this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
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There's nothing bad about Ubuntu, but Canonical rips a fat line and says, "I'm going to make my own display server, with black jack, and hookers!" Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, innovation is good and all, but they release a steaming pile of crap that doesn't really integrate well into the rest of the Linux ecosystem. They spend years telling everyone that their display server is the best thing ever and no they won't offer any alternatives or integrate it into any of your systems thank you very much.
Then 10 years later they unceremoniously dump it in favor for whatever everyone else has been using.
I just wish they would funnel all that innovation upstream instead so everyone benefitted instead of just Canonicals bottom line.
The .deb format has serious impairments toward validating content.
Security people shake their heads when "how do we know" fails, and build/rel people can't answer the question "is that what's expected" for all files.
It's a major difference between enterprise Linux and debuntus, and I've been in groups where this breakage has eliminated that branch of Linux distros from opportunities.
I don't really have any experience with enterprise Ubuntu (we use RHEL at work and I'm not a sysadmin anyway) but its kind of hard to blame that all on Canonical since they inherited it from debian.
I mean, I'm sure you could change the package format that your nascent distro uses, but at that point you might as well make a completely new, unforked distro since you're basically rewriting the entire system.
That's what Ubuntu's doing with Snaps. Ubuntu Core is their "Oops! All Snaps" project.
There's lots of examples. Mir, Unity, Snap, PPAs, and more.
I think Ubuntu Core is a bad example. Immutable distros is where the industry is headed for a lot of good reasons, and it makes sense for Canonical to jump on that train. Snaps are bad (although honestly I do like that they can package server apps unlike flatpak, that's cool), but the concept for the distro is not.
Ubuntu Core is all snaps. That's the selling point.
The selling point is that it is immutable, not that it uses snaps (which it does). Fedora does the same thing with Silverblue and IoT. You don't install rpms, you install flatpaks. You can install rpms, but you're not really meant to.
Since Canonical refuses to get onboard with flatpak (for now) they use snaps instead of debs, but snaps aren't the direct appeal.
The whole idea is that you have a core system in a known configuration. Updating the system just means using a different image. If an update fails, then you just roll back to the last good configuration. Bazzite uses this to nice effect too.
There are a lot of advantages to end users and enterprise admins with systems in this configuration.