Aw man… I'm really not looking forward to getting out of my comfort zone of just running the current Ubuntu LTS on all my machines. Not that I fear other distributions, but I'm just at a loss at figuring out how to get the combination of broadly supported (also by Steam and Proton on my desktop rig), just working out of the box, and minimal fuss.
The writing has been on the wall a while though, with snap making some tools borderline unusable until you install a non-snap version.
"Minimal fuss" has been an Ubuntu strength since the very start. First it was the debian-sanity approach to a desktop that worked just fine.
But LTS really helped keep fuss even lower. I remember buying my first Ubuntu laptop from Dell in disbelief. No fuss, worked for years, no issues.
Right now I gather Ubuntu has a lot of commerical runway and partnership to leverage. Community runway is going to be shorter but there are still (as I understand it) workarounds for just about every significant issue people have with the distro.
What's concerning is that workarounds are essentially the same thing as fuss, for a lot of users out there.
With both Mint and Pop!OS I worry about the consequences of essentially being downstream versions of Ubuntu. I'll see if the Mint maintainers have a view on this; it does seem like a candidate.
Pop!OS seems nice, but I never really got the impression that System76 is doing much more than just reskinning Ubuntu. It just doesn't feel like something that will last.
Going back upstream is an option of course, i.e., Debian. It seems to have modernized quite a bit since the olden days.
The Mint maintainers have Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), which is based on Debian and pretty similar in functionality to the Ubuntu version though you do miss some nice features (for example I don't believe the driver manager is present in this version). They seem to be hedging their bets for if they ever need to jump ship away from Ubuntu.
> Pop!OS seems nice, but I never really got the impression that System76 is doing much more than just reskinning Ubuntu. It just doesn't feel like something that will last.
I think this undersells Pop!_OS a fair bit. They have a FAQ that actually has a heading "Isn’t it just a re-skinned Ubuntu?"[0]:
> To call it a re-skinned Ubuntu brushes over all of the features and quality-of-life improvements that Pop! developers work diligently to create. For an in-depth look at the effort and manpower that goes into updating and maintaining Pop!_OS, take a look at our Roadmap documentation and the This Week in Pop! series on Pop!_Planet. Below, you will find a general list of improvements that make Pop!_OS stand out.
I think roadmap doc they mention[1] tells the story pretty well.
> I worry about the consequences of essentially being downstream versions of Ubuntu
FOr now it doesn't worry me much. Ubuntu is fine if you just remove the bad parts. If it becomes a problem, I see both Mint and Pop easily switching to Debian.
I feel like its much more just reskinning Gnome though, or at least all that is the part I like about it. I haven't tried it myself, but there is no reason I think you couldn't run their DE, tiling, and Launcher ontop of Arch or Nixos.
I'm a daily user of Pop_OS! by System76. (https://pop.system76.com/) It's developed as a desktop system for their range of computers, but you can install it on anything, as I did. It Just Works™ and I didn't have any compatibility issues with it -- as an anecdote, once I was able to connect to a Samsung printer out of the box, while my friends using Windows had to search online for drivers.
I bought a laptop from System76 with Pop_OS! installed.
After turning on wifi and running the updates, I then installed emacs, firefox, and KDE from the Pop_OS! repo, then ran the updates again.
Instead of continuing the process of "moving in", I found apt was now in an error state with what appears to be some broken circular dependencies. My immediate conclusion was that Pop_OS! is either flaky or I was unlucky enough to use their system for the first time just as they had a packaging bug that affected me.
I don't think putting out a solid distro is a trivial thing. System76 probably put in a lot of effort into their (IMHO weird) desktop environment. They also have been promoting donation subscriptions for Pop_OS! development support. Based on my experience, I wonder if they bit off more than they could chew, squandering effort on flashy things rather than doing the basics well.
I agree I'm going to migrate away from them, I can't support this.
Naive question: I've got ubuntu running on servers (mostly just shared files and computer) and some cloud gpu machines. Are these affected as well? As in the ubuntu images that come from aws et al are presumably not "pro" so they won't be properly watchable?
As an aside, what a rip-off. I'm generally hesitant to use free tools from for-profit companies for fear of how they'll later try and monetize, and this is a pretty good case of a company deciding to lure people in then do something really scummy
"I'm generally hesitant to use free tools from for-profit companies for fear of how they'll later try and monetize, and this is a pretty good case of a company deciding to lure people in then do something really scummy"
Counterpoint: Canonical has to pay people to produce Ubuntu. Eventually they need to figure out how to get enough people to pay to cover expenses, salaries, etc. The last revenue figures I saw from Ubuntu were in the green, but that was 2020 and it's not like they were generating a huge profit. The prior year showed a loss. And apparently they are or were planning to go public in 2023. [1] (Whether they'll go through with that given <gestures at everything> the state of the world is another question.)
If the existing system isn't converting enough users from free -> paid, then the alternative may be "didn't work, stop producing these tools, period."
I've had my fair share of complaints about Canonical over the years (Snap, Unity, the so-called Harmony effort to normalize non-friendly CLAs), but if you like being able to expect releases with a certain level of polish and updates... they've got to bring in money.
If you and users like you are unwilling to pay when they don't employ monetization tactics, then... either they end or they start exploring ways to bring in money.
So - just doling out Ubuntu hasn't quite done the trick. If not for "scummy" tactics, what is going to get you to pay for the things you use? If the answer is "nothing" then there's little value in Canonical catering to your preferences.
You seem to have made a lot of assumptions about me. Anyway, what you're saying backs up my point imo. There is always some risk depending another party. If I'm using say python, I feel relatively secure they won't start shaking me down for money. For the reasons you mention, the same isn't true for ubuntu.
> I agree I'm going to migrate away from them, I can't support this.
It almost certainly doesn't affect anything you run on your servers.
Even if you did have Universe packages on your servers, what it means is that you now have the option to get Ubuntu Pro and have security updates for those packages.
Up until this point, you did not get security updates for those packages.
There are now arch-based distros that are quick and easy to set up, like Ubuntu. I'm currently running endeavourOS, and I am eager to try Manjaro.
Don't be put off by the Arch-based nature of the OS - since both Endeavour and Manjaro have installers, they bootstrap your system's drivers, and all.
I've found maintenance to not be too overwhelming, and Arch's wiki is top-notch. When I used other distros like Gentoo, I sometimes found myself reacing the Arch wiki...
Package management isn't too different from using apt, synaptic, or the app store if you use the right tools:
Command-line:
- Pacman: for precompiled official packages
- Yay : Automagically compiles community-ported third-party applications
GUI:
- Pamac: Look it up - it's a lot like Ubuntu's "App Store"
The caveat here is that I'm an experienced Ubuntu/Debian user that moved to Gentoo for a while.
While using Gentoo, I got tired of the systemd migration nightmare and returned to Ubuntu to find the nightmare of Snapd and poorly-sandboxed applications in their community repo.
I've only used Arch for about a month, but after using Gentoo and Ubuntu, I think I'm staying here for a while. The kernels are brand-new and the GPU driver performance is at least 2x what I was getting in Ubuntu. With the derivatives, there's no reason to bootstrap an Arch system from the kernel framebuffer, like the olden days of Gentoo and Slack.
Arch itself has install script (archinstall) these days which streamlines the install process a ton. Not sure how stable it is though (I hear it is still considered experimental) but it certainly made my recent install on my thinkpad a breeze.
The writing has been on the wall a while though, with snap making some tools borderline unusable until you install a non-snap version.