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by simoncion 1225 days ago
Over the two or four years I used Ubuntu, I burned more time fixing upgrade problems in Ubuntu than (barring the libpng nonsense way back in the day) I've spent fixing Gentoo upgrade problems since ~2004.

I really, really, really wanted to be able to recommend Ubuntu, and for a long while it was REALLY good, so I could. But then something happened inside Canonical, (I guess they turned into clowns?) and they started releasing software that would just break _bad_ on upgrade. (In fact, had I not spent so much time developing my sysadmin skills with Gentoo, I would have been unable to recover from the upgrade problems I ran into.)
2 comments
bombcar 1225 days ago
The advantage I have with gentoo for my personal servers (I use Mac for desktop) is that upgrades are incremental - I only have to deal with one issue at a time.

Upgrading Ubuntu LTS scars me and CentOS just wasn’t upgradable at all.

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HybridCurve 1225 days ago
I remember trying Ubuntu when it was new. I did a default desktop install and after about an hour I tried to compile something and got "gcc: command not found". I could not fathom why anyone would not install a compiler on linux by default.

That was the last time I used Ubuntu.

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jm4 1225 days ago
It’s considered poor security practice to have compilers or interpreters installed on machines where they’re not needed. Someone who isn’t a developer and is only installing packages via apt (or snap, yuck) doesn’t need gcc.
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mrybczyn 1225 days ago
"security" practices, only get in the way of the good guys.
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MattPalmer1086 1225 days ago
Haha, I assume you are joking. Because they are intended to get in the way of the bad guys, to be sure at the cost of some inconvenience to the good guys.
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neoromantique 1225 days ago
Many ubuntu-*desktop* users don't need compiler, and since they were intended target audience ubuntu doesn't include it, after all if you need the compiler is it that painful to run `apt install -y build-essential`?
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HybridCurve 1225 days ago
I had been using linux for for almost 10 years by the time Ubuntu came out, starting with SLS and then moving to Slackware. The concept of not having a compiler was foreign to me as it was required to build the kernel so your system would have necessary device drivers and features.

> ... after all if you need the compiler is it that painful to run `apt install -y build-essential`?

No, of course not. But that's when it became obvious to me that I was not the target audience for that distribution, and had switched to Gentoo shortly after.

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