[wilonth]

Wow they're still pushing snaps, the project with some the worst engineering I've ever seen.

- Extremely slow at doing anything, even the most basic commands.

- Ridiculous auto-update mechanism (you can't even disable it wtf).

- Random, nonsense limitations (why can't I open dot files and dot directories???).

So terrible that for most apps that I installed with snaps I end up installing the deb version later on.

What an abomination, it is a devil that's hurting the Linux desktop everyday.

[Saris]

My favorite experience with snaps is Firefox just closing in the middle of doing something because it wanted to update, and it didn't even bother to check if I was using it first.

[sockaddr]

This also happened to me. So I decided to uninstall the snap and “apt install firefox”

Guess what I got?

A freaking snap. Yes, try it.

I’m done with Ubuntu

[friend_and_foe]

Everyone's done with Ubuntu. It's just not good. Its got a stereotype at this point for being the easy noob distro but that's not even true. Its top to bottom awful and has been for many years.

[eYrKEC2]

Call me a noob if you like, but I don't like hunting down drivers. Tried to go to debian on my last dev machine upgrade, but reverted straight back to ubuntu. I may be lazy, but I really don't want to hunt down drivers. I'll try debian again next cycle.

[conor-]

I feel like hunting down drivers hasn't been an issue on Linux for any relatively modern machine I've run in over 10 years.

If it really is something that you have had problems with, maybe try PopOS instead of Debian. The restricting non-free repos by default out of principle with Debian can sometimes get annoying when you need to install certain non-free drivers (looking at you Nvidia), but PopOS is a really well-polished ootb experience that is trivial to install. Second to PopOS for a set it and forget it experience, OpenSUSE is a rock-solid distro that does not seem to get much praise.

[hnzix]

>I feel like hunting down drivers hasn't been an issue on Linux for any relatively modern machine I've run in over 10 years.

Try installing any Debian flavor on an Intel Mac. Keyboard, mouse, bluetooth, wifi drivers all incredibly hard to get working. Need to perform some voodoo extracting the drivers from a MacOS image then making them available during boot.

[tcmart14]

Or another recommendation. If you want all the drivers and you want to run Debian, use the non-free image which I believe they just decided to make it easier to find?

[webkike]

I haven't had trouble with drivers using Fedora in years. RPM fusion handles Nvidia drivers just fine. It's a far cleaner and "noob friendly" distro in my opinion, so long as you're able to google "how to install nvidia drivers fedora"

[GlumWoodpecker]

This is mostly just a Debian problem, due to their "no non-free software" philosophy, which extends to device drivers. I have never in my days booted a Debian install that worked with wifi out of the box, and I suspect I never will, due to that philosophy.. For that reason, I've stopped trying and I default to Ubuntu (-based) distros instead. All it takes to get rid of snaps forever is `sudo apt purge snapd`.

[skrtskrt]

Yeah I use both Fedora and OpenSuse (Tumbleweed) and it's a really stupid easy no-config setup on both distros.

Ubuntu is just maddening.

Pop OS is nice out of the box too, but I just don't want to use Ubuntu derivatives at this point even if they've removed snaps

[entropicdrifter]

I run Mint on my primary desktop and it's fantastic. What Ubuntu LTS would've become if it had continued to focus on a good desktop experience and pushed Flatpak instead of Snap

[at-fates-hands]

I came here to say this too.

Ironically I was about to set up a new Linux Dev machine with Ubuntu and now I'm more inclined to go back to Mint since I never had a bad experience with it. I was fortunate to skip the Gnome 3 days and the Cinnamon and Xfce implementations have been very stable for a while now.

[raffraffraff]

Give OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a shot. Better than Ubuntu (in my experience) when it comes to drivers. They have the MacBook Pro 2015 facetimehd webcam (which Ubuntu doesn't have) and my brand new Asus Zenbook S13 OLED was perfect right out of the box. It's a rolling release so you get extremely recent packages. And its KDE is amazing (I switched from XFCE, it was so good). I love it.

[marcosdumay]

You know what distro I had the most experience of hunting down drivers? Ubuntu.

I've given-up on Debian-like systems on a laptop, because the drivers were never good, just decide one last try with bare Debian, and have everything work out of the box. In my experience, Ubuntu never works, and when you suddenly get most things to work, they break down again in a week or two.

No other distro ever gave me that experience.

[panick21_]

Use PopOs. Better hardware and is mostly Ubuntu with lots of the dumb Snap stuff removed. Plus some other cool features.

[entropicgravity]

You could also try Linux Mint. I moved to that two years ago when Ubuntu started to go sideways and I've been very happy so far.

[reportgunner]

What machine are you using ?

[mb7733]

You want Linux Mint.

[Spooky23]

My favorite fail with Ubuntu is every version changes how DNS configuration works.

[hedora]

This was my last straw. I installed some 6 month old LTS release, and it had to go through a 2-5 second timeout step on the initial lookup of each new dns name. Then, it would populate a local cache, and work well until the TTL expired or whatever.

Anyway, if you are looking for a noob distro, I recommend manjaro. (The AUR packages are extremely unstable, but other than that, it’s pretty competitive with what Ubuntu was 10-15 years ago.)

[kop316]

Please do not use Manjaro. They are known to ship half baked WIP patches that cause massive breakages in their distro. Here is one of their latest instances: https://fosstodon.org/@[e-mail]/110049699665...

I personally have had them ship out WIP patches not meant for production, which has wasted a lot of my (volunteer) time chasing down phantom bugs in software I maintain. This has personally happened to me on at least four different occasions. A lot of other FOSS maintainers I know have similar stories.

More info: https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/

[Sohcahtoa82]

> manjaro

Is Manjaro really that noob-friendly? All I know about Manjaro is that it's based on Arch, which I always understood as being the LEAST noob-friendly distro besides LFS.

[five82]

Canonical makes decisions based on their own self interest. Not for their users and not for the benefit of the greater community. That's what drove everyone away.

[raffraffraff]

But driving everyone away isn't in their own best interest. They're basically shitting in their own well.

[phendrenad2]

They're probably doing just fine selling support for Ubuntu Server.

[michaelcampbell]

I have meager needs so I haven't run into (m)any of the issues here, but what's a deb based alternative that isn't meant for absolute stability at the expense of anything modern?

(I ask with actual curiosity; I'm ignorant to most distros.)

[gmassman]

FWIW I’ve been using Linux Mint for years and have never had a major issue. Most minor issues are with out of date repository packages which can usually be installed by other means.

[michaelcampbell]

Isn't Mint an ubuntu offshoot, or does it avoid the flatpak/snap issues?

[ajvs]

I'll add to this: one that uses KDE, please. Kubuntu has served me well but I'm tired of Canonical's shit.

[linux_is_nice]

I've had several people recommend the testing branches of Debian for relatively up-to-date software while still being stable FWIW

[denton-scratch]

Sid?

[johnny22]

popos maybe?

[eadmund]

Ubuntu can be a bit easier to get a laptop running than Debian (although I personally use Debian).

But whenever I see someone running Ubuntu on a server I think that there is a very real competence issue. Ubuntu should be kept as far from the server room, data centre or cloud as possible.

[vetinari]

Not userfriendly at all, but there is a solution:

  sudo tee <<EOF /etc/apt/preferences.d/firefox-no-snap >/dev/null
  Package: firefox*
  Pin: release o=Ubuntu*
  Pin-Priority: -1
  EOF

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa
  sudo apt update
  sudo apt install firefox

I'm getting old for this; Canonical is getting Microsoft's manners.

[Filligree]

Fedora's really nice. Try it~

Alternately, I could shill for NixOS. It's also really nice. Eventually.

[kibwen]

Note that Fedora has an immutable version of the OS that's similar in intent to NixOS. It's called Fedora Silverblue.

[Filligree]

I've tried it. And while I'm not sure why, its updater never worked for me -- hung while downloading, I think, but there was no feedback.

Honestly, I prefer NixOS. It's far more configurable, which is a nice thing to have in an immutable OS.

[cozzyd]

yes, I tried Ubuntu briefly in 2006 before switching to the Fedora/EL ecosystem since then. Fedora seems to have won every "battle" so far (systemd vs upstart, gnome-shell vs. unity, etc.)

[alias_neo]

It is possible to get an apt package, you have to jump through a few hoops but it can be done; I do it every time I install Ubuntu (frequently) because I won't touch that snap shite again.

I can't move work off of Ubuntu; it's too embedded now, but I'm looking for something else for home. Switching distro-base isn't so easy when you've been using it for decades though; I tried NixOS but it wasn't comfortable (Nix is a steep learning curve), though their community is top notch, and everything I do is deb based.

Looking for a way to get a modern debian (something akin to non-LTS Ubuntu) or just go all out and switch to something Arch based like EndeavourOS.

[__david__]

> Looking for a way to get a modern debian (something akin to non-LTS Ubuntu)

Not exactly sure what you mean by modern, but I'd recommend debian "unstable" (also called "sid"). Despite its name it's pretty stable. Normal debian stable releases are LTS style, unstable is where newly built packages show up first—so it will generally have the latest version of stuff and not be stuck a year or 2 back. It's basically a rolling-release style thing—I put in a little cron-job that does `aptitude safe-upgrade -y` every night to keep me up-to-date.

You can also use debian "testing", which one step back from "unstable"—packages are promoted from "unstable" to "testing" when if they've gone 2 weeks without a bug report of some particular severity (that I can't remember off the top of my head).

What's nice is you can have both testing and unstable in your apt sources—on my machine I set the priority on my testing higher than unstable so I generally get the testing packages, but I can grab unstable if I need to. I've been running this way for about 20 years now, and it seems the right balance of new but consistent.

[alias_neo]

By modern I made access to fairly new packages.

I don't want things breaking left, right and centre but I want access to later versions of tools and libraries I'm using.

For example, at work we were told to upgrade Wireshark and VirtualBox to major versions that aren't available in apt on 22.04 after an audit due to vulnerabilities in older versions.

What you're doing sounds like it'll work nicely for me, thanks.

[Iolaum]

I moved from Ubuntu to Fedora when Canonical started pushing snaps 4 years after the auto update debacle that's also mentioned elsewhere here. Couldn't be happier.

Key differences I noticed:

- apt vs dnf

- Intalling on a new computer.

Would totally recommend.

[alias_neo]

I've used fedora, I have no real issues with it, but I'm not sure if it's going to work for me. At work we target Debian/Ubuntu and I lead the backend team so I need to be on-point; that means not having to mentally switch "environment" all the time because I use something else at home.

Still undecided though; I'm too old (read; jaded) for distro hopping now, but maybe I'll try find a Debian setup as another commenter suggested that'll work.

[beardbound]

I’ve been considering switching and haven’t used fedora in years. I’ll have to give it another chance. Snap has seriously annoyed me.

[AdmiralAsshat]

Just be aware that Fedora's got a six-month release cycle rather than whatever Ubuntu's LTS lifetime is (4 years?), and Fedora only supports current release and one back. So realistically, you've got a year a month to upgrade your workstation.

I've had Fedora for over five years and I've never had my laptop get completely borked by an upgrade, but I've had just enough things break between releases in the past that I still get get the sweats every time I've gotta do the restart upgrade, whether it will come up completely and just work or whether my WiFi is now broken because resolve-d changed to systemd-resolved.

[tomberek]

Would you be interested in a session for me to better understand (and hopefully eventually fix) why Nix was not comfortable? Not looking to evangelize, but to learn about the experience from your perspective.

[alias_neo]

Hey. Yeah, I'd be happy to, time allowing.

I really enjoyed the results of NixOS with flakes but a couple of things were a little more challenging than I have time for to switch it into my daily driver.

It was that steep curve that stopped me going back to date; I liked everything about it, the community was very welcoming and helpful, the declarative nature, and ability to define my machines' states in Git, the documentation, no complaints except the time I'd need to feel as proficient as I am elsewhere.

[mynonameaccount]

do a video or record it for everyone's benefit :)

[jrsj]

I've mostly used Ubuntu in the past & decided to try EndeavourOS and I don't think I'll go back. I've had a great experience with it.

[ttctciyf]

Manjaro was a very smooth transition from an ubuntu-based system (neon, in fact) for me.

[alias_neo]

I ran Manjaro on my gaming desktop for a couple of years but I hated KDE, it felt so clunky, always misbehaving compared to Gnome where I've had relatively few issues.

[ttctciyf]

You can choose the desktop before install time: Gnome, XFCE, and KDE have official support; just download the appropriate ISO from https://manjaro.org/download/

[nightfly]

I've been angry at Canonical for lots of things, but no longer having native apt package for Firefox was forced by Mozilla...

[andrewshadura]

Not true.

[nightfly]

Please read https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/feature-freeze-exception-seed...

[vetinari]

That sounds more like Canonical marketing-speak, than Mozilla. My guess would be that it is Canonical who approached Mozilla for snap support, and Mozilla said yes.

Meanwhile, Mozilla still maintains ppa (mozillateam) with apt version. There's also Flatpak version, which delivers what snap promised.

[tehbeard]

*sigh

Another firefox blunder to add to their growing list.

[spaniard89277]

I went for OpenSuse & Linux Mint, no complaints.

[unicornporn]

Looking at the responses to this post, a more expected headline would've been “Ubuntu stops shipping Snap by default”.

[jrsj]

If they actually wanted Ubuntu desktop usage to go up instead of down this is exactly what they would have done

[ur-whale]

> A freaking snap

Here's how to properly install firefox on ubuntu

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/04/how-to-install-firefox-d...

and, once you're done:

   apt-get purge snapd

[ElCapitanMarkla]

I had to do this, after an update installed the snap version. I had crashes, UI that wouldn't render, all sorts of deal breaking bugs. And I don't really care how I have to install something, as long as it's painless. No idea why the snap copy had those issues but 0 issues with the apt.

[jrsj]

I can't recommend EndeavourOS enough. You get all the good parts of Arch with an easy to use graphical installer, XFCE or another DE + great Nvidia support out of the box.

[colordrops]

And if you are down to install and configure your distro from the CLI, NixOS is amazing.

[jrsj]

It's not really what I would want on the desktop, but I did mess around with it a little and it's pretty interesting. Next time I need to set up a server for something I think I'll probably use it.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Oh so that's why both the Snap and the APT-installed versions of VLC were broken, they were the same one???

[blacksmith_tb]

Yes, I followed this procedure[1] to get a real .deb version again, which has been working fine.

1: https://fostips.com/ubuntu-21-10-two-firefox-remove-snap/

[raffraffraff]

This was what made me find an alternative distro. When I say "apt install", I mean "apt install"

[dzamo_norton]

Come back to Debian (testing, if you want new package versions).

[enobrev]

This happened to me and since I had to immediately stop what I was doing, I used the opportunity to take snap off my system completely and reinstall Firefox properly.

[booleandilemma]

I specifically moved away from Windows to get away from automatic behavior like that.

When will these system designers realize that the system shouldn't do anything observable without me telling it to?

Imagine if a kitchen oven decided to perform a self-clean without any human interaction "because it hadn't performed one in awhile".

[phendrenad2]

If you're moving away from Windows, why not go all the way and install Manjaro or something? Snaps are meant to emulate the Windows ease of use, including the automatic behavior that you dislike (but many users like).

> When will these system designers realize that the system shouldn't do anything observable without me telling it to?

My vehicle changes gears without asking me. If someone makes a broad statement like "when are these vehicle designers going to realize that a vehicle shouldn't do anything observable without me telling it to?" I'm just going to laugh at them.

[camgunz]

This happened to me on my work laptop and I immediately closed the lid and started using my personal Mac instead. Fuuuuuuuuuuck that.

[beardbound]

My snap version of Firefox on Ubuntu kept bugging out my plasma taskbar too. Consistently reproducible, and annoying until I figured it out. I uninstalled the snap and manually added it through apt.

[CalRobert]

Snaps are getting me off Desktop Ubuntu after 12 years of happily using it.

[lumb63]

Canonical seems to be trying to push users off of Ubuntu. I switched to Arch from Ubuntu about 6 years ago after seeing how aggressively Ubuntu would auto-update, and because of Zeitgeist. I would never look back.

Arch is customizable, simple (in the sense that there are no surprises; things work as expected), and has a great community. Folks here can argue about snaps or flatpaks, and I can happily use AUR to install nearly anything. If it’s not there, I can publish it.

I’m not forced to adopt whatever GUI Canonical thinks is best for me in a given year or whatever their trendy new craze is. I can enjoy i3, tmux, vim, and ignore the rest.

[wing-_-nuts]

I also switched to arch for a bit, but then I was left with an unbootable system after the arch devs shipped grub's master branch as stable. The arch devs were completely unapologetic and told me 'well maybe you shouldn't use arch if you can't recover a system who won't boot'

Immediately formatted and switched to pop OS and I've never been happier.

[lumb63]

Yeah, Arch is definitely geared toward a more technically proficient user base. Their users, myself included, are typically willing to wrestle with changes like that. Recovering a system that won’t boot is almost a rite of passage in the community, since there’s an expectation that you probably built up the entire boot process by yourself, so you ought to know what it’s doing. For some users, that’s simply not true.

For future reference, if you ever decide to switch back, breaking changes or ones which require manual intervention are usually announced on archlinux.org.

[wing-_-nuts]

Yeah I was using endeavoros which was basically vanilla arch with an installer at the time.

https://old.reddit.com/r/EndeavourOS/comments/wygfds/full_tr...

[trip-zip]

That was the event that got me to stop using "Basically" arch (Endeavour, arco, etc) and just use arch itself.

[7speter]

Gnome keeps me off of pop. I look forward to the popos team are ready to ship cosmic as the default desktop.

Have you tried OpenSuse Tumbleweed or Gecko Linux? Tumbleweed is a rolling distro but the maintainers apparently test all of the updates they push. OpenSuse can feel a but clunky (it asks for passwords for “everything” for instance), but theres Gecko, which acts a bit as a wrapper of a distro to make OpenSuse a bit more user friendly.

[wing-_-nuts]

I don't understand the hate for gnome, but xfce / kde / i3 or whatever is just a sudo apt install away.

I've heard good things about tumbleweed and it even has support for WSL, so I might try that if I ever build a gaming pc and have to main windows.

[JohnFen]

> I don't understand the hate for gnome

I avoid it because I find it hard to use and hard-or-impossible to configure adequately. It takes a "my way or the highway" approach. If you like how it does things, it's great. If you don't, you're better off using a different DE, which is what I do.

[7speter]

Regarding gnome, I personally don’t like that you have to install browser extensions to change settings on the ui.

I’ve tried adding desktop environments to a pop installation, but I really don’t like having all of the apps included with other desktop environments cluttering the taskbar menu and the like.

[wkat4242]

Yeah this is what keeps me off arch personally. The community that instantly goes 'just get good' when you have an issue. While I never needed any help, I didn't like how the community treated other newbies. I know it's not always meant in a bad way, there's some tough love 'don't give a man a fish but teach him how to fish' sentiment there that makes sense. But the elitism is pretty strong too in my experience.

Also I wanted a distro without systemd and the init system is the one thing you can't choose or change on arch. I tried it but didn't like arch, in the end I moved my stuff to alpine which still runs my docker server.

In the end I chose FreeBSD which has a really nice combo of stable OS but rolling packages which is not common on Linux at all. And the community is much nicer IMO.

[shrimp_emoji]

Shilling Manjaro as the best of both worlds, imo.

It's a user-friendly and maintained Arch with some goodies like kernel switcher and driver updater GUIs.

[vorvac]

https://archlinux.org/news/grub-bootloader-upgrade-and-confi...

In regards to this specific incident, The Arch team did release a statement on how to handle the update.

[DavideNL]

Same here, also i was surprised how well popOS worked "out of the box" with just the default settings, running on a new pc/latest hardware.

[wankle]

> Canonical seems to be trying to push users off of Ubuntu.

I'm on Ubuntu for now because Snaps can be disabled but it does make me wonder since they also dumped Unity Desktop a few years back. It almost seems like they don't care about Linux Desktop users any more.

[Gracana]

Same here. I was a happy Ubuntu desktop user for over a decade. Now I’m a happy Arch user.

[noloblo]

Same here off Ubuntu and onto centos/fedora rpm dnf world

[2b3a51]

Glad you have something sorted out.

Just interested: why not Debian? i.e. still deb based distro?

I'm guessing the poster above you wants recent package versions as they went to Arch.

[kitsunesoba]

In my case Debian’s old package versions can often be awkward because I’m not using Linux exclusively… my macOS and Windows boxes are running latest releases of most things which can cause problems with e.g. sync features.

I usually run Fedora rather than Arch though, because in my limited experience with Arch it really doesn’t like to not be booted into for extended periods of time — if you do that the piled up updates are much more likely to break somehow or things like required config changes will slip through the cracks, whereas I have yet to experience this with Fedora.

[tomxor]

That's kind of ironic considering how ancient some of MacOS's userland is.

[groestl]

For me it's now Debian on the server (debs) and Arch on the desktop (rolling releases, AURs).

[wankle]

Who controls quality and security in the AUR world? It doesn't seem like something I'd want to trust?

[noloblo]

Need nixos for haskell as well

[josteink]

It’s pretty much a meme at this point, but yeah. Snaps just finally did it in for me.

I’ve switched all my laptops and workstations from Ubuntu to Arch.

There are rough edges here too, but on overall I’m much happier. I feel like I know how my machine works again. Ubuntu lately has been giving me that windowsy feeling with lots of things running for god knows what reason.

Also in arch the repos seems to not only contain more current versions of things. They seem to bundle more things altogether.

[markstos]

Same.

[pmontra]

I moved to Debian 11 and recreated exactly the same quite customized GNOME desktop I had on Ubuntu 20.04. Nothing is missing except snaps.

[wankle]

I've had issues recently with WiFi on multiple different machines on Debian 11 and switched back to Ubuntu, is WiFi working for you?

[Tuna-Fish]

What wifi chip are you using? Debian by default has no unfree wifi drivers included, so that can cause issues with them. If you have a good wifi adapter by a vendor that pushes drivers upstream like Mediatek, it should work just fine out of the box.

[slim]

or install from non-free ... which will not be needed anymore for next release

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-in...

[wankle]

Yes I was using the non-free version. It was working fine until I'd set the machines to auto-update then one day found out they had zero connectivity after an update. I thought about going around to each machine and manually trying to revert back whatever was in the updates that broke it and just decided to wipe and install Ubuntu back on them.

[7speter]

Would using debian non free address this?

[Tuna-Fish]

I presume so, but I wouldn't know because I haven't ever tried.

[pmontra]

WiFi is working for me even if I mostly use the Ethernet card.

lshw tells me

  description: Wireless interface
  product: Centrino Advanced-N 6235
  vendor: Intel Corporation

I'm using the iwlwifi driver.

[pydry]

Same here. I used to use it coz it was one of the better debugged distributions that "just worked" and I didn't want to futz with deep config files like I would with arch or gentoo or deal with some confusing "nonfree" workarounds like with Debian.

These days it's looking like Fedora holds that crown.

[wing-_-nuts]

I switched to pop OS (after a brief stint with an arch distro) and have never been happier.

[ehecatl42]

Pop really is a very pleasant experience, and probably the best I've had on a personal computer. 3/4 of my immediate family run it on Thinkpads; the only hold-out is a Gentoo teenager wanting to be "weird".

[wing-_-nuts]

Hey man, sometimes you want a distro where you can really muck about with the internals. I started with redhat 6.2 and then went to slackware until I cared more about being productive than learning internals. It's good to explore as a teen.

[groestl]

I left Ubuntu server and lxd because of it. Maybe a bit emotional, but f*ck that, I don't need this in my life.

[josteink]

I’ve switched everything off Ubuntu but my servers. That bit is just too much effort and I can’t be bothered yet.

Next server though. Not Ubuntu for sure. Probably Debian?

[groestl]

I chose Debian, FWIW.

[josteink]

How is Debian-support for ZFS these days?

Is it doable to setup Debian with a ZFS root file system?

[CoolCold]

Can you share bit more details? I have no issues with that setup or at least I cannot notice the issues.

[groestl]

There were a few things wrt to clustering (which I don't need) and storage pool management that tripped me up at first, but not too bad. However, it made me worry about the fact that I might not be the target audience for the LXD project (I just need simple lightweight machines with snapshots, nothing more).

When they decided to stop officially distributing debs, and promote Snap as distribution channel, that was the final straw. I don't understand what's their target audience anymore. Desktop users? My machines are sensitive about reboots, but pretty much sealed off the internet. Upgrades are tested, and happen in scheduled windows. Yet Snap auto-update insists on restarts, whenever it sees fit.

Sure, I can find workarounds [0], but the complete disregard on this issue and the reason that they probably forced the LXD project to promote the dumpster fire that is Snap just didn't sit well with me. I'm gone for good.

[0] https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...

[CoolCold]

Clustering/storage pools are very optional, defaults are rather sane to my taste (I don't use clustering, may be yet, but use storage pool to define LXD stuff should reside on btrfs which has dedicated LV for that).

Auto update happens and I can understand your pain here with sealed machines/testing updates. Most small to medium companies around don't care though (from what I see) and probably have unattended upgrades on anyways.

Bit more on autoupdates - just to align yourself with how people care on keeping versions, you can imagine and check yourself of how many dockerfiles contain `latest` or no any specification of versions of pulled images. Many, many, not giving a shit.

In practice, though, autoupdates are not bringing VEs/VMs down and I find update happened after my `lxc shell some-ve` sessions are disconnected from time to time (I tend to keep those in tmux and it could be attached for weeks or even months).

As for use cases and audience - both Desktop/Server works for me - on desktop I use LXD under my WSL (it has systemd support for ~ 6 months now) to quickly play around with something and on servers to split one big machine into smaller ones/limit access to system for other users. Even had the case using it in CI/CD - custom Linux software to be packaged and doing basic installation test for centos6/7/8, Ubuntu 16/18/20.04 and so on. Package installs were done via dynamic creation of fresh VE each time, to ensure system is "clean".

[bitcharmer]

Same, my next OS reinstall will be Fedora and I've been a loyal Ubuntu user for the last 20 years. It takes around 20 seconds to start a silly Spotify client on my dual Xeon workstation with 64 GB of RAM. Numerous users reporting slow startup times but Canonical just pretend the problem doesn't exist and proceed to shove snap down everyone's throats like their lives depend on it.

[gtaylor]

Same. Just moved to Fedora about 6 months ago and have pleasantly surprised. Works better on my laptop as well.

[inciampati]

My father in law has been driven mad by the snap notification that say you have to close an application within the next 30 days in order for it to be updateable.

[jmholla]

And it's not anytime within the next 30 days, it's a time in the next 30 days where it being closed coincides with snaps auto-updates.

[curt15]

It's like they were inspired by Microsoft's worst practices.

[Jnr]

For some reasons they ship it with servers as well. So the first task after getting ubuntu up and running, you have to uninstall snap.

[hobs]

One of many reasons to not use ubuntu for your servers.

[dizhn]

LXD is a legit product. Too bad they only ship it as snaps. I think Debian finally has packages for it but I haven't tested it. I actually stopped using it because I don't want to use an Ubuntu stewarded project. More and more it's getting harder to use plain lxc. Almost all resources are talking about it in an lxd context nowadays.

[rascul]

openSUSE has natively packaged LXD in their official repo. Looks like Debian bookworm does as well.

[Jnr]

After using lxc and then lxd for some time I switched to Docker and never looked back.

[phendrenad2]

I'm curious - what's wrong with snaps on the server?

[Jnr]

Same as on Desktop. They are terribly slow, resource hungry, update automatically.

On a bit older desktop I have seen it take 5-10 seconds just to start Chromium. And not the initial start after fresh install, it happens every single time. Meanwhile Flatpak or local packages start instantly on the same machine.

[phendrenad2]

So if I install a web server as a snap, it'll be slower, take up more resources, and restart randomly? I find that hard to believe.

[Jnr]

It updates, not restarts. That can lead to problems after restart.

[phendrenad2]

Sounds like a SRE nightmare. Updates happening when you didn't expect them guarantees problems. I'm starting to get a clearer picture of Canonical now.

[7speter]

Well snaps are supposed to be this great server feature because you can install whatever great program from whatever other distro ecosystem using snaps… or something

[skeletal88]

I have no idea how to update firefox because of this. I get some notification about not being able to update but it doesn't tell me why.

[noveltyaccount]

You have to quit Firefox and then manually update the Snap. I thought restarting Firefox would trigger auto-update, but no.

[sacnoradhq]

Canonical is an expert marksman footgunner.

They take bizarre risks and insist on reinventing things badly.

Security, infrastructure ecosystem integration, and defaults that don't work with reality.

The advantage of RHEL/Cent and sometimes Fedora server-side is it's boringly-reliable. The kernel especially. For development, the userland isn't great and the desktop is mediocre.

Qubes is interesting for security, containerization, and running apps isolation where Fedora, Cent, and Debian (possibly Ubuntu and Windows) are all side-by-side choices as app substrates.

[phendrenad2]

Canonical makes a server OS and also releases a desktop version for nostalgia reasons (my guess). They should just deprecate Ubuntu Desktop already and be done with it.

[Seattle3503]

The file limitations kill my productivity. For permission reasons Firefox won't open local html file on my machine. My work VPN loads a loval file to log in.

[ye-olde-sysrq]

I've been using ubuntu server for I don't even know how long, but am going to be moving all my stuff to debian when I rebuild my hardware here soon.

I should've done it a long time ago but until recently Ubuntu has been "debian but with some nice little extra bits of effort here and there to help make it smoother". Now it's "debian but with a lot of spicy canonical opinions dumped on it".

[sliken]

I hate snaps, doubly so when they appeared on a LTS release and some /dev/random sillyness broke simple things like booting.

However this seems pretty silly when what actually changed is the default OS installs will not have flatpak installed. Easily fixed with "apt install flatpak". It's just a default they are changing, not purging flatpaks or preventing them from working well.

[markstos]

I like the security features of Snaps would accept some trade-offs for that benefit, but Canonical started shipping a Snap of a browser with known issues like breaking media keys.

Security improvements are welcome, but that was a feature that seemed important and reasonable to keep working. (Maybe it works now, but based on that experience, I gave up on Snaps until I heard more positive reports).

[thangalin]

And:

- Violates XDG Base Directory Specification

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053

[brnt]

I've started using Ubuntu in Warthog times, when their value prop was refreshing and sorely needed: an out of the box usable Linux distro. It was my distro until 2020, when I realized they were going in a direction I don't care for (you could argue a direction opposite their original mission), and that other distros have reached and exceeded Ubuntus level of polish. Basically, take your pick, and it's gonna be at least as good.

I ended up with Debian because I like stable but not ancient (CentOS?) and it comes with a release cadence similar to Ubuntu LTS.

[JeremyNT]

This is some crazy NIH syndrome from Canonical.

We've been here before, of course - they pushed their own DE (the original Unity, not the current GNOME theme) for a while as a competitor to GNOME, and they also pushed Upstart over systemd. There are probably other cases I'm missing.

Eventually they gave up on those pet projects for pragmatic reasons, but Snaps seem to be the hill they want to die on (presumably for internal political reasons and/or some weak attempt at lockin).

[techwizrd]

This is bone-headed NIH move from Canonical, but I don't think either of those are good examples. Both Unity and Upstart were released prior to Gnome 3.0 and Systemd respectively and had a quite a significant investment in development time from developers and Canonical as well as an existing base of regular users and corporate users.

The original Unity DE was released in 2010 prior to the release of Gnome 3.0 in 2011. Upstart was originally included in Ubuntu in 2006 to replace sysvinit, and writing upstart scripts was a huge breath of fresh air. Systemd was released in 2010.

As a developer and user, I hate snaps _and_ flatpak. Both are user-hostile and constant source of problems requiring hours of Googling (especially the Flatpak sandbox!). I ended up purging both from my system a month ago and have been much happier since.

[cabirum]

Deleting and pinning snapd is the first thing I do on every fresh Ubuntu install. Next, install ff from mozillateam ppa and chromium from flatpak.

[wankle]

I do the same, pin snap. For Firefox I just download it, it lets me update it from its Help menu then offers to restart itself. I don't use Chromium, use Chrome. It does seem like Canonical is trying to push away all but corporate users, perhaps even all Desktop users.

[phendrenad2]

This is the kind of attitude that holds Linux back. Nothing is ever good enough, but "doing nothing" is considered just fine. Snaps aren't perfect, but adding "the ability to edit dotfiles" later on is a whole heck of a lot easier than whatever you're a fan of.

[_0ffh]

Yup, I ditched Ubuntu for good when they started with this snap nonsense.

[CoolCold]

On my servers I use LXD and certbot from snaps, cannot say I have any noticeable complains here.

[Spivak]

> it is a devil that's hurting the Linux desktop everyday

Don't you just remove it if you're using Ubuntu, never install it if you use Debian/Fedora/Arch, and pretend it doesn't exist? I've never run into an app I want that is only packaged for Snap.

[wilonth]

Some apps chose to distribute with snaps first, past and present. And without snaps they might've pushed a more unified or better experience with something better.

Canonical has money to do lots of good, too bad they waste it on terrible engineers and terrible projects.

[Saris]

On Ubuntu they hijack apt commands to install the snap instead for some packages, so removing snap is only part of the steps you'd have to do.

[calvinmorrison]

snaps just create so many weird sandboxing issues with the environment. If I run "firefox" with it already open it will not create a new window, it will wait 30 seconds and generate "firefox is already running".

I tried about 10 times to get mysql workbench running, but it depends on some key store backend through dbus, I haven't be able to get the conncetions working through snap so i cannot access a database since, for whatever reason, it has to go through the keystore.

The failure message? 'dbus-launch' does not exist.