This was no accident. They want you to install apps via their walled garden snap store.
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Ubuntu goes full enshitification... Glad I'm back to pure Debian for a long time
Yeah man. I'm on LMDE 6 and SO glad about that. No Ubuntu BS. Just pure Debian with Mint optimizations and desktop.
I'd be very surprised if the Mint team keeps the regular mint releases going instead of just going all in on LMDE
From what I've seen they like to take things slow. However I agree that it's only a matter of time now. Ubuntu also plans to have the next distro LTS released as both a regular iso and a snap-only read-only version.
In other words two iso's will be supplied and one will be immutable and every component and library will be all snaps only. This is the future they envision for Ubuntu so Mint will definitely have to move to Debian only eventually.
I've used plain old Debian since ~2016 and only just tried LMDE this month, it's really nice! I prefer Gnome but the default LMDE desktop was perfectly usable and clear, and I really like that it walks the user through setting up automatic backups. I would definitely recommend it over Ubuntu now for new users.
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Try command line?
dpkg -i /path/to/package.deb
That's likely an app just not installed by default for GUI
Correct, but new users don't want to need the command line for something as simple as installing packages.
New users probably shouldn't be installing .debs, especially if they don't know about terminal commands. I've seen so many fucked up systems from people treating Linux as Windows, as in installing everything by searching for stuff on their browser, downloading an installer and installing that.
Problem is a lot of closed source software still release their software as .deb or .rpm packages that installs their repos so you can install their software from the software centre.
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Tell them to install via flatpak. Spotify, Discord and so on should be available as flatpak via Gnome Software or the KDE software center. NOW on Ubuntu, this is anyone's guess. I'm guessing there is no flatpak support by default. Ubuntu is doing the linux community a disservice.
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Add a GUI desktop entry for that, assign .deb file mimetype to it, bam. A usable experience.
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I thought that perhaps Ubuntu were done with screwing the community after they forced snaps on their users.
Just when I thought, ok that's it what worse could they do?, then they pull this nonsense!
They really, really don't want the user to have control of the system do they? They think we are dumb and need a walled garden experience like Apple where you only get apps from Snaps or the repo.
And frankly it's against the principles of FOSS where the foundation is to protect user freedom.
I moved to Mint when this snaps thing made me feel up. And as soon as LMDE 6 came out I immediately switched to that .
I highly recommend everyone abandon Ubuntu and Fedora - the two Corporation backed distros - and use only 100% independent distros like LMDE or Debian or any of the others.
And if you're using a distro that is Ubuntu or Fedora based pressure the dev to move to Debian or opensuse. Or any other independent base.
If we don't take action as a community eventually new users will become accustomed to this BS and will never know what it's like to use REAL Linux.
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If a website stuffed a .deb into your Downloads folder and you click on it, should the default behaviour be to run it? Is there a significant pile of Ubuntu software out there that is unavailable in the apt and snap and flatpak stores? Other stores such as Steam and Epic (Heroic) are easily installable via … starting in your apt/snap/flatpak store.
The default beaviour shouldn't be to run it, but it also shouldn't be to tell you that a program that can run it doesn't exist, when it actually does.
If you want to do it via GUI, default behaviour should be to tell you that for security reasons, installation of deb files from the web is disabled, with a link to the root-accessible setting that enables it (similar to Android, for example).
Well, that marks the first time I've seen anyone refer to it as "the apt store." Thanks, I hate it.
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A deb is not an executable. You can't run it
And neither is a doc file, but most OSes would open up a compatible word processor.
It can install a service that will start automatically after install, so for all intents and purposes, if you click it and enter your sudo password, you might as well have run an executable.
It has pre and post-install scripts. Once you hand it off to dpkg, it can do pretty much anything.
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