[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.

[robocat]

Sorry, you are quite correct about both. I jumped to a conclusion about GNOME because I did do a quick check and saw the “G” stood for GNU, but I didn’t check more deeply. I have no excuse for confusing Debian with GNU/FSF, and the comments will stand to remind me of my shame.

GNOME history: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/141114/what-is-the-...

To return to topic: “How to install Flatpak apps on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS”: https://jatan.blog/2020/04/25/how-to-install-flatpak-apps-on...

[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.

[jcelerier]

Checked a bit, the figure I could find was an ubuntu employee estimating the figure to half a million in 2004, so at the beginning of the programme -> https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1691&page=2&p=3255...

So yeah, lot of people got those.

[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.