Solar Bear

Your example of Ubuntu being a good desktop is a web service run by Canonical that is relevant to maybe 1% of users, if not less?

Look, I’m happy that it works great for your use case. But this doesn’t matter to most users, and it’s also not even intrinsic to Ubuntu itself. OpenSUSE also has fantastic build services. Basically all major git services do too.

The counter to low-quality “Ubuntu sux” posts is not low quality “nuh uh it’s actually super epic!!!” posts, but that’s all we ever get. I’ve seen this pattern for probably fifteen years now, and it’s exhausting. If you don’t care about the criticisms and want to keep using it, then keep using it. More power to you. I probably use things you think are garbage. Hell, Windows users think we both use garbage. I’m just tired of people desperate to justify their choices like they need to “prove” something to everyone who disagrees.

There are plenty of high quality takedowns of Ubuntu, but so rarely are there high quality defenses of it, generally because the criticisms are correct. Nobody ever talks about what makes Ubuntu good, not even Ubuntu users. Arch users will yap your ear off about ArchWiki and AUR. I’ll evangelize Nix to anybody who will listen as the future of advanced Linux management. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed fans will not shut up about rollbacks and bleeding edge software. Fedora users… well, Fedora users are usually busy out there actually doing productive things with their time instead of pointless internet squabbles.

But what is Ubuntu strong at? I genuinely have no idea. All I ever see Ubuntu users say is that it “sucks the least”, in some vague indescribable way. That it’s not as bad as everyone says, that Snaps are actually fine, etc. Always on the defensive. If Ubuntu is actually good, somebody needs to get out there and make a case for what it’s good at, besides being featured as the default instructions for running proprietary third-party software.

I don’t know why we’re still doing snap discourse in 2025. I’m going to be harsh and direct.

It has a proprietary server backend. This is objectively true. Theoretically you can build an open source backend, but nobody has completed a full implementation of it.

If you don’t care about that, you can use Ubuntu, nobody is stopping you. You don’t need other people’s approval. Which is good, because of the people who disapprove, you’re never going to get their approval until it’s actually open sourced. You’re not going to convince anybody here to stop caring that it’s proprietary. So just get over it and use your own operating system without airing your insecurities online about it.

Incredibly funny story, incredibly awful website.

That’s where you’re wrong, buddy. It’s actually very easy to blame Microsoft for holding a decades-long desktop monopoly by pushing manufacturers to include Windows on every PC out of the box.

People really be out here preloading their computer with viruses to get around Microsoft’s latest bullshit instead of just using Linux, we ain’t never gonna have the Year of the Linux Desktop

I explained my reasoning and you made no attempt to engage with it and just asked a question I already answered in depth. I’m not sure what you want, but it’s clearly not an answer.

Hard disagree. Everything you learn on Arch is transferable because Arch is vanilla almost to a fault. The deep understandings of components I learned from Arch have helped me more times than I can count. It’s only non-transferable if you view each command as an arcane spell to be cast in that specific situation. I’ve fixed so many issues over the years using this knowledge, and it’s literally what landed me my current job and promotions.

Arch is why I know how encryption and TPM works at a deeper level, which helped me find and fix the issue a Windows Dell PC was having that kept tripping into Bitlocker recovery. Knowledge of Grub and kernel parameters that I learned from Arch’s install process is why I was able to effortlessly break into a vendor’s DNS server whose root password was lost by the previous sysadmin before me when everybody else was panicking. Hell, it even helps in installing other distros, because advanced disk partitioning is a hot mess on a lot of distro GUI installers, so intimate knowledge of what I actually need helps me work around their failings. Plus all the countless other times that knowledge has helped me solve little problems instantly, because I knew how it worked from implementing it manually. When my coworkers falter because the GUI fails them and they know nothing else, I simply fix it with a command.

If you use Arch and actually make the effort to learn, not just copy and paste commands from the wiki, you will objectively learn a lot about how Linux works. If you seek a career in Linux, there’s nothing I can recommend more than transitioning to using Arch (not Garuda, not Manjaro, Arch) full-time on your daily driver computer.

Anyways, after about a decade I’ve recently switched to NixOS. Now there’s a distro where the skills you learn can’t be transferred out, but the knowledge I gained from Arch absolutely transferred in and gave me a head start.

I’m gonna keep it real with you, I’ll take “weirdo CEO and optional AI tools” over “corporate entity so powerful that society has literally warped around it, whose primary business model is psychological manipulation” any day of the week. The other search engines are so poor at what they do that they’re not viable options.

I’ve switched to Kagi recently and honestly it’s better than Google ever was. You can assign weights to sites to see more or less of them in your results, it automatically cuts the listicle crap out, it has various built in filters for specific things like forums or scientific studies.

Downside: it’s $10/mo. But I’m at the “I’d rather pay with money than data” stage of my life. Especially if it actually makes the experience fucking usable again.

Your response is “why are you doing X, you should do Y”

Because they’re right, you shouldn’t do X. I know that’s not a satisfying answer for most people to hear, but it’s often one people need to hear.

If the process must run as root, then giving a user direct and unauthenticated control over it is a security vulnerability. You’ve created a quick workaround for your issue, and to be clear it is unlikely to realistically cause you problems individually, but on a larger scale that becomes a massive issue. A better solution is required rather than recommend everybody create a hole in their security like yours in order to do this thing.

If this is something that unprivileged users reasonably want to control, then this control should be possible unprivileged, or at least with limited privilege, not by simply granting permanent total control of a root service.

This is ultimately an upstream issue more than anything else.

Recent NixOS convert, where has this work of art been all my life

Anarchism is less a system of functions to be implemented, and more of a governing philosophy on how we build other systems. That philosophy focuses heavily on the expansion of democracy and the elimination of hierarchy wherever possible in order to create the most total freedom in the system. It is not inherently opposed to the concepts of governance or laws as many believe. It usually means focusing on smaller governing units, preferring local governance wherever possible, to give people the most direct control over their own lives. Self-sufficient communities are a major goal here.

The meaning of freedom to an anarchist is wholistic; not just freedom to, but also freedom from. Freedom to pursue your life on your terms, freedom from any obligation or inhibition that would prevent or detract from that goal. This includes, for example, unconditional freedom for all people from starvation, homelessness, or the inability to access medical care. It is an intentionally utopian ideal, that we should strive for something that may not even be possible, because that is how we’ll create the best possible world.

Once upon a time, anarchism was effectively synonymous with libertarianism. That word was bastardized in America to the point that it is unrecognizable now.