What would it look like? I'd guess Amazon ads in the search bar, proprietary package managers overriding the old open package manager, and popup ads for distribution Pro?
Ubuntu was my first distro because ubuntu was linux for outsiders many years ago. Any other distro was only for hardcore people. I don't regret hopping around the linux world.
I used Ubuntu for over 10 years. I loved it. But Canonical does have a lot of baggage. Plus, I wanted to go to the source. So that's why I use Debian. I'd still advise a new user to go for Mint if they loved the Windows UI or Ubuntu if they hated it. If you use and love Mint, I don't think anyone would criticize you for continuing to use it. If you use and love Ubuntu, I'd say Debian is a very easy next step.
I used to be "Debian on the server, Ubuntu on the desktop" but recently I've spun up a few Debian boxes for desktop and I'm pleasantly surprised.
Kinda wish Valve would go for a full-out supported distro that stays in step with the Deck for Linux gamers (the old desktop SteamOS is kinda abandoned from what I can see), among with making the deck frontend a supported desktop manager. It would make sense for them to do so and rake in the game sales whilst providing a well-supported platform without the shit others are doing.
Same. I started really using Linux with Ubuntu 6.06 and was drawn in by its "Linux for human beings" goals - the Ubuntu homepage of the era really pushed the ideals of community and openness. Canonical sat in the background paying to send you free CDs in the mail. It was such an idealistic thing back then.
And then it all changed around 2010. The color scheme shifted to a shitty MacOS lookalike, the human elements were dropped, the logo was reworked, it got bundled with a paid music store, then Amazon ads in the search, and it's been a roller coaster on a downward spiral ever since. I switched to Debian not long after the initial enshittification in the early 2010s and have not looked back, though I moved most of my systems to Arch a few years back because I like life in the fast rolling release lane and Debian wouldn't support my new GPUs.
I got into linux right before all the snap drama really blew up (it did exist but didn't seem to be quite as hot of a topic). I really liked my experience with Ubuntu, but seeing where Canonical has taken it, I'd never recommend it to anyone. I'd honestly advise newbies to use Debian. It's incredibly stable, has a fantastic and well established community, and has everything an average user would want without adding layers of confusion with things like snap.
Ubuntu has had all three of those things. Amazon ads in the search bar was awhile back. Not sure but I assume they still hijack installing Firefox using apt and instead install it using snap. And Ubuntu Pro popups are a new thing.
Does anyone know if this is still the case? This video is 11 years old, but logic and common sense tell me that, if anything, it should be even worse now.
No clue, but they did their "whoopsie, didn't know you wouldn't like it, now it's opt in" pretty quickly.
A while back I've read about some allegations that they're illegally collecting data from Azure Ubuntu instances and sending Ubuntu pro marketing material.
It's ridiculous how Ubuntu went from the easiest entry to Linux to one of the most hated distros in the community. Seriously, I'll never understand how the broken brains of their leadership even work.
Arch packaging is also significantly easier to work with in my experience. I've packaged for both for some years and I'll take the Arch build system over wrangling dpkg every chance I can.
Totally agree. Arch is actually a really good, simple system. That's why so many people pick it as their main distro. Once you have installed it a few times, it's just very simple how it works. There is no magic.
The difficulty with arch is not get it up and running. It's about keeping it up to date. Do you have selinux enabled? I like selinux and among other things that's what fedora bundles for me. I could do everything myself but not only do I have to know the state of the art today, I also will have to know what's up tomorrow. I have to keep up with it. That is the difficulty with arch. Selinux is just one example but probably a prominent. I bet many people running arch have not installed it.
True, I have not installed it. I ran Fedora for a while long time ago and selinux was causing tons of headaches. So I never wanted to have it on my system after that.
How is keeping Arch up-to-date hard? Because there are a lot of updates?
I found Arch to be easier to maintain than any other distro I use. Everything is managed by the package manager ( no snaps, no flatpaks, no PPAs ). Updates are frequent but small and manageable. There are really no update “events” to navigate. And everything is current enough that I never find myself working around missing features or incompatibilities. I found it to “just work”.
I am not sure how your first point relates to SElinux. SELinux is part of the Red Hat ecosystem which is why Fedora uses it. It is not new ( SElinux may pre-date Arch Linux ). Whether you have it installed or not has nothing to do with how hard the system is to maintain. Default Debian installs do not use it either. Most Linux distros don’t. Ubuntu and SUSE use AppArmor instead.
I do not use SElinux on desktop but it makes sense for a server. The Arch kernel includes SElinux support so all you have to do is install the package if you want it. Generally, Arch gives you a newer version than Fedora does.
Flatpak is another good example besides selinux. You as a user have to be up to date how to install packages. You have to install flatpak yourself. I trust that you are up to date enough, but many people lack time and especially interest in how the system works. Many people don't care as long as it works. On arch you have the freedom to do everything but you have to take care of a lot of thing on your own. E.g. fedora makes a lot of decisions for you. You do not have to read about firewalls, you can, but you don't have to. On arch I highly advise evryone to read what a firewall is and then decide which firewall to use and set the right settings. Arch is not bad but it's not for the average person who doesn't read readmes and guides and that's ok
I feel like this is the answer. if you've ever had to maintain a build pipeline or repository for .deb or .rpm, it's not exactly pleasant (it is extremely robust, however). arch packaging is very simple by comparison, and I really doubt they'd need much more.
I have only ever packaged for RPM (the company I work for has our own RPM-based distro). How does it compare? I find RPM to be pretty easy, but I have nothing to compare against.
File system is a core component of any electronic system. Even if it's just 1% less stable than other ones, it's still less stable. Maybe it's faster in some cases and supports better backups but ehh idk if it's worth it. Losing documents is something you probably want to avoid at all costs
Yeah, but it isn't noticeably "less stable" if at all anymore* unless you mean stable as in "essentially in maintenance mode", and clearly good enough for SLES to make it the default. Stop spreading outdated FUD and make backups regularly if you care about your documents (ext4 won't save you from disk failure either which is probably the more likely scenario).
* not talking about the RAID 5/6 modes, but those are explicitly marked unstable
Well gtk if it's really as stable as ext4. I will still stick to ext4 though because why change what already works well and tested on almost any machine you can possibly imagine?
I suppose by being more efficient, "using modern technology" (everything saving Google, Meta, Amazon etc. money and is thus extremely well funded, all server related stuff), is good for the environment.
If something runs faster on the same hardware, it may use less energy. It may also just be restricted in hardware usage, like not using multithreading.
Linux Distros shipping x86_64-v2 packages is a whole other problem...
I disagree. My partition is ext4, but Timeshift saved my ass when an upgrade went wrong. I just had to restore the system from a previous snapshot taken before the upgrade.
Of course updates can break stuff. What I don't understand is why would you intentionally go for a less stable FS that can break and corrupt all files? It's especially bad on old machines with limited space where full backups are not possible
I'm running it for over 3 years as complete linux moron with no issues whatsoever. It was default in openSUSE and its automatic snapshot feature saved my ass multiple times. I've heard everyone saying ext4 is super stable and I should use it, but I went with default and can't complain.
Yes but why intentionally choose a worse option? Sorry but it's not very smart imo.
And not having enough space is not an administrator failure. It's usually budget issue. And are you saying that making apps bloated (like severely bloated) is ok and the user should always be blamed for having lower hardware?
Good that you mentioned that. Reminded me that I have an Arch Linux install here where I forgot that I did choose BTRFS during installation. Within maybe a month I noticed FS errors. Looked scary. Nervously searching for documentation was even more scary :
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/btrfs#btrfs_check -> This article or section is out of date. (Discuss in Talk:Btrfs)
Warning: Since Btrfs is under heavy development, especially the btrfs check command,
it is highly recommended to create a backup and consult btrfs-check(8) before
executing btrfs check with the --repair switch.
What is this? My beloved Arch Wiki is not 100% perfect!
Then found this :
WARNING: Using '--repair' can further damage a filesystem instead of helping if it can't fix your particular issue.
Do not use --repair unless you are advised to do so by a developer or an experienced
user, and then only after having accepted that no fsck successfully repair all types
of filesystem corruption. E.g. some other software or hardware bugs can fatally damage
a volume.
I figure this explains the popularity of BTRFS snapshot configurations.
Luckily I had some backups :)
Filesystem snapshots won't help, if the filesystem itself corrupts. But I've been using BTRFS for 6 years now and haven't had a file system corruption, so mileage may obviously vary.
Reading the bug report about all that ( https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme/-/issues/288 ), it's crazy to see how the gnome dev (Red Hat employee) replies to the issue. He completely ignores the issue in the beginning, then that he doesn't care to follow the spec because it's "old", and yet, he still advertises to the OS as an fdo theme, so OSes ship with it. He's hurting non-gnome apps, and he simply doesn't seem to care about it. To me, this shows a person who simply doesn't care about ecosystem.
If you look at every interaction with a Redhat developer in the context of them having KPIs / set work to do. The responses to non critical issues / MRs makes a lot more sense.
I have defended Red Hat a fair bit over the past year. Their level of contribution to the community is a big reason why.
It is clear though that their prominence comes with a downside in the paternal and authoritative way that their employees present themselves. Design choices and priorities are made with an emphasis on what works for and what is required for Red Hat and the software they are going to ship. The impact on the wider community is not always considered and too often actively dismissed.
Even some of the Linux centrism perceived in Open Source may really be more about Red Hat. For example, GNOME insists on Systemd. Both projects are dominated by Red Hat. There have been problems with their stewardship of other projects.
To me, this is a much bigger problem than all the license hand-waving we saw before.
I was getting really pissed seeing that Pointieststick had to explain the same fucking thing OVER AND OVER again. I don't know if the gnome dev in question is stupid or just trolling.
They didn't "strip" anything, they've split it into 2 variants, a package without networking features (-DWITH_XC_NETWORKING=OFF) and a package with them, because it's considered a privacy issue to have your password manager phone home and fetch favicons and so on. The packages will be called keepassxc and keepassxc-full going forward.
I expect the KeepassXC people are mostly bothered by the naming of the package because the version called "keepassxc" is now the basic one. Anyway, the maintainer has offered to call them -minimal and -full and to make "keepassxc" a metapackage that pops up a debconf dialog telling users that install it to choose one. There is precedent with other complex packages that are split into basic and full. This should solve things nicely for everyone.
Afaiu it, he added a second package with (quote) "all the crap" later, after the storm.
And no, it wasn't just the favicons feature that was removed (which like ... is that really such a big privacy issue that you need to remove it from the binary?). Support for Yubikey was removed as well — which is not a privacy issue. The reasoning mentioned by the Debian maintainer is that all of these features might turn out to be security issues in the long run. Thus, in his view, a password manager application must do nothing but provide access to the database within the app.
I find it an interesting example of diverging upstream, maintainer, and user interests in any case.
I find it a lot of unnecessary fuss over unstable. Sid is supposed to make breaking changes, you offer feedback and you follow it through politely. The next Debian stable is one year away, this is not an urgent matter
And no, it wasn’t just the favicons feature that was removed (which like … is that really such a big privacy issue that you need to remove it from the binary?)
Fetching a favicon means raising a network connection with a predictable endpoint. That's already three concerns (four on the modern internet) to handle security-wise, and it's absolutely an unneeded feature. Favicons could just be shipped on something like keepassxc-data or keepassxc-contrib to handle locally, no need to raise a network call.
I highly recommend reading the Github thread as this is not at all an accurate representation. These features you're talking about are off by default. Removing them from the existing package is just breaking existing users. There's already a report from a user who can't access their passwords because yubikey support was suddenly removed. You don't do that to users just because you suddenly develop an opinion as a package maintainer that you feel is important. There was no dialogue, no consideration and a very rude, dismissive attitude of Julian.
Of course it does. OP asked multiple questions, this was sipposes to answer why they used KDE instead of Gnome. I personally think Arch would have the advantage of having the newewst drivers, Proton version etc. available.
Gaming support is still very much a work in progress all up and down the software stack. Stable distros like Debian tend to ship older proven versions of packages so their packaged software can be up to 18mo behind current releases. The NTSync kernel code that should improve Windows game performance isn't even scheduled for mainline merge until the 6.10 kernel window in a few weeks - that's not likely to be in a stable Debian release for a 12-18mo.
TL;DR: Gaming work is very much ongoing and Arch moves faster than Debian does. Shipping 12-18mo old versions of core software on the Steam deck would degrade performance.
It's pretty common to use debian unstable as a base. stable is not the only release that debian offers, and despite their names they tend to be more dependable than other distros idea of stable.
stable is not the only release that debian offers,
Did you mean to say "branch" rather than "release"? Debian only releases stable. Everything else is part of the process of preparing and supporting stable.
Testing branch may work well or it may not. Its goal is to refine packages for the next stable release so it has an inherent strive towards quality, but it doesn't have a commitment to "quality now" like stable does, just to "quality eventually".
Testing's quality is highest towards the start of each release cycle when it picks up from the previous stable release and towards the end when it's getting ready to become the next stable. But the cycle is 2 years long.
Not sure about the down arrow in particular but I have seen objects (e.g. a corner of a book) accidentally lie on a key at the edge of a keyboard before.
I never understood the hate, tbh. A lot of users don't even care if Sysd is used, as long as it works. So... Since the majority of distros use it... I think it works enough.
I understand the concern about the future and we have seen overbloated projects have issues. In the long run though I will use what works best for me and only get into philosophical comparisons if im making the choice between relatively equal options.
I think some of the hate is from the main systemd dev, Poettering, being so abrasive on social media. He's got a hateboner for certain distros (which don't ship with systemd as the default).
It seems to me to be mainly from people who are dedicated to the Unix philosophy that programs should do only one thing, and do it well. Tying everything up into systemd doesn't follow that. I don't care either, and I don't mind systemd, but some people care about it enough to throw paragraphs of hate on it wherever it's mentioned online. And apparently it's "bloat", and to some " bloat" is worse than the devil himself.
If you dig deeper into systemd, it's not all that far off the Unix philosophy either. Some people seem to think the entirety of systemd runs as PID1, but it really only spawns and tracks processes. Most systemd components are separate processes that focus on their own thing, like journald and log management. It's kinda nice that they all work very similarly, it makes for a nice clean integrated experience.
Because it all lives in one repo doesn't mean it makes one big fat binary that runs as PID1 and does everything.
This is what turned me around: investigating and realizing that it is following the unix philosophy, it's just under the hood (under the other hood inside the bigger under the hood).
My main issues are that it obfuscates things and seems to consume everything it can into itself.
Honestly, if it were more transparent and designed in a way to easily facilitate swapping out components with alternatives, I'd be a lot more okay with it.
I remember in an interview talking about the Steam Deck and its controls, GabeN said (paraphrased) "What we learned from the Steam Controller is there needs to be zero learning curve. Players want to pick it up and understand it immediately."
Given that ethos, it's not difficult to understand adopting KDE over Gnome. Most of Valve's customers are coming from Windows, and KDE resembles Windows' UI, where Gnome resembles iOS after a stroke.
So, what you're saying is you think Gnome resembles MacOS after a stroke? Fair enough.
Whichever who cares. I find Gnome so feature poor and so "why would you ever want to do that?" and so "You have to do it the way it occurred to us, not the way it occurred to you." that I legitimately hate it.
No, GNOME is far superior to MacOS, so superior that Windows 11 copied it, and KDE copies Windows. That makes GNOME the godfather compared to hacky KDE.
You think so? That shit has 2 right click menus and settings hard to navigate, not to mention the unbearable ad ridden Start menu, shitty Control Panel and AI garbage you cannot escape. You need something like AME project to make it barely usable. Oh and forced updates taking hours of time. All this is not a problem on Linux.
False, wrong, invalid opinion. I have been a user of Windows since 95/98, and a user of GNOME for almost 7 years. The current GNOME 40+ workflow and UX is beyond superior to whatever Windows is. Windows only makes sense till it does not, and the moment you try to do things other than the convoluted hack way we have been taught for over 20 years, it falls apart.
Nothing, someone who never needed access to the RHEL snapshot source is butt hurt that it only exists as part of centOS stream, making it harder for community rebuilds to exist.
It's no big deal for 95% of users, truly a nonissue. That last 5% can buy RHEL for production or use it for free for personal hosting or development.
RedHat is one of, if not the, biggest contributors to Linux. They offer RHEL, which you license as a business or use for free for personal use.
RedHat became pissed off about contributing so much to the Linux ecosystem when a number of other corporate distros simply took their product, changed the name, then shoved it out the door with a price tag that undercuts them, taking money while contributing virtually nothing to the wider ecosystem.
And to be clear I don't mean distros based on RHEL, like Pop/Elementary/Mint is to Ubuntu, I mean literally clones. The exact same software with zero differences other than name.
RH then changed their subscription terms so that redistribution of their source code means they can drop you as a RHEL customer. I.e. you wouldn't have access to further to source code.
This is widely believed to be compatible with the GPL licence that Linux uses — GPL only guarantees users need to be able to see source code, not necessarily that it has to be completely open for anybody to see. GPL also doesn't compel the developer to provide updates for everyone, so if the developer thinks you've broken other terms they've set, they are allowed to drop you/not deal with you further. GPL doesn't force a developer to have you as their continued customer.
People argue that RH may well be complying with the GPL legally, but they aren't in spirit.
I'm still not sure where I come down on it tbh. Philosophically I want RH to go with the spirit of the GPL, but I do find it really shitty that a number of other projects just straight up take RH's product, put a different name on it, and skim money away from an organisation that has transformed the Linux desktop and made it usable.
Thing is, I don't even think it's worked. They can still get all the packages by pulling it in a slightly cumbersome way from CentOS.
I think what they tried to achieve was to get rid of the "bit to bit" copypasted distributions which they at least made harder to make. So I suppose at least the cost to "steal the RHEL source" is higher.
btw I dislike that Free Software is also free (0.00 €) software. I feel like there should be some kind of chimera license which would first be proprietary with source available and after a certain time after purchase the code would be open source for the buyer. So you could actually sell it unlike Open Source Software which you can sell only once because the first person can just start giving away free copies. Sadly people in the open source realm tend to get pretty defensive when they see "proprietary". Would cool if flathub at least implemented some kind of way to sell software even if Open Source, that would be a nice start.
First of all, RedHat now belongs to IBM, and they've never been shy about squeezing customers for a buck.
Second, having dealt with their support, it's hit or miss to get a somebody helpful or an endless cycle of tickets. Patching and versioning is sometimes a complete mess.This especially sucks as the main reason most organizations go with RH versus others is for patching and support.
There's also a lot of things where there's a RH-specific implementation , which is further distancing fun other Linuxes and often ignores standard ways of configuring things.
RedHat actually benefitted from Fedora, CentOS etc as it allowed the community to develop products in a way that could be tested to be reasonably compatible, and to develop our port back fixes etc. It wasn't just "RedHat made this and others just took it" but in many ways a symbiotic relationship. Yeah some orgs just went with CentOS but often it was those who worked on RH corporately would run CentOS at home in order to have a similar environment.
You’re not dumb you just haven’t needed that use case before.
Here’s an example of the last time JDownloader saved me. There was a website where people were posting archives of old skateboard videos. There were hundreds of links across dozens of pages in a forum. All links to sites like mega.
I was able to view all pages in one document and extracted all of the hundreds of links and put them in JDownloader. Over the course of the next several weeks JDownloader was able to manage those downloads without clogging my bandwidth. If a download failed it would notify me and I could retry it.
Neat! I haven't had to use download sites in ages so TIL you could bypass it like this. I thought all that stuff died with Rapidshare and letitbit etc.
Familiarity breeds contempt, give it some time and I'm sure cosmic will have its share of haters too. There's hundreds of gnome devs, and all you're seeing are clickbait blogposts like these made to stir up the pot. Go check out the discussions on discourse, matrix, or even gitlab to see what they're actually like.
If the cosmic devs start to behave like the gnome devs, that hate is well deserved. Also, if gnome just abused their own users nobody outside of their userbase would care. Breaking something and then expecting everybody else to clean up the mess is what people hate about gnome. It is a pitty because it sullies the name of gnome as a whole. There are a lot of people doing great work at gnome that now get lumped in with these sad excuses for software developers. For example, I think the gnome UX on a small form factor laptop is unrivaled. My surface tablet never worked better; but I still don't recommend it to anyone else because I know who the devs are and how they conduct themselves.
The problem isn't that every gnome dev is bad - not by a long shot. The problem is that there are just enough gnome devs in just the right (wrong?) positions who have an "our way or the highway" philosophy that it causes problems not just for people trying to use GNOME, but for people (such as the Kate developers) who are trying to give their users a good experience.
And by being the default in so many distros, GNOME has enough clout that if they choose to abandon a standard, many people will change to whatever GNOME does, making their applications worse for people on other desktops.
In the end it's not too dissimilar to the problems created by the dominance of Chromium and Windows. The biggest difference IMO is that Google are actually more conciliatory towards others than the GNOME team are in many cases. Which is kinda crazy given how much Google can throw their weight around on the web.
Google has a swath of PR people, devs are always going to be less socially inclined. Devs at google aren't the ones making the decisions. But yeah gnome does throw its weight around, both for good and bad.
That's because Cosmic is made by really cool people at System76 who actually care about their users/customers and the broader open source Linux desktop ecosystem
I can't wait to throw it on my laptop. I hope the tiling is highly customizable because I need something I can throw on a laptop, not update in a while and still have it not break when I finally do.
I like Hyperland but it does break the config every once and a while.
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