For users, in a positive sense, something around Snow Leopard.
For AAPL investors - every version after that is more "significant", especially after OS X was renamed to macOS and dark mode was used to keep nose-y media out of anti-privacy changes like user being informed what is "shared with Apple" instead of being asked whether anything should be "shared with Apple".
Downhill after that - children are used in hideous manner by Cook to invade users' privacy, like scanning and profiling their files as a pretense of looking for child porn. I find Cook's use of child porn argument to spy on all users absolutely disgusting.
I’d write a wishlist but anyone could write another one, but I’d take any OS that convinces me to pay $300 a year.
I’d pay for anything as nice as macOS (with the old control panel). I pay that price for my IDE and an OS is worth way more, open-source at that, which actually advances humanity. Linux is the VIIth wonder of the human civilization, a demonstration of human selflessness, as opposed to Windows, Linux will be here in 50 years becauE OSS is a donation of code to our children; Also no human construction has ever been so widespread across the world and even on other planets (Linux is powering the helicopter flying on Mars), of course I wish I could pay for… for a Linux that made me productive, not like Ubuntu.
Also paying means it would actually receive good marketing teams.
At the OS level, the amount of money spent on developers will not be satisfied by a small number of individual users paying $300/year. At that level the funding comes from enterprise customers.
You're welcome to use that $300/year to sponsor individual projects / developers.
It’s been systematic that each time someone says “I’d pay for a good linux”, they’re given the link as if to assume we’re not already paying. You forgot that I want a nice OS in exchange.
Moreover, I left Ubuntu. It’s software that I can’t be convinced to use even if it were free. Canonical’s choices (with Unity at the time, but also the mouse issue, and so on) are of the rare kind that they can convince someone to uninstall it and go buy 2x more expensive hardware to run macOS.
What’s missing is, I’d pay good money, but I don’t want to fiddle around with the OS. I’d pay for the betterment of the OS, but with distribs, if you pay, you’re still not the customer.
> It’s been systematic that each time someone says “I’d pay for a good linux”, they’re given the link as if to assume we’re not already paying.
Sorry, maybe I misunderstood what you said. You said that "you want to pay". "Wanting to pay" kind of implies that you don't pay today but you would if given an option. I simply thought you were being a jerk. Thanks for clarifying. No offence.
> You forgot that I want a nice OS in exchange.
Ah, special wishes. The guy next to you wants something that looks like ... beos. Or windows. It's all customizable. You know how it works because
> And I pay for Debian. But it’s not my desktop OS.
You don't want to, you already pay for some Linux distribution. Apologies, it's difficult to predict what you wanted to say when so much context is missing :)
All of this was addressed in my first message. Especially the idea that Linux customers having special requests should rather shut up.
Everyone has special requests, especially around the idea of having a decent UI that doesn’t make you lose heaps of time with Linux, and as I said, what Linux lacks is proper PMs and marketing guys who would sort and address these UX issues.
And fewer obnoxious mobs who just give you the link to pay up and ask you to shut up about your special requests.
Making Linux significantly better to use on the desktop would require taking tight control of the GUI stack [EDIT: really, the entire multimedia stack] to de-balkanize it and integrate & standardize its various layers, which would also mean modifying practically every program that uses it (which is why one can't just declare some GUI stack their official one and be done with it—the overall experience will still be super-janky).
I, for one, don't want significant releases. I want releases that focus on stability and fixing bugs. You want a significant release? Make it a one-in-five-years deal.
since 12.04 we have had unity->gnome, xorg->mir->wayland, upstart->systemd, python2->python3, iptables->nftables, addition of zfs, snap, livepatch, lxd, and dropping 32bit support.
All of those were pretty major changes and definitely not just incremental. And that is just top of my head, I probably missed lot of things. On the other hand, most gnome2 era releases are pretty much a blur in my mind. What to you made those feel more significant?
> addition of zfs, snap, livepatch, lxd, and dropping 32bit support.
Also ZFS being dropped from the installer in the new Lunar Lobster release which uses a Flutter-based installer for some reason. BTRFS is the new default if I'm not mistaken.
Or Debian Testing really. It might not be as polished out of the box but it's a pretty solid and stable experience. Or really any other well mantained Linux distribution, just anything but Ubuntu for the desktop. On the server I get it, ufw is convenient, snaps are not a bad thing in that scenario, LTS releases and extended support are all great if you're not a RedHat shop.
It is a good idea to install security updates from unstable since they take extra time to reach testing and the security team only releases updates to unstable
Looking this over..enterprise stuff, more enterprise stuff, third party dev tools upgraded as usual, which is great...and oh what's this?
> Updates for running snaps download in the background and are applied automatically when the app is closed.
Boom, that's a big one.
> Users and administrators can now pause automatic updates of specific snaps as long as desired.
What, wow.
Something tells me the usual critics still won't be satisfied, but these are both a big deal and tell a story about listening to the improvements that were desired by users.
> Ubuntu 23.04 includes GNOME 44, delivering further usability improvements with a focus on new quick settings options for bluetooth device management and dark mode.
Not a small change...
> The Firefox snap also benefits from significant performance gains on the Raspberry Pi with hardware accelerated rendering.
Q: Is this limited to Raspberry Pi, or not so much?
The Steam changes also seem like potentially huge conveniences to me.
Nice job Ubuntu team! Satisfied user since 2004 here; I do switch between the various buntus (kurrently Kubuntu) & love to discover other distros too.
I was thinking back today...Ubuntu was awesome to me when I Photoshopped and Netflixed in Windows in 2009 [1], played with various hardware & learned to stream video to some of those devices on the WLAN, like my n810 [2] (does VLC encode & stream the given RSS feed at this point in time? That was part of the experiment...), and got really into creating my own journaling and notetaking methods for life-improvement purposes and extreme weight loss [3] in recent years. It's supported everything I wanted to do and has effectively run my local business admin & creative this whole time as well.
Being a Linux enthusiast since the late '90s, this is way more than I would have dared hope for! Very happy to reflect on all those experiences.
> Something tells me the usual critics still won't be satisfied, but these are both a big deal and tell a story about listening to the improvements that were desired by users.
Critic here. apt is still handicapped and snap is still being pushed down users' throats for profit. Improvement of undesired change resulting in less user control than the state before undesired change is an act of pulling the wool over people's eyes. snap is an unfriendly garbage with which you never know if you should use `--classic` without trial and error. Doing small fixes to this garbage doesn't fix the fiasco that handicapping apt to push snap was.
Ubuntu feels like the macOS of Linux distros. Debian still feels like... a Linux distro. I haven't used Ubuntu in awhile though maybe I should try again just to compare to my Debian machine.
I switched from Ubuntu 20.04 to Debian 11 at the end of 2022. If you gave me the updated laptop without telling me anything I'm not sure that I'd notice any difference.
My philosophy has been to let the distro package manager handle system packages (kernel, OpenSSL, etc) but then use flatpak [1] to install user progs like Chromium and VSCode so I get bleeding edge releases and sandboxing.
I use Firefox and I switch to Google Chrome for the very few cases when it's too difficult to make a web site work with Firefox plus all the privacy addons I added to it, maybe not every month.
I think I downloaded the installer from Google and I got this
deb [arch=amd64] https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main
in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list now.
That's what i don't get about all the snap complaining. If you know what a snap is, you're already an outlier. If it bothers the user so much, why don't they go straight to the source to begin with (aka Debian)? You can get to the exact same setup.
Ubuntu lts and debian release on pretty comparable cycles, so the newer packages doesn't really hold anymore. Debian installer is pretty straightforward these days imho, but I might be just used to it. Ubuntu has done more customization on the DE compared to pretty much everyone, with Debian you get closer to vanilla gnome experience. This can be seen both as pro and con.
The current stable Debian (11) is two years old. Of course it has older packages than distros released more recently.
Debian 12 is newer than 22.04 right now, and probably about the same as Ubuntu 23.04. It's in hard freeze, and soon to be released though.
The Debian live DVDs are using the Calamares installer now, if that's more your style. Debian's normal installer is still the same as it always was.
Debian is still more default, you set it up for yourself than Ubuntu. I don't like Ubuntu's defaults, but I know what you mean. GNOME's defaults are better now, if that helps out.
For a/ you can use Debian testing and I think it's more or less the same.
For b/ I don't install my OS often enough that it matters that much to me (I think on a laptop I went from Ubuntu 9.04 to 18.04 without ever re installing)
These days I like old and stable and use Debian stable + backport (mostly for kernel) even for desktop, and I'm really happy :)
Same exact complaint. I'm fine with snaps existing. I'm even fine with it being the default. But I should be able to easily avoid using them, and apt sure as hell shouldn't be tricking people into them. The fact that they had to even do that shows that people didn't want them.
Not really. Apt installs snaps in some cases not because they’re tricking people, but because said package is either abandoned by Canonical team like firefox (Mozilla creates snaps for it, so neither Canonical nor Mozilla have to build debs for all the Ubuntu flavors and supported versions anymore), or created so people can help Canonical to test technology like it was with gnome-calculator several years ago.
Then the package should just not exist in apt and you can go install it with snap instead? I'm just learning about this idea that I might use apt and somehow end up with a snap from this thread :(.
Apt does this "tricking" with other stuff too, often just distributing an installer that contacts a third party endpoint which downloads the real installer.
They are talking about forcing snap even when you type `apt install firefox` or `apt install lxd`. The Ubuntu will redirect to the snap package (e.g. `apt install firefox` -> `snap install firefox`).
One example: `apt install firefox` installs the snap variant (which the user probably just uninstalled to replace it with the apt variant, as it is installed by default.)
> snap is still being pushed down users' throats for profit
Unless you are paying for Ubuntu, there is little point complaining. Change distro if you don’t like what they are doing - there’s plenty of choice out there.
Alternatively pay for Windows 11 and get way more advertisements!
Well, hello! Nice to meet you!
I do know what snaps are and I do prefer them in some situations. And yes, I do like my snaps like Nextcloud and ffmpeg for example.
> Something tells me the usual critics still won't be satisfied, but these are both a big deal and tell a story about listening to the improvements that were desired by users.
As a current user of Ubuntu (and someone who has only defaulted to Ubuntu from the day Shuttleworth shipped a set of like 10 CDs for me to install Ubuntu), I hope this isn’t Canonical’s take in this situation.
Automatic updates and replacements while using the app was egregious behavior by default, and the fact that users couldn’t turn it off for years is not something that is resolved by them fixing it after users suffered with it for years. The fact that they introduced it without an off switch, something that even Apple, which is the ultimate control freak still provides on iOS, the ultimate corporate control freak platform, is not something to be proud of.
The question it raises is what insane settingless default Ubuntu might push onto its users next. And fixing it years later does not answer that question at all.
The only thing it does is Ubuntu admitting that they were wrong after spending years pretending otherwise. Something they’ve also done with other insane decisions, such as Mir, for example.
I'm sure you'll learn this from ads in motd, apt (if it's still working) and possibly new places which Canonical's suits found suitable for ads placement.
For context for other readers, security updates for packages in universe and multiverse used to be "best effort". Now, Canonical's security team does the work of patching all of them just like with main and restricted, except that they're gated behind an Ubuntu Pro subscription even if you're on the latest Ubuntu release.
it is not that easy: in our context (where we have to assure our customerss that the operating systems are patched for security) it practically means that we are not respecting the contract. We have a a lot of servers (all VMs), who doesn't these days?, due to splitting in a lot of micro-services, that means that with the PRO move we have a LOT of added costs: customers says, of course, why don't you use another linux?
It was our (my personal, actually) mistake to move from Centos to Ubuntu some years ago: plus another big mistake was not to feel it coming (the PRO move, I mean), even by reading HN daily! I figured it out only the day I saw, in the cli, the pretty explicit message, which to me sounded like:
* there are security patches available, but you don't get it until you give us 500$
User since the Hoary Hedgehog days. Congrats Canonical on the new release.
Slight tangent - is 22.04 in a good place as a daily driver? I know it's an LTS release. Mostly recalling concerns around wayland and zoom playing well together. Running a thinkpad t15 gen 2 if that helps.
I use Kubuntu 22.04...dot 04 I think?, haven't tried Zoom yet but all of my video-related stuff has worked fine, from streaming to video editing to various games. It's been solid here FWIW. I'm considering turning on backports, for that quasi-rolling experience.
Note, I don't generally take the upgrade path and install from scratch before migrating my home folder & cron jobs and all that. Apt-clone can help as well.
As total Linux noob, I run Ubuntu 22.04 as a daily driver on my private Lenovo X1 Extreme Gen 2. No issues whatsoever, runs better than Windows. Exception: battery life, but I only use the nVidia graphics regardless of OS, and even under Windows that didn't reault in great battery life.
The sole caveat, not all of my Steam library has been ported to Linux. Other than that, I hardly ever boot Windows on that machine anymore.
Been using 22.04 for ~a year now as my primary workstation. My main pain-point is that I can't do screen sharing or snapshots with Wayland. If I had it to do over again, I'd avoid Wayland. Also, Firefox as a snap has largely pushed me away from Firefox.
Unsure. It should. I went all in on wayland, and have decided to just use my mac for screen sharing and snipping rather than messing around with X. Is it easy to switch? Switching to Sway was easy.
Yep, switching from i3 to sway when I made the 22.04+Wayland switch was pretty easy, had some issues with multiple outputs and the screen locker, but the bulk of the i3 config just worked.
I have yet to install a snap that failed to fail. Usually it seems to do with accessing drives. For instance Firefox will not open the Downloads folder and will not open file dialog for email attachments in gmail.
I got the upgrade to Fedora 38 on my machines today too (although I see the official release was a couple days ago).
I'm curious about who gets excited about and uses these non-LTS Ubuntu releases. It seems to me that the five-year LTS offering is the main reason to use Ubuntu, if you want stability and don't like Debian and don't need to pay for RHEL. If you want fresher, why not Fedora or an Arch derivative?
Historically, it's been popular as a user-friendly desktop distribution, in which case updating semi regularly to stay on a current version makes perfect sense
Agreed, if you know how Ubuntu works fairly well, and want to maintain a relatively modern system feel, LTS might not even be the right track. I used to aim to upgrade to non-LTS plus an .01 or .02 at the very end, ideally.
Moving to LTS later on as an experiment was extremely stable but I had to ask how much stability I really needed, as the excitement with my desktop was waning. :-)
It's a jack of all trades with no very particularly weak points, that allows me to just work. I'm done fucking around with config files because oops Arch wants to install glibc-alpha-rewrote-in-haskell.
Want a recent kernel ? Ubuntu is relatively good at that. Want software that's more or less up to date, without needing the bleeding edge ? Their repos are good at that. Not in the repos ? You can probably add-apt-repository something and you'll be good to go. Need a reliable DE ? Gnome is fine. Hate Gnome ? It's alright, there's a KDE and Xfce version too. What's that, you want snaps ? Yeah, it's there. Flatpaks ? There too. Is more or less Debian compatible, which is pretty much the only distro you can expect people to properly package for ? Gotcha. Weird setups like Optimus that end up being broken in most places ? Works just fine. Proprietary nvidia drivers ? Sure.
I'm done fucking around for hours getting Arch to not be crap, or Fedora to not use fucking pacman, give me apt. I just want a work distro that will handle 99% of what I throw at it without any issues.
The primary reason I'm using Ubuntu rather than Debian is the LTS. I know the general consensus is that "Debian is as stable as Ubuntu LTS", but we are still working on upgrading our 18.04 boxes a few months ago.
We can't change all of our platforms as quickly as Debian retires old releases. Especially not while also doing our other operations work. In some cases we can just lay down the new OS and run Ansible and we're good, but in other cases porting to new OS releases can take months of effort.
I don't really understand Debian LTS, I know they more recently, meaning maybe in the last 5 years, talked about increasing the support cycle, but if I go to https://wiki.debian.org/LTS it says "current LTS supported until 2024, future LTS supported to 2026. There is then some "Extended LTS" that has further support, saying "adding another 5 years to the existing 5 years", which is commercial and probably something I'm not going to be able to sell over using Ubuntu LTS.
May sound trite, but Ubuntu feels more visually polished than any other distro. It's clearly in the Canonical DNA to actually care how stuff looks design wise which is an otherwise major failing across the other distros. After all I'm staring at this stuff all day long.
I upgraded all my machines to 38 today (I stopped running Ubuntu on desktop due to snaps), _except_ servers (which are all Ubuntu LTS except hypervisors). I tend to stick to Ubuntu LTS on servers and never try .10 releases, let alone interim years...
In my experience regular Ubuntu releases are still more tested and polished than Fedora or any Arch derivative. So it’s generally safer to use if you want to drive more fresh versions of kernel and graphics stack. They’re not perfect though, some of them were pretty horrible over the years, like 11.04. The current 23.04 has also several gnome and mutter related bugs that are not critical, but annoying.
Not excited and actually not updating right now, but for a desktop install I do see people going every upgrade. Speaking couch laptop here, I usually upgrade when the new LTS release is out, sticking out the full 4-5 years on a desktop is a thing I only know from universities and corps.
I personally mostly stick to LTS and then add any package via nixpkgs where I either want the absolute latest version or want some sort of decoupling from the distro package manager but still not build on my own.
Yeah, this is about what I was thinking; not that most users would go the full five years without upgrading, but that they could, and that every two or three years with a new LTS release would be what most non-Fedora, non-Arch, desktop users would want.
Ugh, great another pointless name to memorize. I really have come to dislike the "cute names" Ubuntu uses and "Lunar Lobster" just makes me not want to. Not that Debian or MacOS are much better.
Sure maybe they're great if you're dealing with it all day, but to I have to Google which version is newer half the time. Or sit there and sing the alphabet song to myself cause I forget if h or k comes first.
Oh come on! Nobody actually refers to the versions by the fun names anyway, the date version numbers are what people search for when they need info. They're just a bit of fun.
If you work with it daily maybe. The LTS releases in numerical form are anchor points. (even number + .04), but even if I should know I'd have to look up again which one is 22.04.
Wasn't a problem when doing OS stuff with servers every day, sure.
I just did the update on a workstation of mine. During the update to 23.04 the Firefox snap was downgraded from 112.0.1-1 (latest/stable) to 111.0.1-2 (latest/stable/ubuntu-23.04). When trying to start Firefox after the reboot it will detect the downgrade and in order to prevent data corruption offer two choices: create a brand new user profile or quit. Oh Canonical, the Firefox snap fun never ends.
Yep, gnome 44 is definitely not good enough yet. I’d advise not to upgrade to 23.04 right now and wait at least a month for fixes to come. While I haven’t noticed major regressions personally, gnome and its components are producing little but annoying bugs. 22.10 was awesome from day one, 23.04 is not.
I really think most Ubuntu users should give Fedora a spin. It's really polished, Red Hat has no interest in pushing proprietary nonsense (Flatpaks, if you choose to use them, are decentralized), the immutable system work in Silverblue/Kinoite is really interesting, and dnf is just nicer to use than apt. You have a full transaction history and can undo a numbered transaction, I have no idea why apt still doesn't have that.
119 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadFor AAPL investors - every version after that is more "significant", especially after OS X was renamed to macOS and dark mode was used to keep nose-y media out of anti-privacy changes like user being informed what is "shared with Apple" instead of being asked whether anything should be "shared with Apple".
Downhill after that - children are used in hideous manner by Cook to invade users' privacy, like scanning and profiling their files as a pretense of looking for child porn. I find Cook's use of child porn argument to spy on all users absolutely disgusting.
I want to pay for my Linux.
I’d write a wishlist but anyone could write another one, but I’d take any OS that convinces me to pay $300 a year.
I’d pay for anything as nice as macOS (with the old control panel). I pay that price for my IDE and an OS is worth way more, open-source at that, which actually advances humanity. Linux is the VIIth wonder of the human civilization, a demonstration of human selflessness, as opposed to Windows, Linux will be here in 50 years becauE OSS is a donation of code to our children; Also no human construction has ever been so widespread across the world and even on other planets (Linux is powering the helicopter flying on Mars), of course I wish I could pay for… for a Linux that made me productive, not like Ubuntu.
Also paying means it would actually receive good marketing teams.
Is this not the theory behind Red Hat?
You're welcome to use that $300/year to sponsor individual projects / developers.
Go for it: https://ubuntu.com/pro/subscribe.
It’s been systematic that each time someone says “I’d pay for a good linux”, they’re given the link as if to assume we’re not already paying. You forgot that I want a nice OS in exchange.
Moreover, I left Ubuntu. It’s software that I can’t be convinced to use even if it were free. Canonical’s choices (with Unity at the time, but also the mouse issue, and so on) are of the rare kind that they can convince someone to uninstall it and go buy 2x more expensive hardware to run macOS.
What’s missing is, I’d pay good money, but I don’t want to fiddle around with the OS. I’d pay for the betterment of the OS, but with distribs, if you pay, you’re still not the customer.
And I pay for Debian. But it’s not my desktop OS.
> It’s been systematic that each time someone says “I’d pay for a good linux”, they’re given the link as if to assume we’re not already paying.
Sorry, maybe I misunderstood what you said. You said that "you want to pay". "Wanting to pay" kind of implies that you don't pay today but you would if given an option. I simply thought you were being a jerk. Thanks for clarifying. No offence.
> You forgot that I want a nice OS in exchange.
Ah, special wishes. The guy next to you wants something that looks like ... beos. Or windows. It's all customizable. You know how it works because
> And I pay for Debian. But it’s not my desktop OS.
You don't want to, you already pay for some Linux distribution. Apologies, it's difficult to predict what you wanted to say when so much context is missing :)
Everyone has special requests, especially around the idea of having a decent UI that doesn’t make you lose heaps of time with Linux, and as I said, what Linux lacks is proper PMs and marketing guys who would sort and address these UX issues.
And fewer obnoxious mobs who just give you the link to pay up and ask you to shut up about your special requests.
That's... let's go with unlikely to happen.
All of those were pretty major changes and definitely not just incremental. And that is just top of my head, I probably missed lot of things. On the other hand, most gnome2 era releases are pretty much a blur in my mind. What to you made those feel more significant?
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting
It is a good idea to install security updates from unstable since they take extra time to reach testing and the security team only releases updates to unstable
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LunarLobster/ReleaseNotes
(Can’t see Canonical’s site behind the tracking popup.)
> Updates for running snaps download in the background and are applied automatically when the app is closed.
Boom, that's a big one.
> Users and administrators can now pause automatic updates of specific snaps as long as desired.
What, wow.
Something tells me the usual critics still won't be satisfied, but these are both a big deal and tell a story about listening to the improvements that were desired by users.
> Ubuntu 23.04 includes GNOME 44, delivering further usability improvements with a focus on new quick settings options for bluetooth device management and dark mode.
Not a small change...
> The Firefox snap also benefits from significant performance gains on the Raspberry Pi with hardware accelerated rendering.
Q: Is this limited to Raspberry Pi, or not so much?
The Steam changes also seem like potentially huge conveniences to me.
Nice job Ubuntu team! Satisfied user since 2004 here; I do switch between the various buntus (kurrently Kubuntu) & love to discover other distros too.
I was thinking back today...Ubuntu was awesome to me when I Photoshopped and Netflixed in Windows in 2009 [1], played with various hardware & learned to stream video to some of those devices on the WLAN, like my n810 [2] (does VLC encode & stream the given RSS feed at this point in time? That was part of the experiment...), and got really into creating my own journaling and notetaking methods for life-improvement purposes and extreme weight loss [3] in recent years. It's supported everything I wanted to do and has effectively run my local business admin & creative this whole time as well.
Being a Linux enthusiast since the late '90s, this is way more than I would have dared hope for! Very happy to reflect on all those experiences.
1. https://www.friendlyskies.net/images/435t.jpg
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7PYUZ5z1wM
3. https://www.friendlyskies.net/images/396t.png
Critic here. apt is still handicapped and snap is still being pushed down users' throats for profit. Improvement of undesired change resulting in less user control than the state before undesired change is an act of pulling the wool over people's eyes. snap is an unfriendly garbage with which you never know if you should use `--classic` without trial and error. Doing small fixes to this garbage doesn't fix the fiasco that handicapping apt to push snap was.
- Chrome Stable - 112.0.5615.137
- Debian Bullseye (stable) - 108.0.5359.94
- Debian Bookworm (testing) - 112.0.5615.49
Most people I know who run Debian for personal desktops uses Testing, not Stable. Vice-versa for servers.
https://wiki.debian.org/Chromium
https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/c...
- buster 90.0.4430.212-1~deb10u1
- bullseye 108.0.5359.94-1~deb11u1
- bullseye (security) 112.0.5615.121-1~deb11u1
- bookworm 112.0.5615.49-2
- sid 112.0.5615.138-1
[1] https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.chromium.Chromium
I think I downloaded the installer from Google and I got this
in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list now.a) ubuntu had newer packages
b) ubuntu had a much nicer installer
c) ubuntu had nice defaults/polish on the ui and fonts
Maybe Debian has changed since, but that's why I'd been hesitant to install it in the past.
Debian 12 is newer than 22.04 right now, and probably about the same as Ubuntu 23.04. It's in hard freeze, and soon to be released though.
The Debian live DVDs are using the Calamares installer now, if that's more your style. Debian's normal installer is still the same as it always was.
Debian is still more default, you set it up for yourself than Ubuntu. I don't like Ubuntu's defaults, but I know what you mean. GNOME's defaults are better now, if that helps out.
For b/ I don't install my OS often enough that it matters that much to me (I think on a laptop I went from Ubuntu 9.04 to 18.04 without ever re installing)
These days I like old and stable and use Debian stable + backport (mostly for kernel) even for desktop, and I'm really happy :)
I am interested to see how they will fare in the long term as ubuntu moves farther and farther away from debian though.
Switching to a new OS isn’t something that’s either easy or a decision that can be made lightly.
That said, I'm on Fedora as a daily driver and it's pretty good.
The package manager is the installer, and the package is the archive to install. This seems ridiculous
Unless you are paying for Ubuntu, there is little point complaining. Change distro if you don’t like what they are doing - there’s plenty of choice out there.
Alternatively pay for Windows 11 and get way more advertisements!
Oh, ubuntu beem making decisions that many users think make things worse since it was first released
and yet it's still quite popular
Give it a few years and they will switch to Flatpack.
As a current user of Ubuntu (and someone who has only defaulted to Ubuntu from the day Shuttleworth shipped a set of like 10 CDs for me to install Ubuntu), I hope this isn’t Canonical’s take in this situation.
Automatic updates and replacements while using the app was egregious behavior by default, and the fact that users couldn’t turn it off for years is not something that is resolved by them fixing it after users suffered with it for years. The fact that they introduced it without an off switch, something that even Apple, which is the ultimate control freak still provides on iOS, the ultimate corporate control freak platform, is not something to be proud of.
The question it raises is what insane settingless default Ubuntu might push onto its users next. And fixing it years later does not answer that question at all.
The only thing it does is Ubuntu admitting that they were wrong after spending years pretending otherwise. Something they’ve also done with other insane decisions, such as Mir, for example.
Yes. It's still a turd under the polish.
https://ubuntu.com/pricing/pro
It was our (my personal, actually) mistake to move from Centos to Ubuntu some years ago: plus another big mistake was not to feel it coming (the PRO move, I mean), even by reading HN daily! I figured it out only the day I saw, in the cli, the pretty explicit message, which to me sounded like:
* there are security patches available, but you don't get it until you give us 500$
Slight tangent - is 22.04 in a good place as a daily driver? I know it's an LTS release. Mostly recalling concerns around wayland and zoom playing well together. Running a thinkpad t15 gen 2 if that helps.
Note, I don't generally take the upgrade path and install from scratch before migrating my home folder & cron jobs and all that. Apt-clone can help as well.
The sole caveat, not all of my Steam library has been ported to Linux. Other than that, I hardly ever boot Windows on that machine anymore.
(I loathe snaps, but they do mostly work IME)
nodejs deb, there wont be errors.
weird snaps.
I'm curious about who gets excited about and uses these non-LTS Ubuntu releases. It seems to me that the five-year LTS offering is the main reason to use Ubuntu, if you want stability and don't like Debian and don't need to pay for RHEL. If you want fresher, why not Fedora or an Arch derivative?
Moving to LTS later on as an experiment was extremely stable but I had to ask how much stability I really needed, as the excitement with my desktop was waning. :-)
Want a recent kernel ? Ubuntu is relatively good at that. Want software that's more or less up to date, without needing the bleeding edge ? Their repos are good at that. Not in the repos ? You can probably add-apt-repository something and you'll be good to go. Need a reliable DE ? Gnome is fine. Hate Gnome ? It's alright, there's a KDE and Xfce version too. What's that, you want snaps ? Yeah, it's there. Flatpaks ? There too. Is more or less Debian compatible, which is pretty much the only distro you can expect people to properly package for ? Gotcha. Weird setups like Optimus that end up being broken in most places ? Works just fine. Proprietary nvidia drivers ? Sure.
I'm done fucking around for hours getting Arch to not be crap, or Fedora to not use fucking pacman, give me apt. I just want a work distro that will handle 99% of what I throw at it without any issues.
why might somebody not like Debian?
We can't change all of our platforms as quickly as Debian retires old releases. Especially not while also doing our other operations work. In some cases we can just lay down the new OS and run Ansible and we're good, but in other cases porting to new OS releases can take months of effort.
I expected the answer to the parent's question to be Ubuntu's support for non-free things out-of-the-box.
I personally mostly stick to LTS and then add any package via nixpkgs where I either want the absolute latest version or want some sort of decoupling from the distro package manager but still not build on my own.
Sure maybe they're great if you're dealing with it all day, but to I have to Google which version is newer half the time. Or sit there and sing the alphabet song to myself cause I forget if h or k comes first.
Wasn't a problem when doing OS stuff with servers every day, sure.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-2304-laptops