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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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

thedeadwalking4242 ,

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

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.

mactan ,

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

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.

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.

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