Speaking of shit: The next nail in the coffin:
#Ubuntu 24.04 ships #Thunderbird as #Snap only.
Go and die #Ubuntu! Nobody needs you any more. You used to be a good distro.
#Linux
#Canonical
Discussion
What alternatives do you recommend?
Depends on your needs and level of experience in Linux.
Desktop:
For beginners I'd recommend MX-Linux or Linux Mint Debian Edition.
For advanced users with special needs I'd recommend Fedora, Arch or Fedora based Qubes.
Server:
Debian. Imho state of the art.
My laptop is a Rog Zephyrus and gets terrible battery life. Wondering if thereās a distro I can run thatās going to be low power?
Iām biased towards Debian derivativesālong time Ubuntu user. But Iāve been considering Qubes lately due to its containment scheme.
Linux is not really well known for lng battery duration. U might give a try to the package tlp.
https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html
#Qubes, awesome and state of the art of security focused distros, is imho not really suitable for the "average" user. For most people firejail provides a pretty good "sandboxing" alternative which can be installed on every distro.
Well #snaps have valid use cases and are great for large corporate or government deployments.
Why would you wish death on #Ubuntu when it's what most of the other popular non-snap distros are based on?
I don't like that their back end is closed source but then so is Signal's. At least for snaps, people are free to create their own snap server...
Thanks for your response. As you said, snap is closed source.
I personally dont care about large corporate or government. They can use #Appimage and #Flatpak. Please tell me one benefit of snap compared to these open alternatives?
Why not supporting flatpak?
Why Firefox and Thunderbird if they can provide compiled packages in their repos, too? They just wanna push their own proprietary shit, which I dont trust at all.
Speaking of other distros based on Ubuntu:
Most of them are kind of useless. And those which are usable try to get rid of snap.
You're welcome. I was under the impression that only the Canonical Snap backend is closed source but it's possible to use, manage and publish snaps without access to Canonical's Snapcraft.io or even access to the internet. Ubuntu Unity maintainer built his own snap store.
So it looks like the snap format, snapd, the core software, confinement tools like #Apparmor and even the snapcraft frontend are all open source. Criticising snap because of #Snapcraft looks like criticising flatpak due to some issue with #Flathub.
Btw, I personally love #flatpak and use it on all our home PCs : )
Snaps can have advantages over flatpaks like:
- support for CLI apps and system services
- built-in automatic updates
- prevents normal users from installing apps I think
Many of these will only make sense for large deployments if you have to manage hundreds of machines and when the users are not the owners...
Also, you and I might not care about government deployments but they're driving #Linux adoption especially in schools with a new generation of students growing up accustomed to #foss.
Well, I still use it. Snap Thunderbird is not a big issue. Why so much hate? It eithers serves you or not