Point taken on the shoddy behaviour, but if you'd like to try it out there's this helpful post on disabling snap[1] shared here[2] when I installed 20.04. Quick and painless!
I've used Debian at home for at least two decades now. It's excellent. Debian is basically Ubuntu minus a lot of user-hostile crap, so if you are familiar with Ubuntu, it should be a fairly smooth transition to Debian.
Watching this snap thing play out, and in the past, watching Mir, Unity, and Amazon Lens, has provided steady confirmation that I've made the right decision to stay away from Ubuntu.
It's dawning on me that it's likely to only become more of a pain with each iteration of upgrades (e.g. install tweaks, synaptic, remove apport... And now remove snaps).
Other threads have suggested various relatively-new distros as alternatives when stuff like this keeps coming up with Ubuntu. The two I have in mind to check out at some point in the future are Pop!_OS and Void Linux.
Pop! is Ubuntu-based, so no idea of the situation with all these other problems, but it intrigues me because they're doing tiling windows first-class.
My understanding of Void is that it doesn't use snaps or systemd, making the system as a whole significantly easier to understand, and simply sounds much much closer to what I want out of a computer (and much like 8.04 was when I first switched to Ubuntu).
Debian used not to work easily on hardware that require proprietary drivers, did it change recently ?
I left Ubuntu almost ten years ago, after 5 years of using it, when they started using MIR instead of Gnome2 and I replaced it with Linux Mint and I haven't looked back. This whole snap thing looks like the new weird decision made by Canonical to make their faithful users leave :/
Debian runs on everything I've come in contact with, or virtualized.
Debian's problem is that it's stodgy updating policy means 'Stable' is still on 4.19, things like Wireguard require a simple, but odd procedure to request apt pull packages from newer releases, and most of the copy/pasteable examples out there assume Ubuntu, and their versions/customization to critical infrastructure packages.
IMHO, the stodgy updates make it a perfect candidate for server based software. Personally, my Debian know-how makes it great for my desktop, and It has not failed for my use case: Development, Sysadmin, Browsers, Steam (or any other games releasing linux versions)
> things like Wireguard require a simple, but odd procedure to request apt pull packages from newer releases
That's not a good idea, as it breaks the assurance that Debian Stable provides. Using the backports repository is the recommended approach if you need a newer version of some clearly-defined piece of software. It will pull the newer dependencies it requires from backports, while still relying on stock-provided packages as far as practicable.
It has been decades since I had to provide extra drivers to a Debian install.
It is true that the first-presented installer ISO images on Debian's downloads page lack the worst proprietary drivers, but another couple of clicks takes you to images with them included. So, worst case, you find that the image you have lacks such a needed driver, and you use another image. In practice, I just start with the latter, and have not encountered hardware not covered. For the absolute newest equipment, a "testing" installer may be the right version to use.
The Debian download pages provide installer images for all needs. I have not needed to look at secondary sites, which also exist for specialized needs.
> you'll need to prepare a USB stick with them downloaded onto it
Not really. Debian also offers one with all the firmware included but explicitly labels it "unofficial" (though very much official in practice and hosted on debian servers).
The "pain" is thus literally to click on another download link.
Generally it's not the drivers but the firmware for those devices, i.e. code that runs inside the device.
I think it's an over-zealous position from Debian not to redistribute firmware. Even systems that are very strict about licensing, like OpenBSD, redistribute firmware, because they have some common sense.
> I think it's an over-zealous position from Debian not to redistribute firmware. Even systems that are very strict about licensing, like OpenBSD, redistribute firmware, because they have some common sense.
OTOH I believe it's a position fully aligned with their ethical standpoint. Equating common sense with your personal preference isn't very gracious.
If you want something that's less zealous about respecting (and eschewing) stupid licensing, but is more zealous about randomly upgrading all your software packages unexpectedly, there's always Ubuntu.
I don't see how it aligns with their ethical standpoint.
Firmware is just a blob you load into the device. The alternative is to have it already burned into ROM.
What exactly do you achieve by refusing to load it? Are you more free in one case and not the other?
While this is indeed helpful why do I want a version of Linux that has to be decrapified like Windows immediately after install and may with a future update may need to be fixed again. If you use non LTS you will have to "fix" it every 6 months.