Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS Released

[arQon]

Rhetorically: What's up with all these people using distributions that do things in a different manner than what they'd like and then complaining about all the stuff they have to do to fix it to make it their own? Why won't they take a trip down distribution lane and find something that's more in line with their needs?

But I *like* answering rhetorical questions!

Funnily enough, I can actually share your exhaustion with this topic *and* to a great extent sympathize with those still complaining about it, though it's certainly getting very old.

For the actual Ubuntu users, the frustration is simply that Snaps *are* terrible. The design, and more tellingly, the implementation, is complete garbage. It's literally a collection of the worst possible choices at almost every point along the way, and even users who don't understand the design failures can *certainly* see the implementation ones writ large.
It's not like Snap is new, or these problems are new - they were called out years ago, over and over again, and whatever clown is in charge of them at Canonical just kept dismissing all the complaints with the usual "It's Beta", "We'll improve A and B and C before we get serious about them", etc, and never made even the *slightest* effort to actually do so until after the 22.04 release when the transition to "Hey, let's royally fuck up what is by far the most used program there is!" caused such enormous backlash that they - finally, begrudgingly - started to do the bare minimum to address *some* of the problems.
So it's kinda hard to blame the "aware" people for being upset with the situation.

A majority of Ubuntu users - in the sense of "actual" users, not geeks - generally *can't* distro-hop the way you suggest. They don't have the knowledge to do so. From their perspective, "the internet got slow", and that's it. They don't understand how, or why, and they sure as hell aren't going to be able to do anything about it without help.
So it's also kinda hard to blame the "unaware" people for being upset with the situation.

If you do the math, that works out to roughly 100% of desktop Ubuntu users being pretty understandably PO'd.

> And if they're not using Ubuntu, why all the hubris about something they're not even using?

Okay, that part's *definitely* rhetorical. From the cultism of the IBM fanboys to the inferiority complexes of the Arch users, bitching about Ubuntu is pretty much the official sport of the Linux "community". That's what happens when you're Top Dog, even when there *isn't* a good reason for it, which unfortunately is very much not the case here.

(aside, I don't think "hubris" is the word you're looking for here. The behavior of the asshats at Canonical who ignored 4 years of feedback is hubris. The trolls are, well, many things, but hubristic is not one of them).

[jo-erlend]

My personal advice to Canonical is to keep Snap for server/enterprise/iot, since it supposedly works better for these workloads and Canonical needs it. For desktop users drop Snap and embrace Flatpak instead. I mean it would be a win-win situation because desktop users will be happy and it shouldn't really cost Canonical anything.

The problem is that they would have to use a Snap to provide support for IBM Flatpak, because Flatpak cannot be used to distribute Flatpak, so Flatpak cannot itself be distro-agnostic. So where is the bonus if all desktop users need to have Snappy in order to use Flatpak? It just becomes a confusing dependency to satisfy the instant gratification guys that nobody in the real world really cares about at all, because men and women know that things take time, while the "homeworkers" have no clue because they're too busy instant-gratifying themselves to read books, manuals and source code.

I understand the counter argument, that IBM Flatpak is supposed to be used along with IBM RPM-OSTree and that it is my fault if I choose to use an unofficial Linux system instead of the official IBM Linux. But when did the Linux community become so loyal to giant corporations? I understand the perceived value of being a Certified IBM Linux Architect, because I once went through the process of taking the Microsoft CSE + Internet back in the days. My father went to China and came home with the greatest gift of all time; a fat stack of CDs with a complete copy of everything related to Microsoft. It was worth my time and if he goes to China again, I'll ask him to pick up the IBM as well. It would be fun. I'm not going to pay for the privilege of becoming a slave though.

Real reality is Flatpak has no chance to become a mainstream app distribution method. Why? Because Microsoft, Apple, Google and Canonical has a partnership on what they call Ambient Distribution. What does that mean? It means that when you build for instance a Flutter application, then you can do something like "flutter distribute mac,linux,windows,ios,android" and it will be compiled, built, packaged and sent to each platforms primary stores. What is the primary store for Linux? It is Canonical's Snap Store. Some people are paranoid about this, saying that even though the Snap system is open source under GPL, they could some day take it away. That's true. They could. But if we continue to build our snaps from debs, it means we first make debs and then make snaps, so why would debs go away? Debian remains the primary platform for non-corporate Linux.

I realize how deceptive this sounds, but there's nothing I can do about it, except adjusting my communication to make it more believable.

It is delusional to think that the microscopic community of Linux desktop app developers should be able to compete with the large platforms that are now coming to Linux. Sure, the IBM is powerful too, and if they really put their weight behind the IBM RPM-OSTree+Flatpak solution, then I'm sure they can also get a separate ibmlinux target for ambient distribution. It's in Google's interest to serve them also. After all, once you have built a snap, it's dead simple to convert it into an IBM RPM-OSTree+Flatpak bundle.

But if I was a shareholder of the IBM, and our brand name was IBM RPM-OSTree+Flatpak and the competition was «Linux Snap», I would invite the chief of marketing to go shark fishing and there would be an unfortunate tragedy, but I would offer thoughts and prayers, even though I'm an atheist and then everyone would be so touched by the speech – and particularly the metaphor about the guitars on the wall, never being played, but not being dead.

How can so many intelligent people be this stupid at the same time, without any coordination? I don't think that can happen. So I think there's coordination.

[Linuxxx]

The problem is that they would have to use a Snap to provide support for IBM Flatpak, because Flatpak cannot be used to distribute Flatpak, so Flatpak cannot itself be distro-agnostic. So where is the bonus if all desktop users need to have Snappy in order to use Flatpak? It just becomes a confusing dependency to satisfy the instant gratification guys that nobody in the real world really cares about at all, because men and women know that things take time, while the "homeworkers" have no clue because they're too busy instant-gratifying themselves to read books, manuals and source code.

I understand the counter argument, that IBM Flatpak is supposed to be used along with IBM RPM-OSTree and that it is my fault if I choose to use an unofficial Linux system instead of the official IBM Linux. But when did the Linux community become so loyal to giant corporations? I understand the perceived value of being a Certified IBM Linux Architect, because I once went through the process of taking the Microsoft CSE + Internet back in the days. My father went to China and came home with the greatest gift of all time; a fat stack of CDs with a complete copy of everything related to Microsoft. It was worth my time and if he goes to China again, I'll ask him to pick up the IBM as well. It would be fun. I'm not going to pay for the privilege of becoming a slave though.

Real reality is Flatpak has no chance to become a mainstream app distribution method. Why? Because Microsoft, Apple, Google and Canonical has a partnership on what they call Ambient Distribution. What does that mean? It means that when you build for instance a Flutter application, then you can do something like "flutter distribute mac,linux,windows,ios,android" and it will be compiled, built, packaged and sent to each platforms primary stores. What is the primary store for Linux? It is Canonical's Snap Store. Some people are paranoid about this, saying that even though the Snap system is open source under GPL, they could some day take it away. That's true. They could. But if we continue to build our snaps from debs, it means we first make debs and then make snaps, so why would debs go away? Debian remains the primary platform for non-corporate Linux.

I realize how deceptive this sounds, but there's nothing I can do about it, except adjusting my communication to make it more believable.

It is delusional to think that the microscopic community of Linux desktop app developers should be able to compete with the large platforms that are now coming to Linux. Sure, the IBM is powerful too, and if they really put their weight behind the IBM RPM-OSTree+Flatpak solution, then I'm sure they can also get a separate ibmlinux target for ambient distribution. It's in Google's interest to serve them also. After all, once you have built a snap, it's dead simple to convert it into an IBM RPM-OSTree+Flatpak bundle.

But if I was a shareholder of the IBM, and our brand name was IBM RPM-OSTree+Flatpak and the competition was «Linux Snap», I would invite the chief of marketing to go shark fishing and there would be an unfortunate tragedy, but I would offer thoughts and prayers, even though I'm an atheist and then everyone would be so touched by the speech – and particularly the metaphor about the guitars on the wall, never being played, but not being dead.

How can so many intelligent people be this stupid at the same time, without any coordination? I don't think that can happen. So I think there's coordination.

Seriously, this is one of the very best written posts I've read in a long while in this usually grim space!

(Red) Hats off to You, Sir!

[skeevy420]

The problem is that they would have to use a Snap to provide support for IBM Flatpak, because Flatpak cannot be used to distribute Flatpak, so Flatpak cannot itself be distro-agnostic. So where is the bonus if all desktop users need to have Snappy in order to use Flatpak? It just becomes a confusing dependency to satisfy the instant gratification guys that nobody in the real world really cares about at all, because men and women know that things take time, while the "homeworkers" have no clue because they're too busy instant-gratifying themselves to read books, manuals and source code.

AFAIK you can swap Flatpak and Snap in that sentence because it's true of any distribution that doesn't come with either installed (I think only Manjaro comes with both by default). When it does come installed by default the distribution uses Apty or DNifFy or Pacmanny to update the App Store. The App Store only updates its runtimes and whatnot. They don't actually have permission to update and overwrite /usr/bin/zsh.

[jo-erlend]

AFAIK you can swap Flatpak and Snap in that sentence because it's true of any distribution that doesn't come with either installed (I think only Manjaro comes with both by default). When it does come installed by default the distribution uses Apty or DNifFy or Pacmanny to update the App Store. The App Store only updates its runtimes and whatnot. They don't actually have permission to update and overwrite /usr/bin/zsh.

I don't understand what you mean by that. Snap packages can be used for any kind of software. It's not limited to confined packages only. You can easily provide a snap that provides /usr/bin/zsh or your Linux kernel. Snapd is itself a snap. You can't do this with Flatpak.