Anecdotal, but I have had bad experiences using Ubuntu. I know it’s not a bad distro, and that it contributes a lot (especially historically), but it’s the other distros that take their contributions and add to it that I find worth using or recommending, or sometimes an unrelated distro. It’s the sort of thing I might give money to, but I’ll never want to use directly.
I think this is what people mean when they say it’s bad - that distros that take what Ubuntu made and add their own touch seem more user friendly.
I was pretty neutral towards Ubuntu, up until an automatic system update removed my deb Firefox and replaced it with the snap version, even though I specifically set the apt repo to a higher priority.
The entire reason I left Windows is because I don’t want (for example) Edge shoved down my throat after every update, and yet Ubuntu has gone and done the exact same thing with snaps.
After literal hours of fighting, the only solution I found was to fully disable automatic updates. With Pop OS I have all the benefits of Ubuntu, but I also get a company (System76) that does cool stuff and doesn’t try shoving snaps down my throat.
Yea, that’s pretty much the reason I always go for mint, when I need something that just works
Ooohh yeah fuck that. That…doesn’t sit well with me at all
I learned better in 2012 when they tried to put an Amazon search bar in their start menu, the same thing people are complaining about with windows today.
If I wanted to use corposhit I would have stayed with windows.
I’d love ubuntu, my only real problem with it is it’s owned by a company and not community backed
Try Pop!_OS if you love Ubuntu
Isn’t Pop OS just System76’s spin on Ubuntu?
Technically, yeah. However, Pop isn’t their product, their hardware is.
They do their absolute best to create great software like coreboot and Pop and keep it all truly open source. They also innovate the space with things like COSMIC DE (which imo is phenomenal already, even in its early alpha state).
They only offer software support and help for customers of their hardware but that seems reasonable to me. The community is big and helpful so it makes sense for S76 to refer non-customers there.
I’ve been using Pop as a daily driver for more than 3 years now and a few months ago, I started to think about switching. Until recently, it was stuck on 22.04 with no clear indicator as to when 24.04 would be released. I decide that I was gonna wait for October and if i still felt that way, I was gonna switch. As of today, I haven’t switched and since the first alpha release of COSMIC and the recent alpha release of Pop 24.04, I’ve never even thought about it.
24.04 is fast, stable and works incredibly well with COSMIC. COSMIC is insane for productivity and has fixed almost all UX gripes I’ve ever had with GNOME and KDE. It’s truly amazing and a must-try imo.
It’s the only distro I’ve liked for the last 2 years.
How is it with NVIDIA gaming?
my first linux distro was pop os, and i had nvdia then, i did not even know nvdia had problems on linux. its that good.
The best from what I’ve heard, except bazzite maybe
Really? Bazzite is that one that looks like steam OS I believe yes?
I think you can also use it as a normal desktop but it does look like steamos
Kubuntu is boring because it just works
Canonical wants to be Microsoft so goddamn bad they can taste it
Canonical is trying to be Redhat for the rest of the world, like SUSE
By doing what exactly? Snap’s server being proprietary doesn’t affect anyone at all, what else?
If
apt-get
detects that a package you told it to install is also available as a snap it’ll silently install that instead and you have to edit the Linux equivalent of the registry to get it to not do thatNot entirely true. I experienced it with curl. Snap of it exists and it mostly works. But
apt install curl
will install regular curl. From what I’ve seen on my Ubuntu it installs a snap only if the apt package is set to install a snap. Such as Firefox. It doesn’t exist in Ubuntu’s repo anymore, only as a metapackage.
Other than snaps, gnome, and the fucking painful default taskbar it’s pretty good yeah. It just works™️.
I hate GNOME lol, I wouldn’t be using Linux today if I had stuck with Ubuntu. If you like it, that’s cool. I respect it, I just can’t stand using it myself.
… And Canonical…
I’m a very happy Manjaro user and have been for more than 5 years.
Let’s just say it doesn’t seem to be a popular opinion around here!
I’ve been curious as to what makes Manjaro better than something like EndeavourOS or just straight up Arch?
I’m too old to say that one distribution is better than another one. The selling points : I have no admin at all to do, and no trouble for 5+ years, although I’m pretty sure I would have had the same results with Arch or Endeavour. I like their default configuration for KDE plasma, and I like their software update workflow. If you’re happy with your distribution, keep it 😁
nothing lol
Nice of you to illustrate OP’s point 🤣
it uses snap (less packages and security than flatpak), app.armor (less secure than Selinux), has a history of anti-privacy integrations (like sending user keystrokes to amazon), still collects some user data. Tumbleweed is better. Great kde implementation, strong security, a lot of cutting-edge software, stability, beginner-friendly
False (except for less packages, that’s true), false, the amazon incident was a honest mistake and only applied to the search bar in unity (even more specifically the amazon lense), and no data is being collected unless you enable it during the install. https://youtu.be/rdPt8WB1lZw
Also are you serious? A rolling release distro with automated package builds being more secure? Last time I checked Tumbleweed got affected by the XZ exploit.
sending user keystrokes to Amazon
That’s a very serious allegation to make without citing any source.
Still collects some user data
Someone has already pointed out, no data is collected unless the user opts in. But, my question is what’s wrong with collecting anonyomized telemetry about most used hardware and most used/unused software features? It helps developers make better decisions.
when i want to aid development with writing down my hardware, i should be able to send them, not they should collect it from me.
Most distros let you either opt-in or opt-out of it though. It’s really not as big of a deal as people make it out to be. Besides, the “general” population switching to Linux doesn’t really care about anonymized telemetry.
Discouraging people to not use a certain distro due to its optional and anonymized telemetry, is foolish.
idk but i’d switch to linux for absolutely zero telemetry, or as little as physically possible, while still maintaining a good gaming experience. That’s the reason i’m planning to buy an amd build, not nvidia, i don’t want propertiary drivers even
If you’re going to shill a corpo distro, at least shill a decent one like fedora.
Lmao. As if corporate operating systems were bad. What makes RedHat that much better tho? I want to know. From what I’ve seen they are both bringing a lot of value to the FOSS space.
- Fedora makes very minimal changes to downstream. The gnome experience on fedora is the experience the devs intended, for better or worse.
- It often experiments with new technologies. It was the first to ship pulseaudio out of box. And then again for pipewire. And if it wasn’t the first to install wayland by default, it probably was the first to stop shipping XOrg out of box.
- It doesn’t install snaps instead of native packages when you run rpm install
- It’s also Linus Torvald’s distro of choice if that’s worth anything
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In my humble opinion, the stock experience on Gnome sucks. No desktop icons, no dock, no minimize maximize buttons, no app indicators. I only use Gnome because of the changes Ubuntu made to it, which can be replicated on other distros with a script.
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That’s valid. Ubuntu has shipped with wayland by default since some time ago but wasn’t the first one. They don’t seem to adopt the latest technology as fast. Which I like. Even the new LTS still gives you the option to use X.org in GDM.
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Also true. If you don’t like Snaps and aren’t comfortable with more and more packages being replaced by them, Ubuntu isn’t the distro to use. I don’t mind the metapackages installing snaps instead at all honestly. The terminal clearly says it’s installing a snap. And from my experience they work great. I was recently using wsl and needed yt-dlp. I went for the snap right away and it worked great.
In fact the only broken snaps I have encountered so far are OBS and curl (which can’t access root directories, making it useless for the script I needed)
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Mfw I switch from windows to Ubuntu and I start seeing bad stuff about it
It is indeed a good distro and one of the main distros that brings innovation to the Linux world. If it works for you, then keep using it.
It’s sad because it’s a genuinely good distro. Linux wouldn’t be anywhere without it yet all I hear is people parroting the same misinformation they heard.
Linux wouldn’t be anywhere without is an incredibly shortsighted statement given that redhat has been the defacto standard in the enterprise and for (US) govt purposes
I should’ve worded that better then. Linux wouldn’t be anywhere when it comes to consumer devices like laptops and desktops. It’s possible that without Canonical someone else would’ve made a just works distro for regular people, but they were the first. As far as I know that is. I haven’t used Linux around 2004.
Hey, you should be careful around Ubuntu fans. They might just snap.
*laugh track*
arch
The cool thing about Arch is that with some learning, time and effort, you can make it function just like Ubuntu
I don’t know if serious or burn
That’s the beauty, it’s both
No, I’m not serious
Careful with that XZ package
❤️
If it works for you, i literally could not care less
Best answer I’ve seen so far about this!
The snaps bad echo chamber
Snaps bad because proprietary
Pre installed Nvidia good because propriety no wait video games!
Ubuntu’s mission was always to build bridges between the user and tech and businesses that the gnu side of Linux wouldn’t.
It’s a good just works distro that has spawned a ton of just works distros and sane server defaults. I see Ubuntu on the same level as macos.
Proprietary Nvidia drivers are seen as a necessity, not a “good thing”, which is why Nvidia was repeatedly pressured to give up the code. Open-source Nvidia drivers suck in all applications, and if you don’t need anything demanding, you probably wouldn’t have a solid Nvidia card in the first place.
Gnu side of Linux tries to change the practices used by said businesses, and the more people embrace it, the more pressured companies become to be compliant.
Any sane copyleft activist (of which there are many in the Linux world) sees this change as a betrayal; security experts and enthusiasts are also not happy about a program doing something unknown sitting on their system.
snaps bad because slow
Snaps bad because shoving updates down throats.
snaps bad because
Are they though? They were at one point, but even then I’ve not seen comparative slowness compared to the equivalent Flatpaks. In some cases I’ve seen them be slow compared to native packages, but even that seems to have all but disappeared for me.
That link includes a whole lot of old things as well as blog posts about how they sped up the performance of the Firefox snap, after which there doesn’t seem to be much, if any, further evidence of the snap being slow.
I don’t like snaps because it’s just another Canonical NIH thing. Everyone else agreed on flatpak which seems to have a good design with portals and all and being fully open.
On the other hand, you have snaps, which is being controlled by Canonical as the server component is l non-public. The packages sometimes work worse than normal debs and the flatpak version (steam being a notable example IIRC).
There is 0 motivation for me as a user to look into that. They have solved the problem in one of the worst ways possible. Even Mint, which is Ubuntu’s biggest downstream, has opted against including it by default.
In addition to all of that, Canonical also installs applications as snap when using the apt\£* command line tools.
So you have a system that is
- proprietary
- worse than the alternatives
- pushed on users even through unexpected channels
Ubuntu’s mission was always to build bridges between the user and tech and businesses that the gnu side of Linux wouldn’t.
Which bridge did they build with snaps?
It’s a good just works distro that has spawned a ton of just works distros
Which in turn have removed snaps by default and replaced the affected packages with native ones because it often didn’t “just work”
I don’t like snaps because it’s just another Canonical NIH thing. Everyone else agreed on flatpak which seems to have a good design with portals and all and being fully open.
Snaps both predate flatpak and do things that Flatpaks are not designed to do.
Canonical have also been a part of the desktop portals standard for a very long time, as they’ve been a part of how snaps do things.
Snaps both predate flatpak and do things that Flatpaks are not designed to do.
By less than a year judging by the article… and for individual applications, there was AppImage.
Snaps can do things flatpaks can’t do. Which is true but also kind of irrelevant if we’re talking about a means to distribute applications in a cross-distribution manner as opposed to a base system A/B partition solution.
Or am I misunderstanding?
The claim that snaps are a Canonical NIH thing is falsified by those two facts. Even if Canonical said “okay, we’ll distribute desktop apps with Flatpak,” that wouldn’t affect the vast majority of their ongoing effort for snaps, which are related to things that Flatpak simply doesn’t do. Instead, they’d have the separate work of making the moving target of flatpaks work with their snap-based systems such as Ubuntu Core while still having to fully maintain that snap based ecosystem for the enterprise customers who use it for things that Flatpak simply doesn’t do.
I like Snaps. They can do more than Flatpak and when packaged well they just work. Sadly some apps on Snapcraft are abandoned or they just don’t work, but the same can be said about Flathub.
Which bridge did they build with snaps?
Proprietary companies are compelled to release on Snapcraft because it gives them advantages over other packaging methods. I’m just a user but I heard Snaps are easy to work with thanks to the documentation.
In addition to all of that, Canonical also installs applications as snap when using the apt\£* command line tools.
Firefox for example isn’t even in their apt repos. So instead of throwing an error, the Firefox meta package installs the snap, and tells you it’s doing that.
But I understand that Ubuntu isn’t for you if you want to avoid snaps.
Everyone should use what suits them best. My negative opinion on snaps doesn’t mean Ubuntu shouldn’t ship it or that users shouldn’t use it. It’s Canonical’s distribution, they can put into it whatever they want for all I care, and if users are happy with it, good for them. But I can still criticize it for perceived issues. (Edit: kind of a straw man since nobody said I couldn’t, I just wanted to stress that I’m not authoritative on the matter)
But I understand that Ubuntu isn’t for you if you want to avoid snaps.
I used Ubuntu in the past, from I think 2004 or maybe 2005 to 2008, but switched away because of other issues that I don’t remember anymore, but I do remember upgrades between major versions were always pain with an Nvidia card (this was before AMD or in the beginning even ATI cards were well-usable under Linux) and I honestly just prefer rolling release nowadays. But snaps are just not at all compelling anyways.
This is a solid take.
Personally, I took snap out of my computer and burned it over a fire, but i toasted my marshmallows first, because I didn’t want snap on my marshmallows.
The only reason I don’t like snap is because useful mount information gets buried in 5 million “loop” mounts.
lsblk is fun with snaps :D
Good thing
grep
exists!