Ubuntu is just Debian with extra steps… and snaps
Which is reason enough to go with Debian (I have an unreasonable issue with snaps).
yeah, snaps… they should have just gone with appimage I don’t like them either, but at least we can all settle on one bag of pain.
Use whatever the fuck you want, you fucking weirdo cultists.
This. I’d better use windows then listen to another round of debate Ubuntu vs Arch…
spoiler
I use arch btw
I use Kubuntu LTS (
--minimal-install; nosnapfuckery from get-go) btw.Garuda is also performing nicely on an older laptop.
I read it as clits. Just saying.
What other than what you just said are you “just saying”?
This is seriously a hot take
If you’re a programmer: NixOS.
Define your OS config, which programs to install, and dotfiles in one repo. Install a fresh OS, pull in the repo (
nix-shell -p git, because NixOS doesn’t come with git >_> ) and run the command to install the whole thing (sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake .for me.wodanis just the name of a config - I have multiple all combines into one repo, so I can share configuration between machines).Took me 17 minutes to set up my laptop exactly the same as my Desktop. Same configuration, applications, and OS settings. It’s so fucking nice.
With Windows, that used to take 2 days to download and install everything manually.
Only downside: You’ll need to learn Nix-the-language, nix-the-os, and nix-the-terminal-program, which took about a month of deeply digging into the Vimjoyer and LibrePhoenix channels.
Just checked my Mint. Why Cinnamon uses so much VRAM? I have over 1GB idle, without anything running. In my Windows i usually have 400Mb with all things closed.
I remember this site
https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
But honestly, although I can’t check it, 1GB idle is still far more ram than what I get idle, so you might have some weird program auto-starting and actually eating your ram.
RAM is ok, i have plenty of it. VRAM (Video RAM) is the problem. The RAM of the GPU, used for showing graphics, UI etc.
Oof sorry my bad lol
Debian since 1998. No reason to change.
that should be their mission statement.
Use Debian. No good reason to change.
“You’ve done a lot of work to make this work. Do you really want more work?”™
I’m okay with it.
I can think of one. The Debian logo is boring!
Consistent branding over multiple decades!
Debian gaming wasn’t great when a lot of the landscape was changing (around 2016?) and even one of my very Debian friendly colleagues switched his gaming machine to Arch back then because getting the new stuff like AMD Vulkan drivers and DXVK running was really hard on Debian. Don’t think he migrated that particular machine back since then.
I’ve always enjoyed the tinkering. My gaming habits pretty much grew up with WINE. DXVK was very exciting!
Never been a stranger to compiling my own kernel or mucking about with DLL overrides.
The thing is, back then, for the stuff to work on Debian, you needed to
- compile your own newer kernel
- compile the new mesa that depended on that kernel
and with how frequent updates were, this was something you’d probably do multiple times per month – at this point, why bother with Debian when you need to compile all the packages yourself? Remember that was a gaming machine… so why bother with Debian and spend hours each month when with Arch, it was just a
pacman -Syufollowed by a reboot and you could try out all that fancy new stuff?That really was not my experience. I didn’t game much. WoW mostly. Some StarCraft. Minecraft. Online games. Debian unstable worked fine and I don’t think I had to compile my own kernel (for gaming) at any point past 2005 or so.
The discussion was implicitly around the changes brought by Vulkan and DXVK which enabled playing Windows Direct3D (this part is important) 11 and later 9 games without performance penalty. You could previously play Windows Direct3D 9 titles using Gallium Nine if you had an AMD card, though this was a bit iffy.
WoW mostly.
That’s OpenGL, so not affected.
Some StarCraft.
Not 3D even.
Minecraft.
Neither Windows nor Direct3D, but Java with OpenGL.
True, if all the games you played were OpenGL-accelerated, these changes didn’t matter. But about 95% of games on the market weren’t.
I’m glad you’re here to tell me how my experience the last 30 years was. Thank you for enlightening me as to how my choices were wrong and how I was silently suffering.
I gamed on Debian. I was so wrong.
Prior to bookworm making non-free easy and nvidia driver opening one could make some arguments.
These days, though, nothing compelling can be said to walk past Debian.
Yeah, but the post I replied to said “since 1998”. That is prior to bookworm.
Personally, I don’t care for it too much. Every time I try it (which is rare) something annoys me. "DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE"s, deviation from upstream that renders official documentation less valuable. With Arch (which I don’t use anymore), you can be pretty sure that what’s on your machine is what’s currently released by upstream. This refers both to version and the software itself. Remember cdrkit? xscreensaver? The weak OpenSSH keys? Sure, these must notable examples are from long ago, but there were just so many issues over the course of my “career” that the distribution for me is somewhat burned. Also because all of this could have been easily avoided.
Anyhow, use what you want, but it’s for sure not my favorite distro.
What about Debian’s inability to run Proton 10?
News to me. I’m running GloriousEggroll with proton 10…
That’s what beta is for right?
I haven’t seen this classic in a long while…
I recently scooped up a pack of rage faces and old memes and threw them into my Immich instance. Now searchable classics ondemand.
I think the whole works part is the most important part, Linux can be janky (and by that I mean obsolete information and deprecated or outdated packages are often recommended and there are a thousand different ways to do anything with only one of them actually working (don’t have an aneurysm)) on the best of days, If something just works you can change what you want later.
This is why I switched to Mint. It just works. It’s broken less than vanilla Ubuntu did. So thats what I use.
Yeah. Generally when I’m using a Linux PC to work on something, I don’t want to be fixing the PC itself too. And we make an embedded Linux product at work, so it’s not like I miss out on the fun, lol.
I use Mint everywhere. It works great. Being easier for newcomers to use and having an extra layer of polish does not restrict my use of the command line or scripting.
I actually wanted to run Ubuntu and then Fedora, but they both kept breaking out of nowhere. I don’t know get why people have a more stable experience than I do with these, I don’t even fucking tinker and fuck with shit.
Ubuntu sucks
You choose the worst option
It’s not that bad but I feel like fedora’s probably a better option
Installed 24.04 this week. On the second day my graphical interface was completely borked. Bare in mind I only installed the usual things I need like neovim, appimage support, compilers, etc.
I’ve used the same installation of Arch, Fedora and Suse on different machines for years in a row without an issue
Why was is borked?
It seems 24.04 is not compatible with the FUSE package provided and you should instead install libfuse2
Why?
Canonical is focused on servers and the cloud. Ubuntu lacks quality controls and does things differently than many other Linux systems which leads to instability. I’ve seen people complain about gnome but in reality they are complaining and Ubuntu gnome not stock. Ubuntu also uses netplan instead of network manager and doesn’t have as much systemd integration.
Snap is also it’s own special form of hell. It runs as root as daemon and is slow to do anything. It also forces auto updates and takes control when you try to do anything with apt. It is much heavier than Flatpak and you are forced to get your apps from it.
The sad part is that 15 years ago Ubuntu was actually pretty solid. They have just slowly lost relevance as they move the focus to things that make actual money.
Thanks for explaining! I am currently on kubuntu, because after some testing different distros, it had the best kde plasma 6 experience with less bugs then the others. Iam not really an ubuntu fan, but it just worked best as an kde distro.
As for snap, I don’t know any backgrounds of it. But I had several problems with flatpaks and the same program in snap worked. It was mostly random small stuff like, Signal does not show notifcation bages or copy paste that did not work in remmina. In Both situations lots of debugging didn’t help, but switching to the snap package did. Could be a kde/flatpak/kubuntu issue of course. Auto update (for some specific) applications can be good I think and I can understand thats not the vibe that the typical linux person wants. As of the overall anti snap hype I started with just flatpaks, but they aren’t as golden as they are sold.
This is crazy. You shouldn’t use Ubuntu for anything desktop related. There’s nothing vanilla about vanilla Ubuntu.
(Custom Gnome extensions, patches on top of Gnome, custom sandbox packages that don’t always work, custom apt that refuses to install the real packages in place of snaps, paywalled security patches, should I keep going?)
Except I have no trouble replacing snaps. I only replace them when there is a need. I always add gnome extensions to mine. I like a little extra and I get it easily with ubuntu. If you are a individual user you can get the ESM updates for free and I do.
When one of the other distros demonstrates anything that I cant get with ubuntu I will move on. Until then I’ll keep using it because it keeps working.
When one of the other distros demonstrates anything that I cant get with ubuntu I will move on. Until then I’ll keep using it because it keeps working.
You can’t get vanilla Gnome on Ubuntu. There are tons of other distros that will give you vanilla Gnome (they don’t put any of their own patches on top of Gnome).
But I think you were pretty clear that you don’t want vanilla Gnome, so if Ubuntu’s working for you, more power to you. I just wouldn’t recommend it to anyone new to Linux.
I don’t like vanilla gnome. Like I said the first thing I do with any debian installation I work on is install extensions.
Extensions are one thing. Even if a distro comes with some Gnome extensions, you can just disable them. Ubuntu puts custom patches on the Gnome packages they ship. Those can’t be disabled, and they could potentially interfere with extensions that don’t expect them to be there. That’s my problem with Ubuntu’s approach to Gnome.
I understand that you don’t like vanilla Gnome, but I still wouldn’t recommend Ubuntu to anyone, especially noobs, as a desktop OS, because of the myriad issues with Canonical’s approach to modifying the source of the packages they ship.
It’s the same reason if anyone reports a bug to any of my software, and they say it happens on Ubuntu, I’ll disregard it unless they can replicate it on an OS that doesn’t patch their packages that way. Canonical is responsible for fixing the bugs their patches cause, and they’ve added tons of extra triage work to devs who have to determine whether Canonical fucked something up or there’s actually an issue with their code.
I totally get you don’t like it but once again you are not giving me any reason why what you prefer is somehow better.
I’ve given you quite a few reasons, you just don’t care.
Let me put this really simply. Canonical fucks shit up with their patches. Users experience this as buggy software. Users file bug reports to the software. The bugs aren’t valid because the problem is with Canonical’s mess of patches. That is bad for me as the dev, because I have to triage that bug and determine that it’s Ubuntu, not my software. That is bad for you as the user, because software that works perfectly fine on any other system doesn’t work on yours. This is also bad for you because the devs that build the software you use have to waste their time tracking down Ubuntu bugs, instead of spending their time improving the software you use.
Maybe you don’t consider this a problem, because you’re used to how buggy Ubuntu is, or maybe you don’t use any software that Ubuntu has fucked up, but that is a problem that people experience, and if you don’t see that, that’s a you problem.
Also, I specifically didn’t mention “what I prefer”, because it doesn’t matter. Canonical is the only big Linux company that does this to an extent that devs waste their time on it. Any other big name distro is better than Ubuntu.
Your right I don’t care. Fanatics care about things no one else does. I don’t have many bugs with ubuntu and any that I do are usually trivial. You keep saying its bad but its not my experience. My experience started with Slackware. I still have a Slackware box that I still compile my own kernel on from time to time to keep in the know on kernel changes. I’m not by any metric an amateur. I’m sure some of these bugs seem unique and are a major problem for you.
I’ve tried mint and wasted my time with arch. I’m installed them all. I’ve even created my own. None of them have ever brought anything game changing to the table. I’ve seen bugs with every distro. Somehow to you these bugs are worse. I can clearly see they are similar to other distros and the bugs they have.
In reference to what you prefer. Its clear you don’t prefer ubuntu and you have continually mentioned it. So don’t pretend you don’t have a preference. Disguising it as some general disdain on how canonical operates doesn’t negate its clearly your preference. You will not change my mind and I don’t want to change yours. You seem like you just can’t take I don’t care about how you see it any other way than personally.
Other linux companies? Of which I really only know of three in total all do things that people don’t like
Red Hat(IBM) killed centos and I moved all my servers over to straight debian the week after their announcement. I didn’t like it but I didn’t foam at the mouth about it. They also clamped down on their sources so fedora is going to become increasingly obscure. Kind of like SCO became. They wont die that death but I look at Red Hat as a dead end.
SUSE has never been a distro I’ve used. No reason really. I always had other options. Their decisions were business ones and therefore unpopular to some.
Canonical is doing it their way and they are doing a good job. You can’t deny that but Its clear you don’t like it. I would really like you to stop generalizing and give me a specific bug they have out of the box that isn’t tied to some specific hardware. I don’t pay for ESM but I use it since I only have two Ubuntu machines that I use personally.
In the unlikely event anyone else bothers to read this. I will speak to you what I’ve said elsewhere in this thread. Find something you like and stick with it and don’t let someone elses problem become yours.
Kubuntu LTS (
--minimal-install; nosnapfuckery from the start) has been wonderful.You could also just use Fedora KDE
The only thing that stops me from recommending Fedora and OpenSUSE more often is that there are still so many niche packages that are only offered as .deb (like Unreal Engine). Being forced to use unofficial community Flatpaks makes me uncomfortable and new converts aren’t going to want to hear how they can compile something themselves, assuming that’s an option.
You should not install random package files. That is a bad idea in general and creates instability and introduces security problems.
anything but Ubuntu tbh.
I won’t use Ubuntu Desktop now, but I used it for 6 years: 16 to 22, and loved it for many reasons. I left it for two reasons:
- Snaps
- Trying to get bridged networking going for VMs in Boxes ended up wrecking my network settings and I couldn’t get them back to normal. With more expertise I could have probably fixed it, but I realised it’s too easy to do things that I can’t fix.
So, I went to NixOS for the declarative setup. It’s not always easy especially for niche cases , but at least I always have a working backup. Yes, there are other options, but I like NixOS so I plan to stick with it for now.
My kids use Bazzite and I like that too.
linux Mint
I really wish they would bring back an official KDE flavor. Cinnamon is fine, but nothing really comes close to KDE in terms of user experience and flexibility.
Mint because the name is fun
deleted by creator
Fedora on the right tbh. Even when you chill and get wisdom Canonical and Snap are just a bit too far.
Fedoras where it’s at!
TL;DR: I’m a true Linux noob, and now love and appreciate Linux thanks to openSUSE Tumbleweed. :)
In all seriousness, as a Linux noob, openSUSE Tumbleweed made me actually start to really enjoy using Linux as my main OS. I’ve fucked up plenty of times, and at that point I would’ve had to reinstall most other distros, but Snapper came in and saved the day. I’m sure there are plenty of other distros that do snapshots just as well, but this is coming from someone who last tried running Linux 5-6 years ago, and was still fucking my shit up somehow. I’ve never had the best of luck with Linux, which is why I always stayed on Windows.
Then came Microsoft’s ever increasing enshittification, and I saw openSUSE Tumbleweed on the distrowatch website, downloaded it, and here we are 8 months later, and openSUSE has remained my main OS. I only got a desktop for gaming, and it fit the bill almost perfectly. I had to learn some things, that’s for sure, but what got me to stay was the stability! I had never used a Linux distro up until that point that made BTRFS and system snapshots the default. This was crucial for someone like me who only dabbled in Linux because I love the idea behind it, I could just never get too far into using it before fucking my shit up!
There are plenty of options that are similar, or maybe even better than openSUSE, but they won my interest and respect for getting a noob like me to truly envelope themselves into Linux.
I’m still nowhere near anything that might resemble your common Linux user, but damn do I really love my computer again now. It’s like when I was kid again, and first started using computers, fascinated by what I could do.
Out of curiosity, do you have an Nvidia graphics card? I tried migrating to Linux at the beginning of this year, but I couldn’t get my favorite games to run, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Kingdom Come Deliverance, so I ended up bailing.
EDIT: I don’t recommend using the flatpak version of Steam, because it gets buried in folders that aren’t human-readable. I installed the openSUSE version, and chose a sane folder name like how it is on windows where all my games are stored.
Yes! I had a 2080ti that I replaced with a 5080 two months ago.
I had no issues whatsoever when I first installed openSUSE, because the graphics card was probably old enough to be supported fully by the time I made my way into this OS.
When I upgraded from the 2080ti to the 5080… I did not have a good time for a few days as I had to learn (the hard way) that nvidia switched from whatever drivers I was using to some “open-driver” that they are going with moving forward (I think, don’t quote me).
I messed up plenty of times trying to get this new graphics card working, but let me tell you, thanks to snapper and BTRFS, I felt confident that no matter how many things I tried, I would always have a snapshot to return everything back to “before swapping cards” is what I named the snapshot through YaST System Snapshots.
After I found the correct terminal commands to install the new open-drivers on the openSUSE website, I was good to go again!
Since then, I’ve played and beaten DOOM: The Dark Ages (came with my card, had to sign into Windows and use a fucking chromium browser for whatever god awful reason…), System Shock Remake, and just a few days ago, Prey (2017).
When playing games through Proton (or even on windows!), I highly recommend going to pcgamingwiki.com, finding your game you want to play, and reading some of the great tips they have on there (ini config, for example on System Shock, because enemies were appearing way way to close to me instead of being able to see them from a distance) and the most important bit to me since I like to edit my saves or back them up to my own server, is the location of your save file in proton compatibility prefix. So, on KDE, I can copy whatever prefix number (System Shock being 482400) and copy that number, open up KDE Runner (windows key+spacebar for me) paste the number in, and go into the compatdata folder.
Needless to say, I’m almost positive that your nvidia graphics cards will be supported in some way, but you just may need to study up a bit before you have it working. Once it is working though, it is working great! :)
My laptop has an nvidia gpu. It never really worked right on Bazzite, basically could not game unless the igpu could run the game. I switched it over to Garuda (which I had been running on my desktop for a couple of years) and the gpu drivers all just worked. It now plays games just as easily as my desktop. The above comment could basically be exactly my experience, just replace openSUSE Tumbleweed with Garuda. I am unlikely to hop distros because I (luckily) found one that “just works” for me.
Honestly, that is kind of the beauty of Linux to me, and why I hate all of the “distro recommendation” threads. If someone only tries one distro, they might never stay because they got unlucky. I’d love for them all to truly work just as well as any other, like so many posts claim, but it just isn’t the case (out of the box, at least). We all have so many varied experiences that drive those recommendations.
As someone with two separate computers that have nvidia cards, I can only recommend hopping distros until one works.
(I’m not going to admit that manjaro worked out of the box on both of them and I ended up staying on it out loud on the internet)
Same bro, Nvidia and Linux don’t play very nice together. I had horrible framerates in browser animations for example, so even videos ran at 3fps or so with audio glitches.
Not to mention 3d gaming. I’ll try again in a few years, see if it changes.
