The Ubuntu volunteers could jump ship to Debian, since they would welcome them with open arms judging by the recent article on el Reg. Ubuntu seems increasingly irrelevant now that downstream, Mint is more attuned to what users want and upstream, Debian has absorbed the better ideas they pioneered. If Mint switched solely to a Debian base, then I can't see what purpose Ubuntu would serve.
Mark Shuttleworth to revive Ubuntu Community Council after body shrinks to single member – Mark Shuttleworth
Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth said yesterday that he will revive the defunct Community Council amid complaints that the volunteer Ubuntu community has been neglected. In theory, the Ubuntu Community Council plays a key role in the governance of the project, setting the code of conduct, resolving disputes, and …
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Monday 14th September 2020 14:43 GMT Steve Davies 3
Oh how the mighty have fallen...
Ubuntu used to be the Linux Distro of choice for everyone in my local Linux Users Group (LUG). I was one of the few that didn't. Most of the holdouts were Debian fans and they weren't going to change. I was and still am in the RedHat camp and a Fedora user.
Now... hadrly anyone is still using Ubuntu. Mint, Debian and Fedora are the most popular distros these days.
To me, Canonical's thrust towards commercialism has been its downfall.
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Monday 14th September 2020 16:32 GMT cyberdemon
Re: Oh how the mighty have fallen...
> Now... hadrly anyone is still using Ubuntu. Mint, Debian and Fedora are the most popular distros these days .
Can someone please tell Nvidia that?
Their Tegra devkits ONLY support Ubuntu, will refuse to install on other distros such as Debian, and break if you try to hack around the check.
As to jumping ship to Debian - Yes please - Like many places in the Linux world, they are short on maintainers. It's becoming a big problem..
Down with DeadRat though.. ;)
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Monday 14th September 2020 17:55 GMT gobaskof
Re: Oh how the mighty have fallen...
I agree there are still a few things where the Linux support is only Ubuntu. I run Kubuntu for this reason but I am seriously researching a way out.
The biggest issue for me is that sometime I apt install something and it is a snap. I am not against the bloat of a snap, as dependency hell in apt can be a headache. But snap seems to be a piss-poor half-baked AppImage. Every snap I have had has had issues doing simple things like accessing USB drives or other programs on the computer. Yes there are a bunch of commands I can run to fix this, but it is a retrograde in usability and it will drive "normal" people away.
Lets hope the normal people find a new linux distro, and don't go back to Windows. Because if they do we will loose some of the gains we have made in companies supporting linux desktops.
Unity was a total hellscape and they finally dropped it, maybe they will drop snap too. Or make it not shit?
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Wednesday 16th September 2020 11:17 GMT dajames
Re: Oh how the mighty have fallen...
To me, Canonical's thrust towards commercialism has been its downfall.
I don't like the commercial side of Ubuntu/Canonical either, but you can't expect Canonical to survive on Mark Shuttleworth's personal fortune for ever. Kudos to him for keeping Ubuntu free and relatively-non-commercial for so long, but I can sympathize with his desire to find another revenue stream.
Red Hat is far more commercial, despite providing Fedora and Centos for nothing.
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Monday 14th September 2020 17:34 GMT Claverhouse
I'm running Mint 18 right now, since that's the last KDE Mint ever minted. Ideally I always use OpenSUSE, but the later iterations don't easily install on an ageing computer; always found Ubuntu a little too slick, and I could never forgive them for the modernist abortion known as Unity.
However Mr. Shuttleworth has done great stuff for Linux, and I wish him well. But with the welter of distros out there *, maybe it's time for Ubuntu to concentrate mostly on the business sector as with Red Hat.
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Most new distros seem to be designed as security distros, which is a little dispiriting...
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Tuesday 15th September 2020 01:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
Instead of creating it's own init system, desktop environment, display server, package formats, etc. Mark should've use existing (as now) and focus on developing/investing preferably in upstream tools that elevate the value of copied OS (from Debian) - like management tools (like Active Directory), corporate email client (as Outlook/Exchange). Also work with more vendors to preinstall it on their PCs.
He also grabbed Debian developers from a working community and that bites his ass as well only that is not apparent immediately.
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Tuesday 15th September 2020 13:49 GMT Ilsa Loving
Gave up on ubuntu
There are lots of reasons why I gave up on Ubuntu, a big one being pushing that annoying snap format when there were far better options available, like AppImage. But the last straw for me was when they release... 19.10 I think, with broken crypto libraries that made it impossible for me to join my workstation to our domain. The solution was to install an alternate library from some random 3rd party source, as if that is somehow reasonable for anyone other that someone monkeying with linux at home. Moreover, the problem had been found and fixed upstream a good 5 months earlier but was never pulled in.
So... At that point it became abundantly clear that Canonical wasn't taking Ubuntu seriously anymore and I jumped to Debian. Not quite as easy to use, but at least it works and stays working.
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Wednesday 16th September 2020 10:08 GMT Dave559
Re: Gave up on ubuntu
Either of the 19.x releases would have been one of the intermediate releases (as was 18.10). Those are where they experiment a little with new features and package versions (and you get to test and break them, and report any problems, as part of the development process). They are not intended for use on "production" computers, so you are being somewhat unfair there. That's the price you pay for relentlessly chasing new and shiny.
If you want a (mostly) stable working Linux system, you should stick to the LTS (long term support) releases. The idea is that issues found in the preceding intermediate releases get found and fixed for the next LTS release.
Your comparison is similar to Debian's "testing" release (where some things might break on each package refresh), or even "unstable"/"sid" (where things will quite likely break, as it's basically made from different toy parts just violently thrown together).
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Tuesday 15th September 2020 16:03 GMT CrackedNoggin
After every major update having to remove "zeitgeist" if it has been re-installed is my biggest complaint. Furthermore, Nautilus (the default file GUI) depends upon a zeitgeist library, so unless one is very careful to remove zeitgeist but leave the library, Nautilus (the default file system GUI) is unusable. (Eventually I stopped using Nautilus because of it).
Zeitgeist remembers all your activity and stores it in a database and some people find this very helpful - no problem with that but opt out once should mean forever. It was a huge CPU drain and wearing out the SSD. Also, it has/had a GUI feature that allow removal of sensitive info -- I tested that and check the digital zeitgeist database blob to see if the into was really gone -- actually it was still in the blob (visible in the raw data as ascii) but no longer visible from the GUI, a state that contrarily highlights the sensitive bits. I'm not a conspiracy believer, it's just just the principle.
But I'm still using Ubuntu due to momentum - and also because of reasonable package maintenance, that clumsy snap notwithstanding. Also, LXC works great in Ubuntu, not surprising as Canonical is the developer of LXC.
