Freebsd has more up to date packages than Ubuntu

NapoleonWils0n

NapoleonWils0n

Freebsd 14.2 quarterly has more up to date packages than Ubuntu 24.10

wlroots on Freebsd is version 18,
on Ubuntu its version 17

dwl 0.7 requires wlroots 18,
a lot of other wlroots wayland compositors require version 18

Freebsd is better if you want to use a wlroots wayland compositor because of this,
not to mention its much easier to actually install the required packages

which is a nightmare on Ubuntu and Fedora
because its pretty impossible to figure out what the packages are actually called

weechat on Freebsd is a newer version than Ubuntu

and if you use Emacs than you can install emacs-devel on Freebsd
which installs Emacs 30 which is the latest version

on Ubuntu and Fedora you have to build Emacs from source to get the latest version
 
This is normal. Ubuntu is a true Debian lineage system, where backports of fixes rule the world. In FreeBSD we don't bother with backporting anything, we just update the whole package at the earliest opportunity.

The flip side is occasional build failures and missing packages.
 
cracauer@ said:
This is normal. Ubuntu is a true Debian lineage system, where backports of fixes rule the world. In FreeBSD we don't bother with backporting anything, we just update the whole package at the earliest opportunity.

The flip side is occasional build failures and missing packages.
Click to expand...

Yep, why go through the backporting pain if you can have the whole new package?
 
NapoleonWils0n said:
Freebsd 14.2 quarterly has more up to date packages than Ubuntu 24.10

wlroots on Freebsd is version 18,
on Ubuntu its version 17

dwl 0.7 requires wlroots 18,
a lot of other wlroots wayland compositors require version 18

Freebsd is better if you want to use a wlroots wayland compositor because of this,
not to mention its much easier to actually install the required packages

which is a nightmare on Ubuntu and Fedora
because its pretty impossible to figure out what the packages are actually called

weechat on Freebsd is a newer version than Ubuntu

and if you use Emacs than you can install emacs-devel on Freebsd
which installs Emacs 30 which is the latest version

on Ubuntu and Fedora you have to build Emacs from source to get the latest version
Click to expand...
Can we talk about gnome? Or budgie? Or cinnamon? ;)
 
Michael-O said:
Yep, why go through the backporting pain if you can have the whole new package?
Click to expand...

Stability. Full upgrades to new packages usually impact packages that depend on them. Leading to an upgrade chain that has fallout like FreeBSD's package system has.

Only backporting security fixes and small bugfixes usually doesn't impact dependencies.

It is what Debian chooses to do. That can also backfire. I remember an incident where a ssh security fix was incorrectly backported, leading to a vulnerable version in Debian when the actual ssh upstream was not. Given that no (or few?) packages depend on ssh or a specific ssh version that seemed unnecessary. But it is Debian policy and hence goes into Ubuntu and Mint.
 
Trying to build various Fedora rpms to use on RedHat10 betas, I've found that Fedora is pretty up to date as well. Fedora 40 has rpms for 0.18. as does 41 (current version) and 42 (Rawhide, sort of equivalent to CURRENT).
While Ubuntu can be a useful measuring point, as far as new packages, one might get better ideas looking at Arch or Fedora, both of which tend to use the newest. (There's also https://pkgs.org which will list packages for a lot of Linux distributions, as well as FreeBSD.)

However, I too, was a bit surprised to read NapoleonWils0n's post, as I would have thought Ubuntu, aimed, to my knowledge, strongly at desktop usage, would have been using the latest and greatest though as cracauer@ says, Debian backports are common there, as far as I know. (I know little about Ubuntu, most of my Linux knowledge is with RH and clones).
 
Ubuntu is clearly aimed at stability at the cost of up-to-dateness. The kernel might be an exception, being updated to bring in new drivers. I am not too familiar with the Debian/Ubuntu policies of kernel backports or updates. Once you get to graphics drivers the mess in complete.

Keep in mind that Canonical (Ubuntu's parent company) makes money from workstation style products. So corporations, which hate fallout, are the target customer.
 
cracauer@ said:
Stability. Full upgrades to new packages usually impact packages that depend on them. Leading to an upgrade chain that has fallout like FreeBSD's package system has.

Only backporting security fixes and small bugfixes usually doesn't impact dependencies.

It is what Debian chooses to do. That can also backfire. I remember an incident where a ssh security fix was incorrectly backported, leading to a vulnerable version in Debian when the actual ssh upstream was not. Given that no (or few?) packages depend on ssh or a specific ssh version that seemed unnecessary. But it is Debian policy and hence goes into Ubuntu and Mint.
Click to expand...
This, of course, I do understand, but at some point the package will be just old and if you need something newer...you are busted.
 
Michael-O said:
This, of course, I do understand, but at some point the package will be just old and if you need something newer...you are busted.
Click to expand...

By then a new Debian release should have come along. Release to release is of course updating packages to their full new versions.

I don't know what Debian does when a security fix only comes out for a major new version of a package and the fix can't be backported to the version currently in Debian. I think they try harder to backport but I guess this doesn't come up all that often.

I like FreeBSD's approach of splitting into a stable base system and an up-to-date third party repository.
 
cracauer@ said:
By then a new Debian release should have come along. Release to release is of course updating packages to their full new versions.

I don't know what Debian does when a security fix only come out for a major new version of a package and the fix can't be backported to the version currently in Debian. I think they try harder to backport but I guess this doesn't come up all that often.

I like FreeBSD's approach of splitting into a stable base system and an up-to-date third party repository.
Click to expand...
I like the approach as well. Makes things easier to understand...
 
although Fedora does have the latest packages
it has multiple problems that make it unsuitable as a workstation in my option

1 - you have to add mutiple repositories for codecs and drivers,
then you do an update and get conflicts and have to remove a package like ffmpeg which then breaks the system

2 - updates to the kernel every couple of days,
so you log into Fedora do an update, have to upgrade the kernel, reboot and then fix a load of stuff

rather than you know actually doing some work

3 - upgrading Fedora, the recommend way to upgrade is with the gui by clicking a big upgrade button
but what they dont mention is you then have to upgrade all the repository groups as well

so the upgrade process is split between the gui and command line

4 - the dnf packages manager has to sync all the repositories every time you do an update or search
so simply searching for a packages can take between 30 seconds and a minute

i also used Arch for several years,
which requires several hundred mbs of updates everyday

also you have to deal with a load of fanboys talking about how they have riced their desktop
 
NapoleonWils0n said:
2 - updates to the kernel every couple of days,
so you log into Fedora do an update, have to upgrade the kernel, reboot and then fix a load of stuff
Click to expand...

The reboot disease has gotten worse with systemd.

Since much functionality moved into systemd and systemd cannot update itself at runtime (like init, too) you have to reboot more and more to make systemd updates active. Much of that functionality in FreeBSD is in demons you can reload at runtime, or not even a demon at all. You would have to do a reboot if you want to update init itself, but it is so small it practically never gets updated.
 
systemd = japanese knotweed

5250.webp
 
cracauer@ said:
By then a new Debian release should have come along. Release to release is of course updating packages to their full new versions.
Click to expand...
However, by then there may be such severe restructuring of the dependency tree, that updating becomes a terrible nuisance (been through that myself.) That might explain why linux folks seem to be quite trigger happy with reinstalling a system rather than updating to a newer release...
 
adorno said:
However, by then there may be such severe restructuring of the dependency tree, that updating becomes a terrible nuisance (been through that myself.) That might explain why linux folks seem to be quite trigger happy with reinstalling a system rather than updating to a newer release...
Click to expand...
Can't do that on a server..
 
adorno said:
However, by then there may be such severe restructuring of the dependency tree, that updating becomes a terrible nuisance (been through that myself.) That might explain why linux folks seem to be quite trigger happy with reinstalling a system rather than updating to a newer release...
Click to expand...

Debian is very careful in making upgrades work. I did have Debian systems commit suicide in dependency hell, but not on release upgrades.

Ubuntu ships special scripts for release upgrades. Not sure what they do on top of what Debian does.
 
NapoleonWils0n said:
Freebsd 14.2 quarterly has more up to date packages than Ubuntu 24.10
Click to expand...
Hello and sorry for my bad english.


That's it, I agree. But you forget one very important thing. And it is the fact that NVIDIA video card owners who use the older model cards cannot appreciate the benefits of Wayland because they are forced to use the closed code video drivers. And the closed code video drivers (older versions) are not working with Wayland.

What do I want to say that? The fact that these cards (older models) cannot use Wayland's benefits because Freebsd do not have open source NVIDIA video drivers in their packages. And Ubuntu (like other Linux distributions) has. Therefore, I do not see any great advantage here in Wayland packages versions.
 
NapoleonWils0n said:
although Fedora does have the latest packages
it has multiple problems that make it unsuitable as a workstation in my option
Click to expand...

Fedora is Redhat's incubator for new stuff so it's by nature very bleeding edge and short release/support cycle. That's why I quit using it several years ago. I migrated to Debian and have been happy with the longer release cycles and the "relatively sane" version/features tradeoff of the packages in the "stable" distro.

So, my take is contrary to Barney's mantra "newer is always better"...I prefer: don't upgrade unless you need to.

My advice to anyone who will listen is to stay away from Ubuntu. It's basically Canonical spyware. IOW, you cannot keep it from phoning home, even if you think you have disabled all the data mining hooks...and don't get me started on snaps as a package distribution method.

There are certain things BSD wont/cant support, so I'm stuck with linux, but it does not mean I will go quietly into that good night.
 
One area where Ubuntu is better than Debian is installing the Gnome desktop
im not a Gnome fan but it can be "tamed" a bit with dconf

the reason i use Gnome on Ubuntu on my second machine is because wlroots is version 0.17
whereas on Freebsd wlroots is 0.18 so its harder to install a wlroots compositor on Ubuntu than Freebsd

Ubuntu has a default minimal install option which only installs a base set of Gnome packages

Debian on the other hand installs all the Gnome packages including games
and even a Thai terminal for some reason

which is really annoying because every time you try and launch the terminal
the Thai terminal comes up first in the application launcher

de bloating Gnome on Debian is a nightmare because not all the packages can be uninstalled using software centre
and you have to remove them on the command line

the issue is the name of the application listed in the gui isnt the name of the package
so if you try and remove "thai terminal" its not listed as a package

i think the Thai Terminal package is actually called "xiterm+thai"
 
NapoleonWils0n said:
One area where Ubuntu is better than Debian is installing the Gnome desktop
im not a Gnome fan but it can be "tamed" a bit with dconf

the reason i use Gnome on Ubuntu on my second machine is because wlroots is version 0.17
whereas on Freebsd wlroots is 0.18 so its harder to install a wlroots compositor on Ubuntu than Freebsd

Ubuntu has a default minimal install option which only installs a base set of Gnome packages

Debian on the other hand installs all the Gnome packages including games
and even a Thai terminal for some reason

which is really annoying because every time you try and launch the terminal
the Thai terminal comes up first in the application launcher

de bloating Gnome on Debian is a nightmare because not all the packages can be uninstalled using software centre
and you have to remove them on the command line

the issue is the name of the application listed in the gui isnt the name of the package
so if you try and remove "thai terminal" its not listed as a package

i think the Thai Terminal package is actually called "xiterm+thai"
Click to expand...
Did you ever try a netinst CD image? Another suggestion.
 
Isn't there a way to cut down on what Debian isntalls with a no-optional settings or something in /etc/apt/apt.config?
Here's something from Ubuntu forums from 2012, no idea if it still works.
askubuntu.com

How to not install recommended and suggested packages?

I use Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit, I did the following: sudo gedit /etc/apt/apt.conf and added APT::Install-Recommends "false"; APT::Install-Suggests "false"; But it did not work. When I try to install a
askubuntu.com askubuntu.com
 
Ogis said:
That's it, I agree. But you forget one very important thing. And it is the fact that NVIDIA video card owners who use the older model cards cannot appreciate the benefits of Wayland because they are forced to use the closed code video drivers. And the closed code video drivers (older versions) are not working with Wayland.

What do I want to say that? The fact that these cards (older models) cannot use Wayland's benefits because Freebsd do not have open source NVIDIA video drivers in their packages. And Ubuntu (like other Linux distributions) has. Therefore, I do not see any great advantage here in Wayland packages versions.
Click to expand...

Wayland has advantages? :)
 
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