Beginner here, what is so bad about Ubuntu? I put it on a laptop this weekend and was running and installing software faster than any Windows install I have ever done. Firefox runs fine, the Mozilla email program hooked right up with my ancient Yahoo account. Blender runs like a scalded dog. Cura and prusa run good enough. I’m arguing with Muse and Ardour a bit but expected that. Spotify runs. I’m having a good first experience. So why the hate?
I have old history with Linux and am just coming back. I did my first test build for my office to get away from the dying Windows 10/avoiding 11. I went with a basic Linux Mint cinnamon build, got our network printer and core software working. Will you let me live?
My toaster is electromechanical. No µC / mutable memory available. Not even a manual switch (turn on/off using the wall switch). So no arch there unless I swap some components. I use EndeavourOS with DWM on one of my VMs, though.
It started when they started including Amazon sponsored results in the menu search really. These days using apt occasionally will install a snap package instead of a deb. It doesn’t give people a good jumping on point and it teaches that linux is more difficult than it has to be.
They don’t really asvertise snaps in the OS per say, but they do push users to use snaps instead of .deb packages. Why? My best guess is they wanna monopozie the portable app market (Snaps, Flatpak, AppImage) and become sort of like what systemd is now - unreasonable to ask to use anything else but systemd.
Pro features ads are right there when you do apt update or apt upgrade (can’t remember which one of these, maybe both).
There is no crime. I just don’t like pushy messages or suggestions. I like using native packages. I don’t like using Snaps/Flatpaks/AppImages. Stop suggesting me to use them!
Well, yeah. It’s not actually an add, but it does say that there are pro features available (can’t remember exactly what it said). It’s just pushy, not something I’d expect to see in a Linux distro.
I don’t like either, I always use native pacakges. I repackage what is not available for the distro I currently use. It’s just simpler IMO. One pacakge manager, all apps are available system wide, so if I decide to switch accounts or someone else might wanna use my computer/laptop, no prob, just log in as Guest, do whatever, log out.
They forced Firefox’s default package into a snap recently. They did this without integrating with Gnome or common plugins like password managers. This of course broke a ton of shit out of the blue.
Then, to get Firefox off of snap, you have to do a non zero amount of config instead of giving the users a simple option at install. If you mess that config up at all, the next Firefox update just goes back to snap.
Forcing people’s primary application into an Canonical controlled packaging system is likely worse than an ad, honestly. It made it very clear to me that Ubuntu did not respect user choice like it used to, so i migrated off of it.
I bounced around to Debain and opensuse tumbleweed, but landed on pop-os. Ubuntu without snap nonsense, optional i3 tiling manager implementation, “just works.”
For the server side, ive moved to Debian. Nothing lost at all.
Is this also true for headless servers? I’ve been using Ubuntu via SSH for 15 years now and it’s always been fine for me but I’ve also never run the desktop version (for more than a few days anyway.)
I just installed it on a scavenged workstation last month to use as a media server and I didn’t notice anything unusual.
Edit:
While we’re at it, what does the hive mind think I should be using instead for turning old trash PCs into shitty servers? The only thing Lemmy has taught me so far is that Ubuntu sucks and the only truly honorable choice is to quit my job and stop speaking to my family so that I can devote my life to installing drivers on unstable Arch. Also, I’m supposed to buy some thigh-high stockings and learn to tuck apparently?
While we’re at it, what does the hive mind think I should be using instead for turning old trash PCs into shitty servers?
Void. The speed difference is unmeasurable, especially when using old equipment. Plus it still supports x86. If you’re used to the terminal, you won’t notice a difference, trust me… except a lot more speed and less RAM usage.
The only thing Lemmy has taught me so far is that Ubuntu sucks and the only truly honorable choice is to quit my job and stop speaking to my family so that I can devote my life to installing drivers on unstable Arch.
Everything works pretty much out of the box in Void. Hardware doesn’t work? Try installing some of the firmware binary blobs (firmware-intel, firmware-broadcom, etc.). Check the hardware manufacturer and model with lspci or lsusb (depending on how the hardware is connected to the PC). 99% of the time, the thing works after firmware packages are installed 👍.
Also, I’m supposed to buy some thigh-high stockings and learn to tuck apparently?
No, just be open minded to new things and have a reddit account for asking questions/getting support… cuz the Void team didn’t join the protest and their subreddit is still the official help forum for Void.
Industry standard means you can find support for it easily. Void has a wiki but you don’t find a lot of users with void knowledge. Its just something to keep in mind.
I’ve been dist updating my fileserver for a decade and noticed over the last year or so that I’m using considerably more disk space than I expected on my OS drive. I see a lot of Snap installs (which I’d rather not use), and am getting messages from apt update telling me there’s additional security packages if I switch to some Ubuntu paid subscription or something.
I don’t really care to look more into it. I’ve been meaning to rebuild the hardware anyways, and will probably install Arch or Debian.
I’ve been using it for desktop for the last 2 years and haven’t had any issues preventing me from booting (that werent self-caused). I’m actually quite impressed with how well it works, but I do have what I consider a healthy distrust of the AUR and tend to stay away unless I can’t find a solution to my problem in the official repos.
Ubuntu is good. I use it for work… maybe mostly because it is supported by Dell ( XPS line). The experience have been very stable, looks good, feels good. Maybe minor complaint about the different app formats, I find it confusing when it is not one single format, but both snap and deb packages work well. Connecting to our windows active directory was smoother than on windows 11 machines.
Ubuntu is fine as long as you avoid the default gnome. Xubuntu and kubuntu derivatives have been solid daily drivers for years now. Plenty of online support.
Emphasis on it was. It started to go downhill with Amazon integration and now we have paid security updates. They are holding back developed and available security packages for their OS!
There is no way to still recommend Ubuntu. No need to even talk about the other questionable decisions like snap.
It is a fork, meanong its like ubuntu but with the bullshit that makes ubuntu bad renoved. It is conpletly safe but if you wanna stay clear of any trace of ubuntu at all there is also a debian based version pf mint
I would recommend only community maintained distros at this point… seing as how RH and Canonical went to the dark side for some things, I’d rather not recommend something maintaned by a company.
Pop-os is likely the best ubuntu flavored OS to recommend. It has nice features like solid gaming intergration and an optional tiling manager, all without snaps.
The problem is always having the bad option being enabled by default. Not even the ads are the biggest problem. I didn’t even mention their current ads in the terminal. The problem is the same Microsoft is having now, that your keyboard input gets sent to an untrustworthy third party.
Your comment got cut off. If you wanted to dispute the paid paid claim. It is about Ubuntu Pro, that’s literally all what the basic tier is. We recently even had the case where a patch with a highish CVE rating was only available to subscribers of the service. We also verified that the same patch was already available on Debian. Even without my anecdote it should be obvious why it is bad.
Part of it is the fact that Ubuntu is an entry level sort of OS, it's been simplified down and made easy. So the sort of people who have it are often less tech-savvy, and when something does go wrong, they ask a lot of pretty basic seeming questions.
This isn't helped by some of Canonical's design choices. Nothing overt, but Ubuntu has a flavor that's distinctly Ubuntu, and knowledge of other distros is sometimes a detriment in solving problems.
Canonical is also a company that just rubs some people the wrong way. There was some data collection shit where they asked users to opt-out of collection, after installing the data collection app.
Then there's Snaps... it's their own unique take on program management. Which is a Canonical thing, reinventing the wheel so that they can have their own unique little thing. Like Mir and Unity, which were then both abandoned to the community.
It's good that the community can take over when Canonical drops something, but still...
Firefox snap doesn’t work with keepassxc browser integration and smart cards randomly, so I uninstalled the default snap on ubuntu, edited configs to make sure it didnt grab snap by default, and then install the deb Firefox.
Every single fucking time I did a distro upgrade, ubuntu uninstalled deb Firefox, rwdis the configs to automatically install snap Firefox, and then reinstalled snap Firefox.
One of the reasons I left windows was because it kept changing my default browser. How is ubuntu any better?
I started my linux journey on ubuntu 11.10. I have some real nostalgia and loyalty to that platform, but I recently gave up on it and switched to fedora because of its relentless self-promotion is snap. I feel like you’d be doing a disservice to recommend it as a gateway into Linux to someone nowadays.
Oooooh, that’d really rub me the wrong way. My wife is still on a Windows PC. She’ll ask my why certain changes she made get reverted, and my default answer is “Microsoft thinks it knows better than you”.
Canonical has a long history of thinking it knows better than you, but funneling everyone into their closed-source walled-garden our-way-or-the-highway gonna-charge-money-the-moment-we-figure-out-the-legality Snap Store sure if the most Microsofty.
Bad track record with their privacy invasion via their Amazon shenanigans (which Richard Stallman called the Ubuntu Spyware), the shilling of Ubuntu One cloud and now Ubuntu Pro subscriptions that are reminiscent of Microsoft’s shilling of Microsoft accounts and OneDrive, Snap telemetry…
Fair enough. I guess it depends how you look at it. I was thinking in terms of UX, in which case it’d be Mint Cinnamon or anything running KDE Plasma that’d be the Windows of the Linux world.
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