Hi Neville, 
I guess in the meantime there´s a rolling release version of Ubuntu available as well.
“Ubuntu Rolling Rhino”.
A Rolling Release Version of Ubuntu
(from: https://www.makeuseof.com/install-ubuntu-rolling-rhino/).
It still seems to use sytemd however.
Cheers from Rosika 
It does work now. I think for the last two LTS releases, but I could be wrong there.
That’s what I’ve thought too, but in a good way. They are “hated” like Microsoft, but also, things mostly just work. It’s amazing to me how well things run, in general, on so many different pieces of hardware. Very different motherboards, chip sets, audio devices, video cards, hard drives, SSDs, from a thousand different manufacturers. It’s a Herculean effort.
A perfect use for Firejail. I’ll have to play with that sometime.
I’ve seen that mentioned on It’s FOSS before, but have never tried it. Every so often I come across some piece of software where I’d like to run a newer version than is available in the default repos. Sometimes I have used AppImage or Flatpak versions, but those aren’t always available.
Well, there’s flatpack and Ubuntu invented the wheel again. Question is why. My quess is that they want to be “the M$/Apple of Linux” so they created a closed app store and tried to make all Ubuntu users their “clients”. Well in FOSS theres always options and forks etc and I think they went too far pushing snaps and trying to hide the fact from users that they are installing snaps and not .deb packages. They thought that they can control the Linux users and can do whatever they like. It’s just wrong. *
And I don’t hate Ubuntu but I won’t use it anymore. I think Ubuntu was the reason people started to use Linux. Ubuntu just works with almost any hardware. It is a great thing.
(* For package maintainer it would be nice if all packages in every distro would be snaps though)
They are free to do it that way if they wish.
At the time I saw it as an attempt to make package system management easier from their point of view.
Now, I dont know… the way they implemented snaps is getting close to a closed shop approach.
Doesn’t Firefox Multi-Account Containers also perform that function?
And we are free to say “no, thanks!” to that 
It does seem to do at least some of the same isolation.
I am not sure I want to trust these half-documented firefox extensions.
At least with firejail, I think I understand what it is doing and I am confident I control it rather than it controls me.
Maybe I am making a harsh judgement… I am open to being convinced otherwise.
Where do you feel it fails over firejail? Isn’t FF open source (as is fj of course) so if that concerns you, you can dig deeper if you feel you can’t trust it.
I use FF containers for on-line Banking too as an extra layer of security over that which my French bank already provides but are you ever totally safe on line in any event?
I have had no instances where I have suspected that FF isn’t doing what it says on the tin and the more slices of swiss cheese you line up, the greater chance of the holes lining up.
But hey, each to his own.
Oh yeah, FF is probably just as good .
I suppose I like small independent tools
There is more room for messups in a giant like FF , especially with extensions.
I dont really know, so lets leave it.
Just to share my 2 cents.
I use a lot Ubuntu and I am happy, it runs fast through either direct installation or VirtualBox. I use Fedora and Debian too. Even Peppermint
About snap, yes, it is “slow” but as I watched many tutorials on YouTube about Debian, is used Flatpak instead. Through snap I only use Firefox and VLC.
If I need more software I will try Flatpak. It is on my “ToDo” list yet
Just in case, snap is slow for the first time when the app is opened. If it is closed and re-open is really fast. Same experience on macOS for all the “Applications” (it about to only Mountain Lion and El Capitan)
When the latest release was available (24.04) was announced a no support about the .deb file through GUI … to be honest it was not a concern for me because I always use the terminal. Anyway through VirtualBox I confirmed that so far is possible install .deb files through the apt command. Of course, even the classic dpkg command
Greetings to all!
From memory - the hate started piling on when :
I never used the Amazon thingie in Ubuntu (don’t even know what it was - I just remember seeing the icon in the HUD/dash [on the left side]) - I did use Ubuntu One though - and - I for one LOVED UNITY and I miss (but I’m not going to downgrade to a distro / DE that’s supported by some teenage hobbiest)…
I seem to recall when that hate started piling on, mostly about Unity, a whole heap of people jumping over to Mint… I never did - stuck with Ubuntu mostly - but have flirted with elementary and Pop!_OS.
When I get fed up of this Pop!_OS 22.04 desktop (I don’t think Cosmic will tempt me) - I’ll probably lump Ubuntu 24.04 back on there. In the “early days” of SNAP - I did notice some performance issues with things like Chromium (not Google Chrome) and eschewed snap in favour of DEB packages… I no longer care, nor notice, what’s installed from a DEB package, and what’s installed from a snap… it’s pretty much seemless…
Ubuntu is the damned quickest way to get an O/S with reasonable GPU support (maybe not as good as Pop!_OS but HEAPS better than the likes of Fedora), a more modern Gnome (e.g. Gnome 46+) DE, easy to install Steam - and - a desktop O/S with a shell!
Same here - I NEVER install deb apps via any sort of GUI… Nearly everything I might want is available in the default Ubuntu repos - so it’s “sudo apt get install $package”. Just few odds and sods I install as deb files via “sudo dpkg -i $packagename.deb” - and if the ONLY option is via PPA - then I’ll live without it (I strongly counter-recommend using PPAs).
That is valuable information , thanks Manuel.
I thought it was rather drastic that Ubuntu would cease to allow .deb files… but , as you say, they have only removed the gui method… that makes sense… people who install .deb files need to know a little about what they are doing.
Your reason, I suppose, is that it is a user-maintained repository … like AUR in Arch?
Is that correct?
As I remember, anyone could create a personal package archive (PPA), which can hold anything packaged.
Noone did make sure the stuff in PPA’s are safe, compatible, and so on.
So those packages even could have contained malicious exectubales, hence the security warning. It’s almost the same as downloading an .exe from a random site and execute it on Windows. Though I don’t think there were real attacks through PPA’s, but incompatibilities surely existed. Especially between different PPA’s.
So say, Uncle Joe made a PPA, which provided a fancy-lib.so much better implemented, than the system originally had. Better performance for example.
Then imagine Jumping Jack jr. made a PPA, which provided fancy-prog, but that fancy-prog required exactly the system-default fancy-lib.so.
Now if we continue to imagine, old Shatterhand had a PPA which had a program in it, which exactly required the fancy-lib.so from Uncle Joe.
Now a user cannot use all of those PPA’s!
Installing something from one PPA can break something already installed from another PPA.
So there’s a conflict between them.
Snaps, flatpaks are a way to overcome this bad situation.
But there are other ways: opensourced programs can be built upon the system default libraries, then package these binaries - this is what Debian does.
Closed sourced pre-packaged programs can specify less strict dependencies, so for example instead glibc = 2.33 (exact match), better glibc > 2.32 (so anything above 2.32 satisfies the dependency).
Softmaker does packag its office suite this way, and it works both on Ubuntu and Debian.
So there are definitely other solutions for the dependency problems, the resource hogging proprietary snaps are just the way Ubuntu solved it.
As long as there are alternative ways, I say no to snaps.
I believe recently snaps got faster to load, but still requires more effort from the system, than a natively installed app.
The more powerful the computer is, the less noticeable the loading time is, and vice versa.
It’s been my experience with using Ubuntu, or Ubuntu derived (e.g. elementary) distros - PPA are huge risk for introducing dependancy hell…
I’d never countenance them again after some bad experiences…
So PPA is not one repo ( like AUR) it is many PPA files that you somehow find and access.
Correct?
I can understand that because they are independently created code packages. There is no coordinator.
All code used to be shared like that once, but programmers in my field tended to avoid system calls so code would be portable.
Todays software tends to be heavily linked into the system and to depend on other apps. That is where the trouble with coordination arises.
I’d say it is a huge collection of repos.
Some of them may be useful (I think FF repo is useful), but there is real mess too.
Like this (it’s empty, but why can it exist at all??):
`https://launchpad.net/~parkg0745/+archive/ubuntu/dsadasd`
No hate, not even dislike but more grown out of. Out of curiosity I tried Ubuntu on and off for years. I still remember how astonished I was the first time encountering the universe of FOSS, all those possibilities and freedom from the MS and/or Apple yoke.
Then ensued what I believe is a common experience for many newbies- spontaneously trying out too much too fast ending up in a broken install and no idea on how to repair it, becoming a bit sceptic about my abilities to use the evironment.
Then late 2021 I decided to use Linux as my main/daily. After using Ubuntu 20.04, later upgrading to22.04 and 24.04 I started to become irritated about it’s behaviour; I had a few complaints about Apps downloaded from Snap being outdated and not possible to update or upgrade and a few other nag’s. The main reason was I found Ubuntu becoming very sluggish and constrained.
Switching to Debian/Gnu was easy as that’s what Ubuntu is constructed from, albeit Ubuntu may have a bit more “polished” GUI, that “polish” is just obtained by using Extensions manager and Tweaks.
So, I have found Debian/Gnu a much more free and much faster environment and never turned back since.
Ubuntu has, in some ways, developed the properties of a proprietary OS and I sincerely hope they will come back around and continue to be the newbie’s first stepping stone into Linux.
And I must state that chatgpt has been great help repairing self made calamities in Linux since becoming available. That, and this here pages 
That is it… no control over the content. So it could be malware or worse.
Literally hundreds of single app specific repos yes…
I’ve seen older Debian (server - maybe Jessie or Wheezy) systems where some “developer” tried to force install a PPA (unsupported - could only be done by tweaking /etc/apt/*.list files) without success and left the whole apt system in disarray… That’s an issue I’ve seen in the past, just because BOTH use apt, and dpkg, doesn’t mean they’re the SAME THING!
Debian didn’t ever used to support PPA - that was a Canonical Ubuntu thing - but I think later versions of Debian (maybe 11 or 12?) now support PPA - it think thats a step in the wrong direction…
I still wouldn’t ever contemplate it. Recipe for disaster IMHO.
I’d rather get the source and compile an app, than install it via PPA…