Red Star OS, a little too much spyware.
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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I've always been intrigued by that one. I want to test it out, but finding an image has proven difficult.
too much spyware
That's just capitalist propaganda. There is no spyware! That's just innocent telemetry!
Android. Google doesnt invest anything in AOSP it seems, GrapheneOS is the only really well made Distro.
Androids security model is a joke as every phone is bloated with malware that has full access over everything.
Banking apps need Google, map apps need Google.
There is no split screen in AOSP since forever.
No tools on the lockscreen. I am not talking about crazy ios like tools that are basically a seperate OS, its still a lockscreen. But camera and torch?
So many restrictions. RootlessJamesDSP is a good example of crazy workarounds that still dont work in the end. No FOSS appstore with autoupdates is also a pain.
Does GrapheneOS have microg or similar now? The last time I used it, it didn't have it, and some apps (Signal, I'm looking at you) had a constant notification. I went to CalyxOS, which I like fine, but it's more for the masses (gives up a little privacy for convenience) than GrapheneOS is.
It has sandboxed google play and services
Calyx is not hardened at all like Graphene. MicroG is supposed to be insecure, I miss UnifiedNLP though.
GrapheneOS has sandboxed Google Play apps, which are said to support all things. So they have the regular apps but with a compatibility layer so they work as normal apps like they should.
I dont use it though, and there is no Openstreetmap redirect or UnifiedNLP
Arch and any arch based distro. It's overused, deb is better and the absolute chads will always be distros like NixOS or Guix System. There is no use for an unstable, beginner-unfriendly, distro where you constantly encounter dependency hell.
Of course I'm just being edgy, every Linux Distro is good for the sole fact of it not being Windows.
Ubuntu. I never liked how it becomes a total mess when it goes EOL.
9 month for normal and 5 years for LTS. It's not that difficult
OpenSUSE, mostly because they differ too much from other distros, often even without any (obvious) advantages.
For example a lot of file paths (config files and such) are different, and when being used to other distros (or just following a guide from the internet) it takes longer to find it (I know there is Yast but I'm not a huge fan of that tool either)
Also, Manjaro
Debian. APT sucks, the installer looks like straight out of 1999 and the packages are just wayyy too old. Also apt-autoremove deleted half of my system the 1st time I tried debian...
Debian is my hometown because back in, I guess 2014?, I had a computer that just sucked. It was like 1GB RAM, I think a single core CPU. Debian was like the only distro that actually installed. Ubuntu, Mint, etc. didn't even finish the installation
I like the installer but the bundles that get automatically installed are such bloat.
Nala runs since Debian 12, and its the greatest pm interface I know.
But Debian stays outdated.
Manjaro, because because the team behind it fuck's up a bit to often for my tastes. And Ubuntu, because they force snap onto their users.
Ubuntu, dont understand me wrong, the distro is nice but, canonical... My point because i dont like Ubuntu.
i share your opinion
Debian, as its so MANUAL. Upgrading by manually updating x times and then literally changing the repos manually in the sources list? Wtf? Without any documentation or automation??
QubesOS, as it probably doesnt run on any real hardware. Didnt get beyond a blackscreen, and also AMD consumer GPUs dont support accelerated VMs making it useless.
Ubuntu because its annoying, but unsnap fixes a lot and its actually okay, still outdated Kernel als a bit weird.
KDE Neon because I cant tolerate its not a workstation distro but want it to be one
Linux Mint. Its old, and always had weird crashes for me. Its kinda nice and easy, kinda weird and complicated to do certain things. Some packages dont run as its not Ubuntu. Would always choose any KDE Distro that is newer.
You're going to get a lot of comments about Ubuntu and snaps. Definitely one of the reasons I switched away from it.
For the uninitiated, as someone who's looking to move from Windows to Linux and Ubuntu is probably my first choice, can you share what's not to like about this?
Edit - insightful answers. Thank you
Performance and functionality.
When I click the Firefox icon, I expect Firefox to open. Like, right away.
When Ubuntu switched it to a snap, there was a noticeable load time. I'd click the icon and wait. In the background the OS was mounting a snap as a virtual volume or something, and loading the sandboxed app from that. It turned my modern computer with SSD into an old computer with a HDD. Firefox gets frequent updates, so the snap would be updated frequently, requiring a remount/reload every update.
Ubuntu tried this with many stock apps (like Calculator), but eventually rolled things back since so many people complained about the obvious performance issues.
I'm talking about literally waiting 10X the time for something to load as a snap than it did compared to a "regular" app.
The more apps you have as snaps, the more things have to be mounted/attached and slowly loaded. This also use to clutter up the output when listing mounted devices.
The Micropolis (GPL SimCity) snap loads with read-only permissions. i.e., you cannot save. There are no permission controls for write access (its snap permissions are only for audio). Basically, the snap was configured wrong and you can never save your game.
I had purged snapd from my system and added repos to get "normal" versions of software, but eventually some other package change would happen and snapd would get included with routine updates.
I understand the benefits of something like Snaps and Flatpaks - but you cannot deny that there are negatives. I thought Linux was about choice. I've been administering a bunch of Ubuntu systems at work for well over a decade, and I don't like what the platform has been becoming.
Also, instead of going with an established solution (flatpak), Ubuntu decided to create a whole new problem (snap) and basically contributes to a splitting of the community. Which do you support? Which gets more developer focus to fix and improve things?
You don't have to take my word for any of this. A quick Google search will yield many similar complaints.
Ubuntu.It' went from a great beginner distro to a dumpster fire filled with snaps and telemetry.
I don't particularly like Arch.
I don't actually have a problem with it in general or its users. Wiki is helpful for almost everyone, regardless of distro (except maybe Nix and some immutables, where some things can be a bit different).
It's actually a tremendously important distro, and it, Debian, and Gentoo are the distros I know that if they disappear, Linux is either dead or very close to it.
Still, I find Arch to be... I don't know. I think this is actually about to be a very unpopular opinion, but I don't like Pacman at all, and that's probably the source of my issues with it. Its syntax annoys me and I use the terminal for package management so I'd have to be using it all the time.
I think maybe I'm just too used to APT. The same way Arch users find Pacman intuitive, that's how I feel about APT. I can use DNF and Zypper fine, but I'll still prefer APT to them as well. It just feels like "home", if that makes sense. (Nala and aptitude are both nice frontends to it as well.)
I also don't like having to rely on AUR for third party packages. That actually goes for every distro. Do not like third party packages or repos. Sometimes it's necessary, but I keep it to absolute minimum and find Debian has most of what I need. If not, Flatpak. If not Flatpak, source.
Another reason is that I think I prefer regular releases to rolling. I can go rolling if I need to, but I like just having something that doesn't surprise me with a shit ton of updates every day. Well, not surprise me as it's expected, but too many can be quite overwhelming sometimes.
Just personal preference, I guess. Nothing at all wrong with rolling, it's fantastic for a lot of purposes, just not mine.
What determines the importance of a distribution?
Mint. I just don't get it. It's Ubuntu but "different"? I heard a lot of people have issues with it. But also a lot of people love it and always recommend it.
To be fair I never used it and it's probably fine/great but I just have a weird unfounded hate for it