Linux

Every time this is asked, I post the same comment. I used Kubuntu for years and liked it, but more recently they started doing things that annoyed me. The biggest was related to snaps and Firefox. Now, sandboxing a browser is probably a great idea, but I wanted to use the regular deb install, so I followed the directions to disable the snap install and used the deb. However, Ubuntu overrode that decision several times - I'd start browsing, then realize I was using a snap AGAIN. Happened a few times over a couple years. If it happened once, eh, maybe an error, but it happened 3 or 4 times. I came to the conclusion I wasn't in control of my system, Ubuntu was.

I switched to Debian and am happy with my choice.

The thing with Ubuntu / Canonical isn't that it doesn't work, it is that they've bad policies and by using their stuff you're making yourself vulnerable to something akin to what happened with VMWare ESXi or with CentOS licensing - they may change their mind at some point and you'll be left with a pile of machines and little to no time to move to other solution.

For starters Ubuntu is the only serious and corporate-backed distribution to ever release a major version on the website and have the ISO installer broken for a few days.

Ubuntu’s kernel is also a dumpster fire of hacks waiting for someone upstream to implement things properly so they can backport them and ditch their own implementations. We've seen this multiple times, shiftfs vs VFS idmap shifting is a great example of the issue.

Canonical has contributing to open-source for a long time, but have you heard about what happened with LXD/LXC? LXC was made with significant investments, primarily from IBM and Canonical. LXD was later developed as an independent project under the Linux Containers umbrella, also funded by Canonical. Everything seemed to be progressing well until last year when Canonical announced that LXD would no longer remain an independent project. They removed it from the Linux Containers project and brought it under in-house development.

They effectively took control of the codebase, changed repositories, relicensed previous contributions under a more restrictive license. To complicate matters, they required all contributors to sign a contract with new limitations and impositions. This shift has caused concerns, but most importantly LXD became essentially a closed-off in-house project of Canonical.

Some people may be annoyed at Snaps as well but I won't get into that.

I don't like snaps (nor flatpaks for that matter, they're too big for my slow internet connection here in my Greek village). But I find it absolutely, 100%, crazy to install gimp and darktable via snaps, and not being able to print (the print option is just not there, because they're snaps and somehow they haven't implemented that for these apps). As an artist who sells prints, this makes the whole distro completely and utterly USELESS to me. Sure, they can be found as deb packages too, but they're older. And Firefox is also sandboxed. And when I installed Chromium from the command line as a deb, it OVERWROTE my wish, and installed Chromium as a snap too.

So, no ubuntu for me. The only advantage it has is that many third party apps (usually commercial ones) that release binary tarballs or appimages have tested with ubuntu and they usually work well (minus davinci resolve). I don't have a big trouble with appimages as they're generally smaller than the kde/gnome frameworks that flatpaks/snaps use, and they're one file-delete away from getting rid of them completely. They're just more straightforward.

I'm old and my gateway to Linux was Ubuntu 5.10 via a live CD they gave me at uni back in 2006.

I got to experience it when they used to take seriously their "Linux for human beings" motto.

Those were GNOME 2 and kernel 2.x times. Albeit the limitations of the technology (40GB HDD disk, 256 MB RAM, an Intel Xeon processor which I can't remember it's exact specs) it felt way snappier (no pun intended) than Windows. You could felt they cared about it in that brown visual theme, the icons, the sounds, the way the documentation was phrased - you could feel the Ubuntu in it.

I ended wiping my entire docs drive while trying to install it but got to learn lots of stuff and feel like my computer was actually mine.

Same as for many people my generation, I switched to Linux thanks to that Ubuntu. It's really sad what it has become and the poor, selfish decisions they have taken, but still it keeps holding a special place in the Linux memories.

Ubuntu is not terrible and if it works for you then fine. I would be surprised if Debian or Mint didn't also work for you just as well though.

I think Ubuntu made sense back in the day when Debian wasn't as user-friendly.

Now that Debian is, it looks like Ubuntu is trying really hard to just be as commercialized as possible.

I still don't understand the logic behind their paying for updates for certain programs when Debian doesn't require it.

Ubuntu does work and is a decent distro in many ways. The problems are around how canonical leverages things for its own financial benefit for the detriment of users and the Linux community.

A good example is Snap. It is forced on users - even Firefox is a snap on Ubuntu. This is not an efficient way fo end users to run their system or their most used software.

Instead of making the builds available as standard software, users have to use the Snap or go hunting elsewhere for builds. That's anti-user and is identical to how Microsoft behaves with windows. It doesn't do things to benefit users, it does things to benefit Microsoft.

It's arguable whether what snap does is actually worth the overhead - I can see that it is more secure in many ways. But then so it Flatpak, and that is more universally used for desktop software across Linux distros. Snap has some inherent benefits for server side use but then why force it on end users where it is not as good as Flatpak in many ways? Or Appimage?

So Ubuntu is fine in many ways, but why bother when you can go for alternatives and give the best of both worlds? Mint is an Ubuntu based distro without snap and other canonical elements. I used mint for ages, it's great and there is a reason it's so popular.

I've moved on to OpenSuSE now but the Ubuntu ecosystem is fine, it works well for many, and it's very well documented and supported which often works downstream in Mint and others. It's just Ubuntu itself thats a bit crappy due to the decisions made to suite canonical rather than what users want or would suit them best. In the end it all comes down to personal choice and what people are willing to accept from their distro.

The distribution is fine, maybe even good.

The politicking and project management around the distro has annoyed a lot of people.

Ubuntu isn't terrible, there are just bad things on Ubuntu that aren't present in other distros.

For me, Mint offers everything good about Ubuntu without any of the bad.

That being said, I don't hate it, but I also don't recommend it ever to people. The pitfalls that can come up from Snaps, plus the default layout of Gnome, are reasons why a brand new Linux user might struggle with it unless they are already somewhat of a techie.

For ex-windows users like my parents who aren't tech savvy, I just install Mint, set up their shortcuts and desktop icons, and away they go, happy little penguins.

Ubuntu was a successful attempt to make Debian user-friendly. If you don't remember Linux in 2003, it took a lot of time to configure.

Ubuntu came along and did everything automatically from first install. Some of the polish it had was things like smooth fonts, TrueType font support (remember old XFree86 Bitmap fonts?) a GUI installer, automatically detecting your monitor resolution, setting up sound automatically, and automatic downloading of firmware needed to make your hardware work. In just one reboot after install, you had a usable system that looked really nice, with smooth fonts.

In 2024, Debian already does all of this out of the box. The value add of Ubuntu is minimal. Ubuntu provides a theme, a splash screen when booting up, a custom font, and a modified version of the Dash to Dock extension that you can just download yourself from the Gnome extension site. That's it. One might argue that snaps make Ubuntu worse than Debian.

Just use Debian. If you want a somewhat more polished system (nice cursors, unique icons, easy to configure animations), there is Mint Debian edition.

It takes less time to just set up Debian to look and behave like Ubuntu (about 10 minutes) than it takes to continually fight against Ubuntu snaps.

Just use Debian.

The thing is. Snaps isn't the first controversy.

Canonical, with Ubuntu early on was helping drive things forward, but they reached a point where they started to do things their own way with disregard to the broader ecosystem.

Each time they did this, they cause fragmentation, struggled, and then deferred to the choice the rest of the ecosystem has. The problem with this is that they're not sharing their effort, they're just throwing it away.

They merely doubled down hard on snaps which is the latest controversy.

Snaps have their own advantages, but Canonical owns the store. Which becomes its own stalewort

In all reality it's fine. Snaps are annoying on occasion, and the Amazon search integration was rightly riffed on, but it'll work like anything else. Sometimes it's just funny to riff on Ubuntu, and sometimes people hate on it because Linux people are very .. er .. um .. opinionated. But if it works best for you then go for it.

There are just better noob-friendly distributions, like LinuxMint.

The Term

The issue is that, no Ubuntu is not "the Windows" of Linux.

First of all this statement makes no sense. You could say "the Samsung of the Android world" as Samsung Android is a Distribution that looks nice and many people think it is nice to use (leaving out that it is the most spyware-riddled software on locked devices with horrible customer treatment)

Windows is just one OS. Android is an easy variant of Linux, and Ubuntu was one too.

Nowadays, uBlue Aurora/Bazzite would be my "best Desktop Linux", because they implement all the great, easy and modern stuff of Fedora Atomic Desktops, while also removing stupid opinionated things, and adding packages they legally simply cannot ship.

Updates & Upgrades

Ubuntu is not easy anymore. Distro upgrades are a mess and break. I had 12 laptops, all had the same 3 issues and updates took forever.

Ubuntu requires a sudo account for them to even work, a nonsudoer gets an update message but clicking it does nothing.

I.e. they dont use polkit, unlike Fedora for example.The paradigm of

1. Needing a user with sudo rights to use a system, otherwise an admin needs to login every week and do the GUI updates
2. Updates and upgrades being a privileged action that requires root permission

Is just bad. Android works without root since forever, and I would say it is the easiest Linux distro out there.

Style

They have their own strange icons, which look worse than GNOMEs. They have their own strange store instead of using and improving GNOME Software.

Their design sucks in comparison to Manjaro if you ask me. Most personal point of this list. Many other Distros just ship GNOME, do the packaging and leave the Branding to small changes, and the upstream DE.

Snaps

Snaps are not cross platform, while Flatpak exists and is cross platform.

Ubuntu doesnt even have uptodate flatpak and dependencies in their repos so the Flatpak project maintains like 6 PPAs just to run them on Ubuntu.

Snaps are not cross platform because they rely on AppArmor for sandboxing, and afaik custom AppArmor patches that are not in upstream.

This means Snaps on Fedora and others would run Snaps unsandboxed.

Technically they are fine. Pretty normal approach. But their repo hat big malware issues and they only allow a single one, which is a total nogo for any opensource project.

Snaps installed by other users with sudo cannot be opened by other users. You need to install them per-user, no other option possible.

Flatpak requires wheel/sudo too, I need to make a Fedora Change request to fix that, my previous one got rejected...

Variants & LTS

They only ship KDE on the LTS variant, which means by now it is very outdated. KDE is the most windows-like desktop, and also has the most features, by far. I tried GNOME and made a writeup on Fedora discuss.

Bloat

They bloat (at least) their (LTS) variants with tons of deb packages.

Safety & Snapshots

They dont integrate timeshift or other backup systems. Linux Mint and OpenSUSE are better here. Fedora Atomic Desktops too, while traditional Fedora not.

Honestly, IMO Mint is just Ubuntu without all the scetchy stuff. The only real major difference (besides the packaging debate) is the default graphical shell.

If you like gnome shell, I wonder if it's worth installing Mint and then gnome-shell...

Ubuntu was a big part of my path to full time Linux use. I adore everyone who has contributed to Ubuntu.

But also, Snaps are bullshit, and are why I replaced all my Ubuntu installs with Debian.

Canonical doesn't get to pretend to be surprised by the backlash for pushing an unnecessary closed proprietary platform on their freedom seeking users.

I still adore everyone at Canonical and in the Ubuntu community, for all they've done for the Linux community. Y'all still rock. Thanks!

My perspective is simple, a win is a win. If someone makes the leap to Linux, that's a huge win, regardless of distro.

Ubuntu started and stayed great for many years. Now I feel it's coasting on the name it rightly earned. It was my daily driver but I left after frustration with firefox snap and some networking malarkey I don't care to recall. There are just better maintained distros out there.

These things go in cycles. I remember when “Fedora Core” — they dropped the “Core” part of the name — was the cool new distro. I remember when Ubuntu was the cool new distro. Just ignore it and play around with distros until you find one you like.

In my opinion, new users should use a very popular distro so they have documentation and message boards. After a few years, you get your legs under you. At that point, start distro hopping using weird desktop environments. Then, someday, you get a lot of experience and use a very popular distro because software is a tool and you don’t care. (If something has buzz, I throw it in a VM and go “Huh, that’s interesting.”)

It’s sort of like how the target audience for Nike Air Monarchs is people buying their first pair of Nike Airs and dads who aren't trying to hear the word “colorway” and just want some shoes.

Moved from Gentoo to Ubuntu in 2008 as I needed to focus more on my job, moved back to Gentoo in 2022. Snaps were part of it, but really the lack of maintenance and vision around the apt repository was really the issue. More and more I was installing stray debs, or having to use flatpaks / AppImages for what what I wanted the system to manage for me.

Not that I've entirely stopped using flatpaks or AppImages, but the process of creating an ebuild is far simpler than trying to do anything with a deb. For a while I had hope about the ppa, however that became fewer and fewer. I do think that the battle to have a comprehensive software repository is a loosing one because of the way things are currently structured.

Canonical lives and dies by the BDFL model. It allowed them to do some great work early on in popularizing Linux with lots of polish. Canonical still does good work when forced to externally, like contributing upstream. The model falters when they have their own sandbox to play in, because the BDFL model means that any internal feedback like "actually this kind of sucks" just gets brushed aside. It doesn't help that the BDFL in this case is the CEO, founder, and funder of the company and paying everyone working there. People generally don't like to risk their job to say the emperor has no clothes and all that, it's easier to just shrug your shoulders and let the internet do that for you.

Here are good examples of when the internal feedback failed and the whole internet had to chime in and say that the hiring process did indeed suck:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31426558

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37059857

"markshuttle" in those threads is the owner/founder/CEO.

I dislike Ubuntu, because it literally never successfully upgraded from one release to the next.
It's also the buggiest distro I've experienced, and I've tried quite a few. I'm talking about bugs like:

• do a fresh install
• log into Gnome
• first thing that pops up is an error message about a crashed service

or:

• do a fresh install
• open Software Center
• it doesn't load, keeps spinning the cursor

Stuff like this disqualifies a distro for years in my opinion.

Ubuntu is so bad in supporting deb packages, that the default included UI package installer under Ubuntu 24.04 didn't support deb packages. See: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2497203

Yes it's that bad. This is the reason I don't promote Ubuntu anymore, they went too far. They crossed a line. Just use Linux Mint or something.

I used to like Ubuntu, but I got so sick for not being able to do things due to packages being out of date, and/or snaps getting in the way.

I ditched it for arch and I'm so much happier

It's the little things. One of my biggest gripes is that EVERY TIME you run apt update, it shoves an add for Ubuntu pro at the bottom of tge output, which shoves all the info I actually care about offscreen. Pure bullshit. It sounds small, but when I need to check which packages are getting updated, it makes my life a bit more inconvenient. And I do most things through CLI, so I see this a lot.

Shit like that has been my entire experience with Ubuntu. I deeply regret switching to it, and I'm switching off as soon as I can get another hard drive to swap in.

I only joke about Arch being the superior distro because, well, I use it and because it’s apparently a thing.

I actually don’t have any strong feelings about Ubuntu. It’s a distro. It works. I only use Arch because of the AUR (I’m lazy, okay?). I don’t have strong feelings about it either. Linux is configurable to basically exactly what you want. Once (or if) you get into customization you just pick the distro that allows you to get to what you want faster.

I do have strong feelings about Windows though.

Ubuntu used to work out of the box and with sensible defaults but that’s no longer the case.

Gave Ubuntu another try a month back and external monitor resolution wasn’t right at all.

Switched back to Pop OS.

In my opinion Ubuntu-bashing is unjustified and counterproductive.

Unjustified because Ubuntu is great! I say that having used it exclusively for years without a problem. That has to be worth something. Yes, there's the Snap issue, and occasional shenanigans from Canonical, but so far these problems are not existential. For context I've been on Linux for 2 decades (also Debian) but I am not a typical techie (history major). Ubuntu just works.

Counterproductive because Linux needs a flagship distro for beginners. Just the word Linux is daunting to most normies! We absolutely need a beginner distro with name recognition. Well, this may hurt to hear but Ubuntu is basically the only candidate. Name recognition does not come cheap. At this point it is decades of work and we should not be squandering it.

Well, they deserve it. A while ago, Ubuntu was a unique distribution, the ease of use was unparalleled and its popularity followed. Nevertheless, several other distros came through, capitalizing Canonical's mistakes they catched up. Now Ubuntu is only quite relevant but the only features that make it currently unique are still controversial, i. e. snaps.

In any case, people found their space in other distributions and communities. Some others stayed with Ubuntu and they are still enjoying the popularity they achieved as a distribution for newcomers, and it does the job, really. It's not that I think they deserve hate, but the criticisms are mostly founded without denying they have the right to make those decisions all the way.

Ubuntu is a fine "nice to meet you" distro -- the criticisms I've gathered happen a few months in. Nvidia+Xorg updates dropping GUI to TUI, MDADM shitting the bed and dropping RAID, the awkward 6 month upgrades where you go from old weird issues in apps to new weird issues -- thou snap and flatpak improve this a lot over stock.

Canonical NIH, Canonical CLA agreement, history of charging forward only to abandon in house tech over and again after users get comfy.

Then there are inner politics and the occasional hankyness inside, or discourteousness like when they shit the bed dropping lib32 without talking to partnrrs like Valve on how this would effect their business after they made Ubuntu their target.

Criticisms typically are based in something. I had started using Ubuntu since 2004 IIRC and its been an interesting ride.

Oh also, PPA's, avoid those, they're not stock and don't be surprised if your OS doesn't boot with the less than stellar ones not staying in sync with the latest kernel updates.

YMMV and this is by no means advice on your personal fit.

Personally I am not fond of most casual user low barrier distros but I still recommend them. Manjaro, PopOS, LinuxMint, Endless, are all fine options depending on what kind of user.

I recently recommended one to a GameDev and considering SteamOS is Arch he decided on Manjaro over Debian.

YMMV, and its important to listen first to people to see what they want their machine to do.

One last criticism of Canonical and Ubuntu. Their HQ is UK based and I honestly wonder how the culture effects development. Germany, UK, California all have different "feels", its hard to be more specific.

Choice is good, always keep your data backed up and the @home on a different partition. The differences across distros are largely not a big deal like they used to be. People find solus in being captain of their Linux adventure and even Ubuntu will do just fine at the basics, just know if you hit a snag it may not be like that on every distro.

There was a time when Ubuntu was the distro for the masses. It was the one that "just worked." It was the one you could use for school. They distributed marketing material with a bunch of diverse young people holding hands.

Now Canonical's website is, by area, mostly corporate logos. They're B2B now, we have lost them, and it shows in their engineering.

If the system you're shopping for an OS for isn't installed in a room with halon extinguishers in the ceiling, you shouldn't even be thinking Canonical's name.

Third party package mechanism is fundamentally broken in Ubuntu (and in Debian).

Third party repos should never be allowed to use package names from the core repos. But they are, so they pretend they're core packages, but use different version names, and at upgrade time the updater doesn't know what to do with those version and how to solve dependencies.

That leaves you with a broken system where you can't upgrade and can't do anything entirely l eventually except a clean reinstall.

After this happened several times while using Ubuntu I resorted to leaving more and more time between major upgrades, running old versions on extended support or even unsupported.

Eventually I figured that if I'm gonna reinstall from scratch I might as well install a different distro.

I should note I still run Debian on my server, because that's a basic install with just core packages and everything else runs in Docker.

So if you delegate your package management to a completely different tool, like Flatpak, I guess you can continue to use Ubuntu. But it seems dumb to be required to resort to Flatpak to make Ubuntu usable.

Canonical historically makes bad decisions. Ubuntu any most points in time is simply great. Their LTS is fab. But they're hungry. And they screw with us over time. the latest Debian just erased most of the reason to go with Ubuntu adding nonfree, and they haven't screwed us over.

My workplace preinstalls Ubuntu, personally I'm using openSUSE. I don't even think that Ubuntu is particularly bad, I'm mainly frustrated with it, because it's just slightly worse than openSUSE (and other distros) in pretty much every way.
It's less stable, less up-to-date, less resilient to breakages. And it's got more quirky behaviour and more things that are broken out-of-the-box. And it doesn't even have a unique selling point. It's just extremely mid, and bad at it.

I think Ubuntu is very good, if you want quick and easy. It's incedibly painless.

However, it does forced auto updates by default. They are called unattended-upgrades and run in the background by default. You can pause or disable them though. Also snaps auto update silently, by default. That can also be paused, though.

What really sucks is, if you don't have a printer it continues to try and install cups, which can be a security concern. However, I successfully blocked it by creating an immutable file where it would put the snap, while it was uninstalled.