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?
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 stand quite corrected. I learned a lot about native messaging on Ubuntu and understand where you’re coming from!
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 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?
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 🤣🤣🤣
That shit of installing what it wants how it wants is MicroShit behavior.
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.
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.
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
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.
Absolutely. I hate Ubuntu now, but Karmic Koala was my gateway drug. I was scared of partitioning so wubi meant I could still try it out.
Then Unity happened and I no longer cared for Ubuntu.
Wao, I haven’t heard of wubi for about 12 years. Is that still a thing?
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.
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.
Ubuntu isn’t terrible, there are just bad things on Ubuntu that aren’t present in other distros.
Yeah I don’t hate Ubuntu, I used it as my daily driver for years, but it did get a bit frustrating how they seem to fixate on the new ‘shiny’ thing (Unity, Mir, the whole convergent desktop thing, now Snaps) and chase after it while other things are left to stagnate, then they seem to get it to where it’s almost good, then drop it and go chasing off after something else.
Also, I find that these days there are just better options for a ‘just works’ kind of distro (like Mint or Pop!OS) so I don’t hate Ubuntu, I just have no particular need for it anymore.
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?
lol, fixed it now :P
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.
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.
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 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!
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Why not just disable the Ubuntu pro ads in the mean time?
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.
