Shuttleworth Says Snappy Won't Replace .deb Linux Package Files In Ubuntu 15.10

darthcamaro writes: Mark Shuttleworth, BDFL of Ubuntu is clearing the air about how Ubuntu will make use of .deb packages even in an era where it is moving to its own Snappy ('snaps') format of rapid updates. Fundamentally it's a chicken and egg issue. From the serverwatch article: "'We build Snappy out of the built deb, so we can't build Snappy unless we first build the deb,' Shuttleworth said. Going forward, Shuttleworth said that Ubuntu users will still get access to an archive of .deb packages. That said, for users of a Snappy Ubuntu-based system, the apt-get command no longer applies. However, Shuttleworth explained that on a Snappy-based system there will be a container that contains all the deb packages. 'The nice thing about Snappy is that it's completely worry-free updates,' Shuttleworth said."

Comments

Re:The Linux community is destroying itself.

[Grishnakh]

I'm not sure it's "the community" that's to blame as much as certain large entities in the community (*cough* Red Hat *cough*).

First, about systemd. Exactly what "problems" has it caused the users? On a normal distro, it runs in the background and should be transparent. sysvinit was ancient, and not even Solaris (the last true UNIX) uses it, it switched to SMF ages ago. All the anti-systemd hysteria I've seen has only been about vague possibilities, or whining about "the one true UNIX philosophy" (which again, apparently real UNIX doesn't even follow), etc. Whereas the systemd supporters can actually point to real, tangible benefits. Now admittedly, at home I'm a longtime user of Linux Mint which still runs on upstart for the moment, but I've been using CentOS 7 machines at work and I haven't run into any problems there (except for fucking Gnome3, more on that later). systemd seems to me to work just fine.

However, with Gnome3 and Unity, you're exactly right. The two most powerful and influential distros (Fedora/RHEL and Ubuntu) both changed to awful DEs, which certainly can't be attractive to new users who aren't looking for something that's a complete sea-change from the UIs they're used to. By all rights, KDE should be the default DE: it's reasonably fast, it's pretty bug-free at this point (compared to Gnome3, which is full of bugs in my personal experience with CentOS7), it's full-featured, it's highly configurable to do whatever you want, whether you want it to be more like Windows or like MacOS, and it's a familiar paradigm. Yes, the "semantic desktop" stuff is useless, but it's actually turned off by default on many distros now I believe, and if not, it's easy to disable and simply ignore--I do. So why Linux distros are pushing minimalistic DEs, I dunno. But I'm certainly not the only one who doesn't like them: there's a reason Mint has become so popular, and so many people have switched to Cinnamon and MATE.

Honestly, the big misstep that started most of this crap was the founding of GNOME back in the late 90s, due to the licensing issue with Qt. They should have abandoned Gnome when Qt finally was released under the GPL, then we wouldn't have these issues now.

Famous Last Words

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"The nice thing about Snappy is that it's completely worry-free updates"

Any time anyone says something is "completely worry-free", that's your cue to worry. Ask me how I know.