[SweetestRug]

I had been an Ubuntu user for almost 16 years, on servers, laptops, and recently containers. The snap situation with Ubuntu is just plain unpalatable, both in principal and in practice. I became so disappointed in the move by Canonical that I finally left Ubuntu altogether and no longer recommend it to friends and colleagues.

It takes years to cultivate a garden, but only minutes to destroy it.

[TheLastSamurai]

Linux Mint responded to the situation by removing snap from their repositories today[1]. I hope other distros will also follow suite.

[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-mint-dumps-ubuntu-snap/

[fgonzag]

Same here, were already in talks with red hat to move dozens of servers which are currently running ubuntu with enterprise subscriptions.

We know redhat is just as bad at forcing people to use their software (systemd...) but they have to key points which ubuntu lacks:

- they usually win their software wars

- their software usually works well enough and they give you great support

- they mantain their projects and live with their decisions, unlike ubuntu which flips and flops with major updates (I'm waiting for them to switch from netplan to something else again and fuck up all my ansible config again, which was already battle tested)

- they have better management tools overall.

The only reason we went with ubuntu in the first place was because it was familiar to all of us (we had all ran it on our desktops). When they take that familiarity away, then they lose their only real advantage.

[Darmody]

If any Canonical employee is around here they should be taking notes or this will blow in their face like Upstart, Mir, Unity 8, etc.

Or maybe Shuttleworth doesn't care at all and he just wants the big bucks from MS.

[BiteCode_dev]

When they moved from Unity to Gnome shell, you could read all over the OMGUbuntu comments that people actually liked Unity and wished they would keep it.

It's always the same, you hear people complaining the most.

Ubuntu has been a success because they took some risk.

The first one has been to make installing proprietary drivers easy. Something they got a lot of heat for.

And since they managed to become the most popular Linux distro ever, I think critics should maybe ask themselves why.

[Darmody]

I'm using Ubuntu 20.04 with Unity right now. Unity wasn't bad. I disliked it at first because it lacked features and it wasn't polished. After some time a lot of people started liking it.

But they messed up with Unity 8 and Mir. They didn't want to work with the community, they didn't care if they were working on stuff that already existed. Instead of working with the upstream devs, they worked alone. Where did they end up? Back to Gnome Shell with a lot of years of effort down the drain.

And this is even worse. More info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23433794

[ppseafield]

EDIT: As a reply to this pointed out, these predate the things I claimed were created from NIH syndrome. Please disregard.

Original comment:

They also created their own init system Upstart, only to replace it with systemd later. They have their own source control system, Bazaar.

I really appreciated Ubuntu back in '06 when my laptop's wifi and graphics drivers just worked out of the box. I've used Ubuntu in various forms for a long time. But their management has some serious NIH problems.

[theevilsharpie]

> They also created their own init system Upstart, only to replace it with systemd later. They have their own source control system, Bazaar... their management has some serious NIH problems.

Citing these as a case of NIH is inaccurate -- Upstart and Bazaar predate Systemd and Git, respectively.

It's fairer to say that Canonical's technology, for whatever reason, often doesn't seem to catch on with the broader FOSS community.

[ppseafield]

Ah! That's my error; thank you for pointing that out. I hadn't realized that. I'll edit my comment.

[uhnllon]

I would agree with you in this about snaps IF snap were somewhere close to production level software.

Nobody can assemble some new kind of app packaging, slowing the starting speed to 5-10 seconds and call that "good rounded software"

"It is just a couple of seconds more sometimes, not a big deal" isn't going to cut it. Most of the Internet using Ubuntu, already knows that.

I think Canonical is again in denial.

It already happened a couple of times: MIR, Unity (buried by not being community driven probably), Unity8, the mobile project or something, all but forgotten now.

This snap thing is probable the pet project from a couple top guys in Canonical. Maybe hundreds of powerpoint presentations have been watched about some "big strategy" for the next years, but they didn't know the thing (snap) is unbearable slow.

[BiteCode_dev]

Apt sucked when it started. Give it some time.

It's a complicated endavior, and it will need many iterations before becomming a decent solution. That's why we have to start ASAP.

[woofie11]

I was annoyed at many of the moves Ubuntu made and voiced that, but at the end of the day, I kept using it. When 20.04 came out, I uninstalled snap. If I'm forced to use snap, I'm gone.

There's no comparison.

The recent I ran Debian and now Ubuntu will be gone. Evaporated in a poof of smoke. I'll be elsewhere. Probably back to Debian.

[dheera]

There are also these "AppImage" files. They launch, but there is no guidance on how to install them to the system.

Launching Chrome: I click the Chrome icon.

Launching PrusaSlicer: Start a terminal and type

    chmod 755 ~/Downloads/PrusaSlicer-2.2.0+linux-x64-202003211856.AppImage
    ~/Downloads/PrusaSlicer-2.2.0+linux-x64-202003211856.AppImage

That doesn't seem like progress to me from a UX perspective.

[mnm1]

And flatpack. So now there's apt, snap, appimage, and flatpack. 4 fucking systems that need to be maintained just to update apps on an OS. Frankly, it's ridiculous and the apps from all those alternate systems all have some issues too. None work as well as apt. I don't understand what is wrong with apt. If they want newer packages provide a repo for newer shit. Problem solved.

[ppseafield]

Apt is great as long as what you want is available in the repo. Over the years I have had a few issues though.

Often apt's versions trail behind the newest versions. There are some good reasons for this, but it can get in the way sometimes.

I have had to ad a lot of PPAs to get some of the software I wanted. The Aurora channel PPA for Firefox stopped getting updates at one point (they discontinued it), and I didn't realize until a few versions later. I don't think any of these package managers have that problem figured out, but PPAs are commonly maintained by third party community/unofficial folks. I had the same problems with Arch's AUR.

I believe it's fixed now, but for a long time Steam required a lot of 32 bit libraries, which meant two versions of several dependencies were installed on my machine.

Additionally we were using an older version of Ruby at work which required OpenSSL1.0 for certain libraries, and a Ruby upgrade (from an old version to a less old version) broke my development environment.

Not that the others are perfect. Just for example the Spotify snap package from the software center doesn't even work. The Deb had problems on my machine which I couldn't resolve. I finally installed Flatpak to get a working version.

[uhnllon]

I think this thing about apps not available for apt is in the past. I specifically use Ubuntu because there are .debs for everything. Most of the new apps for linux published on Internet "need" to have a .dev available, if they want to became popular.

Well, I have found some strange, out of common, software - mostly comercial stuff - which doesn't have any .deb available nor ppas, nor nothing.

It is clearly a decision from somebody who said "no, we are not spending hours packaging our app, if they want it, they will try to install it with the methods we will provide"

Kind of nonsense, except that if you're in Linux looking to install a comercial app, special snowflake, is probably because you have zero chances to do otherwise, then you bit the bullet and try whatever crazy method to deploy their app they have put in place.

Most common stuff I found: - Just download my zipped binary, you know how to deploy it - Just run this command line, "sh something" giving it root credentials to run code from the Internet (YEAH I KNOW TOO, as much insecure as it gets)

Having said that, many comercial apps are there for to be easyly downloaded as .debs (they should just install with a GUI right out from the link, in old-Ubuntu behavior). Or they even offer you detailed instructions to configure a ppa (to manually install with apt).

Heck, nowadays it is common sense and good netiquette to make your installation scripts in the downloaded .deb to just deploy the ppa for apt, so next upgrade happens automatically.

If you ask me and I wouldn't dreaming to control the app-deployment infrastructure in Linux, I would say "yeah, you need to contact EVERY software not providing the .deb format and start working with them, providing them free support, even free scripts to handle the packaging"

I remember in the 90s, there was LOTs of shareware because Microsoft knew this stuff from the 70s and 80s: if you want you're software in use, you need to talk directly with those who could probably use it.

No, links hanging in some flashy website won't cut it, nor repos in github half sharing some code.

[dheera]

I think the main problem with apt is that the traditional way of using it is to depend on other libraries installed by apt, so if two pieces of software want two different versions of something that are not forward/backward compatible then you have issues. However, I don't see why they can't statically compile OR containerize and still use apt. Just have the .deb install an appimage to /usr/bin and create the necessary .desktop files. The .deb would then have almost zero dependencies. Problem solved.

[freedomben]

I have the same problem, except I also add Brew for Linux to that list D-:

[RealStickman_]

From the limited experience I had with an AppImage I found they usually create a .desktop file to make the program searchable. Though I have to agree that there is no really simple, gui way to install AppImages.

[dheera]

Yeah mine used to in 18.04 and now they don't in 20.04. No release notes about the removal of that feature, no workarounds, nothing. Not that it's a big issue for me to create a .desktop file myself but the apt-get experience is slightly nicer still because everything just works.

[e2le]

If you want a centralised repository of AppImages you might as well just use the distributions package manager for that.

[aj3]

  $ sudo install ~/Downloads/PrusaSlicer[tab] /usr/local/bin/PrusaSlicer
  $ PrusaSlicer

[mytailorisrich]

The gravy train of owning the platform with an app store like Google and Apple do is just too tempting to resist trying to pull it off, unfortunately.

[htns]

Same. My go to has been to use Qubes if you at all can, because it's actually secure, and then to use Ubuntu, because it actually works. To me most of the bad reputation of desktop linux seemed to come from people refusing to use Ubuntu for demented reasons... But I have must not have been following distro news at all in recent years, because I only just now learned snap is not fully open. That's quite the cynical walled-garden power grab and bad enough by itself to drop Ubuntu.

[afiori]

> To me most of the bad reputation of desktop linux seemed to come from people refusing to use Ubuntu for demented reasons...

My experience is completely different. I spent 7-8 years using linux on a laptop about 4 of those using either ubuntu or derivatives, my experience was that after about 6 months it was time to reinstall the OS.

Since I have installed fedora and it has been the most stable and resilient system I have ever used, I have also been treating it badly as an experiment (like powering off randomly if my 50 reddit tabs where causing too much lag) and it has no problems at all.

Currently I am using mostly my office laptop with debian and it has the same issues as ubuntu.

From my point of view I cannot understand why fedora is not more popular.

[the_af]

Reinstalling every 6 months? Why on earth?

I'm still using Ubuntu 16.04, which I think I might have reinstalled once (after I upgraded to an SSD, so it doesn't really count), and dragging my feet about upgrading because it simply works marvelously and I don't like change. It does everything I want, coding, watching movies, gaming.

[afiori]

I believe that, we probably did something subtly different.

I am not saying ubuntu is bad, but it was not a good fit for me

[Myrmornis]

When I used to maintain a linux machine about 10 years ago, upgrading the kernel was a huge pain on a fedora system (basically required reinstalling the entire OS IIRC) but could be done using the package manager on ubuntu and thus was incomparably less painful. Has this difference gone away?

[afiori]

I never directly did that, my experience was that major version upgrades on ubuntu rarely were painless and on fedora they mostly worked.

[AlexCoventry]

I don't understand what the big deal is, though. I run ubuntu and I don't run any snaps. This seems to work fine.

[guug]

If you're using desktop ubuntu, you're using snaps. Run `mount` to see which snaps ubunutu has mounted on your system.

[AlexCoventry]

Hmm, interesting. Thanks.

[KCUOJJQJ]

I do the same on 19.10. I also use another Chromium anyway, one that has hardware accelerated video playback.

https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+archive/ubuntu/chromium-...

It's available on Ubuntu 20.04.

Once the regular Chromium had a higher version number than the Chromium in the PPA. aptitude updated to the regular Chromium. I then gave the PPA Chromium a priority of 1000 by creating a file called /etc/apt/preferences.d/saiarcot895-chromium-beta with the following content:

  Package: *chromium*
  Pin: release o=LP-PPA-saiarcot895-chromium-beta
  Pin-Priority: 1000

[zapzupnz]

The point is that later releases will start forcing snaps on people without their knowledge.

[ChuckMcM]

Welcome to the ranks of "old fogey." :-)

More seriously, this is not an unexpected response if you've been using a system for 10 years or more. If you were new to the system you would just say "oh, interesting, this is how it does self contained packages" but your perspective of having a system you understand well, has worked for all your needs, and you know all the ways in which to work around it if you can't get exactly what you want works against your perception of a new feature.

In my experience it is the leading cause of burnout in engineers. You learn things, you use things, you customize them to your needs, and then the 'new participants' who don't have any experience and find those things "arcane" or "opaque" re-implement them for themselves, their friends, their company whatever. And then its something new and something new gets the exposure so still more people see the 'new' thing without even knowing there was an 'old' thing and its just "the way this feature is done."

As an experienced person it is tiring and bothersome to have to re-implement tool flows, capabilities, and other parts of your environment because some youngster re-invented the wheel yet again and you were not in a place to educate them on why the existing wheel was just fine.

The longer you live the more cycles you go through and the more ridiculous each new re-imagining of how to do 'X' becomes until all you seem to do is complain about how in the previous versions everything worked fine and this new stuff is crap and you aren't going to put up with it.

At which point ageism kicks in and your employer lays you off with mumblings about "not a team player" or "resistant to learning new skills" as if sharpening a knife with a round stone is any different or any better than sharpening a knife with a square one. It is easy to get bitter. It is easy to just roll over and whine with your fellow "oldsters" about the "good old days". It is also a kind of death.

Counter intuitively, I suspect that if companies invested in keeping the status quo engineering salaries would go down. That would result from skills learned as a junior engineer always being relevant to the current environment but increasingly more efficiently applied (as it typical as people get more experienced, they do things more quickly). That minimizes the number of people you need to develop your products and that keeps the number of engineers you need to employ down, so your costs go down and the poor engineers who aren't currently working have to compete more aggressively for available entry jobs by taking a lower salary. Fortunately, because it is counter intuitive I don't think there is any risk of it coming to pass.

In my opinion, the elves have left Middle Earth. Ubuntu and Ubuntu's current cohort of developer/users are more interested in an open source version of Windows than anything else. As a result more and more "windows like" architecture and features are replacing the old "UNIX like" architecture and features.

[the_af]

You made me chuckle. I mostly agree with you [1]. Though, to be fair, Ubuntu has been accused of being an open source Windows (or rather, OS X) almost from the get go.

I'm really conservative about software and I want to keep my apt, dammit it! I did like Unity, but only because I was never too attached to Gnome.

----

[1] I still remember when KDE devs broke that desktop for me, I think it was KDE4? They decided you just couldn't place desktop icons -- "you're doing it wrong", foreshadoing Steve Jobs -- and there was much gnashing of teeth, and I and many others ragequit to Ubuntu. Little did we know, of course :P

[znpy]

Interesting, what distro did you move to?

[SweetestRug]

I took a shot and tried Manjaro. After using it for a few weeks, I can say that I absolutely love it, and will be a Manjaro user for a long time on my personal machines. For new users, I have been recommending Pop_OS.

[logicprog]

I used Manjaro for about two years on my Dell XPS, and everything was a constant hassle: features I needed weren't set up by default, stuff broke constantly. Usually it wasn't too bad, so I just fixed it and moved on.

Then my laptops ability to connect to WiFi broke, and there was no way I could figure out to solve it. So I made a new partition, installed Pop_OS, moves my old home directory to this one, and was done with it. Pop_OS has been amazing - I always liked GNOME 3, and Pop Shell really helps in that dept.

[Barrin92]

Not OP but I have the same grievance. I moved to Fedora on my dev machines.

[freedomben]

I moved to Fedora several years ago after getting fed up with Canonical. While it hasn't been entirely pain-free, I experience a lot less pain than I used to. Even OS upgrades alone, always work on Fedora. Modern Fedora is the most "just works" distro there is IMHO (but I'm still mad at Canonical, so am probably biasing my opinion with emotion).

[BeyondLimits99]

I was using Ubuntu since 07, but recently changed my machine to Manjaro and love it.

The AUR is work of genius.

I still build all my containers at work with Ubuntu though.