Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, I go back and forth between Ubuntu and Debian on various machines and I usually hardly notice the difference in terms of my day-to-day. I just have in the past treated Ubuntu as a Debian with a fancier installer and default desktop. But the push towards snap is frustrating me.

Unfortunately Ubuntu pushing Snap means that 3rd parties that would have produced debian-compatible packages before are now moving to just shipping snaps instead.

e.g. I went to install Slack the other day and saw they only have RPM and Snap options now, they removed the deb entirely from their site (but still mention it in their Linux-install instructions).

(And yeah, this could push me to the end of my 25+ years of debian usage, I could be tempted to switch over to NixOS.)

Slack still has .deb files you just need to scroll down and find the small button for it. https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/downloads/linux search for "Download .DEB app". Last I checked they also have an Ubuntu only dependency that has a Debian equivalent but they don't list it so it won't install unless you modify the dependency list. I used the following script to do so, but I haven't updated in a while.

    #!/bin/sh
    if [ "$#" -eq 1 ]; then\
      tmp_dir="$(mktemp -d)"
      dpkg-deb -R "$1" "${tmp_dir}" && sed -i 's/libappindicator3-1/libayatana-appindicator3-1/g' "${tmp_dir}/DEBIAN/control" && dpkg-deb -b "${tmp_dir}" slack-fixed.deb
    else
      echo "Read it"
    fi

dpkg tells me I installed a deb called slack-desktop. It boils down to a 150 MB executable in /usr/lib/slack plus some .so and other files.

It's version 4.29.129. No idea if it updates itself.

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