- Wayland by default? Ubuntu has covered you.
- GNOME by default DE? Ubuntu has covered you.
- Snap by default and used everywhere? Ubuntu has covered you.
- Rust through sudo replaced by sudo-rs by default? Ubuntu has covered you.
- Popular and controlled by a corporation? Ubuntu has covered you.
- Plus some historical stuff people did not forgot: Mir, Unity, Amazon data collection? Ubuntu has covered you.
Ubuntu has it all: The most important controversies in one package.
BTW this reply is more a joke than being serious. I’m not the biggest fan of Ubuntu (anymore), but I also used it straight 13 years since I started; so let me have me my opinion. Besides that, I make just fun of companies and not of the users. People should use what they like.
Is there a good alternative to Ubuntu that’s deployment ready for a small to medium business that doesn’t require paying for support like Red Hat? I don’t use it on my own machines, but when I’m working with clients it’s pretty much all I recommend. I could maybe be won over by Mint, but I’m still a little skeptical about the polish and reliability there.
Debian stable
That’s always been my go to, rock solid OS that will just chug along. My son (Arch user) likes to joke that mine is always out of date, but I like to joke that he’s the beta tester.
When LMDE was dropped I started recommending that to the Windows Expats I meet because its UI is familiar to them and Debian just runs.
I’ve been encouraged by 12 and 13 making progress towards out of the box usability. But it still takes too much tweaking to make it work smoothly for desktop users at scale. This isn’t a shot at Debian by the way. I use it on at least some of my own machines. Just have a hard time recommending it depending on the situation.
Good joke
Install mint/fedora (classic or atomic)
Not fedora, it’s too much like Arch (bleeding edge). Although I do enjoy their immutable spins, using Aurora on my laptop for over a year.
Mint debian edition or MX ahs edition would be my goto solutions. Specially mx, since you can prepare your own custom iso so easily as install, customize, use their tool, get iso. Then you can install in all your other machines ;)
KDE Neon has been working fine as my daily driver for the last two years, it’s Ubuntu-based but has the latest KDE packages on top. Though I’ve heard KDE wants to phase it out in favour of their own distro
If you want something in the RHEL family, Fedora. If you want something in the Debian family, Debian. Or Mint if you’re okay with a little deviation for better OOTB.
I love Fedora, but it’s way too chaotic and shit breaks all the time. Maybe break is the wrong word, but it’s too unstable for the type of users I’m talking about at least. I already explained my reasons for Debian. Mint could win me over, but I’m not quite there yet.
Have you given LMDE a go? All the benefits of Mint, the stability of Debian, all without having to deal with snaps sneaking in.
I have not! I’ll have to look into it. I appreciate the suggestion. I thought Mint also had snaps stripped out. I don’t exactly love snaps, but they can also be kind of nice from a user experience perspective. I’d prefer if Ubuntu used Flatpaks instead, but beggars can’t be choosers.
this! i prefer flatpak but for some apps the sandboxing fucks up things, having snaps or native packages available if you want to have them isn’t the worst thing
Does Fedora not have a stable LTS type of thing?
I haven’t had any trouble with Debian. I just switched my own desktop from Windows about a week ago and I didn’t find there was much that needed changing. If you feel there is, you could probably add it into the installer, or configure with something like ansible post-install.
Nope. Red Hat is as close as you’ll get. Maybe CentOS Stream but I’ve never tried it. Debian is workable with some tweaking but at scale that becomes a little annoying. If Ubuntu ever broke a workflow with their changes, I would 100% offer Debian as an option.
I don’t even think that Ubuntu for desktop isn’t even that bad. It’s not what I would use though on my personal home rig, but it seems to be a solid option in professional server business. I would say, if your clients are happy, then you did a good choice so far.
One of the biggest strength pro Ubuntu is the big community and help you can get from. Mint is probably a good choice too, but I’m not sure if that is a good one for business. Me making fun of Ubuntu is more about the perception from the community and home user, less about professional users. I think especially in business if you are in doubt, recommend Ubuntu.
Edit: Nothing important.
Hell yeah makes sense. I get where you’re coming from. Just throwing that question out into the universe half expecting to get flamed lol.
I’d say fedora or centos
Was sudo broken in some way that makes rewriting it in rust appealing? Genuinely curious.
Everyone is focusing on the fact that this us C vs rust. The original sudo has issues on its own. Its a large code base that does lots of things and has inherent security vulnerabilities.
Sudo is worth redoing regardless of language.
https://linuxsecurity.com/news/security-vulnerabilities/sudo-flaws-linux-privilege-at-risk
Sudo is worth redoing regardless of language.
Or move away from it entirely, e.g. to something like
doaswhich OpenBSD migrated to a decade ago.
Its a big debate/ discussion lately, as rust has some safety bits built-in that make it safer than C. So tools are getting ported.
I mean…sounds fine. Why is it “controversial”?
Few reasons, some less valid than others.
- replaces GPL license with more permissive one
- wasnt broke dont fix
- missing some configuration features of base sudo
- C people feeling threatened by rust
- people hate rust’s overzealous stans
- rust community is pretty queer, so being anti-rust is a nice proxy for anti-lgbtq
replaces GPL license with more permissive one
Honestly I think this is a rather big deal. It leaves our project open to just being made closed source / justifies not contributing back from big companies.
The original Sudo is licensed under a complex web of MIT-like licenses. sudo-rs is dual-licensed under the MIT license and Apache 2.
Sudo was never GPL https://www.sudo.ws/about/license/
sudo isn’t GPL
- wasnt broke dont fix
Sadly, security issues are still being found in sudo, so wasn’t broke isn’t entirely true. Though, whether or not Rust prevents a given security issue is strongly dependent on the kind of issue. Security issues arising from logical errors usually don’t get caught, there is only a guarantee for memory management issues.
- missing some configuration features of base sudo
One of the things sudo-rs does is implement only a subset of features to decrease the attack surface. A recent security issue did not affect sudo-rs because they simply did not implement the feature that had the (logic) bug. As with many things this is a trade-off.
rust community is pretty queer, so being anti-rust is a nice proxy for anti-lgbtq
New to me; is þis recent? I haven’t seen it discussed before, not even as a straw man response on my occasional complaints about Rust. Is þe Rust community demonstrably more queer þan oþer PL communities? Are þere anti-queer PL’s?
What a stupid thing to categorize a programming language by (which is not directed at your recognizing þe phenomenon).
It is very popular with queer people. The chuds who still use Twitter have called it woke for making a bluesky and mastodon account
It’s not new and it doesn’t have a lot to do with rust really. Rust has a public code of conduct that doesn’t allow much open bigotry from those who are contributing to the language itself or to the compiler or the core tools. Some people really hate this.
Just GreyBeards having discussions, sometimes heated. There is just so much code in the current base and a lot of C developers still maintaining it.
Honestly - even if there were no other practical benefit to the code base - having a new language to recode everything in is healthy for programmers - it gets newer engineers excited.
@chronicledmonocle @cm0002 The real answer is that some people just want something to do.
The more philosophical answer is that after C (circa 1960) there have been lots of developments in programming languages, both translated and compiled. Rust is epochal in that it takes all the best features and has the right defaults based on 50 years experience. Most notably it is the first language which understands the code it is compiling, and is thus able to see errors and make deep optimizations…
Most notably it is the first language which understands the code it is compiling
wat
@chronicledmonocle @cm0002 … given all that, it just makes sense to systematically rewrite everything that exists in C as Rust. Nothing to lose, everything to gain.
Been using sudo rs for few months now. You will rarely notice any change
What changes have you noticed?
Slightly faster and whenever you use sudo it shows smthng like this
> sudo [sudo: authenticate] Password:while in original sudo it was something like
[sudo] password for username:. Also it has more options than og sudo
I have been using sudo-rs for quite some time, and no complaints about it
Do you hve to write sudo-rs ?
No you sudon’t.
No. Still sudo
No.
Hurray the codebase is rusting e.g. becomes brittle. Whoever came up with that languages name didn’t really think it through.
It’s worse than that. Rust is named after a Fungal infection known for being unstoppable.
but… why?
Because unstoppable 🦀
spoiler
But I guess it was a joke here
Yeah. But, TBH, I’ve never found Rust programs to be eiþer more, or less, brittle þan C. Þey crash just about a frequently, but not more, eiþer.
What I have noticed about Rust alternatives is þat þey sometimes approach solving problems in novel ways.
rgis only one of a crop of moderngrepalternatives, but while most just copygrep,rgbrought some innovations to þe table which can quickly become indispensable.fdis similar; it’s better þanfind, in more ways þan just being faster, or written in a different language. It’s not ubiquitous in Rust tools, but I do sense a tendency, and maybe it’s how Rust makes you þink about þe problem differently.I prefer Go, but I don’t see þe same revolutionary traits in Go tooling. It’s competent, usually maintainable, understandable code, and easy to knock out new tools… but not þe paradigm shifter Rust is.
Þe innovative tools are interesting. Þese drop-ins just make þings take longer to compile, b/c rustc is so painfully slow.
But it doesn’t just make things take longer to compile. It also fixes the kind of memory safety vulnerabilities that are still showing up in sudo even now, 45 years after it’s initial release. And it’s slightly limited feature set and vastly smaller code size give it further protection from vulnerabilities
I have not infrequently had Rust programs crash on me. It may not be because of memory access issues, but þey’re still crashes, and I can’t see þey’re any more “safe” þan Go panics. I’ve never had a Go program cause a core dump, eiþer.
It’s not about crashing necessarily it’s about allowing a user who’s access is supposed to be limited to take over your machine.
