going to Debian [LWN.net]

going to Debian

Posted Apr 27, 2026 18:29 UTC (Mon) by atai (subscriber, #10977)
Parent article: The future of AI in Ubuntu

Debian is now a good choice for most people. With snap and now AI, Debian should be the choice for a lot of people who might have assumed Ubuntu as the default choice before.

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going to Debian

Posted Apr 27, 2026 22:31 UTC (Mon) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link] (3 responses)

Its a right old pain having to install snap on a new Debian box.

going to Debian

Posted Apr 27, 2026 22:43 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

Why do you need snap? I've never used it, so maybe I don't know what I'm missing.

Benefits of snap

Posted Apr 28, 2026 8:31 UTC (Tue) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link] (1 responses)

Easy access to / rollback from the latest version without library dependency hell breaking unrelated programs is probably the biggest. More streamlined and typically more compact than doing it with an AppImage.

Also allows the packager to control what the program can and can't do to other stuff belonging to the same user, at least to some extent.

Some would say that Flatpak was just as good. You can have both, if you want.

Benefits of snap

Posted Apr 30, 2026 0:49 UTC (Thu) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link]

Alas, both are attempt to solve an NP-complete problem. The tradeoff is increased duplication of maintenance. Fixing something once and using it everywhere is more advisable (:-)).

[* "Dependency hell is NP-complete. But maybe we can climb out", https://research.swtch.com/version-sat]