Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Linux Lite, Pop OS, and several less famous distros are all based on Ubuntu. New versions of all of them will follow this new LTS release in time.
Mint forked GNOME 3 to make something more Windows-like.
Zorin customised upstream GNOME with a lot of extensions.
Pop removed it and replaced it with their own homegrown desktop, written in Rust. It's actually pretty good and works well.
PopOS started as Ubuntu with better hardware enablment but it has evolved far beyond that. They have been removing all the snap stuff. The have done tons of work on DE (Cosmic) and in general don't go along with Gnome or Ubuntu strangness. But yes its Ubuntu and Debian derived.
The constructed policy is quite strict and expects certain UEFI things to be set up correctly. For example both this https://github.com/canonical/secboot/blob/7434bac27844362ff8... and https://github.com/canonical/secboot/blob/7434bac27844362ff8... are enabled in the policy. The policy choices and various early checks, even as trivial as confirming that the TCG log content is correct after booting into installation system, are enough to rule out a lot of potentially problematic EFI deployments. Effectively making it more strict helps avoid a lot of funny issues where the firmware is clearly buggy and things would fall apart sooner or later.
Strict is probably good. My company started to enable bitlocker this year on win11, and a non trivial amount of initial encryptions seem to be failing, destroying the user data and requiring a full reformat.
It's usually used in place of a person/active participant in something.
So ‘Brussels suffered a deadly fire’ will always refer to the city. ‘Brussels decides on new aircraft regulations’ will almost always refer to either the city government, the Belgian government, or the EU Parliament headquartered there. Brussels is just an exceptional case because there is so much based there, as opposed to the Hague or the Vatican.
> And if you aren't paying you aren't even receiving many of the updates.
Are you sure you didn't mean RedHat? Last I checked there's no requirement to pay anything in order to use an LTS release of Ubuntu. Even if you go with Pro to get those extra years of Extended Support (to make it ~12 years?) you still get up to 5 licenses for personal use. No money asked, no *BS* subscription model. Isn't that more than enough any non-commercial user?
Read https://ubuntu.com/security/esm carefully. The chance of running everything out of 'main' is close to zero. I am shocked by how little people understand this.
Main is all you need to set up a working system and deploy services. Much like BaseOS in RHEL you get full support for those packages for 5+5 years. With snaps you effectively get rolling releases of LXD, microk8s, openstack, docker and other relevant things. What else do you need? Seriously, how come this isn't enough for a non commercial user?
Because this is Stockholm syndrome, better community options prevail, main is not all people deploy and is not the only repo default enabled. openstack, docker are legacy tech, never encountered anyone using LXD or microk8s thankfully I'll steer clear of that snap garbage barge.
> GC is a showstopper for my day job (hard realtime industrial machine control/robotics)
Which is a very niche use case to begin with, isn't it? It doesn't really contradict what the parent comment stated about Go feeling like modern C (with a boehm gc included if you will). We're using it this way and it feels just fine. I'd be happy to see parts of our C codebase rewritten in Go, but since that code is security sensitive and has already been through a number of security reviews there's little motivation to do so.
> Which is a very niche use case to begin with, isn't it?
My specific use case is yes, but there are a ton of microcontrollers running realtime tasks all around us: brakes in cars, washing machine controllers, PID loops to regulate fans in your computer, ...
Embedded systems in general are far more common than "normal" computers, and many of them have varying levels of realtime requirements. Don't believe me? Every classical computer or phone will contain multiple microcontrollers, such as an SSD controller, a fan controller, wifi module, cellular baseband processor, ethernet NIC, etc. Depending on the exact specs of your device of course. Each SOC, CPU or GPU will contain multiple hidden helper cores that effectively run as embedded systems (Intel ME, AMD PSP, thermal management, and more). Add to that all the appliances, cars, toys, IOT things, smartcards, etc all around us.
No, I don't think it is niche. Fewer people may work on these, but they run in far more places.
Not familiar with it, but reading the github page it isn't clear how it deals with GC. Do you happen to know?
Some embedded use cases would be fine with a GC (MicroPython is also a thing after all). Some want deterministic deallocation. Some want no dynamic allocator at all. From what I have seen, far more products are in the latter two categories. While many hobby projects fall into the first two categories. That is of course a broad generalization, but there is some truth to it.
Many products want to avoid allocation entirely either because of the realtime properties, or because they are cost sensitive and it is worth spending a little bit extra dev effort to be able to save an Euro or two and use a cheaper microcontroller where the allocator overhead won't fit (either the code in flash, or just the bookkeeping in RAM).
Yes, just like with real time Java for embedded targets from PTC and Aicas, it is its own implementation with another GC algorithm, additionally there are runtime APIs for regions/arenas.
Here is the commercial product for which it was designed,
You can also see it differently: If the language dictates a 4x increase in memory or CPU usage, you have set a much closer deadline before you need to upgrade the machine or rearchitect your code to become a distributed system by a factor 4 as well.
Previously, delivering a system (likely in C++) that consumed factor 4 fewer resources was an effort that cost developer time at a much higher factor, especially if you had uptime requirements. With Rust and similar low-overhead languages, the ratio changes drastically. It is much cheaper to deliver high-performance solutions that scale to the full capabilities of the hardware.
I believe we already have that, and it's called a cab. You pay extra, get an exclusive social experience and, at least in some parts of the world, get to share the bus lanes with other folks taking the bus.
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