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Is Ubuntu deserving the hate?

Long story short, I have a desktop with Fedora, lovely, fast, sleek and surprisingly reliable for a near rolling distro (it failed me only once back around Fedora 34 or something where it nuked Grub). Tried to install on a 2012 i7 MacBook Air… what a slog!!! Surprisingly Ubuntu runs very smooth on it. I have been bothering all my friends for years about moving to Fedora (back then it was because I hated Unity) but now… I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but… Christ, it does run well! In fairness all my VMs are running DietPi (a slimmed version of Ubuntu) and coming back to the APT world feels like coming back home.

On the other end forcing myself to be on Fedora allows me to stay on the DNF world that is compatible with Amazon Linux etc (which I use for work), it has updated packages, it is nice and clean…. Argh, don’t know how to decide!

Thoughts?

I am not in the mood for Debian. I like the Mint approach but I am not a fan of slow rolling releases and also would like to keep myself as close as upstream as possible, the Debian version is the only one that seems reliable enough but, again, it is Debian, the packages are “old”. Pop Os and similar are two hops away from upstream and so I’d rather not.

Is Snap really that bad?

Edit: thank you all for sharing your experience !

jimmy90 ,

i heard all this shit about linux and nvidia

i installed Ubuntu and EVERYTHING WORKS

Decker108 ,

I think a lot of people dislike Ubuntu because of Gnome and Snaps, which is weird to me. You can fairly easily change desktop environment and most Snaps have apt or Flatpak alternatives.

bear ,

Most Snaps have apt or Flatpak alternatives.

I’m simply not going to support a distro that creates a proprietary service and ships it as the default source of software. I will support and use distros that open source their code so that everyone can benefit from it. Whether workarounds or alternatives exist is unimportant, my prime issue with Ubuntu and Canonical is with their principles, not Ubuntu’s quality as a product to be consumed by me.

cmgvd3lw ,

Yes you can, afterall its based on debian. But its manual labor, and not to mention telemetry data sent to canonical.

erwan ,

It’s just simpler to pick a distribution that matches your choices out of the box, rather than hacking a distro. And I’m talking about Snap in particular.

BiggestBulb ,
@BiggestBulb@kbin.social avatar

For anything lower-spec (like, <4Gb of RAM), Ubuntu absolutely CHUGS because of Snaps. Flatpak has no such issue.

Ironically, Lubuntu (a lightweight Ubuntu fork) worked the best for me while I was using it. No slowness, but I installed pretty much everything using Apt (didn't know about Flatpak back then).

I ended up having it lock up and freeze on the sign-in page though, so I moved on to the slightly heavier Linux Mint.

sovietknuckles ,
@sovietknuckles@hexbear.net avatar

I have a desktop with Fedora

IMO snaps aren’t bad enough to choose IBM instead

erwan ,

I don’t hate Ubuntu, and it was my distribution from nearly 20 years. Meaning since it was first released until recently. I loved it for a long time because it was based on dpkg which was much better than rpm at the time AND it was way more user friendly than the others. Even as a software developer I like my distribution to move out of the way to let me focus on using it, not babysitting it.

But I moved away because of Snaps. Currently on Fedora and it’s pretty good. I know it’s possible to get rid of Snaps or use a derivative but I prefer to stay close to stock for whatever distribution I use.

If Ubuntu works for you and you don’t mind snaps, then just use that!

So if

Loucypher OP ,

Same. The idea is to have a machine to code, not to babysit

PseudoSpock ,
@PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Snaps pushed me to mint on one and endeavour on the other box.

CrabAndBroom ,

Personally I don’t really hate Ubuntu, but I tend to find that everything it does, there’s something else that does it slightly better.

For example, it’s supposed to be a good ‘beginner’ distro or good for something that ‘just works’, but IMO things like Mint or Pop!OS do it a little better these days. Snap is supposed to be a nice simple way to manage packages without worrying about dependencies, but Flatpak does it better and so on.

So yeah I don’t hate it, I just don’t see any particular reason to really use it. Opinions may vary though of course.

pineapplelover ,

Snap is terrible. If you have a bunch of snaps on your system, it becomes very slow and sluggish

Rosco ,

If you want something user-friendly, use Linux Mint. There’s really no reason to choose Ubuntu over this. And for any other use it’s outclassed by other distros, it does not fill a niche. And I personally think that GNOME is crap and quite hideous.

banneryear1868 ,

Ubuntu is fine it’s just a more bloated Debian geared towards being as user friendly as possible. Nothing wrong with that.

beanson ,

I use Ubuntu for work and have no issues with it to be honest. I install everything via apt, I think a few things are via snap but nothing that I’ve installed directly. It’s stable and I can get on with stuff. I definitely am not a fan of the move towards snap and the app store: if I was to choose I’d go vanilla Debian.

lefaucet ,

I’m daily driving Ubuntu and my experience aligns with this.

My only gripe is snaps can break copy/paste and prevent me from saving files where I want. This might make Ubuntu unusable for people using Linux for the first time and makes no sense if you dont understand how snaps are sandboxed and how permissions work. The solution is install with apt.

The installer, system configuration programs and UI experience is really good. I argue it is a much superior experience to Windows and arguably better than OS/X. A lot less garbage being shoved down customers throats.

hydroel ,

The solution is install with apt.

I checked on my machine, and out of all the packages I had on snap, only Inkscape, VLC and Slack were also available on apt. Spotify, Whatsdesk (a WhatsApp client) and Signal were among the most commonly used missing.

lefaucet ,

Oh word! I forgot about Signal. I use the snap for that. It works well. I think copy/paste works with it.

I used apt for Firefox, Krita, ffmpeg, Blender and Ksnips

I think the big commercial programs I use were installed with vendor scripts

neonred ,

Or just use Debian sid, which effectively is Debian in a rolling variant. 🚀

akrot ,

Dietpie is a lightweight debian not ubuntu. And debian is still one of the top choices (if not the) for servers.

Ubuntu is just debian with extra bad decisions.

danielfgom ,
@danielfgom@lemmy.world avatar

If it works for you then use it, however if you want the latest packages you’ll have to NOT use the LTS releases in which case be prepared to do a FULL REINSTALL every time a new version comes out.

Or use the LTS but use Snaps for those applications that you want to have the latest versions of. Snaps are getting better and I think eventually you won’t notice the difference between them and native apps, except for the space they just up. But that goes for Flatpak too.

Personally I use Linux Mint Debian Edition because I’m not happy with the way Canonical is going. In most cases the “old” apps are fine for me, but if I felt need the newest version I’ll use a Flatpak.

Another rolling option is OpenSuse Tumbleweed however, being a Mac which uses proprietary WiFi drivers, your WiFi will break with kernel updates, which can be irritating, unless you have ethernet.

_edge ,

If it works for you then use it, however if you want the latest packages you’ll have to NOT use the LTS releases in which case be prepared to do a FULL REINSTALL every time a new version comes out.

This is just wrong. You can update the LTS release to the next non-LTS release. You only have to unchecked “LTS only”. You can also wait for the next LTS release.

You never need a full install. I haven’t done such a thing for a decade.

danielfgom ,
@danielfgom@lemmy.world avatar

Really? I wasn’t aware, or I’d forgotten. Can you go from non lts to lts in the same way?

_edge ,

Well, from non-LTS, you can always go to +1, the next release. If this happens to be an LTS, sure, you will automatically be on LTS. (Then you can change your settings to say on LTS or keep tracking non-LTS release).

nephs ,

Is Ubuntu trying embrace, extend, exterminate?

I just realised snaps kind of look like “extend”, after a long period of “embrace”.

Did anyone write about it, yet? Am I overthinking it?

Shareni ,

Why do you think Ubuntu is the favourite distro at Microsoft? They’ve tried extinguishing Linux through suse, but are now back on the old EEE plan with canonical helping them.

JoeKrogan , (edited )
@JoeKrogan@lemmy.world avatar

I used to use Ubuntu before unity and switched to Debian 👑 in 2012. I still have to use Ubuntu for work and I just get on with it. It could be worse… I could have to use windows.

Anyway my main gripes with Ubuntu are snaps and how they keep swapping packages in apt to be installed as snaps .

I dont hate it, its a tool and in most cases I can use it and there is no problem if not there are other options.

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