Hello everyone! I would like to know why there seems to be some dislike toward Ubuntu within the Linux community. I would like you to share your reasons for why you like Ubuntu or, on the contrary, why you don’t. Thanks 🙇

  • superkret ( superkret@feddit.org ) 
    36·
    2 years ago

    The general philosophy behind it.
    Ubuntu started out as Debian with some improvements.
    Once they were established as the primary Linux distro, they pivoted to an MS-like approach. They tried to invent and implement their own solutions for things that an agreed-upon solution already existed, and was in need of manpower to iron out the kinks (best example is developing Mir instead of throwing their weight behind Wayland, or creating Unity instead of improving Gnome).
    They also tried again and again to monetize their OS, which they built on top of millions of volunteer work hours from the Debian project.

    All of these efforts failed so far. Their current “we can do it better” project is Snaps, which again duplicates volunteer work instead of contributing to Flatpak which was there before.
    I’m willing to admit this one does make sense, since their goal is to make an OS where everything except the kernel and the init system is a snap, something which you can’t do with flatpak.
    But I’m also pretty sure that’ll fail again.

    If they simply built an OS with a Debian base, newer packages, 2 releases per year, an LTS every 2 years, and a GUI selector for Gnome or KDE in the installer, they’d be the perfect beginner distro. On the other hand, then they wouldn’t make any money.

    • mbirth 🇬🇧 ( mbirth@lemmy.ml ) 
      5·
      2 years ago

      I like Ubuntu for exactly that: The bravery and manpower to try different things. I remember I loved their Init-System Upstart when it came out in 2006 - long before systemd got established. It made managing services and their dependencies far easier than with the SysV-Init system other distros had at the time.

      Unity was miles ahead of Gnome-Shell in the beginning. And I loved the one-menu-bar approach - similar to macOS - as it saved screen space on smaller screens.

      It’s easy to flak on Ubuntu for not keeping in line with “tradition”, but I believe we wouldn’t have some newer projects without Canonical trying something new and showing people what’s possible.

      • downhomechunk ( downhomechunk@midwest.social ) English
        2·
        2 years ago

        My daily driver for ~25 years is still on sysvinit. I have plenty of experience with systemd based distros. I run proxmox on my home server. I don’t hate systemd, but it’s a lot less intuitive for me.

        Example: I want to start the tailscale daemon and service at boot. Easy, add it to /etc/rc.d/rc.local . Oh wait, I want my laptop to check for an internet connection before trying to bring up tailscale. Otherwise the boot process halts for 20 seconds until it gives up. Easy, add a bash script in rc.local to test for an internet connection before trying to bring tailscale up.

        I know the answer is systemctl something, but I have to look it up EVERY DAMN TIME. and this is just one of many things that have been giving me heartburn for years.

        • mbirth 🇬🇧 ( mbirth@lemmy.ml ) English
          3·
          2 years ago

          But you are doing the work the computer should do by scripting your own startup process. Also, it will process your rc.local sequentially whereas systemd does things in parallel. If you have 5 different custom services that need network, your approach would have them started one after another. Systemd would wait for network access and then start them all in parallel. If one of those hangs, the others will still start in a few seconds (unless they depend on the hanging service) and the boot process will still continue.

          Also, what about if some service fails? systemd can restart them automatically, you have commands to see at a glance whether your desired services are all running (i.e. the system is in your desired state), it manages the log outputs for each service, etc. etc. … it’s a huge comfort win and once you’ve written a few units, you won’t have to look everything up all the time.

          [Unit]
Description=My service
After=network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/myservice -d

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

          Put this in /etc/systemd/system/myservice.service, run systemctl daemon-reload followed by systemctl enable myservice and Bob’s your mother’s brother. Optionally, start it directly using systemctl start myservice. (On most systems, service myservice start will work, too.) It doesn’t get any easier than that.

          And, if you start to automate your system’s configuration(s) using e.g. Ansible, it’s far easier to just place a few files in the filesystem and run a few commands than to modify the rc.local in an automated fashion without breaking something.

          While I don’t really like the one-tool-for-everything approach with systemd and its various additional features (timedated, resolvd, etc.), I do like the main feature.