The real reason is buried:<p>> It was also raised that Snap packages also aren't currently included as part of Ubuntu source ISO builds anyways so these source ISOs are incomplete and have been so for years.<p>To be completely honest, I was done with Ubuntu after they hardcore started pushing Snap packages. My package manager should <i>never</i> be randomly killing apps. Ubuntu has become the Windows of the Linux world.<p>> We'll see if they pull the trigger for the current Ubuntu 24.04 LTS cycle on doing away with these rather unnecessary source ISOs.<p>I still use them for flashing USBs - a lot of installs are offline, especially when the networking is some new or non-standard driver. Honestly Ubuntu restricting itself like this is a good thing, Canonical need to be kicked off of their perch.
I'm not a fan of Ubuntu, but this sounds a lot worse than it is. This is just about discontinuing the ISOs that contain source code. You can certainly disagree with them doing this, but my initial reaction based on the headline was that this was similar to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux announcement a few months ago when its significantly more benign.
I'm only 6 months into the 'linux world', I don't understand what Ubuntu's competitive advantage is. I only used Debian and Ubuntu (and Parrot OS) and I don't see anything missing in the former (that can't be added manually)
I stopped dealing with anything to do with Canonical the moment I saw their job ads require you to put in your high school gpa. Yes, even if you're a senior+ engineer.
I don't know the strict offline use case for such ISOs, so put me in the 'sounds good to me' group. Being a 15+ year Ubuntu desktop user, rPis, and Ubuntu as preferred images everywhere I do cloud servers, I would rather resources be spent on these normal online things.
Switched to using Gitlab CI/CD to build my own images.<p>Would like to iterate to a complete source build eventually.<p>For Linux hardcores there’s little point to an off the shelf distribution.