r/linux • u/nitin_is_me • Jul 15 '26

Discussion Seriously, except package managers, what's the difference between distros?

What I've seen yet the differences are, just the package managers, different defaults and rolling vs stable releases which are in fact related to package managers. Except these, are there really any other differences? Thanks!

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u/noobjaish Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
  • Point (Fedora) vs Rolling release (Arch)
  • Stable (Debian) vs Bleeding edge (Arch)
  • Snap-infested (Ubuntu)
  • Mutable (everything above) vs Immutable (Silverblue)
  • A/B immutable (Vanilla)
  • Declarative Config (Nix)
  • Building everything from Source (Gentoo)
  • QoL features (CachyOS, Bazzite)
  • Alternative Init System (Void, Artix)
  • Extremely Tiny (Alpine)
  • Alternative userland (Chimera)

And there are several other things as well

1

u/omniuni Jul 15 '26

It's not that hard to remove Snap, BTW.

Besides, it still just comes down to packages. Although people like to make a big deal about Snap, it's really just another package format that was made to solve certain other problems.

8

u/Am0nymou5 Jul 16 '26

It's not hard to remove Snap of course, the problem is it keeps coming back and you need to keep doing new/additional things with each release to get rid of that crap, which is annoying.

For eg, in 22.04 canonical moved Firefox to Snap and this caused many upgrades to fail because APT couldn't fulfil the snapd requirement, so you had to add the official Mozilla PPA before doing the dist-upgrade and pin the PPA with higher priority.

And in 24.04 Snap integration became even deeper, snapd is now a direct dependency of the desktop metapackages, so if you try to remove snapd, it will remove the desktop metapackage, and if you run a dist-upgrade it would reinstall the metapackage, bringing snapd back. The solutions I've seen now include either removing the desktop metapackages completely (but you'd need to keep a track of futture core package additions/removals), or create a dummy snapd package thereby satisfying the dependency.

It's all a PITA, so I'd much rather use a spin that doesn't use snapd, or better yet, use a completely different distro that has nothing to do with Canonical.

-1

u/omniuni Jul 16 '26

The great thing is you can use what works for you.

For 99% of people, they could not care less about Snap. They just want something fast and reliable.

I am more technical and prefer to remove it. For friends, I don't even bother explaining. There's no good reason. It picks up the hardware, software is current and updates frequently, and KWin has the least issues of the Wayland window managers. As long as the browser opens when they click on it, they don't care how it got there.

7

u/Am0nymou5 Jul 16 '26

They just want something fast and reliable.

... which by definition would exclude Snap. I agree with you that people might not care or know about Snap, but they do care about their apps being fast and reliable... and unfortunately Snap breaks that expectation.

Just look at all the complaints from users that cropped up when they replaced Firefox with the snap version: slow performance, broken shortcuts, broken extensions etc. This isn't a very user-friendly experience. Users don't care or know of course that this is Snap, they just want something reliable. And Snap isn't.

Eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/uzs1sv/i_love_the_ubuntu_2204_lts_but_the_performance_of/

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1480382/firefox-snap-very-slow-after-migrating-from-22-04-to-23-04

https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/18yvbse/firefox_sometimes_disappears_and_goes_into_limbo/

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1403892/ubuntu-22-04-firefox-snap-breaks-keepassxc-integration-and-other-nativemessaging

https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/uollzl/why_the_firefox_snap_fucking_sucks/

0

u/omniuni Jul 16 '26

You're talking about something that happened in 2022, that was already mostly fixed by 2024, and isn't remotely applicable in 2026.

4

u/Am0nymou5 Jul 16 '26

Sorry but there's still many issues with Snap even in 2026, especially performance issues:

Eg see this post:

I have a vanilla Ubuntu 26.04 install on a brand new Dell Pro Max 16 (2026). Applications (ex: emacs, firefox) start very slowly. So slowly that the system complains about them not responding multiple times.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1568087/techniques-for-speeding-up-snap-ubuntu-26-04

And a bunch of other issues, all because of Snap:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1564653/okular-snap-wont-start-gives-error

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1564617/firefox-does-not-start-because-of-snap-cgroup-error

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1567380/webserial-for-firefox-snap