Ubuntu installers?

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 11 Jan 2023 at 03:20, Owen Thomas <owen.paul.thomas at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think I need to stick up for others who have expressed sympathy for me before in this thread. So here goes...
>
> That might be true Linux generally

In my expeirence, yes.

> but is it Ubuntu specifically?

No. All Linuxes. In my fairly considerable professional experience,
and I do compare distros for a living right now, Ubuntu is the best.

Maybe by not as much margin as it used to be, but still the best.

For contact: Red Hat did not take up my probation because I posted on
an internal company-wide mailing list that I wanted to help RH and
Fedora catch up with where Ubuntu was, 8 years ago.

This is the vilest heresy in RH and I was let go.

RH does not consider any other Linuxes or Linux companies rivals. It
is the only Linux company, and its rivals are Microsoft, VMware etc.
This is company policy.

They don't really know how poor many of their products are by comparison.

They will, of course, stoutly deny this in public.

>  If Ubuntu ends up being hard to install and manage software on, is Ubuntu offering its users anything of value?

That is a very big question, and as yet, unanswerable.

Others are trying hard to catch up.

Ubuntu is successful but it risks falling into RH territory. It is not
looking at what rivals are doing.

Examples of distros doing this:

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is one of the best rolling-release distros because
it uses Btrfs and snapshots to enable rollback if updates go awry.

In the last year or 2, Garuda Linux, Spiral Linux and Siduction have
all copied this feature, using openSUSE's Snapper tool.  (Fedora has
not; it uses Btrfs, but Snapper was Not Invented Here so they don't
care. They use the more complicated and inefficient OStree instead.)

Ubuntu was investigating ZFS for this, and integrated it.

It is now being removed again.

Void Linux has learned from this and is moving to offer ZFS. So is NixOS.

Ubuntu seems to be ignoring this.


Red Hat and SUSE won't use it for legal fears. RH is inventing its own
replacement, Stratis. The project is moribund.

Snap is widely unpopular, partly because there is only 1 Snap store.

Flatpak is inferior but in theory more open. There are multiple Flatpak stores.

Mint, the Ubuntu derivative, doesn't use GNOME 3 and doesn't use Snap.
If uses Flatpak instead.

It is doing better.

Ubuntu seems to be ignoring this.

Kylin, the Chinese Ubuntu derivative, doesn't use GNOME 3. It uses
UKUI. It seems to be very successful. I don't remember but I think it
has no preinstalled Snaps and as a Chinese distro probably can't talk
to Ubuntu's Western-hosted Snap store. It has its own app store.

Ubuntu seems to be ignoring this.

I think Ubuntu needs to wake up and smell the coffee and address
users' concerns, and do more technical innovation.

But these are my opinions.

> I am a Java developer, and I have my own very small niche. I like things that way because my attention is not as expansive as others. I don't really want to become knowledgeable in all the gnarls and pockmarks of software versions and package managers. Is Ubuntu going to help me?

I can't say. I am not privy to the company's plans or anything, and
I've never worked there.


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