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by michaelt 1022 days ago
> the bootloader (shim and GRUB) and kernel assets will be delivered as snap packages (via gadget and kernel snaps), as opposed to being delivered as Debian packages.

And there it is.

I suppose having your kernel command line signed by Canonical and unmodifiable by the system owner without a pain-in-the-ass manual 'machine owner key enrolment' process is very much on-brand for Snap.

5 comments

Well shit, we were just joking the other day on mastodon about the kernel being distributed as a snap. I guess this is it, then.

I'm tired of computers being awful :(

Just don't use Ubuntu, there are plenty of fish in the sea :-)
Yeah, I completely switched to Arch after I got the ads in my apt-get commands. It's a bit more annoying and unstable, but overall a much better experience than Ubuntu.

I still have a few server instances on Ubuntu, but I'm moving them to straight Debian or arch when they need major upgrades.

Looks perfectly aligned with corporate and especially government IT practices. There the user is by far not the owner.
So if Ubuntu is pivoting hard into big corporate/govt

Who’s the new big community desktop distro?

No idea! Debian proper? Fedora? Nix? Arch?..

(I personally run a relatively niche distro, https://voidlinux.org/)

Void's great although definitely for the tinker crowd (like arch was), debian seems like the better community choice
Arch
The transition from Ubuntu to Debian is about as simple as it gets, since Ubuntu derives much of their base from Debian..
As someone said, "Ubuntu is Debian-based like milk is grass-based" :)

But certainly the bulk of the tools must be familiar.

Perhaps not exactly 'community distro', but Fedora is genuinely a joy to use.
Linux Mint of course
But even in those environments, Canonical isn't the owner.
Hard pass. I'm slowly been dumping Ubuntu due to the force snaps down your throat strategy they have. Still irritated I have to jump through hoops to get Firefox without a snap.
Meanwhile my mom just asked me to switch her Dell to her favorite linux mint flavour and the key enrollment was literally 3 key presses plus the password away.
Oops, I tried to install the nvidia drivers, but it doesn't seem to have worked.

I got a weird screen during the process, pretty sure it was blue, and the default option was 'continue boot' which I selected, I think maybe it was the 'BIOS' ?

I couldn't google what to do while at that screen, or screenshot it either, for some reason.

I've tried uninstalling then reinstalling the drivers, but that hasn't made the mystery screen to come up again, and hasn't fixed my problem.

I will now go and research a fix, but as a newbie I don't know keywords like 'mok enrolment' or 'mokutil' or 'dkms' or 'secure boot' or 'shim' because WTF do those even mean?

Go ahead and try searching, see how long it takes you to find the command you need to run when you don't know any of those terms, or even that the problem is secure boot related.

Meanwhile, the BIOS with its 'secure boot on/off' switch is available every single boot.

> the key enrollment was literally 3 key presses plus the password away

If you don't count the 8+ character password you have to enter three times, maybe.

Most laptops don't have nvidia cards. And none of those issues you're talking about occurred. She's been a happy linux mint user for more than 5 years. I was just trying to get her off her old ultramobile celeron laptop and she refused to use the new one until I ran the mint installer. For me the biggest challenge was figuring out whether to install the Mate or Cinnamon version.

It asked me for an 8 character password during install, rebooted, i entered enroll existing key. I entered the password and then continued the install, that was it. Runs like a charm, boots like a charm.

She's over 70 and she absolutely loathes the random software that various windows things try to install, or the antivirus sneaks in with the next update and stuff like that.

She just browses the web, streams stuff and wants to make sure she can screencapture the streams she watches. Turns out for that use case Thunderbird is also quite good and to my surprise the google 2FA oauth phone login makes it really easy for her to log in to google. I still remember the times when I would have to reset her google password for her.

Not to dismiss your experience, but I think for a lot of basic users it works really well.

That's disappointing, but not surprising.