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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.

d0ntpan1c , (edited )

While I found ubuntu’s business practices (all the upsells, mostly) the most grating, really the thing that pushed me off of Ubuntu was packages being behind inexplicably and all the forking/modifying they did to gnome and just always being like 1-2 major versions behind, especially since gnomes been shipping tons of features the last few years and Ubuntu wouldn’t get them for ages.

Outside of the snaps that Ubuntu seems to force you back into if you purposely try to turn it off, its not the worst to avoid otherwise. Or just deal with for a few apps.

If they want the ubuntu stack of tooling, suggest debian. If they feel intimidated by Debian, Ubuntu is fine. Debian is really solid out of the box for a primary devices nowadays. no need to wait for Ubuntu to bless packages since the Debian ppa’s are usually much faster to update. But as long as they aren’t doing really weird stuff, they can always move off of Ubuntu to Debian or any other debian descendant easily if they want a smooth transition since its the same package manager.

As long as the immutable distro paradigm isnt a turn off for them, Vanilla OS is also really neat, including cross-package manager installs. V1 is Ubuntu based, v2 will be Debian based (if it isnt already GA’d… I know thats soonish)

I’ve mostly switched to using Debian for dev containers and servers, and 99% of the time any ubuntu-specific guides are still perfectlh helpful. I moved to Arch for main devices.

(Side note: I abandoned manjaro for similar reasons as I abandoned Ubuntu: too much customization forced upon me, manjaro’s package repo was always behind or even had some broken packages vs the arch repos, and some odd decisions by the maintainers about all sorts of things. EndeavourOS has been just way better as someone who likes to have a less-dictated setup that is closer to the distro base and faster to get package updates)

Edit: I guess my tl:dr is… If one thinks “Ubuntu”, first ask “why not debian?”, and then proceed to Ubuntu if there are some solid reasons to do so for the situation.

rotopenguin ,
@rotopenguin@infosec.pub avatar

Ubuntu has its ups and downs when you’re actually living with it, but they have a fantastic installer experience. I have had my fair share of bizarre dead ends with other distro installers, like Bazzite telling me “you need -860GB more space”. Ubuntu puts you in a solid live-iso OS where the installer is just an app that you can drag to one side and run other tools before continuing. It tends to do sensible things if I go off the beaten path with a more advanced install.

Nowadays, I am happy with debootstrapping or btrfs send’ing an existing Debian install to set up a new system for myself. I still think that Ubuntu is reasonably likely to be a good experience for a newcomer.

skullgiver ,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

I use it. It’s fine. Livepatch is nice, not needing to reboot to apply kernel updates can make the “boot computer, install updates, reboot computer” cycle a bit shorter. Maybe Fedora also has that? Arch and friends certainly don’t do it.

Snap is an annoying feature that mostly just makes life harder for people starting out on Ubuntu. If you’re here, chances are you can run the three or four commands to rid yourself of Snap. Snap has also gotten better in terms of performance, though the store situation still sucks.

Snap’s RAM impact is minimal. You end up with multiple versions of the same dependency in memory (wasting tens to hundreds of megabytes) but the same is true for Flatpak or Docker or AppImage. My biggest annoyance is snaps mounting on boot and taking a few seconds, but it’s really not that bad. Actually, that’s a lie, my biggest annoyance is the (ノಠ益ಠ)ノlowercase “snap” folder in my home directory ლ(ಠ益ಠლ) that you can’t remove or snap will break.

The Amazon search thing was what, ten years ago? Just click no on the “do you want to submit debug logs” prompt.

I personally use the default desktop. Gnome is fine. Some people are married to their Windows clones, for those Cinnamon or KDE is also fine.

I would indeed recommend Ubuntu stable. Being able to install the OS and not risk breaking anything for half a decade is pretty nice. Certainly beats my Arch-derivatives experience. Ubuntu and Kubuntu both come with the standard suite of tools you’d expect for those desktop environments. You can even install both (though you’ll have tons of duplicate applications if you do).

Fedora does more frequent updates, with more changes over time and more stuff possibly breaking. If you want the latest and greatest, Fedora may be better. Software is generally less supported on Fedora though. I also kind of trust IBM even less than I do Canonical to do the right thing, so there’s that.

The biggest problem with Ubuntu is that it’s popular and has been for years. A lot of old “helpful” forum topics will have you open up a terminal, paste some random commands, and break your OS next time you try to update. I’d recommend avoiding any terminal commands for as long as possible when it comes to troubleshooting. The GUI does most things pretty well these days.

boredsquirrel ,
@boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net avatar

No Fedora doesnt at all have livepatching. I think APT distros are great at not needing reboots, Fedora sucks. Its offline installer doesnt work well enough to excuse the reboots.

Fedora Atomic Desktops meanwhile offer awesome unbreakability. I use Kinoite daily and dont plan on switching. Even though using latest Plasma, it just doesnt break.

I would choose a different Distro though, if I didnt want rpm-ostree. Just not sure what? Kubuntu? No. Arch? Hell no. OpenSUSE Slowroll with KDE probably, yes that would be it.

BCsven , (edited )

Apt will install a package but if a service is in use the kernel still runs the old until you stop the services and restart. its just not apparent to the user. This is not live patching, live patching is when kernel will load a new patch and you temporarily have two states and during a momentary blip pass all control to new kernel…this is typically for mission critical server that can’t have downtime. Just running a regular update does not do this.

Source for live patching tuxcare.com/…/developer-tutorial-live-patching-de…

boredsquirrel ,
@boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net avatar

Interesting! But afaik apt also has mechanisms to only restart necessary services.

BCsven ,

Not sure how to check on apt, but zypper uses ps -s arguments and shows you all the running processes/services that need a restart before the system is fully using all updates

SeikoAlpinist ,

If they are competent with computers, they can probably figure out Ubuntu and maintain it theirself.

I left Ubuntu for systems I manage because I’m not smart enough or willing to invest time learning snaps, and snaps kept breaking Firefox updates and generally made Firefox unusable. Since I’ve been around a while, I found it was just easier to migrate my fleet to Debian and set it to look like Ubuntu with the dock on the left. This has been fine since 2022.

If it’s something you would be partially managing, and they didn’t like Mint, have them try Pop!_OS.

If it’s a super simple, low maintenance desktop, just go Fedora Silverblue and it will stay solid and up to date until the hardware dies.

Fizz ,
@Fizz@lemmy.nz avatar

Ubuntu is a great distro. It’s performant, ,its stable, its well configured it looks nice out of the box. For seasoned Linux users they can be more picky with which their distro but as an intro to Linux I always recommend mint and Ubuntu.

boredsquirrel , (edited )
@boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net avatar

Kubuntu chose to not ship Plasma 6 because it didnt match their release point. While in general a good decision, stable releases are the flaw really.

So a semi-rolling Kubuntu yes, but LTS Kubuntu before Plasma 6? Wouldnt recommend.

Ubuntu is also still full in on Snaps. Flatpak comes from a PPA I think. Their store is snaps-first.

While this is not a bad concept, Flatpaks are better for many reasons. They also may be worse for some others, mainly because Snaps just use Apparmor for sandboxing, like the rest of the system, so you can make easy exceptions.

astro_ray , (edited )

They ship flatpak with their own repo for 5+ years.

The apparmour thing can get pretty annoying if an app you like breaks because of it.

exanime ,

Not recommending Ubuntu because of those 2 things, both of which can be turned off easily, seems a bit extreme. Like not recommending a Toyota because some of the inside trim attrack dust

As an intro into Linux, I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone even if I myself moved on from it

tenelsobahor ,

Biggest problem for me was, due to optimization issues ans since I used it on an old computer with hdd, how slow it was.

smeg ,

Do you know what they didn’t like about Mint? If it’s just the DE (which I imagine covers most of the look and feel for a beginner) then there are three different defaults to try.

Quill7513 ,

I think the bottom line is if they didn’t like Mint they’re not gonna like Ubuntu. Any criticism I can level at mint I can level even harder at Ubuntu. Before anyone can say anything for sure though it’d be important to know what they didn’t like about Mint and what it is that’s drawing them to Ubuntu.

As far as would I recommend Ubuntu? Honestly, no. I don’t recommend it to anyone. Its not easier to use than Mint if you want an easy to use Linux distro. Its basically no better than Windows if you’re issue with Windows was philosophical. From a technical standpoint I find it to be about the worst distro there is.

The list of distros I find myself recommending to people is as follows:

  • Mint (for noobs)
  • MX (for experienced users who don’t wanna Futz with stuff)
  • Antix (for constrained systems)
  • Arch (for experienced users who do wanna Futz with stuff)
  • Debian (for people who are on a futzing with stuff spectrum between MX and Arch, regardless of experience level)
  • Artix (for sickos who love the Futz, live for the futz, and found Arch to not be futzy enough)
CsXGF8uzUAOh6fqV ,
@CsXGF8uzUAOh6fqV@lemmy.world avatar

As a “sicko” (lol) I must say I don’t really futz around much if at all anymore. There are some differences but all in all I don’t think the Artix experience is much different from the regular Arch one.

Quill7513 ,

Oh absolutely. I loved Artix when I was working with it. Helped me fall in love with doas and OpenRC. But also if you’ve got a computer you wanna get working, it gives you WAY too many choices to make. Its mainly for if you’re using something and you just have a frustrating from some tool or another because Artix seriously let’s you customize aspects of the OS that no other sane distro gives you access to. This has some consequences:

  1. Until you have a working system its very futzy
  2. Once you have a working system all other systems feel… Wrong. They didn’t make the right decisions. You know this because you dove deep into every conceivable make able decision and if they didn’t choose what you chose, then you already know it won’t be quite right for you.

Basically… If you have to ask if Artix is right for you, that means it isn’t. I kinda only recommend Artix to people who have already customized the shit out of Arch or Debian and still have complaints. Its by far my favorite distro, and it simply isn’t one I’m running right now because Antix is fine enough for my needs and I don’t want to be without a laptop for an entire weekend while I get every single thing lines up.

Again. This sounds like I hate Artix. I don’t. I fucking love it. Everyone who loves Linux should give it a try some time just to see how esoteric and weird a distro can get when they want to. It’s truly beautiful and pure.

GolfNovemberUniform ,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

Has anything changed about snap?

It became less slow and I think they considered implementing human verification for new packages but idk if they did.

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

Even if management changes are done, it’s as easy to revert them. This one is purely a matter of trust.

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.

I think the default Ubuntu has the best integration in terms of theming and stuff but not having it is absolutely not a problem. I don’t remember the flavours being less user friendly or anything.

Navigator ,
@Navigator@jlai.lu avatar

Default is garbage for me interface wise (weird app menu/panel made for touchpad not desktop), so I prefer Lubuntu or Xubuntu.

Kubuntu is… Well it’s KDE.

BaalInvoker ,

Ubuntu is even more aggressive with snaps. However it’s a ok package manager, I would not be very annoyed by it if I have to use

I mainly just want to know if it will eat all their RAM or something

Kinda the same as Flatpaks… Actually it’s not a big issue, once spare ram is money thrown away…

GolfNovemberUniform ,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

Ubuntu is even more aggressive with snaps.

I forgot to mention that in my comment. Thanks for pointing it out.

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