Running Debian. Snapless and Ubuntuless Ubuntu
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
44 points (94.0% liked)
Linux
47369 readers
1219 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Now that Debian is will to ship “non-free” drivers and firmware, I think it has become far more viable.
It always did, though. Just unofficially.
Was it unofficial? I thought it was merely opt-in, but still official
Yeah just in separate repo that wasn't enabled by default
Snapless Ubuntu is called Linux Mint, no guide needed.
but it's limited to Ubuntu LTS versions
that's not necessarily a downside.
How is only having an LTS version vs. having a choice between using an LTS version or a non-LTS version not a downside?
The LTS versions are more stable, so why bother with non-LTS versions? If you want faster updates, you probably want a rolling release like Arch or openSUSE Tumbleweed.
I've used a lot of Ubuntu over the years starting on 9.04. Let me tell you the six months releases are ass and always have been.
Also I'm switching to Debian.
True but it depends on your usecase- of you need all the fancy new stuff and want to move on quickly you should go another route instead of fucking around with forced software you do not want. Maybe Debian testing or Fedora? If you do not care about the newest stuff I guess Mint is a perfect fit.
My solution is using a distro that doesn't try to force snaps on me.
If you want the ubuntu base, why not use mint?
Mint would be based on Ubuntu 22.04, but I'd like to have something more up-to-date. I believe all other .deb based distros have the same issue that they are not as up-to-date as Ubuntu 23.04?
None of them are like arch where you can read news about an update and find that you just have it installed already.
Given you're on ubuntu and therefore not at the bleeding edge anyways, it won't be a big difference. My personal choice for stuff that just needs to work is debian. I carry debian LTS with the full KDE pack on my ventoy and it's been great. I also heard very good things about testing and Sid, but I haven't tried them myself.
Feels like you don't want to use Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is going the way of snap-only and it might as well pick an Ubuntu-based GNOME distro. There's a bunch out there, but PopOS can be pretty easily stripped down to a vanilla GNOME system. You could even just modify Mint and install GNOME on top of that.
How about VanillaOS? That's an Ubuntu (soon to be debian) based plain GNOME system with support for a range of packaging formats.
You could also go for Manjaro GNOME edition, but not as stable.
Zorin is cool but not as barebones for a GNOME spin.
Could also look at Linux Mint (Cinnamon/MATE/XFCE) or Feren OS (KDE).
I just use Linux Mint :)
So you're using Mint with extra steps.
I am using a single package from Mint, the rest is Ubuntu 23.04. Mint would otherwise be based on Ubuntu 22.04?
Yes, Mint 21.x is based on Jammy.
This may be useful for you (Especially if you use KDE Plasma) : Automated script to remove all traces of Snap, including reinstalling a standalone version of Firefox.
Switched to Linux Mint. But not because of Snaps but rather RAM usage. Mint is lighter and faster. On cold boot it uses just 745mb versus 1.6GB on Ubuntu Gnome.
I don't mind Snaps but I also won't go out of my way to install it because there is no must-have snap that I need.
I love mint. I use it everywhere. You wouldn't recognize it anywhere I use it though. I customize the hell out of it. Right now I got this retro Ubuntu thing going on, running Unity DE and no snaps. not that I'm wholly against them, I just don't have them.
You can just download the firefox tarball from their own site. And that will just update itself.
If I were going to do snapless Ubuntu, I'd probably just install Mint. It seems a lot easier.
Of course, since I use Fedora I don't have to worry about any of that nonsense. I gave up on Ubuntu years ago.
I do nothing.
- I use the Firefox snap. It takes like 800 extra milliseconds to start up on my 10y old laptop and it moves my profile dir. It otherwise impacts my life not at all and is just fine. If it ever bothers me, there PPAs, flatpak, or a dozen other ways to install Firefox that are all perfectly simple.
- I install other stuff from flatpaks or PPAs or using docker.
The angst around snap is inscrutable to me. There are 30 million easy ways to install software and they all work on Ubuntu. There is nothing in my life that's easier to ignore than snap.
I'm basically doing the same, but those "pending update, close the app to avoid disruptions" popups are kind of disrupting.
... those "pending update, close the app to avoid disruptions" popups are kind of disrupting.
I don't exactly disagree that it's slightly irritating but:
- No one declares war on an operating system the way snap haters have over a "restart to update" message. It's an irritation, but it's not an irritation proportional to the response snap gets out of people.
- Restarting to enable an update or complete an update is not something unique to snap. Except for a tiny number of very advanced live-patching systems like the one some kernel updaters use, every updater either nags you to shutdown to do the update, nags you to restart to finish the update, or doesn't nag you and the update just doesn't take effect till you restart (apt falls in this category and it's not unambiguously better than nagging because you're silently vulnerable when security patches are shipped until you restart). So again, this is just an extremely unremarkable thing that tons of updaters deal with similarly.
Very true and good points, and when it comes to snap I mostly agree with you. I would guess the "war on Ubuntu" going on is more due to Ubuntu's history of making controversial decisions that go against the grain of what most other distros are doing at the time (creating and dropping Mir, creating Unity instead of using GNOME and then switching back to GNOME when they finally got Unity working well, installing an Amazon app out of the box in one version), many of which angered a lot of Linux community members before who are still angry despite Ubuntu rolling back most of those decisions, and they've found snap a great current scapegoat issue to use to vent their long-standing frustrations with Ubuntu at.
EDIT: I also notice to a lesser degree a weird fanboy-ism around Flatpak which I think also contributes to it. Pretty much when Flatpak came out the attitude was, "this is the standard for containerized binaries, no alternatives or exceptions will be tolerated", and immediately they went on the warpath to destroy both snap and appimage (though to be fair appimage really isn't great).
Very true and good points, and when it comes to snap I mostly agree with you. I would guess the "war on Ubuntu" going on is more due to Ubuntu's history of making controversial decisions that go against the grain of what most other distros are doing at the time (creating and dropping Mir, creating Unity instead of using GNOME and then switching back to GNOME when they finally got Unity working well, installing an Amazon app out of the box in one version), many of which angered a lot of Linux community members before who are still angry despite Ubuntu rolling back most of those decisions, and they've found snap a great current scapegoat issue to use to vent their long-standing frustrations with Ubuntu at.
I agree with just about every word here. I lived through all this stuff. Mir and Unity were hugely disruptive to the OSS desktop community beyond Ubuntu and I was as salty about them as anyone. If someone is aware of this history and just fucking done with Ubuntu's bullshit they'll get no flak from me. I rarely see this coherent an argument made though, it's much more often "snap bad, use this other distro that's downstream of Ubuntu and shares all the same foundations but has a different default desktop and disables snap by default", which I think is pretty nonsense and is rampant in the comments of this post.
But I've done my share of distro hopping and if someone wants to use something else for any reason or no reason... more power to them. I will make the counterpoint that no one has to care about snap and if you just pretend it doesn't exist then your life will be no different. And if history is any indicator, snap has about 2y left before they abandon it anyway.
My solution is to use MX, based on Debian. All packages came as .deb so a simple sudo apt install firefox is working.
Moving to a different distro :) Experimenting with nixos right now, already got native Firefox working :)
NixOS is amazing. I use it as a daily currently, but I haven't yet unlocked the full power of Nix.