I know there are lots of people that do not like Ubuntu due to the controversies of Snaps, Canonicals head scratching decisions and their ditching of Unity.
However my experience using Ubuntu when I first used it wasn’t that bad, sure the snaps could take a bit or two to boot up but that’s a first time thing.
I’ve even put it on my younger brothers laptop for his school and college use as he just didn’t like the updates from Windows taking away his work and so far he’s been having a good time with using this distro.
I guess what I’m tryna say is that Ubuntu is kind of the “Windows” of the Linux world, yes it’s decisions aren’t always the best, but at least it has MUCH lenient requirements and no dumb features from Windows 11 especially forced auto updates.
What are your thoughts and experiences using Ubuntu? I get there is Mint and Fedora, but how common Ubuntu is used, it seemed like a good idea for my bros study work as a “non interfering” idea.
Your thoughts?
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
Unity is one example I cared about.
Since when is fragmentation a negative around here? Its part of what makes Foss great.
Packages for third party apps is the one place we don’t want fragmentation.
Personally I don’t consider it a con unless rampant. However in many cases they’ve dumped the projects. It is effort that could have helped along another project.
imo the negative side effect is the wasted effort and the abandonment.
It’s also part of what makes FOSS niche.
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.
Ub(loa)tu tries to cater to everyone whilst ending up in pleasing no one – it has too much unnecessary clutter.
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!
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
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.
I had the same experience on my one gui Ubuntu machine. I also have several headless machines, and due to some shared libraries I always ended up with snapd installed even though none of the packages I was running were installed through snap. I always found it through the mount point pollution that snapd does.
Why do you care if it’s a snap or a Deb? To me the biggest problem with snap is the pollution in /dev/loop*.
Because I wanted it to integrate with 1password full client.
I use 1Password and the Firefox snap with no problems. How is the deb different?
The plugin works fine, but it can’t call the separate program if you have that installed.
I use Mac most of the time and I’ve found that the functionality on Mac has largely started following how 1Password works on Linux. Meaning that the desktop app functions as a standalone app to modify your password records and the browser plugin allows you to access or lightly edit those records. Older versions would let you call the desktop app with a simple plugin but since I switched to the 1password.com version that’s no longer the case. If you’re on 1Password 7 then what you’re saying makes sense.
As an aside, the function I use by far the most on Mac is command-shift-space to pop up a password search dialog that works very well. Not sure if that function exists on Linux.
Looks like I’m on 1password 8 in Linux. For whatever reason, I just prefer the app instead of having the browser pop open 1password.com to edit records. I don’t know why, it just bugs me. I know part of it is that I want to use the native app to show support for it.
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.
hey. unrelated question, sorry. do any greeks still worship the olympians?
Thanks for giving me a shot at a woke moment now
That was racist. There is nothing wrong with worshiping Olympian gods. You are a right-wing-conservative-republican-christian-homophobic-misogonistic-white-supremacist-rapper-patriarch.
Lol, I honestly don’t know how woke people manage to find all this crap on any comments, and you just saw me try 🤣🤣🤣
What sort of printers do you make your prints with? And do you print directly from GIMP or from something else? I’ve been trying to set up a FOSS printing workflow using Canon giclee printers, which has been mostly successful but I haven’t yet figured out how to print custom sizes on roll paper, only standard sizes on sheet paper.
I use sheet paper to be honest on an Epson printer. I do use Gimp to print, although most of my editing is happening on Photopea in the browser (gimp didn’t cut it for me as an editor for my paintings, I needed adjustment layers and Secondary Colors). Then, I export a JPEG, and print from Gimp (because the browser doesn’t have all the printing options that gimp has). I use the Debian-Testing rolling release.
Yeah, this kind of things drove me batty on Ubuntu. So many things were delivered as Snaps when they just don’t work that way. The funniest one to me was Filebot. It’s a media file naming/organizing tool…that doesn’t have disk access. Are you kidding me, Canonical?
Flatpak is easier to work with, but has similar issues. Great for simple things, but I’m always worried that at some point I’m going to need some features that just won’t work, and then it’s going to be a hassle to migrate to a native installation. And it has no CLI support.
And yeah, the bloat is wild. Deduplication on btrfs (or similar) helps but there’s no getting past the bandwidth bloat.
Yeah, i hear you. I once installed the new version of snap (and later flatpak) of the gnome ide, and it couldn’t find the vala compiler, because it was outside the sandboxing. Totally useless.
And yes, it’s bloated. Nothing works with less 1.6 gb of ram. But then again, it’s the same on fedora.
I use Fedora Workstation, and that is not the case at all. I will agree that an Arch based distro will arguably give you much more control over everything, but to compare Fedora to Ubuntu? That’s just silly.
I was talking about memory usage, not the rest of the stuff. Yes, Fedora uses as much RAM as Ubuntu.
Ah, that being the case, you’re also somewhat wrong. For the most part, Fedora actually uses a bit more RAM and resources than Ubuntu.
And when I installed Chromium from the command line as a deb, it OVERWROTE my wish, and installed Chromium as a snap too.
This right here is my issue with Ubuntu. A huge part of Linux for me is that I am in control of my OS and machine. If I use apt to install a package, it’s because I want the .deb version. I absolutely don’t need my OS telling me “I know what you asked for, but I’m going to give you the snap version anyway”.
I could see snaps being preferred over .debs in the Software app, sure (though they shouldn’t be the only option). But replacing apps in a command line tool is garbage.
As far as the software app goes, I like how Mint handles it: it clearly marks what’s a system install and what’s a Flatpak, and if both are available it makes it easy to select which one you want. At no point does it try to hide or obfuscate it.
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.
Just wanted to add something for future reference of anyone reading your post: after Canonical did this, LXD was forked by Linux Containers into a new project named Incus.
Yeah, Incus FTW!!
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.
I think Ubuntu made sense back in the day when Debian wasn’t as user-friendly.
This is a very good point.
When Ubuntu launched, it was a big moment for linux. Before then, setting up a linux GUI was a lot of pain (remember setting modelines for individual monitors and the endless fiddling that took - and forget about multiple monitors). Ubuntu made GUI easy - it just worked out of the box for most people. It jumped Linux forwards as a desktop a huge way and adoption grew a lot. They also physically posted you a set of CDs or a DVD for free! And they did a bunch of stuff for educational usage, and getting computers across Africa.
That was all pretty amazing at the time and all very positive.
But then everyone else caught up with the usability and they turned into a corporate entity. Somewhere along the way they stopped listening to their users, or at least the users felt they had no voice, and a lot more linux distros appeared.
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.
I love how you spelled Penguin with a q, can we Call it Linuqs too?
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.
Ubuntu really isn’t the only candidate though… Mint may not have quite as much name recognition, but I don’t think it’s that far off, and it has pretty much all of the benefits of Ubuntu without the issues.
Mint just works.
And I absolutely think it’s justified to call Canonical out for things like quietly redirecting apt to install snaps instead or throwing up scare messages to make people think they’re insecure if they don’t pay for a subscription or adding unnecessary packages to the minimal install image that’re only useful for paid subscribers but call home regardless
Canonical has been toxic and getting worse, not calling them out is basically telling them it’s okay for them to treat the community the way they have.
Fair points. Admittedly I use a tiling window manager so I never see most of these problems.
My basic concern is with fragmentation. IMO many techies just don’t grasp how forbidding Linux is to normal people. Or the importance of reputation in people’s choice to take the leap. It’s all but priceless. Ubuntu-bashing has always struck me as a case of an elite group that prefers to split hairs rather than to take the win of getting extra users of FOSS. Idealism vs pragmatism, basically.
Anyway, I’m repeating myself. If you think that normies have heard of Mint already and that it won’t go away next year, then fine. The important thing is to get them to take the leap. They can always change distro later, the second time is much less forbidding.
But why move people from Microsoft to another company that is implementing more and more user-hostile “features”, when there are alternatives like Mint? If all the new Linux users are herded towards Canonical, it’s just giving them even more power to extract profits in the future.
It’s far easier to have them start with a community-led project on the same basis. Imagine Ubuntu being enshittified and forked - how should they decide which fork to use, and how can they know it will still exist in a couple of years?
Yes yes, these are good points. To be clear, IMO Debian is the ideal Ubuntu replacement. They have the pedigree, the credible claim to be the Universal OS. But have you seen Debian’s website? No way. Hopefully that will change one day.
Debian is amazing, but you’re right that they are far from noob-friendly. I recently switched to Fedora due to the fast availability of new packages (e.g. KDE Plasma 6.1 with fixed Nvidia drivers), and even the arguably easiest option - Ublue images - had some issues I wouldn’t have been able to fix without deep Linux experience.
But there definitely has been a lot of progress over the last couple of years, and I’m sure that will continue. We just have to be mindful of not participating in creating the next Microsoft. Ubuntu is already seen as the default Linux distribution - the further it gets entrenched, the worse for all of us.
Believe it or not, I’m being gradually won over by the arguments deployed in this discussion! Incredible but true.
Being open minded in response to new information is an automatic upvote from me
Not sure why you’d think it would go away next year since it’s been around for 18 years and adoption seems to be going up rather than down, and a lot of people have switched to recommending it for new converts rather than Ubuntu
I don’t think that many normies have heard of Mint, but I don’t think that many have heard of Ubuntu either.
Fragmentation is a concern but it’s an unavoidable side effect of an open community with many people and opinions
Fair enough, and perhaps you’re right. Personally I’m reassured when a for-profit company backstops an open-source project. So many amateur projects turn into abandonware, an OS has to do better than that. But yes, Canonical could get into trouble too.
Personally I see not Mint but Debian as the best claimant to Ubuntu’s mantle. I just wish they would become a bit less amateurish. Maybe move towards the Wikimedia foundation model, get some serious resources, a better website and onboarding funnel, etc. Their ideological position is great, but if you want to change the world then at some point you need to behave at least somewhat like a private business.
Honestly, I feel the exact opposite when a for profit company does that, because inevitably they ask themselves the question “how can I squeeze every last dollar out of this possible?”, which is never, ever, good for the product.
Capitalist hyperfocus on short term quarter-over-quarter gains is toxic and destroys pretty much everything it touches, if not entirely then at least in quality. While I appreciate the amount of development those companies bring to the table, the moment they’re in control of the project they’ll try to find ways to profit from it at the expense of the community, and it almost always results in a poorer product.
Debian vs Mint for server, I’d agree with you, but for desktop, Mint is trying to do something Debian never really set their sights on: making it easy to use, particularly for people switching from Windows. Hell, they even have a version directly based on Debian instead of Ubuntu just in case something happens to make it so they can’t run downstream of Ubuntu with a reasonable amount of work.
I think a better model for FLOSS in general is community owned and operated foundations that get backing from companies that benefit from those projects, but which do not let those companies gain sole or majority control.
*Just to stress, everything here is just my opinions and I don’t pretend to have all the answers, just observations of the world and the impact for profit companies have had on it… For that, I pretty much never trust a for profit company to act in good faith for the benefit of anyone outside of themselves. They may do so for a time, but eventually most of them will become too focused on profit to behave as good citizens.
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.
Why not just disable the Ubuntu pro ads in the mean time?
My perspective is simple, a win is a win. If someone makes the leap to Linux, that’s a huge win, regardless of distro.
Just give him LMDE
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.
