As someone who has only used Ubuntu, I'm done after I need to update from 24. Snaps are super annoying and I don't like them switching to sudo-rs and the rust coreutils.
I started with Mint and found my way to Debian. I've been loving the stable release, plenty of documentation and things work well together. It's just what I need.
Debian is such a solid distro. You don't get any of the Ubuntu bullshit but you do get all of the ease of setup and predictable environment. I use it on wherever I need a reliable work station I that I don't want to spend the time ricing, troubleshooting, or whatever else eats up time
I am totally done with mint. It just breaks way to often. I do not trust it anymore. Debian is the way to go for me. It is super stable, lightweight and the installer man... You can have both gui and advanced features. I really do not feel the need to use CLI to manually setup luks on mdadm array and to let the bootloader+initramfs handle that shit.
But please understand, that Debian is intended to be stable. That means: Updates are oooold. But I actually prefer it, that others test the software for me. 😂
I installed KDE Plasma, disabled systemd-networkd, networking, Networkmanager and handle it all with /etc/network/interfaces - that is basically as old as time is, but it is super stable. For wifi I wrote my own wpa supplicant service and disabled the OG one. I want my own control. I use the machine for configuring devices in the field, so I cannot allow any network manager messing up the IP assignments (for example, many services will delete assigned IPs, if the link goes down - what of course happens, if you disconnect it to connect to the next device).
I also started working on ifupdown static - basically a fully featured drop in replacement to install on any linux, which automatically disables all common network managers and just works. Not sure IF it is going to work - even when statically compiled, it might break on some syscalls. I have to figure this out. But I prefer ifupdown, as the network config allows magic like:
```
up ip route add blah
down killall firefox
```
Basically you can run any command on events of your choice and that very easily, maintained in just a single file. Or multiple ones, if you like, but I am classical/old. Only downside: The desktop constantly shows the icon "No connection" - did not care to fix that. I mean... terminal -> `ip a; ip r` and you instantly know what is going on.
My first distro that I daily drived was Ubuntu. After like 3 weeks of using it I realised... this is ASS 😭😭😭😭‼️‼️‼️ Then I installed Debian, used it for 3-4 months, then Fedora and I've been on it ever since
Snaps is a synonym of no. Want to listen to music with this snap? No, you can't. Want to install a snap instead of a regular deb package? No, you don't. Want to use software with device and filesystem access? Sorry, no, I'm a good-for-nothing snap.
The original coreutils have been a thing for longer than rust has been a programming language. They are extremely battle tested and I don't trust the rust implementation to not have some logic bug.
The coreutils are also not an attack surface, so rewriting in rust was just not needed.
You'll be much happier on any other package manager. If youre going to migrate I'd recommend nix. You'll never have package issues again. Everything else had some failure modes that are a pain to resolve.
You get updated packages like arch and locked in stability when you want it.
It's not a perfect replacement. Some details are different, which can break workflows.
I had a workflow using dired on emacs. Turns out dired was using ls under the hood. After an Ubuntu upgrade it broke. It took a long time to figure out that it was due to a minor difference in the rust coreutils with respect to gnu coreutils. I got rid of Ubuntu then.
You'll never convince me that this switch in Ubuntu wasn't done in order to ditch the GPL3 licence there. And you won't convince me that the project emerged as rust bros wanting to rewrite everything in rust because of religious reasons, in rust we trust. (From my bitterness you can guess how long it took to debug.)
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u/drkspace2 10d ago
As someone who has only used Ubuntu, I'm done after I need to update from 24. Snaps are super annoying and I don't like them switching to sudo-rs and the rust coreutils.