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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  3d ago (text post)   340 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for June 03, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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The fact that I'm a Linux newb and it was supposed to be the most user friendly. I don't think I see myself distro hopping either, I just want something that works, and it does. But who knows, maybe I'll find myself with more time than sense and going down rabbit holes.

Oh. There probably isn't much substantive difference between desktop distros if you do a mainstream one. Mint might come with nicer defaults out of the box and that's cool but if you can flip over to a Mac or Chromebook without much trouble than a random distro like Ubuntu probably wouldn't be any more wack.

Yeah, Ubuntu was going to be my first choice because it seems so ubiquitous and stuff like Steam claims to only support Ubuntu. But a friend of me talked me out of it because Ubuntu began gathering telemetry or something? And a lot of the places I used to see evangelizing Ubuntu shifted to Mint?

I donno man. I'm an outsider looking in.

Oh. There's some. Telemetry for a Linux distro will be pretty weaksauce compared to the rest of the world because of how fickle Linux users are.

But yeah no harm in Mint if you want the full anti-corpo experience.

I also know geeks who have limited Linux experience, but know they don’t want Ubuntu because of the telemetry scandal… which was, what, like 12 years ago or something, and completely irrelevant to modern Ubuntu?

The movement towards desktop Linux among techies has been driven largely by Microsoft telemetry in Windows, so it’s not entirely surprising to me that “avoid telemetry at all costs” would be an essential driver for them, even if people don’t really understand what the scandal was about and what modern Ubuntu is like. (Which, to be fair, has its own details that alienate a lot of greybeards.)

The big one was embedded amazon web search in the start-menu equivalent from 2013-2016; Cortana is obnoxious enough that I don't think anyone wants a Linux version. Not an issue in modern versions. Ubuntu OS itself now is just limited to an on-install and on-wakeup 'here's my system specs' sorta stuff, which I agree basically rounds to not mattering, but I will caveat that the Snap Store is more aggressive (sending on-program-start info, at minimum) that it may have additional concerns.

The good news is that the Snap Store is so badly maintained and especially filtered that you should basically never use it -- Snaps are slow to launch, they're often out-of-date (even by downstream standards), they're bloated even compared to flatpak, and Ubuntu has been extremely willing to let outright obvious malware into the store. The downside is that Canonical really wants everything moved to Snap, and unless you uninstall snapd you can get surprised to find things like your web browser or IDE can 'upgrade' to their Snap version.

((This is not an advocacy of flatpak. Just damning Snap with faint praise.))

That said, you can remove Snap, and I think it stays gone, so still better than Windows. Just a lot of footgun opportunity compared to something like Mint.

I've been using Ubuntu for O(decades) now and don't think I've ever used snap.

I only ever install stuff from the CLI using apt. Anything GUI or snap related I usually X out of.

Oh. There is a pop-up periodically that offers to update packages that I click okay on. I do notice it runs apt so I consider that fine.

Maybe I'll be rudely disappointed soon enough.

I would check if it's been installed -- snap list will either return file not found if you've avoided it or a list of snap installs if you haven't. Most post-14.x Ubuntu installs will include it, excluding a few server options, and will hook it into the apt-get behaviors.

That doesn't necessarily make it a huge deal -- if you aren't finding any performance issues, and you're not using the Snap Store to install random things, and you don't care much about (tbf, pretty trivial) telemetry, there's no reason to panic or do a fresh install. But it's good to be aware.

Hmm yeah, snap is installed (which I expected) and lists some random packages. Apparently I installed ghidra and thunderbird with it, both for one off projects.

Easy enough to just nuke them now, and snap entirely. Thank you for your vigilance, sir!

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