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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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What did I miss? Ubuntu used to be the shit.
It's still good, it's just popular now so the edgelords hate it.
They basically force you to use snaps, that's why it's not good.
They also have ads in the package manager.
For me the question is rather, what's the current raison d'être for Ubuntu if you're not looking for Debian with paid support?
Granted it's been long since I've used it (I used it from 2005 or so until 2008 when I switched to Arch), but there's no really appealing quality for me there that I couldn't have with Debian. Apart from that, Canonical makes questionable decisions – snap, as others have mentioned, a total disaster in my opinion; Mir was another of their misadventures (later retrofitted into a Wayland compositor); upstart didn't turn out successful (though to give credit, it was an honest attempt at a new init system and lessons were learned); the LXD maintainer issue as of late leaves a sore taste in my mouth, plus they were always very community-unfriendly with their CLAs. And all this for what? Might as well use their upstream instead.
Ubuntu has the largest community around it, meaning you'll find help for it the fastest.
Granted, some issues are distro-agnostic, but you can't always know whether yours is, especially if you are newer to Linux.
Some issues just stem from Ubuntu itself though. Granted those aren't all and maybe not even a big portion, but they do exist. I had huge issues upgrading Ubuntu back when I used it if Nvidia drivers were installed. On Arch, it was trivial. At work, we have VMs running Ubuntu 20.04 and we were advised not to upgrade because they no longer work correctly after upgrading (these are special VMs not in our company network for testing and stuff under administration of the user with only the initial image rolled out centrally).
I can see why a new user might be attracted to using Ubuntu, and without trying to talk anyone down, my reasoning was more something for educated users who make an informed decision on which distribution to run, which is not something you can ask from a novice.
Also, while I know this isn't the best metric, Debian currently ranks above Ubuntu on Distrowatch, so interest is there, which is nice; personally I wouldn't recommend anything Debian based to experienced users but also wouldn't explicitly warn against Debian either. I think their approach of a distribution is outdated, but they're a driving force behind some innovations like reproducible builds, so it kind of evens out.
They have made quite a few questionable decisions over time and trying to push users into their own packaging format is a big no no for many. Yours is a very dumb take.
Ubuntu has gotten worse that it seams to was a few years ago. I didn't use it outside of servers. Many don't like the direction that ubuntu goes with snaps. But use whatever distro you want
Welcome to the land of freedom
Oh right I forgot all about snaps. Yeah I haven't used it as a dedicated desktop since probably 2006. It's generally all server usage in the cloud for me these days, which basically means everything is disposable and I couldn't care less about the full OS in general. I really do need to get back on Linux for personal use though. I don't really care for running VMs on windows for my self hosted stuff.
Why would anyone use Ubuntu on a server? Ubuntu is basically Debian unstable + non-free drivers that they tried to get sorta stable in 6 months. That may be ok on a desktop where you can accept some bugs in exchange for newer versions of the software. But why would you not run Debian stable on a server instead?
Maybe 10 years ago when Debian stable got really out-of-date, but that hasn't been true in a looong time. Debian releases much more frequently, much stabler, it has all the goid stuff from Ubuntu backported but none if the bad stuff.
Since I reinstall Windows (trying different versions just because) as often as I distro hop I just started using different distros in WSL. Let's me distro hop in both OSes as I want and at the same time without any kind of dual booting problems.
It's always seemed to me that Ubuntu has a pattern of going "Ick, NIH! Let's replace it!" about some important system component, then giving up on their reimplementation a few years later and moving back to an equivalent mainstream component. Upstart, Unity (third parties have taken over, but Canonical no longer develops it), Mir as an independent display server . . . There are probably more that I'm missing, since it isn't my distro. But snaps seem to me to be in the first half of that pattern. Probably they'll give up on the system in five years or so and replace it with Flatpak.
Forced Snaps is a big one. If you're not familiar, Snap is Canonical's proprietary alternative to Appimage and Flatpak. While the Snap Store is open source and can be forked or modified as needed, the backend is completely closed source, which has vexed many members of the Open Source community.
While the distribution itself is currently pretty solid, they've made questionable decisions in the past like including an amazon search function in their fork of gnome (Unity). Snap can be removed by a skilled user or someone well versed in search-fu, but their choice to have it installed by default, the be the default for package management, and to inject snaps in place of deb packages when installed via Apt, are all big red-flags given that nobody can see what is in those snaps til they're installed except for canonical.
I don't know about anyone else, but, I went from Kubuntu to Debian/KDE because I don't like seeing all the Snap-fake hard drives in lsblk.