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Canonical always has tried to differentiate themselves, and they just can't execute. Remember Unity, Mir, Juju, upstart and all the other failed shit they've co

Canonical always has tried to differentiate themselves, and they just can't execute. Remember Unity, Mir, Juju, upstart and all the other failed shit they've come out with? Snap is just more of the same. I don't want to run that garbage on my desktop. I don't need more daemons and forced auto-updates and all the baggage. I strongly recommend anyone similarly frustrated to check out debian, which is a fantastic distro. Thanks to Kevin for posting this, but if you're using Ubuntu and disabling snap, you're fighting against the current and I have to imagine it's going to be increasingly difficult with subsequent releases.

robocat 6y ago
> and they just can't execute That’s a bit rich: are they not the #1 consumer distro, which hardly implies they are failing to execute. A successful product has missteps, so what. > I don't want to run that garbage on my desktop. So don’t. Why complain that others do? I use Ubuntu because it works and I can mostly find information about how to do what I want. There are major aspects of Ubuntu I don’t like (Gnome, Snap) but selecting a distro is all about choosing your compromises. I have tried Debian and other distros, but I tend to go back to Ubuntu because it works best for me.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  > That’s a bit rich: are they not the #1 consumer distro, which hardly implies they are failing to execute All the hard work to make it a viable OS is done by Debian. Canonical just adds some polish and then wrecks it all with poor design decisions over and over again.
  - ch33zer 6y ago
    Then why doesn't everyone use Debian?
    - harry8 6y ago
      Because it's popular it gets 3rd party support. So people use it making it popular. Vicious/virtuous circle depending on whether you're looking at it from above or below. Just like windows Shuttleworth admires and seeks emulate so very much.
      - harry8 6y ago
        Sigh. ok then let me explain that last comment. It's called a network externality. Microsoft achieved this with piracy based market penetration of dos and it worked great for them and they've built on it ever since. Shuttleworth understood the importance of getting established as being popular when he launched and would press install disks, as many as you asked for, and ship them to you at his own cost. As one example of nakedly going after market share and spending resource to do so. Bug #1 in the ubu bug tracker is literally "windows is the most popular os." Separate to the marketing, which is worth discussing on this site because some of us actually care about what works and why so wish to discuss it, let's talk engineering decisions. Between 2 choices that are technically about equal. Choose the one that is more popular. Many feet trample more bugs. Better support. More likely to be around after $time_period. If it needs to work with something else, the managers of the something else project will likely suppor the more popular first etc. Obviously popularity is not the only concern but it really does count for something, ignore it as a dimension in your decision process at your peril. I use linux, and ubuntu as it happens on this laptop. I'm aware windows and osx are more popular and that popularity makes certain things easier. For /my/ purposes and to /my/ taste linux and ubuntu are worth paying that cost to have installed here and I'm very comfortable with that decision. Just quietly, perhaps people who don't care for business decisions and engineering decisions are on the wrong website? There's plenty of places "boosters" can go to do that.
    - ColanR 6y ago
      Marketing?
    - RMPR 6y ago
      Ubuntu has been marketed as a beginner friendly distro, with communities easily accessible using a Google search (thinking about the likes of askubuntu, omgubuntu, ...). So I'd say online presence and beginner-friendliness.
      - bscphil 6y ago
        Similarly, Mint is also one of the most popular distros, and its marketing, at least for a long time, has been that it's even more user-friendly than Ubuntu.
    - Koshkin 6y ago
      Third-party support.
    - alyandon 6y ago
      Debian has its own set of problems. Like the Chromium package maintainer deciding unilaterally several years ago that installing extensions remotely shouldn't be allowed and gated that standard functionality behind a command ling flag. There was zero documentation on the change and the error you received attempting to install an extension was basically "operation failed". I discovered the cause only because there was an open bug about it on the Debian bug tracker where the maintainer refused to acknowledge the problem. Eventually, sane minds prevailed and that stupid patch was reverted. So, unfortunately - you'll end up having to deal with people that refuse to look at things from the user's perspective no matter what distro you use. And yes - I'm still bitter. :-/
      - guug 6y ago
        There is also the ffmpeg kerfuffle a few years back when Debian decided to replace the ffmpeg package with an incompatible and inferior fork. You can imagine the amount of confusion that ensued. That said, I think Debian's occasional messups are far less egregious and damaging than Ubuntu's though.
        alyandon 6y ago
        There was also that time many, many years ago they decided to remove the ability to load binary firmware blobs for things like network cards in the kernel because of an interesting interpretation of the GPL. :-/
    - Thaxll 6y ago
      Maybe when they tought that none-free drivers opt-in was a good idea, also old kernel / packages. LTS on Ubuntu was always better than Debian, I mean saying that Ubuntu is just a repackage of Debian is very short sighted, especially on the security side, Canonical security team is top notch.
      - RMPR 6y ago
        > Canonical security team is top notch. They need to, for a long time, Ubuntu has been shipped with EOL Kernel versions https://ubuntu.com/kernel/lifecycle https://ubuntu.com/kernel/lifecycle
        wahern 6y ago
        Canonical is at a disadvantage here because Red Hat directly employs or has significant established relationships with many of the people who make kernel release decisions. Plus, RHEL is the de facto standard enterprise distribution, which means any decision the kernel community makes regarding what they believe "enterprise" requires will often be a reflection of Red Hat's plans. But what benefits Red Hat in the enterprise world is to their detriment in the consumer world. There's a reason the Debian/Ubuntu package ecosystem is richer and more featureful than RPM, and this is why Ubuntu dominates in the container space--because almost any piece of software that one could expect to have been packaged has been packaged as a .deb and already exists in the default package archives. I can't count the number of times I couldn't find an RPM--certainly not in the default repositories (RHEL, CentOS, or even Fedora), but not even in the third-party community repositories. And those that do exist are of lesser quality than the comparable .deb, for various reasons. (That is, the long-tail of packages is of higher quality for Debian.) By pushing Snap, Canonical is definitely going astray. Ubuntu's competitive advantage is the Debian package ecosystem. Both Canonical and Red Hat seem to underestimate the role and importance of their respective packaging ecosystems. How many projects to revolutionize or replace RPM/Yum/whatever at Red Hat have crashed and burned? Many, though it's hard to count because half-way through they often realize what they're trying to do is functionally or even technically impossible (as with their aborted 2017 plans for RPM package streams), and scale things back to iterative improvements. Containers are a security nightmare, and pretty much the only reason to pay Canonical and Red Hat licensing fees is for security and bug fix maintenance of their package archives. On our large Kubernetes clusters at work there are thousands of open CVEs for the containers that are being run, and we'll have to boil the oceans to get them all updated, let alone keep them updated. But updating packages is as simple as an apt-get/yum upgrade[1], and rarely do you have to worry about anything breaking, especially relative to the pain that updating containers regularly brings. [1] If the container uses Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc you can sometimes just rebuild the container to get the newer packages. But that assumes you control the container image. Most containers come from third-party, decentralized sources (that's the point!). But Docker Hub doesn't cajole and coordinate container owners to update their crappy images. It's no substitute for the orchestration of people that are traditional package repositories.
    - jcelerier 6y ago
      Debian did not send free CDs by mail
      - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        Did a large numbers of people use those? Legitimate question—it always struck me as a cool initiative for a very small number of people, but only that. I'd expect most people tech-savvy enough to install Ubuntu would also have a decent enough internet to download a ~700mb file.
        alyandon 6y ago
        I ordered a few back in the day - the sleeve design was really nicely done.
        zapzupnz 6y ago
        Back in the day, not much of my country, or even the US, had particularly fast internet. Nor did everybody have a disc burner in the days before USB booting being supported by the majority of computers' firmware.
        oarsinsync 6y ago
        If my memory serves correctly, this was 2004/2005, around the time I was discovering my home burnt CDs and DVDs were going bad. This was also around the time I would often brick my primary (only) workstation for whatever reason. Having a properly mastered Live CD was super useful. I would order at least two with every release cycle for a few years at least. Thankfully, I saw the light early with Ubuntu-server, and stayed with Debian. Ubuntu-desktop makes for a good enough live / recovery / troubleshooting environment, but not sure I’d use it for anything more.
        maccam94 6y ago
        The free LiveCDs were great marketing. As a teenage computer geek, it was way easier to convince casual computer users to try it out when I could lend them a nicely printed CD. And it looked way better than handing them a sketchy CD-R with some marker scribbles on it.
    - eternauta3k 6y ago
      Lots of software out there with Ubuntu PPAs.
  - robocat 6y ago
    > All the hard work to make it a viable OS is done by Debian You could equally say that all the hard work to make a viable OS is done by Linux, so screw Debian? Last I hurd, the GNU developed OS is unviable (no 64 bit, no SMP). Or equally say that all the hard work to make the majority of end-user programs (you know, the raison d’être for an OS) is done by other open source projects, not Debian, so screw Debian... These are open source projects, with cross-pollination everywhere, each with their own opinions on licensing. Ubuntu mostly helps the ecosystem, and certainly isn’t a parasitic player (although like all, they are not perfect). Why bag on Ubuntu just because it happens to be popular? Should we also cancel all the other Debian based distros? PS: complaining about upstart shows you are just being biased (or perhaps misinformed). Canonical were developing upstart before systemd was developed - and systemd was developed by RedHat. The main con given against upstart was not technical, but due to licensing. “In terms of overall feature[s] there is really rather little to distinguish upstart from systemd” https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/upstart https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/upstart
    - Skunkleton 6y ago
      > You could equally say that all the hard work to make a viable OS is done by Linux, so screw Debian? No, you couldn't say that. Without toolchains, userlands, and packaging, a kernel is pretty worthless. The barest bones you can go is still gcc, linux, uclibc, and busybox. There is more code that goes into a computer running linux, then there is in the linux kernel. By a wide margin.
      - robocat 6y ago
        If it had to be done, GNU programs could all be replaced. Port BSD tools or improve busybox tools, use KDE instead of Gnome, and there is a variety of great packaging solutions that aren’t .deb. AFAIK GCC is already being replaced by clang due to the GCC codebase, amongst other reasons. Distros mostly use GNU programs for historical convenience. Given incentive, GNU could be dropped by Ubuntu for the desktop. The most popular Linux distro Android has moved away from GNU already. FSF does fabulous work, which we are all appreciative of, but some decisions are peeing in the open source pool. I think RMS creates unnecessary division against Linux and Linus for what I feel are poor reasons. I went to a lecture by him where he spent half his time being negative towards Linux and Linus (that felt like he was just pissed off because Linux was popular) and a bit because Linus had used the GPL2 (not trivial to change, and you don’t get change by attack). Being negative towards the people who are on your own side is wrong IMHO. It could equally be argued that Debian should be called Debian/Linux. Edit: I just found a quote from Linus about RMS that summarises what I wished to say here: “It's not passion for something, it becomes passion against something else.“ - http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white.html http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white.... PS: I totally admire RMS and his relentless idealism. He has given so much to the world, and the faults I see in him are interwoven with the strengths I see: I’m not sure the faults could be mitigated without badly weakening the virtues.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  >> and they just can't execute > That’s a bit rich: are they not the #1 consumer distro, which hardly implies they are failing to execute. No, that's Debian doing almost all the work. 90% of the packages in Ubuntu are simply taken from Debian without significant modification.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  > I don’t like (Gnome, Snap) Snaps may be a pain sometimes, but Gnome seems to be working like a charm...
  - RMPR 6y ago
    People often complain about design decisions of the GNOME team: removing desktop icons, status bar, ...
    - petepete 6y ago
      Those people can choose another DE with legacy features like desktop icons. Tradition isn't a reason to keep up bad habits and I'm thankful to Gnome for daring to take tough decisions for the greater good. I wouldn't use any other DE, at this point.KDE has always been cluttered and XFCE is buggy and not particularly intuitive.
      - RMPR 6y ago
        This is debatable because it's a matter of taste (or habit), but one thing they got right is optimizing the interface for Touchscreens.
      - jason0597 6y ago
        There was a very good post here in Hacker News explaining why the decisions that GNOME (and others as well) have taken are bad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901541
        petepete 6y ago
        Yes I saw this the other day. The post is incorrect in several ways but there are some valid opinions in there that I agree with too. Nothing as big as a DE is perfect, thankfully it's broadly moving in the right direction.
      - stonogo 6y ago
        They're not "legacy features" merely because your tastes have changed. They're still just "features." Calling them mean names doesn't change that, it just makes it harder to take your argument in good faith -- same as calling desktop icons "bad habits." I'm a happy GNOME user but ascribing moral judgements to common computer functionality is kind of weird.
- coleifer 6y ago
  You: "w-works on my machine" Ok bro cope however you want. Your defeatist attitude and worthless comment really make a strong case for using ubuntu.
- cassiet 6y ago
  Most of HN is shitting on popular things with a hot take and a smug condescending tone, usually erroneously. If Conical hadn’t tried new projects and failed, the poster would complain that they never innovate. People complain like this because they have no real control of their own lives. It makes them feel smart, if only they were in control, then things would be better. It would be so easy, the people in charge must be stupid. It comes from a lack of experience and the inability to understand the challenges in those positions.
  - coleifer 6y ago
    >Projecting this hard. The shortcomings of snap are well documented. I assumed anyone reading the comments would have been aware of them. But apparently some people will jump on any chance to virtue-signal.
james_s_tayler 6y ago
I agree. The last Ubuntu release I actually liked was 12.04? After Unity I've been fighting Ubuntu ever since. I'm seriously considering not taking the 20.04 LTS release and either using 18.04 until it's untenable or switching to something else.
- yummypaint 6y ago
  Yep this hits the nail on the head. There was some kind of fundamental shift around that time. Running other GUIs has been a bandaid, but the underlying thought processes that led to unity are still clearly at work. Im going to stop even trying out new ubuntu releases anymore. I think this is ok though. If ubuntu were better thought out, the linux ecosystem might be less vibrant than it is. I would like to think other distros are learning from these failures. Personally ive had excellent luck with scientific linux (CentOs based).
hvis 6y ago
Unity was very good in a lot of respects. Both its UI elements and its performance. Unfortunately, Unity 7 depended on Compiz somewhat heavily, and when it came to writing a replacement of the full stack, Canonical didn't manage to execute. But have you been following last year's improvements to GNOME's performance and responsiveness? A lot of it is Canonical's devs bringing their experience from Unity.
- bgorman 6y ago
  Gnome 3 runs like an absolute dog on my Skylake notebook using Ubuntu 19.10. I don't know what metrics you have been looking at, but as a regular user I "feel" that the UI is constantly lagging during regular use. I didn't think it was this bad when I was using Fedora in the past, but that was a wayland based installation.
  - hvis 6y ago
    It's better than 19.04 was. :-) 20.04 should be better still (I've yet to upgrade).
  - RMPR 6y ago
    Enabling the BFQ scheduler reportedly boosted the responsiveness https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1738828 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1738828 and I can't remember where I saw someone saying it had a positive impact on Gnome in particular.
    - bgorman 6y ago
      Thanks, this is definitely worth a shot
  - Pmop 6y ago
    Weird. I'm on a ThinkPad x230 Ivy Bridge and Gnome (3.36) is butter smooth for me (Ubuntu 20.04, fresh install). I did the minimal installation though.
    - 6y ago
waltpad 6y ago
> I strongly recommend anyone similarly frustrated to check out debian, which is a fantastic distro. It is true that the Debian people are doing a great job. > [...] if you're using Ubuntu and disabling snap, you're fighting against the current and I have to imagine it's going to be increasingly difficult with subsequent releases. Actually, snap was harder to remove in the previous release: you had to rebuild certain packages (actually, just pulseaudio, so it only matters for desktops) to get rid of the dependency, but it seems now that it's just a couple of apt commands, so you have to give Canonical credits for making it easier.
- RMPR 6y ago
  Give them credits to fix what they have broken?
  - waltpad 6y ago
    Well, tbh, that sounds a bit far fetched. I meant that we should cut them some slack (English is not my first language). That being said, it's not as bright as I thought it was - see my other comment.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    It's not broken. People prefer not to use snap and want to remove it. But overall snap works, and apps installed via snap work.
- waltpad 6y ago
  Now, this is embarassing, here the list of reverse dependencies on snapd: python3-ubuntu-image xubuntu-desktop xubuntu-core vanilla-gnome-desktop ubuntustudio-desktop-core ubuntustudio-desktop ubuntukylin-desktop ubuntu-unity-desktop ubuntu-snappy-cli ubuntu-snappy ubuntu-mate-desktop ubuntu-mate-core ubuntu-core-launcher ubuntu-budgie-desktop snapd-xdg-open snapcraft snap-confine qml-module-snapd plasma-discover-backend-snap lxd lubuntu-desktop libsnapd-qt1 kubuntu-desktop ember cyphesis-cpp chromium-browser ubuntu-server ubuntu-desktop-minimal ubuntu-desktop ubuntu-core-snapd-units livecd-rootfs maas apparmor libsnapd-glib1 gnome-software-plugin-snap command-not-found Any of these packages is going to pull snapd in if installed. Soon after writing the above comment, I decided to install chromium, and ... snapd got installed as well as a result. I guess I should double check each claim I am about to make, BEFORE making it. sigh... Edit: Please note that many of these are "leaf" packages, by which I mean that no other packages depend on them.
sneak 6y ago
I recently hit the wall with Ubuntu too. I'll still run -server in the cloud, but each time over the last 5-7 years I did point-samples of "is Linux viable as a desktop other than ChromeOS", it was always Ubuntu/Gnome. It turns out that that was my problem all along! I tossed Gentoo and KDE (this is not a Gentoo endorsement, it was just a "hey I wonder what Gentoo's been up to in the last dozen years since I last used it") on a spare laptop. It turns out that KDE is amazing now. It's seriously the best DE I've ever used, and I'm a Mac user! (Half of the utilities I install out of the box on a fresh macOS are built in, and the annoying stuff that used to be editing arcane files is now easy preference settings. It's actually great.) What the hell are Ubuntu doing shipping Gnome (with the ugliest custom theme known to man, to boot)? Admittedly it was my own ignorance, for which they are not responsible, but their mindshare and bad choice tainted my whole view of the state of the art for a long time.
- snazz 6y ago
  It's interesting how underrepresented KDE is in the "big distros". While it makes sense that Fedora and Ubuntu ship GNOME, and there are "spins" of each that include different desktops out of the box, it still surprises me.
  - coredog64 6y ago
    Wasn’t there some big kerfuffle years ago involving KDE, Qt, and licensing?
    - guug 6y ago
      There was.
      - eitland 6y ago
        Correct. A few more details: >[...] To show our commitment to this dual licensing model, the KDE Free Qt Foundation was founded in 1998. It is a non-profit foundation ensuring that Qt will always be available under open source licensing terms. The agreement that governs this foundation has stayed mainly unchanged over the last 17 years. As a lot of things have changed during these years, we have been working with KDE over the last year to create a new and updated agreement that takes todays realities better into account.[...] From: https://www.qt.io/blog/2016/01/13/new-agreement-with-the-kde-free-qt-foundation https://www.qt.io/blog/2016/01/13/new-agreement-with-the-kde... The updated contract mentioned in that blog post is available here: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/Software_License_Agreement_2015.pdfhttps://kde.org/community/whatiskde/Software_License_Agreement_2015.pdf https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/Software_License_Agreeme...
unethical_ban 6y ago
Unity was a good DE, and I have come to appreciate their design, which even today differentiates from standard GNOME. Also recall that it was made to be one DE for all: Phone, tablet, desktop. The idea was that you would have an Ubuntu phone, dock it, and use it as your PC! And that is doable now, considering Thunderbolt. Hell, Oneplus should try to push OxygenOS to be tablet-like and this would set them apart from everyone. Upstart was started alongside or even before systemd, if I recall correctly.
- dingo_bat 6y ago
  Dex is pretty mature now.
amaccuish 6y ago
The one I'm currently fighting server-side is netplan. I want to use systemd-networkd directly, since it exposes a lot more features than netplan, but getting netplan to stop intervening is a ballache. Like, it's not a systemd service, it has to be disabled on the kernel command line?!
- nightfly 6y ago
  I've found that if you delete /etc/netplan (just making sure this is at least empty seems to be the most important part) and /var/run/systemd/network netplan doesn't really seem to do anything. My org has been using systemd-networkd directly after doing that for about a year and it's working fine for us.
  - amaccuish 6y ago
    Yes I've done that and it definitely works, though I've still got "netcfg/do_not_use_netplan=true" in my cmdline for good measure, not sure if it does anything though, or even when I got that from, come to think of it. But still, emptying a directory is not how I expect to disable what is a system service. It should be systemctl disable netplan... I think emptying would be better than deleting the directory since it'll probably just get recreated on an update.
    - nightfly 6y ago
      It's because netplan uses a system generator /lib/systemd/system-generators/netplan, to parse the files in /etc/netplan and generate systemd-networkd configs from them on boot (Like how /etc/fstab gets parse into systemd mount units). It would be nice if there was a flag file or something you could touch to disable it though.
- jschwartzi 6y ago
  Yeah I was trying to get systemd-networkd to handle hotplugging, and I spent about a day trying to figure out how to describe a computer with one Ethernet port to netplan before giving up and removing the whole package. At which point systemd-networkd started working beautifully as-expected. For a system administration tool netplan is wonderful at making the simple things needlessly complicated.
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
Unity had a rough start, but grew to be a pretty nice DE. I actually remember it warmly every time I see how Gnome3 eats 3 horizontal bars of screen space, placing a freaking WATCH on the center of the top bar. Seriously, a whole bar for a WATCH? How come good old Gnome2 did it better 15 years ago, and had a terrific hierarchical menu, to add?
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Do you mean the clock? I don’t like it it there either. Used to looking in the corner.
op03 6y ago
It's not that bad. Linux threads attract the biggest drama queens in the galaxy.
gerdesj 6y ago
Numpty. Minimal. End of.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
I recommend Debian too, but potential switchers should be aware that it has a very particular update model. You get (non-security!) software updates once every two years, and that is the version you will be on for the next two years. There are sometimes workarounds (namely backports), but they're less well tested and sometimes break. I think this model is underrated, for all that it can sometimes be annoying. Consistency is valuable. Constant change is not good, even when the changes themselves are positive. But it does mean you'll sometimes be left with out-of-date software. Edit: Oh, I should mention that you can also use Debian testing to get frequent updates. Primary issue here there is Debian Testing actually gets security updates later than Debian Stable.
alexfromapex 6y ago
Netplan is another fail... although I love Ubuntu otherwise
viraptor 6y ago
> upstart [...] failed shit they've come out with? upstart was pretty good. It just lost the popularity contest with systemd. I'm not sure if there's really anything serious to complain here about.
- vbernat 6y ago
  There were some serious complains around upstart. Notably, jobs may get stuck in a bad state, difficult to recover. This was never fixed. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/964207 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/96420..., https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/406397 https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/406397 and http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2012/09/29/upstart-job-getting-stuck-in-the-startkilled-state/ http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2012/09/29/upstart-job-gett....
cerberusss 6y ago
> I don't want to run that garbage on my desktop Please read the HN guidelines: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work". Link at the bottom-left.
simion314 6y ago
>upstart Do you know Red Hat and google were using upstart? This companies must be hyper incompetent if they run garbage.
urlwolf 6y ago
Mint is also a possibility. They don't use snaps but flatpaks.

robocat 6y ago

> and they just can't execute That’s a bit rich: are they not the #1 consumer distro, which hardly implies they are failing to execute. A successful product has missteps, so what. > I don't want to run that garbage on my desktop. So don’t. Why complain that others do? I use Ubuntu because it works and I can mostly find information about how to do what I want. There are major aspects of Ubuntu I don’t like (Gnome, Snap) but selecting a distro is all about choosing your compromises. I have tried Debian and other distros, but I tend to go back to Ubuntu because it works best for me.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
> That’s a bit rich: are they not the #1 consumer distro, which hardly implies they are failing to execute All the hard work to make it a viable OS is done by Debian. Canonical just adds some polish and then wrecks it all with poor design decisions over and over again.
- ch33zer 6y ago
  Then why doesn't everyone use Debian?
  - harry8 6y ago
    Because it's popular it gets 3rd party support. So people use it making it popular. Vicious/virtuous circle depending on whether you're looking at it from above or below. Just like windows Shuttleworth admires and seeks emulate so very much.
    - harry8 6y ago
      Sigh. ok then let me explain that last comment. It's called a network externality. Microsoft achieved this with piracy based market penetration of dos and it worked great for them and they've built on it ever since. Shuttleworth understood the importance of getting established as being popular when he launched and would press install disks, as many as you asked for, and ship them to you at his own cost. As one example of nakedly going after market share and spending resource to do so. Bug #1 in the ubu bug tracker is literally "windows is the most popular os." Separate to the marketing, which is worth discussing on this site because some of us actually care about what works and why so wish to discuss it, let's talk engineering decisions. Between 2 choices that are technically about equal. Choose the one that is more popular. Many feet trample more bugs. Better support. More likely to be around after $time_period. If it needs to work with something else, the managers of the something else project will likely suppor the more popular first etc. Obviously popularity is not the only concern but it really does count for something, ignore it as a dimension in your decision process at your peril. I use linux, and ubuntu as it happens on this laptop. I'm aware windows and osx are more popular and that popularity makes certain things easier. For /my/ purposes and to /my/ taste linux and ubuntu are worth paying that cost to have installed here and I'm very comfortable with that decision. Just quietly, perhaps people who don't care for business decisions and engineering decisions are on the wrong website? There's plenty of places "boosters" can go to do that.
  - ColanR 6y ago
    Marketing?
  - RMPR 6y ago
    Ubuntu has been marketed as a beginner friendly distro, with communities easily accessible using a Google search (thinking about the likes of askubuntu, omgubuntu, ...). So I'd say online presence and beginner-friendliness.
    - bscphil 6y ago
      Similarly, Mint is also one of the most popular distros, and its marketing, at least for a long time, has been that it's even more user-friendly than Ubuntu.
  - Koshkin 6y ago
    Third-party support.
  - alyandon 6y ago
    Debian has its own set of problems. Like the Chromium package maintainer deciding unilaterally several years ago that installing extensions remotely shouldn't be allowed and gated that standard functionality behind a command ling flag. There was zero documentation on the change and the error you received attempting to install an extension was basically "operation failed". I discovered the cause only because there was an open bug about it on the Debian bug tracker where the maintainer refused to acknowledge the problem. Eventually, sane minds prevailed and that stupid patch was reverted. So, unfortunately - you'll end up having to deal with people that refuse to look at things from the user's perspective no matter what distro you use. And yes - I'm still bitter. :-/
    - guug 6y ago
      There is also the ffmpeg kerfuffle a few years back when Debian decided to replace the ffmpeg package with an incompatible and inferior fork. You can imagine the amount of confusion that ensued. That said, I think Debian's occasional messups are far less egregious and damaging than Ubuntu's though.
      - alyandon 6y ago
        There was also that time many, many years ago they decided to remove the ability to load binary firmware blobs for things like network cards in the kernel because of an interesting interpretation of the GPL. :-/
  - Thaxll 6y ago
    Maybe when they tought that none-free drivers opt-in was a good idea, also old kernel / packages. LTS on Ubuntu was always better than Debian, I mean saying that Ubuntu is just a repackage of Debian is very short sighted, especially on the security side, Canonical security team is top notch.
    - RMPR 6y ago
      > Canonical security team is top notch. They need to, for a long time, Ubuntu has been shipped with EOL Kernel versions https://ubuntu.com/kernel/lifecycle https://ubuntu.com/kernel/lifecycle
      - wahern 6y ago
        Canonical is at a disadvantage here because Red Hat directly employs or has significant established relationships with many of the people who make kernel release decisions. Plus, RHEL is the de facto standard enterprise distribution, which means any decision the kernel community makes regarding what they believe "enterprise" requires will often be a reflection of Red Hat's plans. But what benefits Red Hat in the enterprise world is to their detriment in the consumer world. There's a reason the Debian/Ubuntu package ecosystem is richer and more featureful than RPM, and this is why Ubuntu dominates in the container space--because almost any piece of software that one could expect to have been packaged has been packaged as a .deb and already exists in the default package archives. I can't count the number of times I couldn't find an RPM--certainly not in the default repositories (RHEL, CentOS, or even Fedora), but not even in the third-party community repositories. And those that do exist are of lesser quality than the comparable .deb, for various reasons. (That is, the long-tail of packages is of higher quality for Debian.) By pushing Snap, Canonical is definitely going astray. Ubuntu's competitive advantage is the Debian package ecosystem. Both Canonical and Red Hat seem to underestimate the role and importance of their respective packaging ecosystems. How many projects to revolutionize or replace RPM/Yum/whatever at Red Hat have crashed and burned? Many, though it's hard to count because half-way through they often realize what they're trying to do is functionally or even technically impossible (as with their aborted 2017 plans for RPM package streams), and scale things back to iterative improvements. Containers are a security nightmare, and pretty much the only reason to pay Canonical and Red Hat licensing fees is for security and bug fix maintenance of their package archives. On our large Kubernetes clusters at work there are thousands of open CVEs for the containers that are being run, and we'll have to boil the oceans to get them all updated, let alone keep them updated. But updating packages is as simple as an apt-get/yum upgrade[1], and rarely do you have to worry about anything breaking, especially relative to the pain that updating containers regularly brings. [1] If the container uses Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc you can sometimes just rebuild the container to get the newer packages. But that assumes you control the container image. Most containers come from third-party, decentralized sources (that's the point!). But Docker Hub doesn't cajole and coordinate container owners to update their crappy images. It's no substitute for the orchestration of people that are traditional package repositories.
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    Debian did not send free CDs by mail
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      Did a large numbers of people use those? Legitimate question—it always struck me as a cool initiative for a very small number of people, but only that. I'd expect most people tech-savvy enough to install Ubuntu would also have a decent enough internet to download a ~700mb file.
      - alyandon 6y ago
        I ordered a few back in the day - the sleeve design was really nicely done.
      - zapzupnz 6y ago
        Back in the day, not much of my country, or even the US, had particularly fast internet. Nor did everybody have a disc burner in the days before USB booting being supported by the majority of computers' firmware.
      - oarsinsync 6y ago
        If my memory serves correctly, this was 2004/2005, around the time I was discovering my home burnt CDs and DVDs were going bad. This was also around the time I would often brick my primary (only) workstation for whatever reason. Having a properly mastered Live CD was super useful. I would order at least two with every release cycle for a few years at least. Thankfully, I saw the light early with Ubuntu-server, and stayed with Debian. Ubuntu-desktop makes for a good enough live / recovery / troubleshooting environment, but not sure I’d use it for anything more.
      - maccam94 6y ago
        The free LiveCDs were great marketing. As a teenage computer geek, it was way easier to convince casual computer users to try it out when I could lend them a nicely printed CD. And it looked way better than handing them a sketchy CD-R with some marker scribbles on it.
  - eternauta3k 6y ago
    Lots of software out there with Ubuntu PPAs.
- robocat 6y ago
  > All the hard work to make it a viable OS is done by Debian You could equally say that all the hard work to make a viable OS is done by Linux, so screw Debian? Last I hurd, the GNU developed OS is unviable (no 64 bit, no SMP). Or equally say that all the hard work to make the majority of end-user programs (you know, the raison d’être for an OS) is done by other open source projects, not Debian, so screw Debian... These are open source projects, with cross-pollination everywhere, each with their own opinions on licensing. Ubuntu mostly helps the ecosystem, and certainly isn’t a parasitic player (although like all, they are not perfect). Why bag on Ubuntu just because it happens to be popular? Should we also cancel all the other Debian based distros? PS: complaining about upstart shows you are just being biased (or perhaps misinformed). Canonical were developing upstart before systemd was developed - and systemd was developed by RedHat. The main con given against upstart was not technical, but due to licensing. “In terms of overall feature[s] there is really rather little to distinguish upstart from systemd” https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/upstart https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/upstart
  - Skunkleton 6y ago
    > You could equally say that all the hard work to make a viable OS is done by Linux, so screw Debian? No, you couldn't say that. Without toolchains, userlands, and packaging, a kernel is pretty worthless. The barest bones you can go is still gcc, linux, uclibc, and busybox. There is more code that goes into a computer running linux, then there is in the linux kernel. By a wide margin.
    - robocat 6y ago
      If it had to be done, GNU programs could all be replaced. Port BSD tools or improve busybox tools, use KDE instead of Gnome, and there is a variety of great packaging solutions that aren’t .deb. AFAIK GCC is already being replaced by clang due to the GCC codebase, amongst other reasons. Distros mostly use GNU programs for historical convenience. Given incentive, GNU could be dropped by Ubuntu for the desktop. The most popular Linux distro Android has moved away from GNU already. FSF does fabulous work, which we are all appreciative of, but some decisions are peeing in the open source pool. I think RMS creates unnecessary division against Linux and Linus for what I feel are poor reasons. I went to a lecture by him where he spent half his time being negative towards Linux and Linus (that felt like he was just pissed off because Linux was popular) and a bit because Linus had used the GPL2 (not trivial to change, and you don’t get change by attack). Being negative towards the people who are on your own side is wrong IMHO. It could equally be argued that Debian should be called Debian/Linux. Edit: I just found a quote from Linus about RMS that summarises what I wished to say here: “It's not passion for something, it becomes passion against something else.“ - http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white.html http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white.... PS: I totally admire RMS and his relentless idealism. He has given so much to the world, and the faults I see in him are interwoven with the strengths I see: I’m not sure the faults could be mitigated without badly weakening the virtues.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
>> and they just can't execute > That’s a bit rich: are they not the #1 consumer distro, which hardly implies they are failing to execute. No, that's Debian doing almost all the work. 90% of the packages in Ubuntu are simply taken from Debian without significant modification.
Koshkin 6y ago
> I don’t like (Gnome, Snap) Snaps may be a pain sometimes, but Gnome seems to be working like a charm...
- RMPR 6y ago
  People often complain about design decisions of the GNOME team: removing desktop icons, status bar, ...
  - petepete 6y ago
    Those people can choose another DE with legacy features like desktop icons. Tradition isn't a reason to keep up bad habits and I'm thankful to Gnome for daring to take tough decisions for the greater good. I wouldn't use any other DE, at this point.KDE has always been cluttered and XFCE is buggy and not particularly intuitive.
    - RMPR 6y ago
      This is debatable because it's a matter of taste (or habit), but one thing they got right is optimizing the interface for Touchscreens.
    - jason0597 6y ago
      There was a very good post here in Hacker News explaining why the decisions that GNOME (and others as well) have taken are bad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901541
      - petepete 6y ago
        Yes I saw this the other day. The post is incorrect in several ways but there are some valid opinions in there that I agree with too. Nothing as big as a DE is perfect, thankfully it's broadly moving in the right direction.
    - stonogo 6y ago
      They're not "legacy features" merely because your tastes have changed. They're still just "features." Calling them mean names doesn't change that, it just makes it harder to take your argument in good faith -- same as calling desktop icons "bad habits." I'm a happy GNOME user but ascribing moral judgements to common computer functionality is kind of weird.
coleifer 6y ago
You: "w-works on my machine" Ok bro cope however you want. Your defeatist attitude and worthless comment really make a strong case for using ubuntu.
cassiet 6y ago
Most of HN is shitting on popular things with a hot take and a smug condescending tone, usually erroneously. If Conical hadn’t tried new projects and failed, the poster would complain that they never innovate. People complain like this because they have no real control of their own lives. It makes them feel smart, if only they were in control, then things would be better. It would be so easy, the people in charge must be stupid. It comes from a lack of experience and the inability to understand the challenges in those positions.
- coleifer 6y ago
  >Projecting this hard. The shortcomings of snap are well documented. I assumed anyone reading the comments would have been aware of them. But apparently some people will jump on any chance to virtue-signal.

james_s_tayler 6y ago

I agree. The last Ubuntu release I actually liked was 12.04? After Unity I've been fighting Ubuntu ever since. I'm seriously considering not taking the 20.04 LTS release and either using 18.04 until it's untenable or switching to something else.

yummypaint 6y ago
Yep this hits the nail on the head. There was some kind of fundamental shift around that time. Running other GUIs has been a bandaid, but the underlying thought processes that led to unity are still clearly at work. Im going to stop even trying out new ubuntu releases anymore. I think this is ok though. If ubuntu were better thought out, the linux ecosystem might be less vibrant than it is. I would like to think other distros are learning from these failures. Personally ive had excellent luck with scientific linux (CentOs based).

hvis 6y ago

Unity was very good in a lot of respects. Both its UI elements and its performance. Unfortunately, Unity 7 depended on Compiz somewhat heavily, and when it came to writing a replacement of the full stack, Canonical didn't manage to execute. But have you been following last year's improvements to GNOME's performance and responsiveness? A lot of it is Canonical's devs bringing their experience from Unity.

bgorman 6y ago
Gnome 3 runs like an absolute dog on my Skylake notebook using Ubuntu 19.10. I don't know what metrics you have been looking at, but as a regular user I "feel" that the UI is constantly lagging during regular use. I didn't think it was this bad when I was using Fedora in the past, but that was a wayland based installation.
- hvis 6y ago
  It's better than 19.04 was. :-) 20.04 should be better still (I've yet to upgrade).
- RMPR 6y ago
  Enabling the BFQ scheduler reportedly boosted the responsiveness https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1738828 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1738828 and I can't remember where I saw someone saying it had a positive impact on Gnome in particular.
  - bgorman 6y ago
    Thanks, this is definitely worth a shot
- Pmop 6y ago
  Weird. I'm on a ThinkPad x230 Ivy Bridge and Gnome (3.36) is butter smooth for me (Ubuntu 20.04, fresh install). I did the minimal installation though.
  - 6y ago

waltpad 6y ago

> I strongly recommend anyone similarly frustrated to check out debian, which is a fantastic distro. It is true that the Debian people are doing a great job. > [...] if you're using Ubuntu and disabling snap, you're fighting against the current and I have to imagine it's going to be increasingly difficult with subsequent releases. Actually, snap was harder to remove in the previous release: you had to rebuild certain packages (actually, just pulseaudio, so it only matters for desktops) to get rid of the dependency, but it seems now that it's just a couple of apt commands, so you have to give Canonical credits for making it easier.

RMPR 6y ago
Give them credits to fix what they have broken?
- waltpad 6y ago
  Well, tbh, that sounds a bit far fetched. I meant that we should cut them some slack (English is not my first language). That being said, it's not as bright as I thought it was - see my other comment.
- viraptor 6y ago
  It's not broken. People prefer not to use snap and want to remove it. But overall snap works, and apps installed via snap work.
waltpad 6y ago
Now, this is embarassing, here the list of reverse dependencies on snapd: python3-ubuntu-image xubuntu-desktop xubuntu-core vanilla-gnome-desktop ubuntustudio-desktop-core ubuntustudio-desktop ubuntukylin-desktop ubuntu-unity-desktop ubuntu-snappy-cli ubuntu-snappy ubuntu-mate-desktop ubuntu-mate-core ubuntu-core-launcher ubuntu-budgie-desktop snapd-xdg-open snapcraft snap-confine qml-module-snapd plasma-discover-backend-snap lxd lubuntu-desktop libsnapd-qt1 kubuntu-desktop ember cyphesis-cpp chromium-browser ubuntu-server ubuntu-desktop-minimal ubuntu-desktop ubuntu-core-snapd-units livecd-rootfs maas apparmor libsnapd-glib1 gnome-software-plugin-snap command-not-found Any of these packages is going to pull snapd in if installed. Soon after writing the above comment, I decided to install chromium, and ... snapd got installed as well as a result. I guess I should double check each claim I am about to make, BEFORE making it. sigh... Edit: Please note that many of these are "leaf" packages, by which I mean that no other packages depend on them.

sneak 6y ago

I recently hit the wall with Ubuntu too. I'll still run -server in the cloud, but each time over the last 5-7 years I did point-samples of "is Linux viable as a desktop other than ChromeOS", it was always Ubuntu/Gnome. It turns out that that was my problem all along! I tossed Gentoo and KDE (this is not a Gentoo endorsement, it was just a "hey I wonder what Gentoo's been up to in the last dozen years since I last used it") on a spare laptop. It turns out that KDE is amazing now. It's seriously the best DE I've ever used, and I'm a Mac user! (Half of the utilities I install out of the box on a fresh macOS are built in, and the annoying stuff that used to be editing arcane files is now easy preference settings. It's actually great.) What the hell are Ubuntu doing shipping Gnome (with the ugliest custom theme known to man, to boot)? Admittedly it was my own ignorance, for which they are not responsible, but their mindshare and bad choice tainted my whole view of the state of the art for a long time.

snazz 6y ago
It's interesting how underrepresented KDE is in the "big distros". While it makes sense that Fedora and Ubuntu ship GNOME, and there are "spins" of each that include different desktops out of the box, it still surprises me.
- coredog64 6y ago
  Wasn’t there some big kerfuffle years ago involving KDE, Qt, and licensing?
  - guug 6y ago
    There was.
    - eitland 6y ago
      Correct. A few more details: >[...] To show our commitment to this dual licensing model, the KDE Free Qt Foundation was founded in 1998. It is a non-profit foundation ensuring that Qt will always be available under open source licensing terms. The agreement that governs this foundation has stayed mainly unchanged over the last 17 years. As a lot of things have changed during these years, we have been working with KDE over the last year to create a new and updated agreement that takes todays realities better into account.[...] From: https://www.qt.io/blog/2016/01/13/new-agreement-with-the-kde-free-qt-foundation https://www.qt.io/blog/2016/01/13/new-agreement-with-the-kde... The updated contract mentioned in that blog post is available here: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/Software_License_Agreement_2015.pdfhttps://kde.org/community/whatiskde/Software_License_Agreement_2015.pdf https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/Software_License_Agreeme...

unethical_ban 6y ago

Unity was a good DE, and I have come to appreciate their design, which even today differentiates from standard GNOME. Also recall that it was made to be one DE for all: Phone, tablet, desktop. The idea was that you would have an Ubuntu phone, dock it, and use it as your PC! And that is doable now, considering Thunderbolt. Hell, Oneplus should try to push OxygenOS to be tablet-like and this would set them apart from everyone. Upstart was started alongside or even before systemd, if I recall correctly.

dingo_bat 6y ago
Dex is pretty mature now.

amaccuish 6y ago

The one I'm currently fighting server-side is netplan. I want to use systemd-networkd directly, since it exposes a lot more features than netplan, but getting netplan to stop intervening is a ballache. Like, it's not a systemd service, it has to be disabled on the kernel command line?!

nightfly 6y ago
I've found that if you delete /etc/netplan (just making sure this is at least empty seems to be the most important part) and /var/run/systemd/network netplan doesn't really seem to do anything. My org has been using systemd-networkd directly after doing that for about a year and it's working fine for us.
- amaccuish 6y ago
  Yes I've done that and it definitely works, though I've still got "netcfg/do_not_use_netplan=true" in my cmdline for good measure, not sure if it does anything though, or even when I got that from, come to think of it. But still, emptying a directory is not how I expect to disable what is a system service. It should be systemctl disable netplan... I think emptying would be better than deleting the directory since it'll probably just get recreated on an update.
  - nightfly 6y ago
    It's because netplan uses a system generator /lib/systemd/system-generators/netplan, to parse the files in /etc/netplan and generate systemd-networkd configs from them on boot (Like how /etc/fstab gets parse into systemd mount units). It would be nice if there was a flag file or something you could touch to disable it though.
jschwartzi 6y ago
Yeah I was trying to get systemd-networkd to handle hotplugging, and I spent about a day trying to figure out how to describe a computer with one Ethernet port to netplan before giving up and removing the whole package. At which point systemd-networkd started working beautifully as-expected. For a system administration tool netplan is wonderful at making the simple things needlessly complicated.

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago

Unity had a rough start, but grew to be a pretty nice DE. I actually remember it warmly every time I see how Gnome3 eats 3 horizontal bars of screen space, placing a freaking WATCH on the center of the top bar. Seriously, a whole bar for a WATCH? How come good old Gnome2 did it better 15 years ago, and had a terrific hierarchical menu, to add?

mixmastamyk 6y ago
Do you mean the clock? I don’t like it it there either. Used to looking in the corner.

op03 6y ago

It's not that bad. Linux threads attract the biggest drama queens in the galaxy.

gerdesj 6y ago

Numpty. Minimal. End of.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

I recommend Debian too, but potential switchers should be aware that it has a very particular update model. You get (non-security!) software updates once every two years, and that is the version you will be on for the next two years. There are sometimes workarounds (namely backports), but they're less well tested and sometimes break. I think this model is underrated, for all that it can sometimes be annoying. Consistency is valuable. Constant change is not good, even when the changes themselves are positive. But it does mean you'll sometimes be left with out-of-date software. Edit: Oh, I should mention that you can also use Debian testing to get frequent updates. Primary issue here there is Debian Testing actually gets security updates later than Debian Stable.

alexfromapex 6y ago

Netplan is another fail... although I love Ubuntu otherwise

viraptor 6y ago

> upstart [...] failed shit they've come out with? upstart was pretty good. It just lost the popularity contest with systemd. I'm not sure if there's really anything serious to complain here about.

vbernat 6y ago
There were some serious complains around upstart. Notably, jobs may get stuck in a bad state, difficult to recover. This was never fixed. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/964207 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/96420..., https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/406397 https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/406397 and http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2012/09/29/upstart-job-getting-stuck-in-the-startkilled-state/ http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2012/09/29/upstart-job-gett....

cerberusss 6y ago

> I don't want to run that garbage on my desktop Please read the HN guidelines: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work". Link at the bottom-left.

simion314 6y ago

>upstart Do you know Red Hat and google were using upstart? This companies must be hyper incompetent if they run garbage.

urlwolf 6y ago

Mint is also a possibility. They don't use snaps but flatpaks.