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How bad is Ubuntu?

I have been not recommending Ubuntu to people because of obvious reasons (the Amazon search integration and snaps, mainly). The reason I am posting this is because someone I know mentioned that they are considering Ubuntu. They have a degree in cs and generally are competent with computers, but didn’t like mint when they tried it. I would like to know a few things, since I haven’t looked into Ubuntu in a while:

Has anything changed about snap? I know people didn’t like it at first, especially the proprietary server, but I don’t think they will care about that and I mainly just want to know if it will eat all their RAM or something.

Have they made any changes in their management that may make sure there won’t be another Amazon search thing?

Is it best to use the default desktop on Ubuntu? I would recommend Kubuntu to them, all else being equal, but don’t know if maybe the default one is better integrated.

Edit: The person will be 100’s of miles away so helping them with issues will be hard, and Ubuntu LTS should be stable. Plus, basically everything that “supports” linux but doesn’t really usually supports Ubuntu. I do really see where they’re coming from, but want to know if it has a major potential to backfire on them and if they might be better off with Fedora.

indigomirage ,

I’m about to try Ubuntu again.

I switched to Fedora for a few months, and really prefer it over Ubuntu . Clean Gnome. dnf is great. Useful COPRs. It just makes sense. But in my Sisyphian attempts to switch to Linux as my platform for music production (with my existing paid vsts and sound libraries), I hit one brick wall too many. Things that worked no longer work. Things that I could never get to work remain unworking.

So, going to try Ubuntu. I dislike snaps. I dislike the twisted Gnome UI. I will say the Ubuntu fonts are nice though (I actually imported them into Fedora…)

The further I stray from a default install, the harder it is to maintain going forward. Fingers crossed for Ubuntu.

limelight79 ,

I just switched away from Kubuntu to Debian.

The snap thing was annoying, but not a major problem for me, except for one thing: I switched Firefox back to a debian package, following the directions online to do so, and every few months it seemed somehow I had been switched back to a snap version. I removed the snap and all of that, but every now and then I’d realize I was using Firefox in a snap. (It became obvious when I tried to unlock 1Password - the snap version relies on the plugin, but the non-snap version fires up the standalone 1Password program.)

In general, I’m not opposed to the concept of snaps, and a browser is probably something that should be in a sandbox. But, I preferred the standard Debian package installation, and somehow that kept getting overridden. And that is the kind of thing that I hate about Windows.

The install was smooth, or would have been if I hadn’t had a slightly unusual setup with my drives. It works just like Kubuntu, by switching to KDE with X11 (I had a few minor issues with Wayland), but without Canonical. I don’t need bleeding edge, I just want my system to work reliably.

My Linux background: Spent a lot of time with Slackware starting in the late 90s, both on server and desktop. Switched desktop and laptop to Kubuntu around 2010. Server got switched to Debian in 2017 or so.

AndrewZabar ,

THANK YOU!! I started to think I was going crazy with Firefox!! Their updates kept messing around with where the program and profiles were aligned to, the path and files sometimes the way they would be with a .deb and sometimes they were where you’d find a snap package. Also have to keep unpinning it or it would start launching new windows without current settings.

Does their dev team have both being done and they keep fucking around with which is going to be used next? I still can’t figure out what’s going on there.

limelight79 ,

You know, I assumed Canonical was pulling something, but it’s possible it was also just incompetence. I didn’t think they even distributed a .deb version of Firefox, so it definitely felt like they WANTED me to use snap Firefox…and then I’d start wondering why it was so important. What vested interest would Canonical have in me using snap Firefox? Maybe it was just honest mistakes.

Linux is about freedom to make our own choices, and whatever is happening with Canonical (malice or ineptitude) was getting away from that. Kubuntu feels like, “We’ve made this garden for you and we recommend you stay inside it.” Debian feels like, “Hey, man, you wanna go hose your system? Here’s the apt command to do that. Have a good day.” (Apparently, I measure true power as ability to screw things up.)

Slackware: “You have all of the power. Right now. And all of the responsibility.”

AndrewZabar ,

Honestly I am a huge fan of raw Debian it’s just that I got a new laptop and not all distros have the drivers for it. Even Ubuntu 22.x could not get the audio going but 24.04 boom it all just worked. So I’ve been debating with myself as to whether or not I should give Debian a try on it. I have a few older laptops on which I put Debian and I quite enjoy it. It’s solid and not trying to push the envelope and I’m very fond of that approach. But I’ve also spent a lot of time getting everything setup and just right. I’ve customized the ever-living shit out of the desktop and the appearance settings, widgets, app setups, a bunch of sites I nativefier-ed, and a million other things. So the prospect of redoing it all is daunting.

If a time should come when I feel it’s worth the effort I definitely would.

VLC media player also has this nonsense that their latest stuff seems to only be available as snap lately.

limelight79 ,

I just had to change a few things - KDE, dark mode, X11 when I couldn’t get screen power off to work under Wayland, and it’s basically good to go. There might be a few other things I changed, but in general out of the box was pretty close to what I wanted. It even installed the AMD driver for my graphics card.

AndrewZabar ,

Oh yeah and even with all the drivers working I still had problem with power management. I did read that of all the things it’s probably the most problematic in Linux to get it working properly that often it can’t. Once the system went to sleep it would not wake, had to hard-reboot. However, it’s a laptop and already uses very little so I’m not overly concerned. So my lid close action is just black screen. Actually it has some benefits in that I can close the lid and running operations will finish.

limelight79 ,

That reminds me - for my Lenovo laptop, no issues at all with suspend and resume (just like Kubuntu). But my desktop was going to sleep when I first installed Debian, and it was NOT waking up gracefully; in fact I had to reboot it each time. Since I didn’t want it to go to sleep at all, I didn’t attempt to diagnose the issue beyond turning off the suspend mode in power management.

AndrewZabar ,

From a few years ago but maybe they’re still in cahoots lol.

news.itsfoss.com/ubuntu-firefox-snap-default/

limelight79 ,

That sounds like it’s mostly about the default install, and I don’t have a problem with them making the default a snap - as I said, sandboxing a browser probably is a good idea from a security perspective, and most people probably aren’t going to care about snap vs. deb installs, so why not go with the safer alternative?

My issue was that it kept switching back to snaps even after I tried to go to .deb installations. It happened at least three or four times. It would be fine for several months, then something would happen during an update, and it would switch back.

I didn’t have the concerns the article mentions about it automatically updating; it would only update whenever I told software in general to update.

AndrewZabar ,

Yeah I don’t disagree I was just providing reference info.

Varyag ,

“Who has power to destroy something, is the one who holds true control over it.” Or something, I never conquered a planet. Thank you Paul Atreides, very cool.

That is a nice way of measuring control over your own devices and systems, though.

limelight79 ,

I can’t find it at the moment, but a few weeks ago I made a comment that I didn’t really care for the paddle shifters in our car (it’s an automatic, but you can switch to “manual mode” and shift it manually), because I know it’s not going to let me do something stupid, whereas a stick shift will usually let me do stupid things that can damage the engine. That’s partially what prompted the measuring power as ability to screw things up comment. :)

phoenixz ,

I’ve switched to KDE neon, after being disappointed how far behind Ubuntu was, again, with KDE.

Snaps are teeth grinding slow crap that I always disable and remove first thing

SystemD still aucks, over a decade later, and always managed to add yet another thing to its bloated corpse causing yet more hours of work for me to do basic setups that shouldn’t take more than 30 seconds… But it’s everywhere and basically nearly impossible to avoid st this point. Such is life, I guess?

olafurp ,

Systemd is not that bad. It’s pretty stable, modular and frees up a ton of time for OS developers. Sure, Alpine’s init system is faster but it also has fewer features.

phoenixz ,

Systemd always causes me more extra work that I don’t want to have to do, but here we are.

technocrit ,

After like 15 years of ubuntu, I got so sick of their bulllshit that I switched to Debian a few months ago. It’s endlessly better.

I still have ubuntu on a raspberry pi(hole). Whenever I login to update, I get this message about “premium updates” or whatever they call it. It makes me want to barf but I haven’t motivated to switch the pi yet.

mactan ,

server: LTS , desktop: latest point release. keeps the video games happy

prettybunnys ,

Ubuntu is a perfectly usable operating system, there is a LOT of elitism in the Linux community.

De gustibus non est disputandum

In matters of taste there is no dispute

CrabAndBroom ,

Yeah that’s kind of where I’m at with Ubuntu now. I personally got tired of using it because I find Canonical tends to fixate on whatever shiny thing they currently think is cool (Unity, that hybrid phone/desktop OS thing, Mir, now Snaps), then they let a lot of other stuff stagnate, get the thing they’re fixated on to the point where it’s almost really good, then they get bored and ditch it and go chasing something else.

But none of that’s a killer technical issue necessarily, if you don’t care about that you can still install it and have a good working/stable computer that’ll still do probably 99% of what you need it to.

olafurp ,

Snaps sucks, canonical sucks, Amazon integration sucks, KDE updates are years behind which also sucks, pushing snaps over deb sucks, pushing snap over flatpak sucks.

However, Ubuntu is a great distro. Incredibly stable, very well tested and polished. Installation is super easy and hardware support is very good, unless you got some very new hardware.

I recommend Ubuntu to a lot of people even though I’d never use it myself. Most people just want their computer to work.

Ephera ,

Personal main-complaint about Snaps is that they ship Firefox by default with it and some things in it are just broken:

  • “Save Image As…” in the right-click menu would just fail to open the file dialog and therefore do nothing.
  • It doesn’t use ~/Downloads/ for downloads, but rather some complex folder underneath ~/snap/. You can get to that folder from Firefox’s download list, I believe, but navigating there via file manager is tricky.

Thankfully, Mozilla now offers a DEB repo: support.mozilla.org/…/install-firefox-linux#w_ins…

As for Kubuntu, it’s far from the greatest showing of KDE. They frequently have oddball KDE versions, e.g. not quite shipping the KDE LTS version in Ubuntu LTS, because releases didn’t line up, but also just in general weird instabilities and crashes which don’t happen on my openSUSE laptop (my workplace issues Ubuntu laptops).

Having said that, we gave some of our Linux newbie colleagues GNOME and they always seem to struggle more with it than the colleagues with KDE, because usability in GNOME is just whack.
Things like not being able to type a file path into the file manager (unless you know the magic shortcut Ctrl+L), or the file-open dialog highlighting the name field, but when you type into it, it starts searching files instead.
But also just the whole thing not behaving like Windows. I’ll be the last to praise Windows’ usability, but it is what many people know.

Montagge ,

my snap Firefox can save images as and downloads to ~/Downloads

Ephera ,

Hmm, alright. It is still on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, so maybe some fixes to the runtime allow that on newer Ubuntu versions.

ture ,

Even back then Save As… was working for me and I never bothered replacing the Firefox snap with the .deb version. Probably some weird configuration on your machine, since I set up quite a bunch of machines with plain Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and never got complaints about this.

cevn ,

I used Ubuntu for 10 ish years before moving to Fedora. I switched because the Kde packages were seemingly years out of date with no idea of when the new versions would hit the Apt repos.

Seems like a lot of Ubuntu packages are old compared to Fedora since I’ve experienced way fewer bugs now adays.

Snaps were bad but I never was forced to use them, had it purged and disabled the whole time.

F04118F , (edited )

Completely off topic, but: I’ve been trying Fedora (KDE spin) for a few months now, and I’m flabbergasted at how unusable the distro version (not the Flatpak) of Firefox is. I think it’s a codec issue as I’ve checked Firefox is running in wayland mode, but:

  • video calls (Zoom, Slack) don’t work.
  • despite installing every codec I could find through Fedy, a package manager for non-free Fedora repos.

Meanwhile, the Microsoft Edge flatpak works flawlessly.

Are you using a flatpak browser too? If not, how did you get your browser to work?

I really like Fedora otherwise: up-to-date kernel and modern (very efficiently stored) packages, but properly tested with major releases, btrfs and systemd by default and commonality with RHEL is useful at work.

But these codec issues are pushing me back to Arch…

cevn ,

I remember some video sites not loading and having to load a non free codec. Other than that I am using librewolf which works but havent tried teams calls and such.

ganymede ,

yet to use any OS where the default firefox install was good for too much, other than using it to install a clean firefox directly from mozilla

F04118F ,

Distro version of Firefox worked wonderfully for me on EndeavourOS (Arch repo / Wayland / Sway) and Pop!_OS 22.04 (Ubuntu base / X11 / GNOME)

thedeadwalking4242 ,

You’d be surprised how many people don’t care about business practices. It’s actually kind of alarming

iopq ,

I tried to install GrapheneOS from Chromium, but online installation doesn’t work on snaps, I had to go hunting for apks because Ubuntu doesn’t allow you to just choose which version of the program you want

That’s the opposite of what I want from Linux. I installed NixOS on my new laptop

dingdongitsabear ,

if they run hardware that’s not cutting edge, by all means, that’s the best solution as a first distro.

ubuntu is important as a stepping stone. myself and everyone I know that’s on Fedora et al started with Ubuntu. we learned what’s what and how to go about doing things and after hitting the ceiling one too many times, we tried other stuff, found better havens and finally abandoned it forever.

so I’d caution against any action aimed at hurting it. leave it be and know that it’s still the most user-friendly solution out there and the one that’s most likely to “just work” for most people. it’ll convert people over, whether from Windows or MacOS. once they’ve crossed over, they’re more likely to wander further.

senectus ,

Its not bad, but I don’t like it because it’s ugly brown defaults and it’s gnome.

Admittedly very superficial reasons. But I know that.

trollercoaster ,

I am in the same boat as you. I am still running Ubuntu (with snap removed, so I can’t comment on its current performance overhead) on a few of my machines because I couldn’t be bothered to do a reinstall with something less insane, but I’m not recommending Ubuntu to anyone anymore over the same concerns as you have.

If you want to recommend a system that runs decently out of the box and runs a lot of software, recommend Mint instead. Ubuntu used to be Debian with sane default settings that would run out of the box, nowadays Mint is Ubuntu with sane default settings that will run out of the box. Mint also doesn’t subscribe to this snap madness and is continuing to maintain a few packages Ubuntu has migrated to snap as .deb package (for instance Firefox and Chromium).

fratermus ,
@fratermus@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

nowadays Mint is Ubuntu with sane default settings that will run out of the box

There’s also an official version of Mint based on Debian (LMDE)

trollercoaster ,

I know, but I don’t have any half way recent experience with it, so I don’t know whether I can recommend it. When I last checked it out some years ago, it still lacked functionality regular Ubuntu based Mint had.

lord_ryvan ,

If you want to recommend a system that runs decently out of the box and runs a lot of software, recommend Mint

OP already stated they tried and disliked Mint.

atzanteol ,

It’s fine.

Seriously I’ve run it for years. It’s just fine. No greater or fewer issues than other distros. You can avoid snaps if you like, but I don’t. I simply don’t care and they usually work better than flatpaks for me (snaps can install a cli executable, flatpaks require silly ways of running from the CLI).

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