Long story short, I have a desktop with Fedora, lovely, fast, sleek and surprisingly reliable for a near rolling distro (it failed me only once back around Fedora 34 or something where it nuked Grub). Tried to install on a 2012 i7 MacBook Air… what a slog!!! Surprisingly Ubuntu runs very smooth on it. I have been bothering all my friends for years about moving to Fedora (back then it was because I hated Unity) but now… I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but… Christ, it does run well! In fairness all my VMs are running DietPi (a slimmed version of Ubuntu) and coming back to the APT world feels like coming back home.
On the other end forcing myself to be on Fedora allows me to stay on the DNF world that is compatible with Amazon Linux etc (which I use for work), it has updated packages, it is nice and clean…. Argh, don’t know how to decide!
Thoughts?
I am not in the mood for Debian. I like the Mint approach but I am not a fan of slow rolling releases and also would like to keep myself as close as upstream as possible, the Debian version is the only one that seems reliable enough but, again, it is Debian, the packages are “old”. Pop Os and similar are two hops away from upstream and so I’d rather not.
Is Snap really that bad?
Edit: thank you all for sharing your experience !
Snaps are centralised packaging, a’la Apple App Store or Google Play. Now if someone forked snapd, added third party repo and made It so you could select which repo is the main one, that’d be a start.
But as long as Canonical commits to a centralised form of distribution with no third party support I’m going to advise desktop users to stay away from Ubuntu.
It’s more than just centralized control.
They have the ability to arbitrarily push out Snap updates.
That’s right! Your production server is getting patched without your knowledge or consent. Thankfully they magnanimously decided to let admins delay it by a few weeks.
Linux is about control. I decide what my machine does. When it updates. What it updates. The feedback from Canonical regarding Snaps was so tone dead and condescending it made Steve Balmer look sane. It boiled down to, don’t worry your pretty little head off. We know what’s best.
What deranged donkey is using snaps for infra?
If you run Ubuntu on a production server, you better having snapd disabled.