All things Linux

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Hmmm.

So I'm catching up with Linux news now and I'm just now learning about the situation last year with Red Hat, and other developments in open-source in general, and it's concerning. Kubuntu WORKS fine on my computer, I mean I don't have any function issues that I wouldn't be having on some other random distro; but on the meta/principled front I'm really doubting whether I can trust a for-profit like Canonical to never do something like what Red Hat just did. A couple of Linux youtubers that I do tend to trust, have made arguments that are hard for me to refute. I might end up switching to straight Debian after all.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

XD

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

I kinda like this guy's attitude (might have to click to read the whole thing):

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (@ifixcoinops@retro.social)

Linux is a bit shit sometimes, There's your headline. I don't care whether you use linux or not; ten years ago that might have mattered, I might be trying to get more people to use it so that adobe or whoever would put more effort into supporting it, but that doesn't really matter anymore...

retro.social

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

I got another NVMe drive and put Debian 12 on it, planning to ditch Kubuntu for Debian. But I've found out after some work that a utility that I need to add in order to get GPU rendering in Blender with my Radeon card isn't compatible with Debian's newer kernel. That's a hard requirement - I NEED to be able to do GPU rendering, end of story. So I have to stick with Kubuntu (where it works fine right now) and wait for AMD to update their software for the new kernel before I can do the move. Ah well.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

That's probably a good reason to use a downstream distro. Upstream changes have been shaken out a bit before ending up in a downstream distro like Ubuntu or Mint.

Out of curiosity, why do you want to ditch Kubuntu?

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Out of curiosity, why do you want to ditch Kubuntu?

Well...it's kind of a personal feeling of mine. It's not something super substantial.

I think this youtuber, who is one of my favorite Linux youtubers, probably explains the whole situation better than I could. This video isn't what convinced me, I only first saw it like a month ago, but it really nails the big picture:


She comes at the situation from the POV of an enterprise sysadmin, which I am very not, but her points are real even for me as just a rando personal desktop user. Canonical is a for-profit company, and she's right - I just can't really claim to be confident that at some point Canonical won't go the Red Hat route of choosing profit over users' expectations and objections. The Snap situation is kind of an orange flag that way - I don't have any problem with Snaps themselves, but the way Canonical pushes them and even sort of underhandedly switcheroos them in for Apt packages is not a good look.

I would still recommend Kubuntu to like someone just starting out in Linux for the first time, no question. It includes all the things, and that makes it a really easy and more comfortable introduction to the "Linux world", or whatnot. But while I'm still very noob, I think I'm comfortable enough now to use Debian without all the Ubuntu sauce on top and not get into too much trouble.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

I parted ways with Canonical when they pushed Unity on Ubuntu. I switched to Mint briefly, then jumped over to OpenSuse to try out Gnome 3. OpenSuse was mainly a KDE distro, but I felt they did a really good job implementing Gnome 3. I ran that for a few years, then I heard about Cinnamon, so I tried out Mint again, and have run it since.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I would stay with Debian based distros like Ubuntu or Mint rather than Red Hat based distros like OpenSuse. I had to package our software in RPM and APT in a former job and frankly I'm amazed RPM even works without exploding like the fat guy in "Meaning of Life".

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

I parted ways with Canonical when they pushed Unity on Ubuntu. I switched to Mint briefly, then jumped over to OpenSuse to try out Gnome 3. OpenSuse was mainly a KDE distro, but I felt they did a really good job implementing Gnome 3. I ran that for a few years, then I heard about Cinnamon, so I tried out Mint again, and have run it since.

Cinnamon is great! To me the two are basically interchangeable when it comes to ticking the UI design philosophy boxes that I care about. If I hadn't just happened to try Plasma first I'd likely be using Cinnamon right now.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

I would stay with Debian based distros like Ubuntu or Mint rather than Red Hat based distros like OpenSuse. I had to package our software in RPM and APT in a former job and frankly I'm amazed RPM even works without exploding like the fat guy in "Meaning of Life".

LOL. I haven't really even tried Red Hat or Arch stuff; when I hear their fans talk about them, they really like to make it clear that they're geared toward advanced penguinheads, and I'm not that. I'm not a tinkerer or a distro-hopper. So when I decided I wanted to leave Ubuntu, Debian or something else Debian-based is kind of a no-brainer to me, I already know how to use it.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

LOL. Red Hat is geared towards corporations with centralized IT departments that want to control the horizontal and the vertical.

The distro for advanced penguinheads is Gentoo.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

The distro for advanced penguinheads is Gentoo.

But ARCH LINUX

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

This thread from Reddit is an example of the Snap switcheroo thing that I mentioned in action. The OP wants to install the .deb version of Firefox, which you normally can do with Apt, but when you're using Ubuntu's repository - even explicitly asking for the .deb - it just installs the Snap version instead regardless. When he configured Apt to not install snapd no matter what, it just plain wouldn't let him install Firefox. And adding Mozilla's own repository didn't help because Ubuntu set their own package to a "higher priority", so any request for Firefox would be forced to use their Snap.

Someone in the thread was able to point him to a workaround, but it's this kinda skeezy behavior that damages my trust in Canonical.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

LOL, as if advanced penguinheads would want a distro that doesn't recompile the kernel during boot to better optimize the drivers. Plus, isn't Arch amd64-only? What if you want to do advanced penguining on an IBM mainframe, like running a penguin herd in zOS partitions?

 

[Noodles]

Hannah Montana Linux or nothing.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

Is Slackware still a thing?

 

[Khamon]

Slackware was my introduction to linux. I do not know if it's still a thing. It was the mid-nineties-ish. Come to think of it, that was also my introduction to TCP/IP. Protocols were so proprietary in those days.

 

[Noodles]

Last weekend I was visiting with my parents and my dad mentioned that he discovered that he had WiFi tethering available on his phone and it didn't try to charge him extra.

Like they just allow it now.

So I tried it on my phone, and sure enough, it worked.

This is convenient because previously I have been using a work around using a USB connection toy laptop. I have had issues getting this to work properly in Linux.

But it's basically at this point, the only reason I use Windows still ony Laptop.

So I may have to wipe it and put some sort of Linux on it. I may hold off to make sure the WiFi thing stays though. It will be kind of convenient since Windows 10 is EOL next year.

 

[Noodles]

I have jumped back on the Linux train on my Laptop.

Everything was moved pver pretty smoothly, and I have been planning on doing it for a while now.

Anyway, I just want to say, it comes up extremely quickly from standby, which is surprising, especially aince my laptop is like, maybe 10 years old now.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Holy smoke, new Apt is about to look fantastic.

It's still on Debian testing at the moment so it's going to be a little while before I get to see it on stable, but what an improvement!