
Thanks for the discussion. Very helpful. On Wed, Jul 2, 2025 at 3:18 PM Lennart Sorensen via Talk < talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
On Tue, Jul 01, 2025 at 10:24:25AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier via Talk wrote:
Ubuntu is an exception. Although it is derived from debian, it has way more users, mind share, and perhaps engineers. I'm not sure why Ubuntu doesn't cut the tie. Its innovations have just as often been bad as good. I do like their two update and support cycles (every six months and every two years). It is the default distro for many software projects.
Unfortunately that last point is a compelling factor. As I look around the AI-on-Linux world, it seems that developers have concentrated on "official" support for Fedora and Ubuntu and little else. I note that we now have a third type of distro based on Hugh's categorization; second order derivatives, those based on Ubuntu which is itself based on Debian. Two of the distros on my short list (TuxedoOS and KDE Neon) fall in that category, replacing or repackaging specific components (and often replacing snaps with flatpaks) but otherwise leaving the heavy lifting to Canonical & friends for better or worse. Lazy or efficient? You decide. I have already encountered a situation (the AMD proprietary drivers) in which the package won't immediately install on Tuxedo but can be faked out by temporarily changing /etc/issue or the install script. Even then one must hope that any driver/kernel "enhancements" from the derivative distro do not impact installations that expect naked Ubuntu. I'm quite sure that SUSE, Arch and other distro communities have figured out workarounds to install many of these apps, but to me it's just one more PITA and excuse for things not working.
I like Fedora. Mostly. It has been very good for my uses. I wish that
there were a more stable version for some of my systems. There's too much of a discontinuity between RHEL (and clones) and Fedora.
If continuity with RHEL is important ... weren't Rocky and Alma developed for just that reason? Question: besides the package management and look-and-feel uses, are there any big technical or cultural issues moving from Kubuntu to Fedora/KDE?
I like the open source purity of Fedora but sometimes that is
uncomfortable -- much less these days.
That's exactly the same reaction I had to Debian when I tried it some years ago. I don't have an option; I have some bleeding-edge hardware that *needs* the proprietary drivers. And, much as I utterly despise them, I have external needs that demand I have proprietary chat apps. And there's also Steam, which brings a whole new world to my desktop. I applaud any project that really really really wants to keep their own stuff FOSS. But I draw the line between encouraging users to choose FOSS and being an obstacle to the proprietary stuff. By all means suggest IRC as an alternative to Whatsapp but don' t try to FORCE me down that path.
The time when Flatpak's are justified is for really big things shared by many distros. Think of Firefox. The individual distros probably add no value to it -- too complex. The Firefox developers probably want to handle bug reports without needing to have every distro at hand. The
extra cost of duplicated libraries is probably a minor percentage of the resources used by FireFox. Bonus: perhaps whole-program optimization can make a difference (Link Time Optimization is a start).
I will stick with proper packages.
I insist that my browser be a regular package ... it's such a vital component that I consider it a core system part. Plus, browsers may need to access or provide data elsewhere on the system where sandboxing may get in the way. For other apps I prefer regular packages but am not dogmatically against flatpaks. Snaps, OTOH, I refuse. -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56