Linux

I avoid Ubuntu because Canonical has a history of going their own way alone rather than collaborating on universal standards. For instance, when the X devs decided the successor to X11 needed to be a complete redesign from scratch companies like RedHat, Collabora, Intel, Google, Samsung, and more collaborated to build Wayland. However, Canonical announced Mir, and they went their own way alone.

When Gnome3 came out it was very controversial and this spawned alternatives such as Cinnamin, MATE, and Ubuntu's Unity desktop. Unity was the only Linux desktop, before or since, to include sponsored bloatware apps installed by default, and it also sold user search history to advertisers.

Then, there's snap. While Flatpak matured and becoame the defacto standard distro-agnostic package system, Canonical once again went their own way alone by creating snap.

I'm not an expert on Ubuntu or the Linux community, I've just been around long enough to see Canonical stir up controversy over and over by going left when everyone else goes right, failing after a few years, and wasting thousands of worker hours in the process.

People dont hate on ubuntu cause its inherently bad. They hate on it because its a corporate distro and they do some questionable stuff sometimes. The OS runs fine.

Why not debian unstable? Its better than ubuntu in pretty much every way imo. Somewhat less user friendly i guess.

Snap has a locked and proprietary store, even if the client is FOSS. There is no reason to "hate" Ubuntu but there are better choices.

It's pitched as a open source operation system, yet the snap store is closed source and vendor locked, one of the reasons some of us use Liniux is because we prefer open source (and there are rational justifications for that).

Hate is a strong word, but there is legitimate criticism, I also think the closed source nature of snap led to the fact that it has no volunteers and that eventually caused malware to appear on the snap store multiple time, it never happened on flathub as far as i know.

Today for beginner i think opensuse and linux mint are better.

Regarding debian having old packages , i use nix but it is fairly immature, flathub should also work.

Snaps are centralised packaging, a'la Apple App Store or Google Play. Now if someone forked snapd, added third party repo and made It so you could select which repo is the main one, that'd be a start.

But as long as Canonical commits to a centralised form of distribution with no third party support I'm going to advise desktop users to stay away from Ubuntu.

They've embraced Wayland, pipewire, gnome and what not, but snap is really questionable, particularly in the Linux ecosystem.

I gather it can be somewhat annoying to contend with (I.e. some apps on Ubuntu may only be available as snaps?)

I wouldn't call it hate, more like disapprobation with Canonical's choices. No one have to use Ubuntu, we have tons of distro to choose. If someone wants LTS, you can always go pure Debian way, it's not hard to install as it's used to be (for beginners), or there is Linux Mint Debian Edition. You can easily use flatpaks with these and keep your software up-to-date.

I gave up on Ubuntu before the snaps became a thing. Here's what I hated :

• ugly purple and orange theme
• Upgrades between lts never worked right for me: 14->16 fail and broke, 16->18 lots of problems, 18->20 still not great.

Is Ubuntu deserving the hate?

Yes.

Debian version is the only one that seems reliable enough but, again, it is Debian, the packages are “old”.

Install Debian, then install all the software you might need using Flatpak. There you go, solid and stable OS with the latest of with little to no effort. Bonus extra security.

Use whatever you want, why do you care about what feelings other people have towards Ubuntu?

Ubuntu is a tough one. I don't like it. I don't like snaps, but more than that I don't like their direction in general.

But I have some respect for them too. I think they played a pretty significant role in Linux being as popular (relatively speaking) as it is, and I don't feel like they have any ill intent.

So I don't personally care for it but I'm glad it's around I guess is my point?

It's because Ubuntu is a company-backed distro consistently wants to go their own way. Not just snap but they've done it before with Unity and Mir (and probably others idk).

Course Fedora does literally the same thing and doesn't get any hate for it so idk. It's just a meme.

Personally I don't like Ubuntu because they didnt go far enough into their own ways but thats just me.

Dietpie is a lightweight debian not ubuntu. And debian is still one of the top choices (if not the) for servers.

Ubuntu is just debian with extra bad decisions.

Ubuntu attacted a lot of control freaks because Shuttleworth was originally splashing some money when it started and a bunch of nerds saw dollar signs. As a result they have a culture of "not invented here" syndrome where someone just has to reinvent the wheel in only the way they see it and they don't work well with others or accept their input because they want all the credit.

Personally, I got sick of it having been pretty involved early on in the project. It's easier and saner to just use a distro based on what everyone else is doing.

I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but…

There is no "supposed to" when it comes to distro preferences. Use whatever you like, other people's opinions do not dictate your behavior. If Ubuntu works for you, use that. If anything, that's the freedom of FOSS. You can take other people's views in to account when choosing a distro, but in the end it is your decision. I dislike Ubuntu for a few reasons, but I don't get to dictate to anyone else what they use and why.

If you like rolling release, you could try Debian sid/unstable. I hear it's quite stable and reliable and, of course, isn't Ubuntu.

Most of the problems I've experienced with Ubuntu recently were caused by Snap. I really hate that they insist shipping that buggy mess.

In a nutshell, Ubluntu is trying to take user control off its users. And the users are mad because of it.

And yes, I'm talking about snap.

As an operating system Ubuntu is great. It's user friendly, has great hardware support and is up to date enough for most users. Canonical though... That's where the real sore spot lies for a lot of die-hards.

I use Ubuntu for work and have no issues with it to be honest. I install everything via apt, I think a few things are via snap but nothing that I've installed directly. It's stable and I can get on with stuff. I definitely am not a fan of the move towards snap and the app store: if I was to choose I'd go vanilla Debian.

I don't hate Ubuntu, and it was my distribution from nearly 20 years. Meaning since it was first released until recently. I loved it for a long time because it was based on dpkg which was much better than rpm at the time AND it was way more user friendly than the others. Even as a software developer I like my distribution to move out of the way to let me focus on using it, not babysitting it.

But I moved away because of Snaps. Currently on Fedora and it's pretty good. I know it's possible to get rid of Snaps or use a derivative but I prefer to stay close to stock for whatever distribution I use.

If Ubuntu works for you and you don't mind snaps, then just use that!

So if

I'm pretty happy using Ubuntu. Its got a decent UI and works well enough with little fuss. As much as I enjoy tinkering, I use my Ubuntu machines for work and I really only need something simple that works out of the box.

I loved Unity. Also, I would argue that both Snap and Flatpak are bad. That said, be happy with whatever works for you. Ubuntu always gives me problems, whereas Fedora runs smooth. That said Ubuntu can read my old Passports, Fedora can't. They each have the benefits.

For anything lower-spec (like, <4Gb of RAM), Ubuntu absolutely CHUGS because of Snaps. Flatpak has no such issue.

Ironically, Lubuntu (a lightweight Ubuntu fork) worked the best for me while I was using it. No slowness, but I installed pretty much everything using Apt (didn't know about Flatpak back then).

I ended up having it lock up and freeze on the sign-in page though, so I moved on to the slightly heavier Linux Mint.

Snap is terrible. If you have a bunch of snaps on your system, it becomes very slow and sluggish

I don't mind it, but I don't really use it for any of its features. I use i3 over Unity, I think Snaps (and flatpaks, appimages, etc) are dumb as shit.l, and don't even get me started on how garbage Nautilus is - drives me nuts trying to type a filename in to jump to it only to have Nautilus run a search instead... No idea who thought that was a good idea, but they need to fix that crap already.

I'd probably get by just fine with a full Debian setup tbh.

Ubuntu is fine it's just a more bloated Debian geared towards being as user friendly as possible. Nothing wrong with that.

Ubuntu is nice. Apt/DEB works as they should. Some default apps, mostly browsers, are snaps now, but this does not bother you at all. You were getting them from your distro anyway.

Flatpak and AppImages work just fine if you need them.

The Ubuntu desktop (any flavour) just works. Others are different, but nothing is bad about Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is trying new things, proprietary to their ecosystem, e.g. Unity or snap. On the big picture, those are experiment. Ubuntu is still Linux.

The community reaction to snap is overblown. So Canonical developed something you don't like? Ignore it. This has mostly been a waste of time for them.

(Yes, maybe that dev time would be better spent on flatpak or open-source apps. But that's their time. I'm not paying Ubuntu developers, so can I really complain?)

I still think Ubuntu is the best option (particularly if you want to use the non-LTS releases)

Having said that I do hate snaps and also dislike flatpaks. So what I do is just use the Firefox deb package from the PPA and the chromium package from Linux Mint. Oh, and I have actually replaced ubuntu-advantage-tools with a no-op dummy package.

Or just use Debian sid, which effectively is Debian in a rolling variant. 🚀