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 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
- Needing a user with sudo rights to use a system, otherwise an admin needs to login every week and do the GUI updates
- 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.
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.
Debian can be annoying if you want to install a newish version of something from the package manager. It’s why I can’t use APT to keep Rust up to date and have to use Rustup instead, for an example.
You can use distrobox with podman to get newer software. You also can use Flatpaks
You can also use a distro with more up to date packages. But not if you need Debian’s stability of course.
The benefit of Debian is that it stays the same for a long time. It can be huge timesaver
Fantastic for servers
Exactly
On Debian Testing or Unstable you don’t have to worry about that as much. Right now, I have rustc 1.80.1 from the Testing repo, just one version behind.
While I don’t disagree with you, I think it’s a bit funny that you’re bringing up hardships using apt to update software in Debian when the biggest complaint about Ubuntu is having to use snap instead of apt.
Oh I thought it was already implied that Ubuntu is shit lol
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.
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.
I agree with you that using what other “normal” people are using has a lot of value and Ubuntu is still the most popular distro by far ( even I do not like it ).
I think both Fedora and Mint are popular enough as well and a better base than Ubuntu. But that said, Ubuntu is fine.
One of the things Fedora specifically has going for it is the generally newer kernel, which has been important for me in the past.
Newer kernel matters and can actually make the distro more new user friendly for sure.
Newer packages as well which prevents you from having to find newer versions in PPAs and other places. In my view, this makes a distro less stable and harder to maintain.
In fact, I think Arch can be more stable than Ubuntu precisely because Arch users hardly ever have to look beyond the repos. I think Arch users really less on Flatpak for the same reason. In theory the AUR is no different than a PPA but it causes way fewer problems in practice ( especially conflicts ). There is something about APT as well that handles conflicts by removing stuff ( stuff you may really need ). Pacman and dnf do not seem to do that.
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.
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.
That shit of installing what it wants how it wants is MicroShit behavior.
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.
Absolutely, I daily drive Mint and it’s one of my favorite things about it!
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.
You have to explicitly grant permission to the disk because the app is sandboxed.
I forget the exact terminology but I tried putting it into the most permissive mode available. Is still could not work with external hard drives. This was several years ago so I can’t say what might have changed since then, but I did spend some time troubleshooting and at the time that functionality did not work. I’d read that it was possible in the previous version (maybe 18.04?)
Edit: Come to think of it, it might not have been as simple as “couldn’t access external drives”. It might have had something to do with how my disks were mounted and their permissions and mount points. I remember that I hit a wall at some point and further troubleshooting would have required more surgery on my system than I was willing to attempt.
Snaps call your atypical drive arrangement “removable media” so even if you saw it, it might have been counter intuitive. This is what you would’ve needed to run:
sudo snap connect filebot:removable-mediaSince 23.10 setting snap permissions has been easier in the gui.
hey. unrelated question, sorry. do any greeks still worship the olympians?
No, they’re all orthodox christians now
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.
Ub(loa)tu tries to cater to everyone whilst ending up in pleasing no one – it has too much unnecessary clutter.
started playing with ubuntu around version 6, been using it for various things ever since
honestly never got in the way of me doing what i wanted
I use Ubuntu, I’ve used Arch, Debian, Fedora, Pop and many others too. I use Ubuntu because all my hardware works out of the box. Snaps are inoffensive imo. I have just as many issues with abandoned debs or flatpaks and I usually just use whatever package is more maintained.
The most annoying thing about Ubuntu is how slow the packages are sometimes to make it to a release.
But it seems like there are other easy distros with lenient requirements that don’t try to force Snaps and ads on their users.
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
While I appreciate the utility of snaps and flatpaks for providing sandboxed, cross-platform apps, I’ve often found them slower than traditional packages. Their tendency to take up more disk space also feels inefficient, especially when system resources are sometimes precious. For these reasons, I generally prefer using apps installed directly through the system’s default package manager, which tend to offer better performance and use space more efficiently…
I just switched back to Linux a week ago (Ubuntu Studio 24.04) from windows. I used to use Linux 15 years ago and I tried a lot of distros at that time. Eventually I landed on Crunchbang which I loved dearly.
Since it’s been awhile I wanted something fairly vanilla so Ubuntu Studio felt like a good start. I was planning on switching to something else (I hear we have Crunchbang++ now) after getting used to Linux again but I have kind of settled in to Ubuntu now. It feels a little sloppy but comfortable somehow.
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.
I still run ubuntu on my main work desktop and will likely do so until I replace it with a new one as I cannot face rebuilding it at this point in time. I like its broad support, its ease of install and use, but its becoming increasingly annoying having to disable all the enforced decisions the maintainers make, such as snap, ubuntu pro ads and so on. My fear is at some point it will not be reversible
