I know there are lots of people that do not like Ubuntu due to the controversies of Snaps, Canonicals head scratching decisions and their ditching of Unity.
However my experience using Ubuntu when I first used it wasn’t that bad, sure the snaps could take a bit or two to boot up but that’s a first time thing.
I’ve even put it on my younger brothers laptop for his school and college use as he just didn’t like the updates from Windows taking away his work and so far he’s been having a good time with using this distro.
I guess what I’m tryna say is that Ubuntu is kind of the “Windows” of the Linux world, yes it’s decisions aren’t always the best, but at least it has MUCH lenient requirements and no dumb features from Windows 11 especially forced auto updates.
What are your thoughts and experiences using Ubuntu? I get there is Mint and Fedora, but how common Ubuntu is used, it seemed like a good idea for my bros study work as a “non interfering” idea.
Your thoughts?
Ubuntu isn’t terrible, there are just bad things on Ubuntu that aren’t present in other distros.
Its not like it is the only option. There are so many better systems these days it isn’t even funny. Use Linux Mint, Fedora, Pop OS or maybe even Bazzite.
Ubuntu used to work out of the box and with sensible defaults but that’s no longer the case.
Gave Ubuntu another try a month back and external monitor resolution wasn’t right at all.
Switched back to Pop OS.
I don’t like snaps (nor flatpaks for that matter, they’re too big for my slow internet connection here in my Greek village). But I find it absolutely, 100%, crazy to install gimp and darktable via snaps, and not being able to print (the print option is just not there, because they’re snaps and somehow they haven’t implemented that for these apps). As an artist who sells prints, this makes the whole distro completely and utterly USELESS to me. Sure, they can be found as deb packages too, but they’re older. And Firefox is also sandboxed. And when I installed Chromium from the command line as a deb, it OVERWROTE my wish, and installed Chromium as a snap too.
So, no ubuntu for me. The only advantage it has is that many third party apps (usually commercial ones) that release binary tarballs or appimages have tested with ubuntu and they usually work well (minus davinci resolve). I don’t have a big trouble with appimages as they’re generally smaller than the kde/gnome frameworks that flatpaks/snaps use, and they’re one file-delete away from getting rid of them completely. They’re just more straightforward.
And when I installed Chromium from the command line as a deb, it OVERWROTE my wish, and installed Chromium as a snap too.
This right here is my issue with Ubuntu. A huge part of Linux for me is that I am in control of my OS and machine. If I use apt to install a package, it’s because I want the .deb version. I absolutely don’t need my OS telling me “I know what you asked for, but I’m going to give you the snap version anyway”.
I could see snaps being preferred over .debs in the Software app, sure (though they shouldn’t be the only option). But replacing apps in a command line tool is garbage.
Yeah, this kind of things drove me batty on Ubuntu. So many things were delivered as Snaps when they just don’t work that way. The funniest one to me was Filebot. It’s a media file naming/organizing tool…that doesn’t have disk access. Are you kidding me, Canonical?
Flatpak is easier to work with, but has similar issues. Great for simple things, but I’m always worried that at some point I’m going to need some features that just won’t work, and then it’s going to be a hassle to migrate to a native installation. And it has no CLI support.
And yeah, the bloat is wild. Deduplication on btrfs (or similar) helps but there’s no getting past the bandwidth bloat.
Yeah, i hear you. I once installed the new version of snap (and later flatpak) of the gnome ide, and it couldn’t find the vala compiler, because it was outside the sandboxing. Totally useless.
And yes, it’s bloated. Nothing works with less 1.6 gb of ram. But then again, it’s the same on fedora.
hey. unrelated question, sorry. do any greeks still worship the olympians?
Ubuntu was a big part of my path to full time Linux use. I adore everyone who has contributed to Ubuntu.
But also, Snaps are bullshit, and are why I replaced all my Ubuntu installs with Debian.
Canonical doesn’t get to pretend to be surprised by the backlash for pushing an unnecessary closed proprietary platform on their freedom seeking users.
I still adore everyone at Canonical and in the Ubuntu community, for all they’ve done for the Linux community. Y’all still rock. Thanks!
Ubuntu is not terrible and if it works for you then fine. I would be surprised if Debian or Mint didn’t also work for you just as well though.
Debian can be annoying if you want to install a newish version of something from the package manager. It’s why I can’t use APT to keep Rust up to date and have to use Rustup instead, for an example.
You can use distrobox with podman to get newer software. You also can use Flatpaks
While I don’t disagree with you, I think it’s a bit funny that you’re bringing up hardships using apt to update software in Debian when the biggest complaint about Ubuntu is having to use snap instead of apt.
Oh I thought it was already implied that Ubuntu is shit lol
I only joke about Arch being the superior distro because, well, I use it and because it’s apparently a thing.
I actually don’t have any strong feelings about Ubuntu. It’s a distro. It works. I only use Arch because of the AUR (I’m lazy, okay?). I don’t have strong feelings about it either. Linux is configurable to basically exactly what you want. Once (or if) you get into customization you just pick the distro that allows you to get to what you want faster.
I do have strong feelings about Windows though.
But it seems like there are other easy distros with lenient requirements that don’t try to force Snaps and ads on their users.
There are just better noob-friendly distributions, like LinuxMint.
I watched a video of a Linux noob trying it for the first time. They chose Mint, and a significant amount of problems arose from the fact that mint is still on an old kernel version, and there was little to no indication from the OS or from cursory googling that updating it would fix the issue or even that you should do that.
If you open up the kernel manager you can switch to a newer release
Also I think they now have a version with a newer kernel
Mint uses the same kernel version as Ubuntu, so that’s not really a point in favor of Ubuntu in any case. Do you remember what video it was?
Every time this is asked, I post the same comment. I used Kubuntu for years and liked it, but more recently they started doing things that annoyed me. The biggest was related to snaps and Firefox. Now, sandboxing a browser is probably a great idea, but I wanted to use the regular deb install, so I followed the directions to disable the snap install and used the deb. However, Ubuntu overrode that decision several times - I’d start browsing, then realize I was using a snap AGAIN. Happened a few times over a couple years. If it happened once, eh, maybe an error, but it happened 3 or 4 times. I came to the conclusion I wasn’t in control of my system, Ubuntu was.
I switched to Debian and am happy with my choice.
I had the same experience on my one gui Ubuntu machine. I also have several headless machines, and due to some shared libraries I always ended up with snapd installed even though none of the packages I was running were installed through snap. I always found it through the mount point pollution that snapd does.
I remember when Ubuntu was released, and I still have one of the first or second release Ubuntu shipit CDs.
Ubuntu was good at marketing and they were good at making things ‘just work’.
It was often the recommended choice of starter-distro due to hardware compatibility.
I’ve installed and admin’ed Ubuntu on 20 PCs in a small office setting, and it provides a decent user experience.
I would not personally use Ubuntu.
My daily driver now is Trisquel GNU/Linux, which is Ubuntu with all non-free packages(and binary blobs) removed.
If you are at the stage where you know how to source hardware that works with FLOSS-drivers, try out a fully-free FSF approved distro.
https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.en.html
Clean, with zero corporate fluff.
While the criticism may be valid, it doesn’t make sense to someone new to Linux.
It’s easy to switch to Ubuntu from Windows, and it’s easier to switch from Ubuntu to another distro.
Many of us are still very salty
While I appreciate the utility of snaps and flatpaks for providing sandboxed, cross-platform apps, I’ve often found them slower than traditional packages. Their tendency to take up more disk space also feels inefficient, especially when system resources are sometimes precious. For these reasons, I generally prefer using apps installed directly through the system’s default package manager, which tend to offer better performance and use space more efficiently…
I’m old and my gateway to Linux was Ubuntu 5.10 via a live CD they gave me at uni back in 2006.
I got to experience it when they used to take seriously their “Linux for human beings” motto.
Those were GNOME 2 and kernel 2.x times. Albeit the limitations of the technology (40GB HDD disk, 256 MB RAM, an Intel Xeon processor which I can’t remember it’s exact specs) it felt way snappier (no pun intended) than Windows. You could felt they cared about it in that brown visual theme, the icons, the sounds, the way the documentation was phrased - you could feel the Ubuntu in it.
I ended wiping my entire docs drive while trying to install it but got to learn lots of stuff and feel like my computer was actually mine.
Same as for many people my generation, I switched to Linux thanks to that Ubuntu. It’s really sad what it has become and the poor, selfish decisions they have taken, but still it keeps holding a special place in the Linux memories.
Absolutely. I hate Ubuntu now, but Karmic Koala was my gateway drug. I was scared of partitioning so wubi meant I could still try it out.
Then Unity happened and I no longer cared for Ubuntu.
My workplace preinstalls Ubuntu, personally I’m using openSUSE. I don’t even think that Ubuntu is particularly bad, I’m mainly frustrated with it, because it’s just slightly worse than openSUSE (and other distros) in pretty much every way.
It’s less stable, less up-to-date, less resilient to breakages. And it’s got more quirky behaviour and more things that are broken out-of-the-box. And it doesn’t even have a unique selling point. It’s just extremely mid, and bad at it.
