back to article Sick of GNOME, Snap and Flatpak? You might like Linux Lite, but beware rough edges

Linux Lite version 6.4 is the latest point release from this Ubuntu remix aimed at new migrants from Windows. The updates in this version are fairly modest. For instance, although it's based on Ubuntu 22.04.2, the latest point release of the current Long Term Support version, it doesn't include that version's HWE (Hardware …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Snap free?

    as it is still based upon Ubuntu then for how long?

    SNAP is getting everywhere as app packagers decide to only supply SNAP packages. I even have it on my CentOS server thanks to the non availability of an rpm.

    IT IS LIKE THE PLAGUE

    GET RID OF SNAP before it is too late.

    1. Kurgan

      Re: Snap free?

      Snap is the new systemd.

      1. ludicrous_buffoon

        Re: Snap free?

        Your comment sparked an idea over at Red Hat. Systemd now has filesystem mounted package dependency management on the roadmap.

        1. Rich 2 Silver badge

          Re: Snap free?

          “… Systemd now has filesystem mounted package dependency management…”

          Thank The Lord for that!!!! I was getting quite worried that System-Desirable might be falling behind the Completely Usable and Not-at-all Turd curve.

          Phew!

  2. ludicrous_buffoon

    Ubuntu without the cruft

    So it's Debian?

  3. georgezilla Silver badge

    The Linux community was warned about systemd.

    Did anyone pay attention?

    The community knew about Ubuntu.

    It has a long history.

    Did anyone pay attention.

    And now here we are.

    It looks like we're about to be fucked.

    Does anyone care.

    Apparently not anyone with the common sense of a cucumber or above.

    < heavy sigh >

    1. David 132 Silver badge
      Happy

      Hey now. I’ve known some pretty smart cucumbers in my time!

      1. bazza Silver badge

        Likewise, but they always seem to get themselves into a pickle...

    2. Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells Silver badge

      While it might not be ideal, Systemd solved a real world problem. Namely that the Linux init system was made of gaffa-tape, WD-40 and shell scripts.

      From my experience with it a long time ago, Snap only solves the problem of apt being too reliable.

    3. devin3782

      Although systemd might not be the best possible solution humanity could come up with it is better than the shell script forerunner. Having a simple method of setting up a service is a good thing, just recently I've configured mysql and postgres to not start until the network is up and iscsi based volumes are mounted, this is was trivial to set up with systemd the old way of buggering about with run levels was less than fun.

      I'd love to hear the actual problems with systemd (apart from the binary logs and it not being unix-y i.e. does one thing and only one thing)

      1. bazza Silver badge

        My experience of SystemD and it's view of "when is a network up?" is that it deems the job done if an interface has a link and it's assigned an IPv6 address to it. Which is ****ing bonkers, if there's IPv4 DHCP outstanding, DNS still to come figure, etc. I have to start a bunch of stuff in crontab some time after boot, because depending on SystemD is so massively unreliable. It's not like this is me not understanding what I'm doing whilst setting up stuff of my own, this is out of the box services like Samba packaged with major distros that don't work post boot because SystemD is ridiculous.

        And don't get me started on start up circular dependencies. SystemD is perfectly capable of randomly failing to bring up the whole system - again with out of the box major distros stuff - because of such problems.

      2. bazza Silver badge

        Oh, and the logs are nuts. It's fine to have timestamped log entries, but it's not fine for the viewing tools to assume that the timestamps are guaranteed correct, and that the as-recorded-in-files order is not.

        This is bonkers because 1) how could the file order ever, ever be wrong, and 2) you try understanding SystemD's log files if your system clock ever goes wrong, or isn't there until a network has come up and ntp has done it's job whilst journalctl is sorting entries by invalid and valid timestamps? It's *worse* than useless.

        1. Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells Silver badge

          As a guess, does SystemD support the syslog protocol?

          It could be for collating logs across multiple machines.

  4. Updraft102

    "That's a legitimate choice: kernel 5.15 is a LTS kernel and it's still getting updated, whereas 5.19 reached its end of life back in October."

    They are both being updated. Kernel 5.19 reached the end of its updates on the mainline, but Ubuntu (like most distros) does not ship the pure mainline version in any of their releases anyway. The Ubuntu-ized version of 5.19 is still current, with the latest update being one month ago (five months after October).

  5. NATTtrash

    Evince vs. Atril

    Linux Lite uses GNOME's Evince document viewer, with its clunky "CSD" combined titlebar-cum-toolbar, while MATE's Atril, with a more traditional UI, was right there in the repositories.

    Having used both, (for me) there is something that makes me put up with Evince's CSD... ...which, disclaimer, I'm not wild about: last time I compared the two, Evince has the better search and presentation of search results. If Atril would bring it up to the same standard I would switch in a heartbeat. But having to work with large pdfs professionally a lot, and the main use case being to search for the relevant passages, Evince has the clear advantage (for me). So yeah, there is more... which makes you put up with CSD ;)

  6. ud6

    People (except newbies and windows users) hate snap. Ubuntu is trying its best to get rid of its home users.

    What I don't understand is what the advantage of Linux Lite is over mint XFCE? Same kernel, same base OS, but mint more polished and in speed tests I've seen, mint is slightly faster. Also mint does not come with stupid snap by default.

    Anyway, Canonical have to make a serious choice now of keeping snap and losing many home users and possibly even alienating downstream distros, or abandoning snap and remaining the hub around which most other distros are based.

    1. Rich 2 Silver badge

      Lite Linux

      If you are looking for a “lite” Linux then you could do a lot worse than Void Linux. No system-dunce. No flapjack/snap/whatever by default. No Gnome by default. Bliss.

      I’m sure there are other similar Linuxy versions too. I’m guessing?

  7. Mockup1974 Bronze badge

    I still don't get the Snap hate compared to the much-lauded Flatpak. Yes, the Snap Store is proprietary but you can still distribute packages as .snap files. And Flatpaks are very much centered around Flathub as well, I've never seen another Flatpak repo even though it's possible in theory.

    1. NATTtrash

      "I still don't get the Snap hate compared to the much-lauded Flatpak. "

      [A] I tell you to. Comply.

      [B] What I suggest is...

      Simples.

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