skullgiver , 7 months ago

You don’t have to use Snap (except for LXC, I think?). It’s not enabled by default, but you can enable Flatpak and everything will work fine. Flatpak has Firefox and Chrome and all the other applications thst Canonical foolishly moved from their apt repos to their Snap repos.

There are some frustrating things about Snaps (loading all of them at boot time rather than at runtime, for quicker app start but slower boot, for example, and that stupid snap folder that can’t be moved) but honestly I don’t really see what the fuss is about as an end user. Nobody sets up a purely Snap based system anyway.

The problem with Snap is an ideological one. If you don’t care who runs your software store and if you don’t care about having the ability to add more software stores then the default, you’ll be fine with Snap. If you’re ideologically driven towards Linux, you’ll probably dislike the way Snap is set up.

Like it or not, Ubuntu is still one of the best supported distros out there. If you want drivers from any manufacturer, you get to pick between drivers tested for Ubuntu or Fedora. Every other distro repackages those drivers using their own scripts and compatibility layers because nobody over at Intel is going to spend company time specifically getting Garuda to work when its customers don’t sell hardware with it preinstalled.

Software like Discord and VS Code having the “.deb, maybe .rpm, or you figure it out yourself” approach of official distribution is pretty standard, I’d say, for better or for worse. It also helps that a lot of entry level Linux questions and answers online are about Ubuntu. Askubuntu may not be as vast and up to date as the Arch wiki, but at least the askubuntu people aren’t going to tell you off for not knowing advanced Linux stuff.

There are upsides and downsides to any Linux distro. You’re not “supposed” to think anything, try it out, keep an open mind, and pick what works for you.