE's response was to ban said users from reddit.com/r/kde and call them "paranoid schizos."

[sneak]

The recording is local, on the hard disk. I think people are worried that by producing the files, there is just one layer of bug (accidental upload) keeping them private.

I agree. The data should not even be generated if the analytics are not opted-in-to.

I do give them credit for making the system opt-in. They deserve that.

[emilsedgh]

Not really. I wasn't aware of this. The only thing I found on reddit regarding the situation was the link I sent above which didn't have any controversy.

[Razengan]

> all the phone-home that Catalina STILL does even with iCloud, Siri, analytics/crashes, Screen Time, iMessage/FaceTime, Location Services, ntp, App Store, and software update all disabled.

Do you have examples of what you mean?

[sneak]

I have a bunch of Little Snitch screenshots around here somewhere, but it is easy to reproduce: do a fresh install on spare machine or VM (opt out of all services like iCloud, Siri, Location, MAS, et c), install Little Snitch, and then disable the built-in Little Snitch silent allow rules for “system services/iCloud” or whatever it’s called. Reboot and observe.

[eitland]

Do you happen to have links?

[anonymousab]

It appears to be this: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/f7ojg9/kde_plasma_kuse...

It sounds a bit hyperbolic, but I can't recall a time when telemetry was added to a system and then later dialed back in any way. It always increases.

[exikyut]

Echoing the other similar comment, where can I find citations for this annoying drama I now need to take into account?

[snazz]

It's interesting how underrepresented KDE is in the "big distros". While it makes sense that Fedora and Ubuntu ship GNOME, and there are "spins" of each that include different desktops out of the box, it still surprises me.

[bzb3]

In my opinion KDE has always been way less polished than gnome and is currently not financially backed in any meaningful way. They also have problems focusing on the core product and won't stop shipping half-assed programs nobody asked for.

[coredog64]

Wasn’t there some big kerfuffle years ago involving KDE, Qt, and licensing?

[appleflaxen]

yes; and again about 2 weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821050

[guug]

There was.

[eitland]

Correct. A few more details:

>[...] To show our commitment to this dual licensing model, the KDE Free Qt Foundation was founded in 1998. It is a non-profit foundation ensuring that Qt will always be available under open source licensing terms. The agreement that governs this foundation has stayed mainly unchanged over the last 17 years. As a lot of things have changed during these years, we have been working with KDE over the last year to create a new and updated agreement that takes todays realities better into account.[...]

From: https://www.qt.io/blog/2016/01/13/new-agreement-with-the-kde...

The updated contract mentioned in that blog post is available here: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/Software_License_Agreeme...

[useragent86]

You could look it up on Wikipedia. KDE and Qt are Free Software.

[m463]

I put arch/gnome on a system right next to an ubuntu box.

It was like a different gnome - quickly reaching the desktop and lots of nice differences (like the privacy menu wasn't crafted by marketing and legal)

[robocat]

> and they just can't execute

That’s a bit rich: are they not the #1 consumer distro, which hardly implies they are failing to execute. A successful product has missteps, so what.

> I don't want to run that garbage on my desktop.

So don’t. Why complain that others do? I use Ubuntu because it works and I can mostly find information about how to do what I want. There are major aspects of Ubuntu I don’t like (Gnome, Snap) but selecting a distro is all about choosing your compromises. I have tried Debian and other distros, but I tend to go back to Ubuntu because it works best for me.

[cassiet]

Most of HN is shitting on popular things with a hot take and a smug condescending tone, usually erroneously. If Conical hadn’t tried new projects and failed, the poster would complain that they never innovate.

People complain like this because they have no real control of their own lives. It makes them feel smart, if only they were in control, then things would be better. It would be so easy, the people in charge must be stupid. It comes from a lack of experience and the inability to understand the challenges in those positions.

[_pgmf]

>Projecting this hard.

The shortcomings of snap are well documented. I assumed anyone reading the comments would have been aware of them. But apparently some people will jump on any chance to virtue-signal.

[kevin_thibedeau]

> That’s a bit rich: are they not the #1 consumer distro, which hardly implies they are failing to execute

All the hard work to make it a viable OS is done by Debian. Canonical just adds some polish and then wrecks it all with poor design decisions over and over again.

[robocat]

> All the hard work to make it a viable OS is done by Debian

You could equally say that all the hard work to make a viable OS is done by Linux, so screw Debian? Last I hurd, the GNU developed OS is unviable (no 64 bit, no SMP).

Or equally say that all the hard work to make the majority of end-user programs (you know, the raison d’être for an OS) is done by other open source projects, not Debian, so screw Debian...

These are open source projects, with cross-pollination everywhere, each with their own opinions on licensing. Ubuntu mostly helps the ecosystem, and certainly isn’t a parasitic player (although like all, they are not perfect).

Why bag on Ubuntu just because it happens to be popular? Should we also cancel all the other Debian based distros?

PS: complaining about upstart shows you are just being biased (or perhaps misinformed). Canonical were developing upstart before systemd was developed - and systemd was developed by RedHat. The main con given against upstart was not technical, but due to licensing. “In terms of overall feature[s] there is really rather little to distinguish upstart from systemd” https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/upstart

[Skunkleton]

> You could equally say that all the hard work to make a viable OS is done by Linux, so screw Debian?

No, you couldn't say that. Without toolchains, userlands, and packaging, a kernel is pretty worthless. The barest bones you can go is still gcc, linux, uclibc, and busybox. There is more code that goes into a computer running linux, then there is in the linux kernel. By a wide margin.

[robocat]

If it had to be done, GNU programs could all be replaced. Port BSD tools or improve busybox tools, use KDE instead of Gnome, and there is a variety of great packaging solutions that aren’t .deb. AFAIK GCC is already being replaced by clang due to the GCC codebase, amongst other reasons. Distros mostly use GNU programs for historical convenience. Given incentive, GNU could be dropped by Ubuntu for the desktop. The most popular Linux distro Android has moved away from GNU already.

FSF does fabulous work, which we are all appreciative of, but some decisions are peeing in the open source pool.

I think RMS creates unnecessary division against Linux and Linus for what I feel are poor reasons. I went to a lecture by him where he spent half his time being negative towards Linux and Linus (that felt like he was just pissed off because Linux was popular) and a bit because Linus had used the GPL2 (not trivial to change, and you don’t get change by attack). Being negative towards the people who are on your own side is wrong IMHO. It could equally be argued that Debian should be called Debian/Linux. Edit: I just found a quote from Linus about RMS that summarises what I wished to say here: “It's not passion for something, it becomes passion against something else.“ - http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white....

PS: I totally admire RMS and his relentless idealism. He has given so much to the world, and the faults I see in him are interwoven with the strengths I see: I’m not sure the faults could be mitigated without badly weakening the virtues.

[guerby]

> The most popular Linux distro Android has moved away from GNU already.

Android went from non GNU absolutism to GNU LGPL for its standard java library a few years ago:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/android-n-switch...

[Skunkleton]

Replacing GNU has already been done, but that isn’t the point. The point is that without projects like Debian, there is no operating system.

FWIW the whole GNU/Linux pedantry bothers me too.

[alexhutcheson]

Neither Debian nor GNOME are FSF projects.

[sour-taste]

Then why doesn't everyone use Debian?

[alyandon]

Debian has its own set of problems. Like the Chromium package maintainer deciding unilaterally several years ago that installing extensions remotely shouldn't be allowed and gated that standard functionality behind a command ling flag.

There was zero documentation on the change and the error you received attempting to install an extension was basically "operation failed". I discovered the cause only because there was an open bug about it on the Debian bug tracker where the maintainer refused to acknowledge the problem. Eventually, sane minds prevailed and that stupid patch was reverted.

So, unfortunately - you'll end up having to deal with people that refuse to look at things from the user's perspective no matter what distro you use.

And yes - I'm still bitter. :-/

[guug]

There is also the ffmpeg kerfuffle a few years back when Debian decided to replace the ffmpeg package with an incompatible and inferior fork. You can imagine the amount of confusion that ensued.

That said, I think Debian's occasional messups are far less egregious and damaging than Ubuntu's though.

[alyandon]

There was also that time many, many years ago they decided to remove the ability to load binary firmware blobs for things like network cards in the kernel because of an interesting interpretation of the GPL. :-/

[Thaxll]

Maybe when they tought that none-free drivers opt-in was a good idea, also old kernel / packages.

LTS on Ubuntu was always better than Debian, I mean saying that Ubuntu is just a repackage of Debian is very short sighted, especially on the security side, Canonical security team is top notch.

[RMPR]

> Canonical security team is top notch.

They need to, for a long time, Ubuntu has been shipped with EOL Kernel versions https://ubuntu.com/kernel/lifecycle

[wahern]

Canonical is at a disadvantage here because Red Hat directly employs or has significant established relationships with many of the people who make kernel release decisions. Plus, RHEL is the de facto standard enterprise distribution, which means any decision the kernel community makes regarding what they believe "enterprise" requires will often be a reflection of Red Hat's plans.

But what benefits Red Hat in the enterprise world is to their detriment in the consumer world. There's a reason the Debian/Ubuntu package ecosystem is richer and more featureful than RPM, and this is why Ubuntu dominates in the container space--because almost any piece of software that one could expect to have been packaged has been packaged as a .deb and already exists in the default package archives. I can't count the number of times I couldn't find an RPM--certainly not in the default repositories (RHEL, CentOS, or even Fedora), but not even in the third-party community repositories. And those that do exist are of lesser quality than the comparable .deb, for various reasons. (That is, the long-tail of packages is of higher quality for Debian.)

By pushing Snap, Canonical is definitely going astray. Ubuntu's competitive advantage is the Debian package ecosystem. Both Canonical and Red Hat seem to underestimate the role and importance of their respective packaging ecosystems. How many projects to revolutionize or replace RPM/Yum/whatever at Red Hat have crashed and burned? Many, though it's hard to count because half-way through they often realize what they're trying to do is functionally or even technically impossible (as with their aborted 2017 plans for RPM package streams), and scale things back to iterative improvements.

Containers are a security nightmare, and pretty much the only reason to pay Canonical and Red Hat licensing fees is for security and bug fix maintenance of their package archives. On our large Kubernetes clusters at work there are thousands of open CVEs for the containers that are being run, and we'll have to boil the oceans to get them all updated, let alone keep them updated. But updating packages is as simple as an apt-get/yum upgrade[1], and rarely do you have to worry about anything breaking, especially relative to the pain that updating containers regularly brings.

[1] If the container uses Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc you can sometimes just rebuild the container to get the newer packages. But that assumes you control the container image. Most containers come from third-party, decentralized sources (that's the point!). But Docker Hub doesn't cajole and coordinate container owners to update their crappy images. It's no substitute for the orchestration of people that are traditional package repositories.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> also old kernel / packages.

So, LTS/stable.

[RMPR]

Ubuntu has been marketed as a beginner friendly distro, with communities easily accessible using a Google search (thinking about the likes of askubuntu, omgubuntu, ...). So I'd say online presence and beginner-friendliness.

[bscphil]

Similarly, Mint is also one of the most popular distros, and its marketing, at least for a long time, has been that it's even more user-friendly than Ubuntu.

[ColanR]

Marketing?

[Koshkin]

Third-party support.

[eternauta3k]

Lots of software out there with Ubuntu PPAs.

[jcelerier]

Debian did not send free CDs by mail

[Wowfunhappy]

Did a large numbers of people use those? Legitimate question—it always struck me as a cool initiative for a very small number of people, but only that.

I'd expect most people tech-savvy enough to install Ubuntu would also have a decent enough internet to download a ~700mb file.

[zapzupnz]

Back in the day, not much of my country, or even the US, had particularly fast internet. Nor did everybody have a disc burner in the days before USB booting being supported by the majority of computers' firmware.

[oarsinsync]

If my memory serves correctly, this was 2004/2005, around the time I was discovering my home burnt CDs and DVDs were going bad.

This was also around the time I would often brick my primary (only) workstation for whatever reason. Having a properly mastered Live CD was super useful.

I would order at least two with every release cycle for a few years at least.

Thankfully, I saw the light early with Ubuntu-server, and stayed with Debian. Ubuntu-desktop makes for a good enough live / recovery / troubleshooting environment, but not sure I’d use it for anything more.

[maccam94]

The free LiveCDs were great marketing. As a teenage computer geek, it was way easier to convince casual computer users to try it out when I could lend them a nicely printed CD. And it looked way better than handing them a sketchy CD-R with some marker scribbles on it.

[jcelerier]

> I'd expect most people tech-savvy enough to install Ubuntu

we installed ubuntu with friends in freakin junior high school. it's not like it's rocket science...

OTOH the village where I grew up as a child only got DSL > 512k around 2008 iirc.

[alyandon]

I ordered a few back in the day - the sleeve design was really nicely done.

[harry8]

Because it's popular it gets 3rd party support. So people use it making it popular. Vicious/virtuous circle depending on whether you're looking at it from above or below.

Just like windows Shuttleworth admires and seeks emulate so very much.

[harry8]

Sigh. ok then let me explain that last comment.

It's called a network externality. Microsoft achieved this with piracy based market penetration of dos and it worked great for them and they've built on it ever since.

Shuttleworth understood the importance of getting established as being popular when he launched and would press install disks, as many as you asked for, and ship them to you at his own cost. As one example of nakedly going after market share and spending resource to do so.

Bug #1 in the ubu bug tracker is literally "windows is the most popular os."

Separate to the marketing, which is worth discussing on this site because some of us actually care about what works and why so wish to discuss it, let's talk engineering decisions.

Between 2 choices that are technically about equal. Choose the one that is more popular. Many feet trample more bugs. Better support. More likely to be around after $time_period. If it needs to work with something else, the managers of the something else project will likely suppor the more popular first etc. Obviously popularity is not the only concern but it really does count for something, ignore it as a dimension in your decision process at your peril. I use linux, and ubuntu as it happens on this laptop. I'm aware windows and osx are more popular and that popularity makes certain things easier. For /my/ purposes and to /my/ taste linux and ubuntu are worth paying that cost to have installed here and I'm very comfortable with that decision.

Just quietly, perhaps people who don't care for business decisions and engineering decisions are on the wrong website? There's plenty of places "boosters" can go to do that.

[Koshkin]

> I don’t like (Gnome, Snap)

Snaps may be a pain sometimes, but Gnome seems to be working like a charm...

[yjftsjthsd-h]

GNOME is great as long as you use it the way that GNOME devs want you to (this year). If you want extensions, themes, customization, to use software the way it worked last year, or tray icons, it becomes... less supported.

[willtim]

I tried it recently and went back to i3. For me, Gnome didn't work well for multi-monitor setups and seems surprisingly lacking in customisations. It did seem very polished though.

[RMPR]

People often complain about design decisions of the GNOME team: removing desktop icons, status bar, ...

[petepete]

Those people can choose another DE with legacy features like desktop icons. Tradition isn't a reason to keep up bad habits and I'm thankful to Gnome for daring to take tough decisions for the greater good.

I wouldn't use any other DE, at this point.KDE has always been cluttered and XFCE is buggy and not particularly intuitive.

[jason0597]

There was a very good post here in Hacker News explaining why the decisions that GNOME (and others as well) have taken are bad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901541

[petepete]

Yes I saw this the other day. The post is incorrect in several ways but there are some valid opinions in there that I agree with too.

Nothing as big as a DE is perfect, thankfully it's broadly moving in the right direction.

[stonogo]

They're not "legacy features" merely because your tastes have changed. They're still just "features." Calling them mean names doesn't change that, it just makes it harder to take your argument in good faith -- same as calling desktop icons "bad habits." I'm a happy GNOME user but ascribing moral judgements to common computer functionality is kind of weird.

[RMPR]

This is debatable because it's a matter of taste (or habit), but one thing they got right is optimizing the interface for Touchscreens.

[samsquire]

How is removing features "for the greater good"?

[gaius_baltar]

> like a charm.

Like a Juju one? :)

[eeZah7Ux]

>> and they just can't execute

> That’s a bit rich: are they not the #1 consumer distro, which hardly implies they are failing to execute.

No, that's Debian doing almost all the work.

90% of the packages in Ubuntu are simply taken from Debian without significant modification.

[hvis]

Unity was very good in a lot of respects. Both its UI elements and its performance. Unfortunately, Unity 7 depended on Compiz somewhat heavily, and when it came to writing a replacement of the full stack, Canonical didn't manage to execute.

But have you been following last year's improvements to GNOME's performance and responsiveness? A lot of it is Canonical's devs bringing their experience from Unity.

[bgorman]

Gnome 3 runs like an absolute dog on my Skylake notebook using Ubuntu 19.10. I don't know what metrics you have been looking at, but as a regular user I "feel" that the UI is constantly lagging during regular use. I didn't think it was this bad when I was using Fedora in the past, but that was a wayland based installation.

[RMPR]

Enabling the BFQ scheduler reportedly boosted the responsiveness https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1738828 and I can't remember where I saw someone saying it had a positive impact on Gnome in particular.

[bgorman]

Thanks, this is definitely worth a shot

[Pmop]

Weird. I'm on a ThinkPad x230 Ivy Bridge and Gnome (3.36) is butter smooth for me (Ubuntu 20.04, fresh install). I did the minimal installation though.

[bgorman]

What were you using prior to 20.04?

[Pmop]

Windows 10.

And Void Linux/ i3-gaps before that.

And Linux BBQ / OpenBox before that.

[hvis]

It's better than 19.04 was. :-)

20.04 should be better still (I've yet to upgrade).

[5-]

it's not a fair comparison, but for many years i have been running i3wm+dmenu+xterm as my desktop environment (and dwm instead of i3wm before that), and not even once i had given as much as a thought about performance of that. it just responds to my commands... instantaneously?

there is no need for latency-hiding animations and subsequently trying to make them run smoothly on the gpu if there's no perceptible latency.

[RMPR]

The only caveat is the initial configuration which makes many people reluctant to use i3 or WMs in general.

[eitland]

> Unity was very good in a lot of respects. Both its UI elements and its performance.

I hear a lot of praise for Unity and I'm the kind of person who enjoy trying out new stuff and Linux Desktops is no exception.

For me, Unity was broken because of alt-tab (behavior and lack of configurability).

It might work for everyone else but when I want to switch back to the last or second last thing I worked with I want that done now.

I don't want to look at the tab switcher to ponder what to do next, just alt-tab, done.

This has worked consistently in every Windows since at least 3.1 (the first my family owned), and in every Linux desktop environment I've used except Unity and Gnome 3. And in Gnome 3 it was at least configurable.

This might seem trivial to a lot of you but to keep focus I keep one application maximized most of the time. I don't use them side by side. Then when I need to reference something (Jira, vendor documentation etc) I alt-tab. Same goes for slack.

[hvis]

I also Alt-Tab a lot, and don't remember this being a problem. Either I got used to its behavior quickly, or it was configurable too.

[Wowfunhappy]

I recommend Debian too, but potential switchers should be aware that it has a very particular update model. You get (non-security!) software updates once every two years, and that is the version you will be on for the next two years. There are sometimes workarounds (namely backports), but they're less well tested and sometimes break.

I think this model is underrated, for all that it can sometimes be annoying. Consistency is valuable. Constant change is not good, even when the changes themselves are positive. But it does mean you'll sometimes be left with out-of-date software.

Edit: Oh, I should mention that you can also use Debian testing to get frequent updates. Primary issue here there is Debian Testing actually gets security updates later than Debian Stable.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

Unity had a rough start, but grew to be a pretty nice DE. I actually remember it warmly every time I see how Gnome3 eats 3 horizontal bars of screen space, placing a freaking WATCH on the center of the top bar.

Seriously, a whole bar for a WATCH? How come good old Gnome2 did it better 15 years ago, and had a terrific hierarchical menu, to add?

[mixmastamyk]

Do you mean the clock? I don’t like it it there either. Used to looking in the corner.

[unethical_ban]

Unity was a good DE, and I have come to appreciate their design, which even today differentiates from standard GNOME. Also recall that it was made to be one DE for all: Phone, tablet, desktop. The idea was that you would have an Ubuntu phone, dock it, and use it as your PC!

And that is doable now, considering Thunderbolt. Hell, Oneplus should try to push OxygenOS to be tablet-like and this would set them apart from everyone.

Upstart was started alongside or even before systemd, if I recall correctly.

[waltpad]

> I strongly recommend anyone similarly frustrated to check out debian, which is a fantastic distro.

It is true that the Debian people are doing a great job.

> [...] if you're using Ubuntu and disabling snap, you're fighting against the current and I have to imagine it's going to be increasingly difficult with subsequent releases.

Actually, snap was harder to remove in the previous release: you had to rebuild certain packages (actually, just pulseaudio, so it only matters for desktops) to get rid of the dependency, but it seems now that it's just a couple of apt commands, so you have to give Canonical credits for making it easier.

[waltpad]

Now, this is embarassing, here the list of reverse dependencies on snapd:

  python3-ubuntu-image
  xubuntu-desktop
  xubuntu-core
  vanilla-gnome-desktop
  ubuntustudio-desktop-core
  ubuntustudio-desktop
  ubuntukylin-desktop
  ubuntu-unity-desktop
  ubuntu-snappy-cli
  ubuntu-snappy
  ubuntu-mate-desktop
  ubuntu-mate-core
  ubuntu-core-launcher
  ubuntu-budgie-desktop
  snapd-xdg-open
  snapcraft
  snap-confine
  qml-module-snapd
  plasma-discover-backend-snap
  lxd
  lubuntu-desktop
  libsnapd-qt1
  kubuntu-desktop
  ember
  cyphesis-cpp
  chromium-browser
  ubuntu-server
  ubuntu-desktop-minimal
  ubuntu-desktop
  ubuntu-core-snapd-units
  livecd-rootfs
  maas
  apparmor
  libsnapd-glib1
  gnome-software-plugin-snap
  command-not-found

Any of these packages is going to pull snapd in if installed. Soon after writing the above comment, I decided to install chromium, and ... snapd got installed as well as a result. I guess I should double check each claim I am about to make, BEFORE making it.

sigh...

Edit: Please note that many of these are "leaf" packages, by which I mean that no other packages depend on them.

[usr1106]

> Now, this is embarassing, here the list of reverse dependencies on snapd:

Not at my computer now, but that cannot be correct. Could recommended packages be included in that list?

I did apt-purge snapd on my xubuntu 20.04 and it did not pull out anything unrelated.

When you install something later an it tries to pull in something later you can always try --no-install-recommends.

In the worst case there is eqivs https://wiki.debian.org/Packaging/HackingDependencies but it has been 3+ years that I needed to use that the last time.

[wiredfool]

Many of those are also the main meta packages for specific flavors.

[waltpad]

Which means that removing them (when removing snapd) doesn't matter much.

[pbhjpbhj]

Can't you hold snapd, and then install with force-depends?

[RMPR]

Give them credits to fix what they have broken?

[waltpad]

Well, tbh, that sounds a bit far fetched. I meant that we should cut them some slack (English is not my first language).

That being said, it's not as bright as I thought it was - see my other comment.

[viraptor]

It's not broken. People prefer not to use snap and want to remove it. But overall snap works, and apps installed via snap work.

[amaccuish]

The one I'm currently fighting server-side is netplan. I want to use systemd-networkd directly, since it exposes a lot more features than netplan, but getting netplan to stop intervening is a ballache. Like, it's not a systemd service, it has to be disabled on the kernel command line?!

[jschwartzi]

Yeah I was trying to get systemd-networkd to handle hotplugging, and I spent about a day trying to figure out how to describe a computer with one Ethernet port to netplan before giving up and removing the whole package. At which point systemd-networkd started working beautifully as-expected. For a system administration tool netplan is wonderful at making the simple things needlessly complicated.

[nightfly]

I've found that if you delete /etc/netplan (just making sure this is at least empty seems to be the most important part) and /var/run/systemd/network netplan doesn't really seem to do anything. My org has been using systemd-networkd directly after doing that for about a year and it's working fine for us.

[amaccuish]

Yes I've done that and it definitely works, though I've still got "netcfg/do_not_use_netplan=true" in my cmdline for good measure, not sure if it does anything though, or even when I got that from, come to think of it.

But still, emptying a directory is not how I expect to disable what is a system service. It should be systemctl disable netplan...

I think emptying would be better than deleting the directory since it'll probably just get recreated on an update.

[nightfly]

It's because netplan uses a system generator /lib/systemd/system-generators/netplan, to parse the files in /etc/netplan and generate systemd-networkd configs from them on boot (Like how /etc/fstab gets parse into systemd mount units). It would be nice if there was a flag file or something you could touch to disable it though.

[viraptor]

> upstart [...] failed shit they've come out with?

upstart was pretty good. It just lost the popularity contest with systemd. I'm not sure if there's really anything serious to complain here about.

[vbernat]

There were some serious complains around upstart. Notably, jobs may get stuck in a bad state, difficult to recover. This was never fixed. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/96420..., https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/406397 and http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2012/09/29/upstart-job-gett....

[cerberusss]

> I don't want to run that garbage on my desktop

Please read the HN guidelines: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work". Link at the bottom-left.

[op03]

It's not that bad. Linux threads attract the biggest drama queens in the galaxy.

[simion314]

>upstart

Do you know Red Hat and google were using upstart? This companies must be hyper incompetent if they run garbage.

[james_s_tayler]

I agree. The last Ubuntu release I actually liked was 12.04? After Unity I've been fighting Ubuntu ever since.

I'm seriously considering not taking the 20.04 LTS release and either using 18.04 until it's untenable or switching to something else.

[yummypaint]

Yep this hits the nail on the head. There was some kind of fundamental shift around that time. Running other GUIs has been a bandaid, but the underlying thought processes that led to unity are still clearly at work. Im going to stop even trying out new ubuntu releases anymore.

I think this is ok though. If ubuntu were better thought out, the linux ecosystem might be less vibrant than it is. I would like to think other distros are learning from these failures. Personally ive had excellent luck with scientific linux (CentOs based).

[urlwolf]

Mint is also a possibility. They don't use snaps but flatpaks.

[alexfromapex]

Netplan is another fail... although I love Ubuntu otherwise

[gerdesj]

Numpty. Minimal. End of.