I was hardcore Ubuntu devotee for many years and at one point just got tired of having to undo all of the terrible choices being made for users. Minimal install saved the time of having to undo before doing things the way I wanted.
It's this kind of messing around with package and desktop managers that finally sent me to other distros.
Yeah. It's hard to figure out who Canonical thinks its customers are now. I'm not a super-libre-pedant and am usually happy to run closed source driver blobs. But stock debian seems to be getting better with driver support and I probably should be more careful about the provenance of proprietary drivers. Seems like every week there's a reminder that I'm not Ubuntu's target market.
AFAICT, Canonical's customers are cloud vendors and people who buy cloud services. The Linux desktop is, in that sense, just a hearts and minds investment for people who run linux workstations to manage their much larger linux server fleet. From that perspective, the investments in charm and snap on the desktop feel a bit like a sales pitch for their new cloud features. Which.... would be more effective if they didn't also make the user experience for FF emphatically worse.
And originally, Ubuntu was a high visibility demo piece for Launchpad. If it can manage the full build cycle for Debian, it can certainly handle your niche app.
I'm guessing Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop customers are businesses that are using Ubuntu as a cheap Windows replacement. The IT departments who set up their OS probably just do the default install, so the minimal install option is just more code to maintain.
Even now snaps are pretty avoidable for almost everything but we'll see how that lasts.
Firefox is the only major thing where I've just abandoned the package manager, and it's probably a better experience this way than the .deb was in the first place.
I run Ubuntu LTS on many of my servers. Most of them are just VM hosts running KVM. If I had to do it again, I'd go with Debian. Ubuntu upgrades often do strange and surprising things. I remember doing a minor upgrade with 20.04 and losing the default route! Another minor upgrade renamed network interfaces. (20.04.1 I think?) The machine was completely inaccessible remotely.
Perhaps this was "my" fault because the machine had been updated several times, originally at 14.04 through various LTS releases, accumulating cruft.
Fedora has an existing look of being... too easy/friendly/noobish? It's not necessarily the trendy "at your own risk" distro others choose. However, I completely feel Fedora is going to be the strongest distros in the mix in the next decade. ostree, docker-image-based, read-only images are going to be The Thing (tm). I'm hoping they take CoreOS and continue it as a server-oriented minimal distro, and use it as a base layer for the desktop-oriented ones like Silverblue.
I wish I could articulate this better, but this is how 1 person is creating their own customized version of Fedora Silverblue - with Github workflows:
I can just rebase off of that image and try it out like a git remote branch.
Add in eventual plans for dm-verity and such, and Fedora's distros (kinoite, silverblue, (sigacea?)) are going to be leaders. Much more dependable and predictable.
The one thing I would want to know before switching from fedora to ubuntu - there's a ton of software support given ubuntu's prior popularity, so it always seems like the path of least resistance getting set up for basic things like a samba server or for a pytorch/CUDA development setup - how far along is this with Fedora? Similarly, there's a ton of user generated tutorials/technical and configuration answers online for ubuntu - I am hoping Fedora has this sort of material floating around?
Similarly, it seems the Fedora community exists by the good graces...of IBM - how much independence would it have in the future?
In my experience I’ve not had any issues finding resources and materials for most anything I want to do with Fedora.
That said I also migrated from Arch to Fedora when I needed to pick between Ubuntu and Fedora for work, so I was used to being a bit more hands on to begin with.
Universal Blue (https://universal-blue.org/) takes the OCI-based Silverblue and extends it even further, including bluefin (https://universal-blue.org/images/bluefin/) which aims to provide an Ubuntu-like desktop experience for those of us who've given up on Ubuntu/Canonical.
I switched to mint linux for a few VMs that used to be ubuntu. So far it's working well where ubuntu just kind of stopped working for reasons I don't really have time for. Ubuntu changed some stuff and it's not really viable for me anymore.
I really wouldn't call it a reskin of Ubuntu. It uses the Ubuntu repositories sure, but it also has many of its own packages and there is the LMDE version which bases on Debian instead of Ubuntu (in case they ever want to become independant of ubuntu). Mint has none of the crap Ubuntu comes with and won't inexplicitly install snaps.
Mint develops their own desktop environment cinnamon (based on gnome 2).
If a distro is a reskin one should be able to convert an install of the original distro to the reskinned version. Mint comes with heaps of its own software, for managing software installation, software upgrades, managing kernels, managing release upgrades and of course its own DE.
Hi all I’m Tim the Director of Engineering for the Ubuntu Desktop. I think the headline here may have embellished my original post, so if you’re interested, you can find it here [1].
Ubuntu is (almost) 20 years young! As I am sure you can appreciate that means a long history of technical changes. We’re looking to modernise the desktop. We started with 23.04 when we moved from Ubiquity to Subiquity, the Ubuntu Server installer, unifying our tech stack to create a more coherent installation experience across Ubuntu Server and Desktop. We also moved the installer UI from GTK to Flutter to make iterating the interface much easier (Flutter tooling is excellent).
Still, we need to be bolder. In fact we shouldn’t be talking about the installer nearly so much; it's a tool not the destination. I want to improve the installation through the first boot experience so we can move onto more interesting things. We’re exploring a range of changes to get this part right: from declarative configs to answering the question “what does security by default” mean in 2023? In the context of this headline, and to make our intentions clear, we are looking to minimise the default installation. So the plan is to have one lean installation option.
It's late in the UK so I’m going to sign off and be back at this in the morning. We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on what an awesome out-of-box-experience could look like (either here or in the original discourse post).
> We also moved the installer UI from GTK to Flutter to make iterating the interface much easier (Flutter tooling is excellent).
I'm an Ubuntu fan. With that said, I agree that GTK tooling could definitely be better. However, rather than branching off to Flutter, I would much rather see Canonical unite around GNOME technologies and use Vala/GTK.
In a broader sense, I believe Ubuntu is branching off too much and in a number of ways. I myself, and several users I know, have left Ubuntu after the decision to push Snaps so heavily. Flatpak has a number of advantages, and I believe Canonical's efforts would be better spent helping to improve Flatpak rather than building a competing product.
Fundamentally, I believe Ubuntu's vision should be a Debian derivative whose system is updated via aptitude/dpkg on the awesome interim/LTS release schedule that made Ubuntu great. Userspace apps, on the other hand, can and probably should be sandboxed in the form of Flatpaks, which would provide rolling releases and system isolation. With the combined efforts of Canonical and the rest of the community centered on Flatpak, much could be gained.
Ubuntu Desktop, being a desktop distribution, should choose one desktop environment and embrace it wholeheartedly. With GNOME being the environment of choice, I believe Ubuntu should ship GNOME's core apps by default (https://apps.gnome.org/) and no more, no less. Along this vein of thought, while it's cute to have a rebranded version of GNOME software and call it the "Snap Store", that honestly feels tangential. Instead, Ubuntu should use a mostly vanilla GNOME software center (and not a renamed one), and as I said above, switch the Ubuntu ecosystem from Snaps to Flatpak.
Ubuntu was great not when it was different, but when it provided stable, sane defaults that "just worked."
I’m in an interesting scenario because I actually use a Linux desktop at work (working on Linux platform devices so having your desktop be able to run buildroot and/or the software directly is useful and IT likes Ubuntu) and it’s honestly a very good OOB experience as is atm, the main changes I would make for casual users would be fleshing out the store more and removing reliance on snaps, apt auto installing snaps has caused me way more problems than it has solved and while I think snap is fine it shouldn’t do things unless I try to use it directly because it doesn’t play very nicely with apt. Also I think you’re overestimating how much people actually want bold changes, we’re using Ubuntu 20.04 because 22.04 changed too many things and many packages we use don’t work.
unattended fleet VMs with common AUTH linked to billing, none of which is run by me, does not look like the same security as my computer, my choice , Sir
I can sympathize with the technical concern, but really? We shouldn't talk like that to people willing to come here and discuss their decisions. It'll just prevent people from doing so in the future.
The reply was too kind and I'm glad they held back; Ubuntu needs to understand that we're abandoning it primarily for concerns about their technical reasoning. "What the fuck is their going on with their decision making process" is exactly the problem.
On the installer image is a directory casper, there is another image filesystem.squashfs, I suspect that it is simply unpacked to the hard disk during installation. System deployment is really fast this way. Also in casper directory are two more interesting files: filesystem.manifest-minimal-remove and filesystem.manifest-remove with a bunch of packages names. And of course you should have a look at the log during the installation process, all the "apt purge" things show up there.
That is no longer the case with the new default Desktop subiquity installer in 23.04. Instead of a single squashfs, there are separate squashfs files so the minimal install is faster than default in 23.04.
Just follow the installer log. It does the Ubuntu standard installation followed by removal of non-essential packages (office utilities, AV utilities etc.)
That is how i understood it. Then during install you’re promoted if you want to install additional software with probably a list that’s is the equivalent of today’s full install, easily selectable.
"DietPi is an extremely lightweight Debian OS, highly optimised for minimal CPU and RAM resource usage, ensuring your SBC always runs at its maximum potential".
I recently upgraded a Linode Ubuntu VPS to the latest (server) LTS version. After the upgrade, it started shutting down every 15-20 minutes like clockwork. I looked everywhere. I thought perhaps it could be some errant kernel configuration that was incompatible with the new version of the distro. I must’ve overlooked the actual problem at least a dozen times before I finally got a hint from /var/log/syslog. A lack of display/network activity had been detected, so the system was going to sleep. After the upgrade, that must’ve been the new default. I still don’t understand how this made sense for a server edition. How does the new default handle situations like these?
Yeah, no thanks. I don't want all my packages to break when something fundamental like libpng updates. Again. Or for an update to break just because I didn't update for a month, and then I have to read multiple forum threads to figure out how to unfuck things.
It's not nearly as bad as you're making it out to be. I only vaguely remember a big libpng breakage thing from ~10 years ago--is that what you're referring to?
Also, I often go 6+ months without updating this machine. The only friction I've gotten in years is pacman-keyring updates sometimes need to be done first, before updating the rest of the system because of key expiration from going so long between updates. Recently, they merged the community repo into the extra repo and left community empty for the time being, so the only maintenance I did was to remove [community] from my pacman.conf after running a system update a few weeks ago (again, after months of not updating)--and even that I didn't technically need to do yet, since the community repo still exists for now.
Everyone's use case is different, and I surely don't have the same configuration or packages as you or anyone else, but this kind of comment sounds like bullshit to me.
EDIT: Not that I'm agreeing with the recommendation to use Arch if you used to use Ubuntu's minimal install. Arch is a drastic change compared to just doing a full Ubuntu install and removing a bunch of crap...
libpng has done it, as has libjpeg. Grub did it, unexpected kernel updates have done it, and updates to wireless driver packages - which was particularly egregious.
I first want to emphasize that I'm sorry you multiple rough experiences, and I'll concede that Arch seems to not meet your needs (especially your hardware needs, apparently).
But, for anyone else reading, I'll say that I ran Arch on my personal laptop from about 2009 to 2020 before I finally stopped using that machine altogether, and I've run Arch on my current personal laptop from about 2015/2016 until now. This current one has an Nvidia GPU, which is a little hit or miss depending on the kernel/driver version.
At various points I've definitely had to spend some time fixing things after updates, but almost all of those were because of packages I had installed from the AUR (a community "repository" of unofficial, untrusted, packages maintained by individual users) that either updated before or after my official Arch packages did, which cause dependency issues. This is certainly no different than any Linux distro where you install a third-party package outside of the official channels that also depends on specific versions of packages being present.
Other times, things broke because I was doing hacky shit, like custom kernel patches.
Certainly there were a few times that breaking changes came from official updates. There was always enough info on the Arch main page and/or forums to either prevent a breakage or to quickly fix it.
This is the price we pay for a rolling release instead of periodic major releases like most popular distros do. I've run Ubuntu on several machines and I've never done a version upgrade without it borking something (often times it was the GRUB config not being updated correctly and failing to boot). Granted, it's been several years since attempting an Ubuntu major version upgrade, so maybe they're awesome and smooth now--I don't know.
I ran Arch on my first laptop for 10 years without ever wiping and reinstalling it. I've run it on my current laptop for going on 7 years (the machine is falling apart, so it probably won't make it to 10, but not because of the OS) without reinstalling. The most fiddling I have to do with my current one is that I sometimes switch between the proprietary Nvidia driver and the free Nouveau driver.
Now, Arch is not for everyone. If you don't want to actually touch config files for all of your underlying system services, and don't want to think about how to partition your disk or what filesystem to use, Arch is no fun. And, to be completely honest, if I weren't already very familiar with Arch, I might not have the energy/time to get into it today. But, I feel lucky that I found Arch when I was young and had not much better to do than tinker around with my computer's OS, because I get pretty frustrated and overwhelmed these days when I have to use something like Ubuntu where I feel like it's a little harder to do anything that's not "standard" (though, I'm not necessarily saying Ubuntu does stuff wrong--just that I like how transparent Arch is).
>for an update to break just because I didn't update for a month,
I don't understand why people thing infrequent updates will break things. This idea seems to have started spreading a few years ago, but nobody I ask can tell me why Arch would break if you didn't update frequently enough.
Arch is great when you live and breathe it, but it's pretty much the only distro that has required reading to know when manual intervention is required and what the latest problem packages are just to run updates.
And if you aren't part of Arch culture and already know that you need to know this, or you step away from a system for long enough and miss some Arch News, you're going to have a uniquely Arch experience when you reflexively pacman -Syu instead of running informant or checkupdates first.
Is it illogical and inscrutable? Not at all. Does it sometimes skip a few steps here and there that can trip up both new users and old ones? For sure.
While needing to read the news may be specific to Arch, it's going to cause the same problems if you don't read the news before daily updates or yearly updates. It doesn't explain the idea that rare updates is guaranteed breakage.
This comes from having used Arch for years previously.
Arch breaks things all the time. They've needed specific /etc updates, fixes to unbreak config changes, and as I alluded to, holding off updates to stop breaking due to uneven updates of incredibly common shared libraries
Debian mini.iso, with the option to not install additional packages is also pretty minimal, and text-only. You can install your desktop later via apt.
Ubuntu used to have a mini.iso too, and it was almost indistinguishable from its Debian counterpart. Both distros relied on apt, and since these minimal installs essentially just contained whatever was needed to have a working system running apt, they were essentially the same, with slightly different default settings. The biggest difference was the release cycle and the attitude towards proprietary software.
From my experience, Arch is great for messing around with, but not as a daily driver. It is also not the most beginner friendly distro for people looking for one.
Arch's package management tooling is a bit of an unconsolidated inconsistent mess.
As someone who used Debian for decades before experimenting with Arch on my laptop for a few years now, Debian is far more polished and ergonomic in the package tooling.
The ability to install a source package for what's installed isn't even included in the distro's package tooling out of the box.
Coming from Debian you'd expect `pacman` to support doing this, let alone at least say something about it in its man page.
I'm not even sure how the hell you'd figure out `asp` exists and is something you need to explicitly install if all you knew is `pacman`, without using internet searches as an escape hatch.
There was a time long ago when most distros were a hodge podge of work-in-progress discrete tools you had to discover the names of and install separately. Using Arch feels like going back decades in this regard, not in a good way. It's unclear to me why they haven't worked on consolidating these components into a cohesive entrypoint making everything discoverable and more uniform in their UX.
Ubuntu, the distro for desktops and laptops, is DEAD and has been for sometime, Ubuntu is now Microsoft's lapdog. (For better or worse, I don't think it's super evil, but let's just all be honest here)
Linux Mint or MX Linux are the way to go here. Time to move on.
I started on Debian and I will die using Debian. I have used Ubuntu before, and I admit it is a good way for Debian to get new features like an upstream or something.
there is always testing and unstable - if you want something fresher.
i personally run unstable for past 20 years. i think i had serious breakage only once
Ditto. Toyed with RH and Mandrake back in the day, but quickly moved to Debian and have been there since. Played with Ubuntu and a couple smaller niche distros, but always came back to good ol' Deborah.
on AWS in go-go years, Ubuntu with easy defaults and permissive licenses became the number one installed VM .. by a very large margin. The numbers were not even close.. like 15x more daily volume of VMs on AWS than the next closest three or whatever.. look for yourself. That in turn begat the very hot breath of MSFT upon Ubuntu-Canonical, which shows in the boot signing keys for Ubuntu, the MSFT-private partition type in the disk installer, and the WSL. MSFT influences can be seen in the push for always-on snap with libc and unattended-upgrades phone home and the like.
idk about MX Linux but Linux Mint is Ubuntu without any Snap, with additional official apt repos, Flatpack support out of the box and, last but not least, its own house made desktop environment.
To me it’s as far from Ubuntu as Ubuntu is far from Debian.
This is 90% true, but also the 10% matters in terms of "onboarding people to the desktop," which I think still is very important (and actually going reasonably well, IMHO)
Right, but that's all taken care of. Chromebooks outsell everything else, and Android phones outsell everything else, and Steam Decks haven't quite got there yet but it's early days.
Linux is 100% of one market segment, broadband routers. No matter how staunch a Windows zealot someone is, there's a bunch of stuff they depend on that cannot be done with Windows at all, not no-how.
Can't tell you "exactly" because it's been so long. Might have been as early as '99? Was definitely using Ubuntu as a desktop from its literal beginning. Why?
Anyway, no, the new Ubuntu crap is mostly just that. This isn't a mere idea; I teach IT and every semester I require folks to use a Linux desktop. Mint, MX, Lubuntu and Ubuntu, the occasional Arch are all in testing rotation; over the past few years Ubuntu/Gnome give me the most trouble -- they just suck at backwards compatibility.
Oh, crap. What do I install on the little laptops I use for single-purpose stuff. Is there still going to be XUbuntu? Can I get something that never "phones home"?
If you have the time and know-how, you can build your own system off of Ubuntu Base[0]. It's as barebones you can get with Ubuntu - doesn't have snap or any other crap the "minimal" ISO does. You'd need to chroot into it to install the kernel, and you'd probably want to generate an initrd image. I have an example of how to do this on GitHub that you can steal from[1].
It's this kind of messing around with package and desktop managers that finally sent me to other distros.