You must log in or # to comment.
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.
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
That behavior fucking sucks actually
If it works for you, i literally could not care less
Best answer I’ve seen so far about this!
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
grepexists!
Ubuntu is recommended by microsoft
Damn, that amounts to corporate disparagement…
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 am still pissed at Ubuntu
As you should be.
I don’t get why anybody uses Ubuntu. Just use Debian. It’s basically more stable and functional Ubuntu, but without snaps and you don’t need an entire distro branch for different DEs.
Because you don’t have to know what to do already if you start with Ubuntu. You have to know your way around the Linux world more if you use Debian
Because it’s a popular distro. Because when you look for “how to X in linux”, there’s a 90% chance the response will be about Ubuntu. Because your workplace said so. The list goes on.
Ubuntu is Debian with lipstick so that all still applies
Yeah but everything that I named would say Ubutnu. That’s important. Until you know more, you’ll already be using Ubuntu. That’s why “anybody uses Ubuntu”.
I don’t get why anyone uses windows 7,8,8.1,11, use Linux mint (windows 10 is replaced with a distro that uses kde plasma)
I don’t get why anyone uses, my body makes my own chemicals.
I don’t get why anyone makes chemicals when they could be using my body.
Blursed. Not that I disagree.
Rant, but not at you.
Well I would use Debian, but the last two systems I tried to install it on hung at some point in the install process. I tried multiple times, multiple downloads, multiple versions (across multiple months!), and these are two separate machines from two different vendors.
Debian is fine on my server boxes, but fuck me it’s dogshit in a consumer environment. One of those laptops has - and is an absolute necessity to have working - WWAN. I tried over a dozen distros, from ‘easy and popular’ to ‘obscure and edge-case’. Ubuntu (actually Kubuntu, I like KDE) was literally the only distro to 1) boot, 2) install, and 3) have working WWAN (after fucking with the fcc-unlock shit and filling my carrier details). Nothing, literally nothing else could do this simple task.
Linux is great, they say. It’s easy. It’s simple to install and use. It puts you in control. These are ideas that the Linux community wants to believe, that I want to believe, but it’s just not. Given the right circumstances, with the right hardware, and the right use-case, it’s good. Stray anywhere off the beaten path and unless you’re a veteran *nix sysadmin who values their time as $0, sometimes you’re just fucked. I would know, I’ve been using various distros on and off for 20 years. It’s still bad. I don’t understand how, but here we are.
I don’t like Ubuntu for a few reasons, but in my experience, the situation sucks the least when you use it. Sometimes - see above WWAN bullshit - it’s the only thing that works.
And that’s fucking bullshit, but it’s a fact. And even interested users, who like to tinker, have a limit to what they will put up with before throwing in the towel and using what works.
Ubuntu user here. Swapped away from Debian in its early days when Ubuntu made a real effort to stay current with the desktop environment (even coordinating their releases after GNOME), and back then it mattered. Nowadays my few attempts at other distros suggest that the hardware driver situation (especially proprietary) seems better on Ubuntu, for example to get everything working on fairly new laptops.
There are of course other things I’m less happy about. The snap installs via apt drives me crazy; not that I necessarily hate the technology, but sometimes I need a non-containeraized browser (for example to run inside another container), so I need to be allowed to choose what is being installed.
I despise ubuntu solely because of snap
may I introduce you to ubuntu pro spamming your apt-get these days? You’re welcome
Ubuntu in ~2015 was peak Linux (for me). Everything worked flawlessly with zero bugs, even printers. It’s been downhill ever since with the exception of Steam Proton, but even then I’ve had more bugs with Steam in the past couple years then I did in 2013.
I can’t tell if this in-fighting on Linux flavors is in good humor or just snobby opinions.
false dichotomy. Sometimes people justifiably dislike something for reasons beyond elitism (e.g. Canonical is a for-profit corporation that muddies the waters of FOSS), but it’s also not just playful bants.
Also, as with every opinionated topic: do your own research and think critically. Don’t hate Ubuntu until you have tried it and have investigated those who maintain it. Don’t praise it until you do so either.
I don’t care if you come to a different conclusion than me, as long as you didn’t just function on the “wisdom of the crowd”
Like most things in life, it’s somewhere in the middle. Some of the criticism is factual and valid. Some, a matter of taste (mostly relating to GNOME). Some arises from negative personal experience. Some is just elitist bluster.
The best thing to do is to be rational and critical. Never dismiss an opinion outright without separating the truth from the bullshit.
I think it’s just elitism. The worst example is Chris Titus making a video where he explains why you shouldn’t use Ubuntu. And then proceeds to make video explaining how it’s not actually that bad and he uses it with a different DE.
But now 300K people saw that Ubuntu bad for stupid reasons, from a “reputable” source.
I’ve been using it for many years and I have no idea who Chris Titus is.
There’s no reason to use Ubuntu over Debian, especially since Bookworm included non-free firmware in installation media by default.I think you’re far too gone if you genuinely believe there’s no need for Ubuntu.
Ubuntu has its own kernel, they have a security team making patches specifically for Ubuntu, there’s a tool that detects any drivers your device needs and downloads them for you, and their GNOME implementation is the best I’ve seen. I also like the new software centre in 24.04, displaying both apt and snap packages when you search for them, really fast.
And yes I know, you will tell me that you can replicate all of this on Debian. And you can replicate basically everything Debian can do on RHEL. So there’s no need for Debian. Ans there’s no need for RHEL since…
If there really was no point in using Ubuntu, people wouldn’t use it. And yes this applies to Windows as well. Users aren’t braindead idiots. If there is a much better alternative that suits their needs they will use that instead.
Edit: Also free 10 year support for non-commercial use.
Debian has its own kernel, and security team, in fact as Ubuntu is downstream of Debian they get the full benefit of Debian’s security patches (yes Canonical maintains their own kernel, but the vast majority of other packages are pulled from Debian’s repositories), fwupd isn’t unique to Ubuntu, KDE has been combining update managers into Discover for ages, not everybody likes Gnome.
You’re saying “replicate” like these are all things Ubuntu did first and everyone else is copying them. That’s ignorant at best and disingenuous at worst.It may surprise you to see how many Debian contributors are doing so on Canonical’s payroll.
That’s not what I said. I didn’t claim that Ubuntu invented the idea of a software store. I just said that they add a lot of value to Debian. So Ubuntu’s existence is perfectly justified. And replicating their setup takes time. Especially how their gnome is set up. i have a script that turns vanilla Gnome on any distro into one that looks like Ubuntu’s, so I know.
Is Linux Mint useless as well? It just preconfigures Debian/Ubuntu to be more user friendly. Anyone can do that on their own.
Interestingly, Mint strips away several things that Ubuntu enforces, like their Gnome setup and Snaps entirely, removing most of the “value” added by Canonical.
More interestingly is that Linux Mint offers a Debian version, sidestepping Ubuntu completely.It’s fine if you like Ubuntu’s default Gnome setup. That’s the point of having multiple distros. It’s fine if you like Snaps. It’s not fine to force everyone into your ecosystem or enforce your choices on others. If you don’t think that both of those things are true of Canonical, go try to install the .deb version of Firefox.
If you don’t think that both of those things are true of Canonical, go try to install the .deb version of Firefox.
I opened a 24.04 VM just for fun. I cosplayed a regular user who discovered that his snap version of firefox isn’t working well.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux
I copied and pasted the commands from there, to add mozilla’s repo and downloaded firefox from there. Then I went into Ubuntu’s new GUI app store and clicked Uninstall next to Firefox. Super hard stuff. Walled garden with walls so tall I can’t see their end.
Good for you
