Further validation of our decision to move to Debian (as if the sluggish kernel updates and ramming of snaps down our throats weren’t enough). We migrated a few hundred lab machines this summer, and have around half of our servers and containers switched over. It has gone very smoothly.
We're an redhat (originally) and derivatives based shop for 30 years now, but if I was going to choose a different stable enterprise level distro to base a fleet on, there's a very good chance it would be Debian.
Why would you move to Debian? Have you used it recently?
I am struggling to remember, but the last time I tried Debian a year ago there was a lot of setup and a few things broken (I think it was outdated packages). One of the things I tried to setup was a RAID array which was a very involved experience. It felt like things were not being tested. While on RHEL it was a simple point and click in Cockpit.
My employer has similar plans. Ubuntu 24.04 will be the last Ubuntu release in use for production. Once the support period ends, we are migrating to NixOS.
So you're moving from a distro that's being wrecked by ideologically-driven decisions, to one that is almost entirely ideologically motivated and notable for internal drama. Great choice, best of luck.
The Rustaceans will come for you too. While you’re asleep, they’re watching Claude port the entire Debian userspace to Rust in the name of Jesus Christ amen.
Debian for servers and could also be for desktop, though for desktop Mint seemed okay (still Ubuntu based, just without the focus on snaps and the Cinnamon desktop is nice; this one doesn’t fit the question exactly, but figured I’d mention it anyways cause had a pleasant experience).
Whereas on the RPM side Fedora is pretty good for desktop and something like RockyLinux for your servers (essentially carries on the spirit of the old CentOS).
Then again, I never really needed any of the more fancy modern distros, most of the time I just need good LTS and to run Docker, many might prefer Podman.
I used to use ubuntu for most everything. This year I'm trying arch a la cachyos. It's actually super nice to not have to wait for hardware support and security patches. Has anything broken? Nope. In fact, things that I would just have to deal with as "teehee isn't linux quirky?" shit is mostly gone. Turns out that it really is as simple as canonical and gnome being the problem.
I honestly don't understand why there isn't more people talking about debian. Ubuntu is always mentioned, but it's going down hill, and debian is the obvious alternative. When I went from Ubuntu to debian, I got way more recent versions of my software. That used to be the only complaint people had with debian.
Whether Debian or Ubuntu LTS have newer versions of software really just depends on which was most recently released - they both have a 2 year release schedule but release on alternating years.
sudo.rs is a really weird direction for an evolution — it re-implements a complex piece of security dropping some arbitrary choices but keeping it pretty complex. It has the exact same security model. I honestly can't understand the appeal.
If you want something similar but simpler, go for doas.
If you need all the features in sudo, keep using sudo.
If you want to try new security models, try s6-sudo, or any other of various tools out there.
sudo-rs keeping the same name is actually a worse breakage — because it doesn't have the same API as sudo (as described by op), but has the same name and pretends to be a drop-in replacement while also not being a drop-in.
To many of us it's not about the features which you obliquely refer to when you say "evolve" but about licensing. It's extremely concerning that we're replacing GPL stuff for non GPL, and just as concerning that so many folks don't recognise this point.
Licensing is downstream of software existing. The person who actually writes software gets to make the license. If you want a GPL one you have to make that.
Maybe the GPL people need to get with the times, then. LLVM exists largely because the GCC people were so obstinate. I'm a big believer in copyleft software, but it only works if people want to use your software with their projects.
If you read the article you would know this is a regression, not an improvement. Stuff breaking silently is never good. If you change config options error when you read the config file that no longer works.
It's not a regression, it's a documented, deliberate decision to change the behaviour of the program.
The sudo-rs 'sudoers' manual page suggests that this is a deliberate decision, which makes the Rust version of sudo very definitely not a compatible implementation. The manual page has a nice full section and description of 'Wildcards', and then at the end casually says:
> Wildcards in command line arguments are not supported—using these in original versions of sudo was usually a sign of mis-configuration and consequently sudo-rs simply forbids using them. The only supported use is ‘*’ as the final argument to indicate “zero or more subsequent arguments as noted above.
The manual should probably drop the wildcards section it's not implementing anyway, though.
I don't understand that logic. If it's fine for sudo-rs to have different behavior from sudo, why can't it also just have a different executable name? So that people who are expecting traditional sudo will get "executable not found" instead of having subtle silent problems.
"Canonical's Jon Seager mentions that the sudo-rs developers are collaborating with Todd Miller, the original maintainer of sudo, and to think of sudo-rs as a "handshake across generations of secure systems".
He also added that sudo-rs is not expected to bring over all the features of sudo, as the devs are taking a "less is more" approach, excluding features that are too niche or outdated."
So sudo.rs drops some features because "less is more", but it's still called "sudo" because by working together with the original maintainer they capture the spirit of the original, a "sudo 2.0" so to speak.
You can perfectly write a replacement with advanced features w/o breaking anything. Best example breadth-first implementation of find. It mostly exists because find can't handle statx and so doesn't have access to all file properties like their birthtime.
It's 100% compatible to find plus some additional features. That's why it mentions find's manual for the basics and only points out what was added on top in its own manual.
Evolving tools or their defaults should be lead to silent and unexpected experiences on stable distros.
A transition period with warnings and logs, changes and key differences at the top of the man docs and helpers to find, migrate or at least fail loudly. These are all important bring everyone along, and vital to transition a critical tool like sudo.
> At least the command is still called sudo or run0
You're happy it's a knockoff?
> would have been a much more breaking change
All these "Rust rewrite" projects are creating breaking changes all over the place, whilst solving no real problems. They can shove them up their arses.
It’s not a knockoff. They have a friendly relationship with the original creator of sudo. And their work helps uncover bugs of the original sudo so they send fixes upstream.
>Tools have to be allowed to evolve. Half the Linux ecosystem's problems are caused by sticking on some design that made sense in 1980.
the other half of the problems are from people who think redesigning the wheel is a good idea and try to wedge conformity-breaking tools into the thing.
You may still be using flint-knapped knives, but the world as a whole moved on to bronze, then iron, and, more recently, steel. Hammers evolved as well, with more ergonomic grips being invented to reduce repetitive strain injuries, as well as various heads which are better suited to different tasks (like the claw hammer or ball-peen hammer).
Sudoers glob expressions are a horrible footgun and I have little empathy for anyone complaining about their removal, especially when it’s trivial to fix with 3 extra (explicit) lines.
I do manage more than a handful of machines, and that means using automation tools and IaC as much as possible, while avoiding humans using shells as much as possible. I’m struggling to enumerate a lot of use cases for a bespoke sudo configuration that shouldn’t be a proper setup.
> I do not really have words for this. The Rust sudo has apparently opted to keep the single most dangerous wildcard while disallowing all of the wildcards that allow one to be narrow and specific about what you're allowing, and it buries this at the end of a section that devotes a bunch of words to describing functionality it doesn't have and doesn't support, with absolutely nothing else in that section to say this (either up front or in the descriptions of how all the wildcards would work if sudo-rs supported them, which it doesn't).
> Also, this is documentation calculated to mislead busy system administrators who are skimming it to see if there is some big difference between the Rust sudo that Canonical has stuck them with and the real version of sudo.
I think ubuntu-minimal is an empty package that depends on all the core system packages to be installed by default. If you remove it, nothing will happen immediately but the next autoremove will try to uninstall most of the system as it's no longer a required dependency of something.
Seems in Linux land, compatibly, even between distros, is going out the window. :(
Individuals can deal with that, but companies will have a hard time. You would think the Linux Foundation (LF) would chime in with all these differences. But they seem more concerned with AI than Linux these days.
If it was up to me, I would standardize on OpenBSD's doas, but me doing that would make for more incompatibilities.
>Seems in Linux land, compatibly, even between distros, is going out the window. :(
That happened 30 years ago. Userland is not compatible. Too many distro related patchese, especially on Debian/Ubuntu.
The only common denominator is libc because daddy Torvalds doesn't allow the kids to break it. That's why things like snap work but come with a full blown os stack inside.
It works fine, has broad support for many packages from Canonical, has well over a decade of kernel and core program updates (up to 15 years for free up to five computers with a personal account!) and is often the target distribution for third-party packages. Most guides for professional software target either Red Hat or Ubuntu, and many driver packages for platforms like Arch are just the Ubuntu .debs that are extracted and shoved back into a different format.
If you need to run a five year old version of [PHP|Apache|Nginx|Caddy|whatever], Ubuntu is a solid bet. None of that "we need to update our configuration to a new format to solve a criticial CVE issue" nonsense, for much longer than Debian is offering free labour.
Debian has its own flaws, like its controversial patches, lack of real LTS releases, and lack of business contracts guaranteeing support directly from the source if you're a business.
I have yet to encounter any issues with either sudo-rs or their coreutils rewrite. From what I've come to expect from utcc.utoronto.ca, I'm not surprised they're using some obscure feature that Canonical chose to remove, though. I'm surprised they're even running Ubuntu.
Ayenertia, 'tis not to be under-estimated. Tis why, with certainty, many a hacker here maintain some rudimentary Facebook account despite an open disdain for Meta.
I started off with Ubuntu in the 2010s because I wanted to try out Linux but was sure as hell didn't have the patience nor resources to make consumer conveniences like WiFi just work. The local LUG was also heavily promoting it; that's even more inertia.
Then I got fancy and started really customizing my configuration---I got a dotfiles repo. The oldest commit touching a top-level file in my dotfiles is 11 years ago (almost unthinkable to me!). I haven't really tried it out on any other distro but I'm pretty sure I've written some shim or personal bash command relying on something Ubuntu-specific.
I happen to be in the market for a new laptop right now. I'm looking at Starlabs but unfortunately they do not ship with Debian. Today, however, I saw a random woman in a cafe with Linux Mint so that might be my sign to investigate that ecosystem.
Ubuntu typically has more packages available and newer versions of them, besides supporting PPAs and Snaps to expand the easily available software.
Also, Gnome and KDE are both horribly unintuitive for newcomers. Ubuntu makes a several tweaks to Gnome to make it more user-friendly. Debian just gives a list of names and says to choose one or more.
From my experience, Kubuntu barely changes anything about KDE these days, and that's a good thing, too. I compile my own KDE on my usual machines, but I also have stock Kubuntu on one, and it's pretty much the same.
There's a lot of inertia. That is leading to various major companies shipping their software for, and only supporting, Ubuntu, and if you're lucky Red Hat.
I run Ubuntu on my framework laptop. I still run Win11 on my desktops to play games and to have less faff when remoting into work.
I want the simplest possible experience. There is more documentation for Ubuntu, which means things are more likely to work. Or if they don’t work, someone might have posted about the issue.
sudo being slightly different doesn’t make a difference for me when my laptop experience of sudo is “sudo apt …”.
One reason is that we have a lot of developers who get into programming in the last 10 years. Ubuntu was catering directly to "beginners". Many people who only used Ubuntu because they wanted "a linux" never really reconsidered and just use what they know (and often don't even know there are other options).
Debian releases lag behind quite considerably. Debian 13 for instance comes out of the box with Python 3.13, whereas Ubuntu 26.04 LTS comes with Python 3.14.
I should note I am a Debian diehard been using it 20 years my main workstation is still on deb12 lol. But recently I have been pivoting away from Debian and towards Fedora. Running Fedora 44 on my Framework 13 Pro and my Chuwi N150 netbook and it has been very stable and pleasant. Relatively cutting edge, too. I am on KDE 6.8 for instance.
PLEASE don't spread misinformation. Debian releases every 2 years (usually summer of odd years). During the summer of even years, Ubuntu takes what is in debian, makes a copy, and calls it their release. Thus they leapfrog. For python specificall, the main maintainer is even the same person in both. It's not possible for Debian to "lag behind quite considerably". Here's the current situation:
The ubuntu server reporting this is super slow (one of a million paper cuts you suffer when you use ubuntu instead of debian). The latest Debian stable has 3.13.5 as you say. The latest ubuntu lts release (i.e. what anybody actually uses) was released a year later, and has 3.14.3. Next summer, Debian will be ahead. Also note that the current bleeding-edge ubuntu is 3.14.8-1, which is exactly the same as the bleeding-edge debian. Because they're copies of one another
Theress a bug. That happens. Reporting it should take way less time than writing a sarcastic blog post ("I haven't filed a bug because we aren't Canonical's free debugging resource"). It's open source, so I think reporting bugs or submitting a PR is just good citizenship.
It's not a bug, it's a deliberate incompatibility, as noted by the article's author:
>> Wildcards in command line arguments are not supported—using these in original versions of sudo was usually a sign of mis-configuration and consequently sudo-rs simply forbids using them. The only supported use is ‘’ as the final argument to indicate “zero or more subsequent arguments as noted above.*
> I do not really have words for this. The Rust sudo has apparently opted to keep the single most dangerous wildcard while disallowing all of the wildcards that allow one to be narrow and specific about what you're allowing, and it buries this at the end of a section that devotes a bunch of words to describing functionality it doesn't have and doesn't support, with absolutely nothing else in that section to say this (either up front or in the descriptions of how all the wildcards would work if sudo-rs supported them, which it doesn't).
If someone tries to do an in-place upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04, sudo-rs could potentially be installed instead of 'regular' sudo, and now you have a potentially system with borked functionality.
> It's open source, so I think reporting bugs or submitting a PR is just good citizenship.
LOL, the author's very next weblog post:
> One reaction to my entry on how the Rust Sudo is not fully compatible with proper Sudo is that I should have filed a bug report about this behavior. One of the reasons I have not done this comes down why I was using the Rust Sudo, and in my view it's a wider issue with bug reporting in general. To put it simply, I am (or was) an involuntary user of the Rust Sudo, not a voluntary one.
[…]
> In a project centered view, all people using Rust Sudo 'should' report issues to the project because that's how FOSS projects improve (this is not really true, the project unquestionably only wants what it considers 'good' bug reports and will be unhappy about ones that, for example, revisit decisions it has no intentions of changing). In the people centered view, many people have not chosen to use the new Rust Sudo or the Rust Coreutils, they've been stuck with them by Canonical's decisions. These people are under no obligation to help out with Canonical's apparent project of improving these projects (or help out the projects themselves); the Ubuntu project does not get to make everyone using Ubuntu into obligatory bug reporters through its own choices.
Given that the selling point of the rust rewrite is gnu compatibility, you’d think they’d RTFM of the thing they were replacing, or at least fuzz the two to confirm identical side effects.
I’m increasingly considering just pretending Ubuntu doesn’t exist. It’s a clown show, and devuan is fine.
And this is why you don't just jump to rust-written alternatives because they're supposedly "safer": the "safer" implementation might actually be incompatible (intentionally or otherwise) from the original, which for something like sudo or coreutils is... Erm, kinda important. Maybe "rewrite it in Rust" was a bad idea after all...
I start using Ubuntu because my company used it, and they remind me of Redhat and the other Linux vendors that got too big for their breeches. For my personal stuff, I went all in on Debian, FreeBSD and OpenBSD and will never run Ubuntu for personal stuff. I still can't forgive them for adopting systemd or the Wayland mess and I suspect they are going to break more stuff.
Further validation of our decision to move to Debian (as if the sluggish kernel updates and ramming of snaps down our throats weren’t enough). We migrated a few hundred lab machines this summer, and have around half of our servers and containers switched over. It has gone very smoothly.
We're an redhat (originally) and derivatives based shop for 30 years now, but if I was going to choose a different stable enterprise level distro to base a fleet on, there's a very good chance it would be Debian.
Why would you move to Debian? Have you used it recently?
I am struggling to remember, but the last time I tried Debian a year ago there was a lot of setup and a few things broken (I think it was outdated packages). One of the things I tried to setup was a RAID array which was a very involved experience. It felt like things were not being tested. While on RHEL it was a simple point and click in Cockpit.
My employer has similar plans. Ubuntu 24.04 will be the last Ubuntu release in use for production. Once the support period ends, we are migrating to NixOS.
I don’t have any skin in this rs-coreutils debate. But Ubuntu still hasn’t patched CVE-2026-98432. We’re migrating too
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> we are migrating to NixOS
So you're moving from a distro that's being wrecked by ideologically-driven decisions, to one that is almost entirely ideologically motivated and notable for internal drama. Great choice, best of luck.
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i set up a bunch of machines at my new place. ubuntu.
my weekend project is moving them over to debian.
it pains me, ubuntu used to be “the” linux i would point people to. the “un-fuckup-able” thing people should try if they’re switching.
The Rustaceans will come for you too. While you’re asleep, they’re watching Claude port the entire Debian userspace to Rust in the name of Jesus Christ amen.
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As someone who's been using ubuntu since warty warthog, what did you end up switching to / what are other people using these days?
Debian for servers and could also be for desktop, though for desktop Mint seemed okay (still Ubuntu based, just without the focus on snaps and the Cinnamon desktop is nice; this one doesn’t fit the question exactly, but figured I’d mention it anyways cause had a pleasant experience).
Whereas on the RPM side Fedora is pretty good for desktop and something like RockyLinux for your servers (essentially carries on the spirit of the old CentOS).
Then again, I never really needed any of the more fancy modern distros, most of the time I just need good LTS and to run Docker, many might prefer Podman.
They said—Debian
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I use Fedora if that's helpful. Well, I've been using Bluefin for the last few months and it's certainly different.
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I used to use ubuntu for most everything. This year I'm trying arch a la cachyos. It's actually super nice to not have to wait for hardware support and security patches. Has anything broken? Nope. In fact, things that I would just have to deal with as "teehee isn't linux quirky?" shit is mostly gone. Turns out that it really is as simple as canonical and gnome being the problem.
I honestly don't understand why there isn't more people talking about debian. Ubuntu is always mentioned, but it's going down hill, and debian is the obvious alternative. When I went from Ubuntu to debian, I got way more recent versions of my software. That used to be the only complaint people had with debian.
I wish debian would include ssh-import-id in the installer, its a minor change but big quality of life improvement that ubuntu has
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Whether Debian or Ubuntu LTS have newer versions of software really just depends on which was most recently released - they both have a 2 year release schedule but release on alternating years.
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Ubuntu is a frozen debian/sid. At least it was back in the day.
I mean i switched because of current packages including changes like rust sudo if it makes it better (I do remember a few sudo CVEs).
Are you know running debian with testing or unstable?
Tools have to be allowed to evolve. Half the Linux ecosystem's problems are caused by sticking on some design that made sense in 1980.
At least the command is still called sudo or run0. Changing it to doas would have been a much more breaking change.
Alas, TFA blocks me with no workaround because I'm using Tor Browser so I can't read about the nature of the changes.
sudo.rs is a really weird direction for an evolution — it re-implements a complex piece of security dropping some arbitrary choices but keeping it pretty complex. It has the exact same security model. I honestly can't understand the appeal.
If you want something similar but simpler, go for doas.
If you need all the features in sudo, keep using sudo.
If you want to try new security models, try s6-sudo, or any other of various tools out there.
sudo-rs keeping the same name is actually a worse breakage — because it doesn't have the same API as sudo (as described by op), but has the same name and pretends to be a drop-in replacement while also not being a drop-in.
> I honestly can't understand the appeal.
Virtue signaling.
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To many of us it's not about the features which you obliquely refer to when you say "evolve" but about licensing. It's extremely concerning that we're replacing GPL stuff for non GPL, and just as concerning that so many folks don't recognise this point.
sudo is MIT-licensed: https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/main/LICENSE.md
sudo-rs is MIT-licensed: https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs/blob/main/...
Perhaps you are thinking of uutils? https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/blob/main/LICENSE
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This is by design.
They are slow-rolling the cancellation of Stallman's connection to the OS because their first attempt failed.
In 10 years, no one will have heard of GNU after all components have been replaced with corporate clones.
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Licensing is downstream of software existing. The person who actually writes software gets to make the license. If you want a GPL one you have to make that.
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What is the GPL software that is being replaced?
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Hardly relevant to TFA though
Maybe the GPL people need to get with the times, then. LLVM exists largely because the GCC people were so obstinate. I'm a big believer in copyleft software, but it only works if people want to use your software with their projects.
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If you read the article you would know this is a regression, not an improvement. Stuff breaking silently is never good. If you change config options error when you read the config file that no longer works.
It's not a regression, it's a documented, deliberate decision to change the behaviour of the program.
The manual should probably drop the wildcards section it's not implementing anyway, though.
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I don't understand that logic. If it's fine for sudo-rs to have different behavior from sudo, why can't it also just have a different executable name? So that people who are expecting traditional sudo will get "executable not found" instead of having subtle silent problems.
according to https://itsfoss.com/news/ubuntu-25-10-sudo-rs/:
"Canonical's Jon Seager mentions that the sudo-rs developers are collaborating with Todd Miller, the original maintainer of sudo, and to think of sudo-rs as a "handshake across generations of secure systems".
He also added that sudo-rs is not expected to bring over all the features of sudo, as the devs are taking a "less is more" approach, excluding features that are too niche or outdated."
So sudo.rs drops some features because "less is more", but it's still called "sudo" because by working together with the original maintainer they capture the spirit of the original, a "sudo 2.0" so to speak.
You can perfectly write a replacement with advanced features w/o breaking anything. Best example breadth-first implementation of find. It mostly exists because find can't handle statx and so doesn't have access to all file properties like their birthtime.
It's 100% compatible to find plus some additional features. That's why it mentions find's manual for the basics and only points out what was added on top in its own manual.
It's treating command patterns in the sudoers file as literals when the previous one treated them as regexes.
Evolving tools or their defaults should be lead to silent and unexpected experiences on stable distros.
A transition period with warnings and logs, changes and key differences at the top of the man docs and helpers to find, migrate or at least fail loudly. These are all important bring everyone along, and vital to transition a critical tool like sudo.
> Tools have to be allowed to evolve.
Great, then give it a new name.
> At least the command is still called sudo or run0
You're happy it's a knockoff?
> would have been a much more breaking change
All these "Rust rewrite" projects are creating breaking changes all over the place, whilst solving no real problems. They can shove them up their arses.
It’s not a knockoff. They have a friendly relationship with the original creator of sudo. And their work helps uncover bugs of the original sudo so they send fixes upstream.
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Rust is a very good language, but some dogmatic people hyped in the language are ruining the reputation of the language.
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>Tools have to be allowed to evolve. Half the Linux ecosystem's problems are caused by sticking on some design that made sense in 1980.
the other half of the problems are from people who think redesigning the wheel is a good idea and try to wedge conformity-breaking tools into the thing.
> TFA blocks me with no workaround
I hope this copy works https://pastebin.com/mxAZyQJL (I was surprised the website even blocked archive.ph with "suspicious old browser")
Yes, they do. Put them into your stable server distribution AFTER they are complete.
Doas is already a replacement to sudo especially in the OpenBSD world.
You can install it in replacement as sudo on Linux.
Why? Do knives need to evolve? Screwdrivers? Hammers? Can’t good be good?
I don't know the history of knives and hammers, but screwdrivers _have_ evolved, in backwards incompatible ways.
Slot screws date back to the ~15th century, Phillips to the 1930s, and Torx to the 60s. They all brought improvements.
You may still be using flint-knapped knives, but the world as a whole moved on to bronze, then iron, and, more recently, steel. Hammers evolved as well, with more ergonomic grips being invented to reduce repetitive strain injuries, as well as various heads which are better suited to different tasks (like the claw hammer or ball-peen hammer).
Did you mean changing it to doas or run0 would be breaking?
Sudoers glob expressions are a horrible footgun and I have little empathy for anyone complaining about their removal, especially when it’s trivial to fix with 3 extra (explicit) lines.
This is trivial to fix, at least for you.
That being said there definitely should be an automated way to check for incompatibilities between normal and rust sudo.
Before you know it, you will be needing a workaround for every replacement tool you use in Ubuntu. This is what makes it unacceptable.
forgive me if i’m wrong. i don’t think you’ve ever had to administer more than a handful of machines. your “fix” is irrelevant.
> That being said there definitely should be an automated way to check for incompatibilities between normal and rust sudo.
yes. it’s called the bare minimum.
I do manage more than a handful of machines, and that means using automation tools and IaC as much as possible, while avoiding humans using shells as much as possible. I’m struggling to enumerate a lot of use cases for a bespoke sudo configuration that shouldn’t be a proper setup.
If you're using `sudo` for something beyond trivial `reboot`, you're doing something VERY wrong.
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> I do not really have words for this. The Rust sudo has apparently opted to keep the single most dangerous wildcard while disallowing all of the wildcards that allow one to be narrow and specific about what you're allowing, and it buries this at the end of a section that devotes a bunch of words to describing functionality it doesn't have and doesn't support, with absolutely nothing else in that section to say this (either up front or in the descriptions of how all the wildcards would work if sudo-rs supported them, which it doesn't).
> Also, this is documentation calculated to mislead busy system administrators who are skimming it to see if there is some big difference between the Rust sudo that Canonical has stuck them with and the real version of sudo.
just.. wow.
I think ubuntu-minimal is an empty package that depends on all the core system packages to be installed by default. If you remove it, nothing will happen immediately but the next autoremove will try to uninstall most of the system as it's no longer a required dependency of something.
Sidebar: TFW I haven't updated Thorium Mac since V150.
I got dumped to https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/cspace-bad/cspace-old-browser.... trying to visit the page.
Seems in Linux land, compatibly, even between distros, is going out the window. :(
Individuals can deal with that, but companies will have a hard time. You would think the Linux Foundation (LF) would chime in with all these differences. But they seem more concerned with AI than Linux these days.
If it was up to me, I would standardize on OpenBSD's doas, but me doing that would make for more incompatibilities.
>Seems in Linux land, compatibly, even between distros, is going out the window. :(
That happened 30 years ago. Userland is not compatible. Too many distro related patchese, especially on Debian/Ubuntu.
The only common denominator is libc because daddy Torvalds doesn't allow the kids to break it. That's why things like snap work but come with a full blown os stack inside.
> If it was up to me, I would standardize on OpenBSD's doas
doas is ~ 1k LOC of easy to understand C code. It can quite literally be made 100% bug-free.
But it was never about that, never about finding a better replacement. It's about religious proselytizing of their chosen language.
If they were going to make breaking changes anyways, they should have just switched to the much simpler `doas`
Ah, but then you don't get to skip editing docs, proclaim walking on a tightrope, or make a new TiVo!
Strange that such issues haven’t been probed with ai. It’s good st finding regressions
I prefer to have sudo uninstalled.
It also doesn't work with ansible, as I recently found out...
Could someone remind me why people use Ubuntu?
I remember 20 years ago Ubuntu was marginally more user friendly. Is it the power of inertia? Ubuntu is just Debian actively made worse.
It works fine, has broad support for many packages from Canonical, has well over a decade of kernel and core program updates (up to 15 years for free up to five computers with a personal account!) and is often the target distribution for third-party packages. Most guides for professional software target either Red Hat or Ubuntu, and many driver packages for platforms like Arch are just the Ubuntu .debs that are extracted and shoved back into a different format.
If you need to run a five year old version of [PHP|Apache|Nginx|Caddy|whatever], Ubuntu is a solid bet. None of that "we need to update our configuration to a new format to solve a criticial CVE issue" nonsense, for much longer than Debian is offering free labour.
Debian has its own flaws, like its controversial patches, lack of real LTS releases, and lack of business contracts guaranteeing support directly from the source if you're a business.
I have yet to encounter any issues with either sudo-rs or their coreutils rewrite. From what I've come to expect from utcc.utoronto.ca, I'm not surprised they're using some obscure feature that Canonical chose to remove, though. I'm surprised they're even running Ubuntu.
> I have yet to encounter any issues with either sudo-rs
I feel like this is just ignoring the issues raised in the post, or saying “well, I didn’t use those features so I don’t care”.
You personally not caring is ok. The distro not caring is generating some hate.
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In my day-to-day use of Ubuntu 26 "LTS", I've found bugs with chown, sudo, date, ls and sort.
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Ayenertia, 'tis not to be under-estimated. Tis why, with certainty, many a hacker here maintain some rudimentary Facebook account despite an open disdain for Meta.
I started off with Ubuntu in the 2010s because I wanted to try out Linux but was sure as hell didn't have the patience nor resources to make consumer conveniences like WiFi just work. The local LUG was also heavily promoting it; that's even more inertia.
Then I got fancy and started really customizing my configuration---I got a dotfiles repo. The oldest commit touching a top-level file in my dotfiles is 11 years ago (almost unthinkable to me!). I haven't really tried it out on any other distro but I'm pretty sure I've written some shim or personal bash command relying on something Ubuntu-specific.
I happen to be in the market for a new laptop right now. I'm looking at Starlabs but unfortunately they do not ship with Debian. Today, however, I saw a random woman in a cafe with Linux Mint so that might be my sign to investigate that ecosystem.
CachyOS.
Never been happier.
Ubuntu typically has more packages available and newer versions of them, besides supporting PPAs and Snaps to expand the easily available software.
Also, Gnome and KDE are both horribly unintuitive for newcomers. Ubuntu makes a several tweaks to Gnome to make it more user-friendly. Debian just gives a list of names and says to choose one or more.
It is mostly just inertia though.
From my experience, Kubuntu barely changes anything about KDE these days, and that's a good thing, too. I compile my own KDE on my usual machines, but I also have stock Kubuntu on one, and it's pretty much the same.
KDE is basically a clone of the Windows UI when it comes to how things work and there's a billion people out there that know how to handle Windows.
So it can't be that much of a hurdle.
Debian at the time of a new release has up to date software. Ubuntu feels more updated just because it releases every 6 months.
Agree on all other points though. Ubuntu's take on the Gnome interface is what makes it usable. Stock Gnome is just too barebones.
There's a lot of inertia. That is leading to various major companies shipping their software for, and only supporting, Ubuntu, and if you're lucky Red Hat.
I run Ubuntu on my framework laptop. I still run Win11 on my desktops to play games and to have less faff when remoting into work.
I want the simplest possible experience. There is more documentation for Ubuntu, which means things are more likely to work. Or if they don’t work, someone might have posted about the issue.
sudo being slightly different doesn’t make a difference for me when my laptop experience of sudo is “sudo apt …”.
Yes, I would guess that a combination of inertia and network effects explain Ubuntu's prevalence.
I started with Ubuntu because it was more up to date than CentOS or Debian and didn’t require a ton of weird repos to get a modern LAMP stack.
Those days are likely done.
I'm on nvidia jetson, and it comes with ubuntu, and running anything else is a surefire way to run into problems.
The GPU and unified memory is great though.
It's _the_ operating system for GPU / AI.
It's quite a bit more up to date than Debian
Ubuntu is african for "I can't install Debian.". At least that's the joke we mad on irc back in the day :-D
One reason is that we have a lot of developers who get into programming in the last 10 years. Ubuntu was catering directly to "beginners". Many people who only used Ubuntu because they wanted "a linux" never really reconsidered and just use what they know (and often don't even know there are other options).
Debian releases lag behind quite considerably. Debian 13 for instance comes out of the box with Python 3.13, whereas Ubuntu 26.04 LTS comes with Python 3.14.
I should note I am a Debian diehard been using it 20 years my main workstation is still on deb12 lol. But recently I have been pivoting away from Debian and towards Fedora. Running Fedora 44 on my Framework 13 Pro and my Chuwi N150 netbook and it has been very stable and pleasant. Relatively cutting edge, too. I am on KDE 6.8 for instance.
PLEASE don't spread misinformation. Debian releases every 2 years (usually summer of odd years). During the summer of even years, Ubuntu takes what is in debian, makes a copy, and calls it their release. Thus they leapfrog. For python specificall, the main maintainer is even the same person in both. It's not possible for Debian to "lag behind quite considerably". Here's the current situation:
The ubuntu server reporting this is super slow (one of a million paper cuts you suffer when you use ubuntu instead of debian). The latest Debian stable has 3.13.5 as you say. The latest ubuntu lts release (i.e. what anybody actually uses) was released a year later, and has 3.14.3. Next summer, Debian will be ahead. Also note that the current bleeding-edge ubuntu is 3.14.8-1, which is exactly the same as the bleeding-edge debian. Because they're copies of one another
For me it is entirely inertia, I have hordes of TODO items (more and less urgent ones) and switching OS on my laptop took noticeable time last time.
Despite that it was just upgrade to new OS version and SSD replacement.
Though one of servers is getting upgraded to Debian from Ubuntu adware.
Theress a bug. That happens. Reporting it should take way less time than writing a sarcastic blog post ("I haven't filed a bug because we aren't Canonical's free debugging resource"). It's open source, so I think reporting bugs or submitting a PR is just good citizenship.
> Theress a bug. That happens.
It's not a bug, it's a deliberate incompatibility, as noted by the article's author:
>> Wildcards in command line arguments are not supported—using these in original versions of sudo was usually a sign of mis-configuration and consequently sudo-rs simply forbids using them. The only supported use is ‘’ as the final argument to indicate “zero or more subsequent arguments as noted above.*
> I do not really have words for this. The Rust sudo has apparently opted to keep the single most dangerous wildcard while disallowing all of the wildcards that allow one to be narrow and specific about what you're allowing, and it buries this at the end of a section that devotes a bunch of words to describing functionality it doesn't have and doesn't support, with absolutely nothing else in that section to say this (either up front or in the descriptions of how all the wildcards would work if sudo-rs supported them, which it doesn't).
If someone tries to do an in-place upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04, sudo-rs could potentially be installed instead of 'regular' sudo, and now you have a potentially system with borked functionality.
> It's open source, so I think reporting bugs or submitting a PR is just good citizenship.
LOL, the author's very next weblog post:
> One reaction to my entry on how the Rust Sudo is not fully compatible with proper Sudo is that I should have filed a bug report about this behavior. One of the reasons I have not done this comes down why I was using the Rust Sudo, and in my view it's a wider issue with bug reporting in general. To put it simply, I am (or was) an involuntary user of the Rust Sudo, not a voluntary one.
[…]
> In a project centered view, all people using Rust Sudo 'should' report issues to the project because that's how FOSS projects improve (this is not really true, the project unquestionably only wants what it considers 'good' bug reports and will be unhappy about ones that, for example, revisit decisions it has no intentions of changing). In the people centered view, many people have not chosen to use the new Rust Sudo or the Rust Coreutils, they've been stuck with them by Canonical's decisions. These people are under no obligation to help out with Canonical's apparent project of improving these projects (or help out the projects themselves); the Ubuntu project does not get to make everyone using Ubuntu into obligatory bug reporters through its own choices.
* https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/BugReports...
On the other hand, they seemingly think that Canonical is their free Linux provisioner. The irony.
Can't read the article because
> You're using a suspiciously old browser
m8 it's firefox mobile from two months ago, calm down
“Calculated to mislead” feels like an absurd overreaction to some docs not being formatted the way you feel is appropriate.
It's an absolutely obnoxious post, full of empty accusations and grudges towards a free (as in free beer) software.
Canonical don't owe them anything. . I really think some people just need to keep their opinion to themselves.
What a ludicrous take.
Nobody's forcing you to use Ubuntu, a software that is free of charge by the way.
It's fine to disapprove of a decision. It's another thing to come with accusations and grudges like this post does.
Ubuntu’s new ln -h is a similar tire fire:
It does something in bsd:
https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?ln
Returns error in gnu:
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/ln.1.html
No-ops the command and returns success in new Ubuntu:
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/resolute/man1/rust-ln.1...
Given that the selling point of the rust rewrite is gnu compatibility, you’d think they’d RTFM of the thing they were replacing, or at least fuzz the two to confirm identical side effects.
I’m increasingly considering just pretending Ubuntu doesn’t exist. It’s a clown show, and devuan is fine.
And this is why you don't just jump to rust-written alternatives because they're supposedly "safer": the "safer" implementation might actually be incompatible (intentionally or otherwise) from the original, which for something like sudo or coreutils is... Erm, kinda important. Maybe "rewrite it in Rust" was a bad idea after all...
To op: ubuntu-minimal is a meta packaged that contains nothing itself. Safe to remove.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/
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I start using Ubuntu because my company used it, and they remind me of Redhat and the other Linux vendors that got too big for their breeches. For my personal stuff, I went all in on Debian, FreeBSD and OpenBSD and will never run Ubuntu for personal stuff. I still can't forgive them for adopting systemd or the Wayland mess and I suspect they are going to break more stuff.
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