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Beginner's Guides for Switching to Linux?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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@curiousgoo @WR5 "You would want to avoid Ubuntu, and installing anything through Snap or PPA repositories if it ever comes up in your searches."
Snaps have improved greatly and there's nothing to stop people from using Flatpak instead. Also, it's not clear why you suggested not using PPA repositories, there are risks, but there are advantages too. Ubuntu has a huge support community, I've been using Ubuntu happily since 2007, tried many other distros, but always go back.
Why would you recommend Canonical/Ubuntu to new users when there are better distros without proprietary snap stores you have to work around.
Ubuntu is a good and stable distro, the community is great and it's good that you feel at home with it. But that doesn't make it an obvious choice for beginners when there are simply better alternatives for them - talking mainly about Mint.
Mainly from a security standpoint PPAs are something I would want to avoid.
I've not used Snap since I tried it out a couple of years ago, it wasn't as good as Flatpak in terms of performance, and there were concerns which got highlighted like it's entirely proprietary and hosted by Canonical only, I heard Snap was being forced even when you would want through system packages, and something about forced updates.
I get why Flatpak is better in terms of sandboxing each application, but I personally prefer to use system packages wherever I can.