ubuntu is an excellent base, but there’s no reason to use it over other distros based on it. it does nothing better than others and forces snaps on you to the point of not even having flatpak installed by default unlike almost every other distro that is even remotely modern.
Meh, I tend to install snap on the non-Ubuntu distros I use. I also think it does a lot of things better, namely “not making me think about my OS when I don’t want to.” Of course, Kubuntu does that better than Ubuntu does.
The other four distros they use are Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Gobuntu and Mythbuntu.
Ubutu sucks really bad. I installed it checks notes 17 years ago and I didn’t even get internet running out of the box. Fedora 41 is just so much better and I can’t see how anyone can argue with that.
Yes, Fedora 41 is undoubtedly better than a 17 year old version of Ubuntu.
I believe that was the joke
Nothing wrong with Ubuntu.
Plenty wrong with Ubuntu.
If you use it wrong, sure. There’s a use for almost anything; just gotta figure out what’s appropriate.
Ubuntu is perfect for my non-technical, 76 year old father to run his own plex server where I don’t have to help too much.
I like Ubuntu, use it as my main laptop os, and main server’s os for a production system that’s been upgraded through 3 LTS versions without issue. Three.
I don’t think windows can do that, at all.
Have you ever upgraded the Ubuntu laptop? Cause that’s my main gripe with Ubuntu. Server upgrades work, desktop upgrades never did for me.
Have you ever upgraded the Ubuntu laptop? Cause that’s my main gripe with Ubuntu. Server upgrades work, desktop upgrades never did for me.
I wonder about this. I have been running Ubuntu on one of my laptops for years, and updated it several times withouth hitch. All the way from around 18.10 to 22.04 (non-lts, so I upgraded to every release) until the laptop was replaced.
Usually the breakage happens if one has tons of shitty third-party repos and thus will get package conflicts when upgrading. And those are solved by removing/replacing all software installed from those repos and then after upgrade reinstalling them again if needed.
I started my PC on Ubuntu 16 and upgraded it through the years alll the way up to 24. Never had an issue. Mainly use it for plex and for Dolphin emulator (for the kids)
Well I haven’t used Ubuntu in quite a while, so my anecdote is probably just way outdated. But now there are so many other good offerings I see no reason to come back.
I can’t speak for plain Ubuntu, but I’ve got desktops running both Kubuntu and KDE Neon that have been upgraded version to version for over a decade now. (Ok I lie. The Kubuntu one is a laptop.)
Everything I don’t like is Reddit
Where’s the lie?
Not sure yet but the fact that the only word your username doesn’t contain is “correct” I’m pretty suspicious already… /s
There’s no way I’d survive lemmy with the first word being correct in my username so I had to truncate the xkcd password.
Canonical deserves most of the critics they get.
Ubuntu users on the other hand don’t deserve even the slight amount of critic they get for just… Using Ubuntu. like, at least they use Linux, we should be encouraging them to keep using it.
I have my own criticism of Canonical, but most of what I hear from the anti-Ubuntu crowd isn’t even grounded in reality.
My favourite one recently was that upstart was Canonical NIHing systemd.
Didn’t upstart show up in jaunty jackalope? I don’t recall systemd being all that big back then. Also, jaunty booted in 30s to desktop on a 4200rpm spinning rust IDE drive, Intel m processor. In my book they succeeded there but yeah, the attitude they have about contributing to current projects is bullshit.
NIHing?
Not Invented Here. Basically, reinventing the wheel just so they can have full control of a project.
Not Invented Here-ing? lol
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Q: what does
apt install firefoxdo? Surely it uses apt to install Firefox, right??? A: The command gets highjacked by snap, which promptly crashed and hangs.Ran into this just a few hours ago, made the mistake of suggesting Ubuntu as a sane default (instead of debian or something else), never making that mistake again hopefully.
Mint fixes that. Based on Ubuntu, it intentionally disables Snap, and all apt commands actually use apt.
Or yes, just straight up use Debian if you don’t mind older apps outside Flatpaks.
You can also install Linux Mint Debian Edition which isn’t based on Ubuntu at all.
Note that on the negative side it inherits most of the issues of Debian, including extremely old packages.
Also, Debian 12 finally got very user-friendly enough to the point I would recommend it over LMDE.
That’s true, but if you want you can change to testing repos. I still prefer it over vanilla Debian due to polish. I find even using Cinnamon DE in Debian it’s just rougher around the edges than Mint.
Fair enough - if you’re a fan of Cinnamon, LMDE will always be a bit more polished. I can see your use case :)
This is the way. Debian net install. Or even better, boot over iPXE, ephemeral kernel in RAM with only backups and static binaries written to disk. Snapshotting handled by BTRFS
Except I just uninstalled Mint’s default Firefox because whatever additional theming they did to my boy fucked up the right click context menu. FF is now flatpak.
I’m pretty sure Mozilla encourages use of the flatpak. Flatpak FF is definitely the way to go.
Firefox isn’t in the repos of Debian, so any derivative (derivative (derivative)) distro must deal with that in some way.
What does
apt install firefoxdo in Debian?package »firefox« has no installation candidateFirefox isn’t in Debian’s repository, cause it moves too fast for Debian’s release cycle and is too complicated for their security team.
Debian instead offersfirefox-esr
Ubuntu instead offersfirefoxsnapSo would you prefer they just remove the
firefoxpackage from new releases without offering an upgrade path?Here’s a thought: Before installing packages you don’t understand, go to the Firefox site and follow their instructions which work fine on Ubuntu and doesn’t install snap.
I’m not a fan of snap either, but with all software, people need to RTFM. Not do the dumb thing and then cry on the Internet seeking hive mind rage when the dumb thing happens.
I’ve followed those directions, only to find snap firefox was reinstalled a few months later.
Switched to Debian, much happier.
Usually I hate when people ditch an entire distro because they don’t understand or refuse to understand its quirks, but…
Switched to Debian
At least there was a happy ending.
Where was I refusing to understand its quirks? After several years of using snap-based Firefox, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t like the snap based installation of firefox. So, I followed the directions to go back to a deb-based Firefox installation. But Kubuntu “helpfully” reverted it a few months later, and that cycle repeated a few times.
I specifically requested the deb-based installation and it ignored my wishes. I know what operating system that reminds me of, and it isn’t Linux.
I’m sure someone will tell me I’m wrong for wanting a .deb-based Firefox and that snaps are better anyway. Even if that’s true (I don’t care to argue), I chose a path and Kubuntu overrode my choice. Silently, too.
I’ll also note that I started using Kubuntu back in 2008 or so, and stopped last year. I used it on both my desktop and laptop machines. So, it wasn’t like I just tried it for a few hours and got upset; I was a long time user that was quite familiar with how it worked. For most of that time, I was really happy with Kubuntu, but having it override my explicit configuration was extremely frustrating.
Others can continue to use it, that’s fine with me. This isn’t a personal attack on anyone’s choices.
I think expecting people running Ubuntu to RTFM is a longshot. The people installing it want an experience where they don’t want to put any effort into learning how things work. If they did they probably would run something else.
I personally think Ubuntu sucks, thats why I always reccomend other distros to people starting :3
Productivity: Debian (you dont need up to date packages if all you do is edit documents)
Gaming: Pop_OS (especially when Cosmic releases)
I use Kubuntu. No complaints here. Im also not super well versed in linux and my husband installed it for me so that I had something that was well supported for gaming and streaming/vtubing.
(I dont remember what he uses, he switches it weekly)
Criticizing Ubuntu is hivemind? Wow. Now do Systemd critics.
SystemD critics formed as a cult of anti-personality. This both describes what they are (people with the opposite of a personality) and what they are about (hating that shithead Lennart Pöttering, who is a German man who grew up in South America to his German parents if you’re picking up what I’m putting down*).
Per the wiki, Lennart is well known for being a weird dick about things in the Linux ecosystem and using market power and dominance, rather than a more collaborative or tech-first approach, to push his and only his ideas forward. This rubs people the wrong way, especially in a community predominantly built on the opposite ideals, leading to the universal hatred of everything he’s ever built. But it makes creating distros easier so people deal with it.
Today, he spends his time working for Microsoft and refusing to acknowledge vulnerabilities in his overly complex standards-incompliant code.
SystemD haters are of course just jealous of his ability to be completely free of self-doubt.
*To be clear I have no evidence of this and it’s probably not true, but it’s 2025 let’s be honest nobody cares if it’s true or not
Problem with Poettering is that he was right, but he was a dick about it. Like Rick Sanchez.
Well Ubuntu os not that bad if you just stick to the ecosystem. I mean… Not everyone… Pffft… Wants to… HmmHMpf… Babysit… Ahahahah I can’t…
Just install Mint
No thanks. The Mint maintainers keeping provable misinformation in their documentation despite being called out on it makes me distrust them.
citation needed
https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.html
Snap on the other hand, only works with the Ubuntu Store.
It also works with any other distribution and signing mechanism you want, including signing the snap files yourself and distributing them via GitHub releases if you prefer. Snaps installed like that won’t get magically replaced with store snaps either.
Nobody knows how to make a Snap Store and nobody can.
There’s documentation available online, and it’s known to be usable because someone did implement their own minimal store. The project kinda died out of lack of interest though.
I can’t find the issue I filed years ago about this (and more). They have at least made the page less filled with emotionally-charged language, though.
I don’t know why we’re still doing snap discourse in 2025. I’m going to be harsh and direct.
It has a proprietary server backend. This is objectively true. Theoretically you can build an open source backend, but nobody has completed a full implementation of it.
If you don’t care about that, you can use Ubuntu, nobody is stopping you. You don’t need other people’s approval. Which is good, because of the people who disapprove, you’re never going to get their approval until it’s actually open sourced. You’re not going to convince anybody here to stop caring that it’s proprietary. So just get over it and use your own operating system without airing your insecurities online about it.
I never said Canonical’s store isn’t proprietary. I said the statements in Mint’s anti-snap screed are factually incorrect.
What irritates me is all the “lol ubuntu sux” posts showing me that the quality of the discourse is declining. There are valid criticisms, but there are also invalid criticisms. And the recent string of anti-Ubuntu memes has been clearly in the latter. So yeah, I will mock those, and it’s nothing to do with insecurities. Are you sure you’re not just projecting?
The counter to low-quality “Ubuntu sux” posts is not low quality “nuh uh it’s actually super epic!!!” posts, but that’s all we ever get. I’ve seen this pattern for probably fifteen years now, and it’s exhausting. If you don’t care about the criticisms and want to keep using it, then keep using it. More power to you. I probably use things you think are garbage. Hell, Windows users think we both use garbage. I’m just tired of people desperate to justify their choices like they need to “prove” something to everyone who disagrees.
There are plenty of high quality takedowns of Ubuntu, but so rarely are there high quality defenses of it, generally because the criticisms are correct. Nobody ever talks about what makes Ubuntu good, not even Ubuntu users. Arch users will yap your ear off about ArchWiki and AUR. I’ll evangelize Nix to anybody who will listen as the future of advanced Linux management. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed fans will not shut up about rollbacks and bleeding edge software. Fedora users… well, Fedora users are usually busy out there actually doing productive things with their time instead of pointless internet squabbles.
But what is Ubuntu strong at? I genuinely have no idea. All I ever see Ubuntu users say is that it “sucks the least”, in some vague indescribable way. That it’s not as bad as everyone says, that Snaps are actually fine, etc. Always on the defensive. If Ubuntu is actually good, somebody needs to get out there and make a case for what it’s good at, besides being featured as the default instructions for running proprietary third-party software.
Okay, I’ll start. Ubuntu is good at providing a way to test and build packages for platforms you don’t necessarily have access to, for free. And because Launchpad does snap builds, that extends to those too. I have in the past used Launchpad builds to generate debugging information that solved an architecture-specific bug I wasn’t able to reproduce in QEMU and which would otherwise have remained a mystery due to my lack of access to 6 figures worth of mainframe. And I didn’t have to be an Ubuntu maintainer or anything for that. I just had to have a free Launchpad account.
Just by how the documentation is written, you should understand who’s its target audience: it’s clearly for new users that want to understand their philosophy.
Is it oversimplified? Yes.
Does this mean it’s misinformation? If I can oversimplify, then no it’s not.It’s not oversimplified - it’s exaggerating to the point of misinformation, and it’s written more like a political screed than like documentation.
I don’t see it that way but I’m not gonna argue, since I have no horse in this race. I’m not an ubuntu hater, I actually think it’s both a good gateway to the FOSS world and a good permanent solutions for those who don’t mind a corporate approach to linux. I just find it funny to take random punches at it once in a while…
Humour at Ubuntu’s expense is fine, as long as it’s good natured and actually making valid criticisms about it. The problem is that low effort “lol ubuntu bad” memes don’t tend to be either of those. Moreover, documentation is not an appropriate place to make questionable political claims.
Yeah, I don’t get the hate and intentional division being sowed there.
I’m not a fan of Ubuntu since they went all Thanos Snap (the final straw was replacing
debpackages inaptwith snap stubs), but I can applaud that they’re using Linux.Just seems like low effort, pointless gatekeeping to me.
Yeah I never understood the hate but today I did read a comment saying Canonical (the company that develops Ubuntu) had injected some amazon telemetry into one of the search functionalities, that and using Snap is what makes some people shit on it. I didn’t verify the telemetry thing FYI.
I can definitely understand people being upset at telemetry injections.
The above is to say I don’t think it’s exclusively people gate keeping, dome people have legitimate issues with it.I haven’t seen people shit on mint a lot and it’s an easy distro. Honestly most people are super supportive of mint. That being said there is definitely some amount of gatekeeping.
That was the point where I stopped using it.
They included a global search function which in a default installation sent your search terms to Amazon and returned search results from them.
It also sent them to a web search (with real time results while you typed, including image previews). So it was possible to get shown NSFW images accidentally inside your OS, without opening a browser.
It was just really bad design, and a heavy-handed attempt of monetizing their OS.Of course that could all be removed with a bash one-liner, but it showed where Canonical was headed,
Canonical is even putting advertisements into
aptffs. They are insufferable:
I get the annoyance around tribalism/elitism, some people in other posts pointed out the fact that silly dramas and bad/dumb linux takes scares out new users but tbh I feel more confortable with a vocal community, even a silly one. Feels healthier and more alive to me than a mute and apathetic one.
If something goes wrong, if something displeases someone we will hear about it, people will get angry, at the worst we get a nice entertainment to watch and a good laugh, at the very best it leads us to some nice changes.
It’s something I grew to like about Linux, even the silliness of it all, even how you can’t really tell if people are dead serious or not about the stupidest things.
Amen brother. I’m really hoping a lot of these gotchas get ironed out in some way as more people start choosing Linux over windows. I would be really happy to see some smoother experiences in the coming year or years. Don’t get me wrong, things are a bajillion times better than ten years ago, but there’s still a ways to go yet.
I switched to fedora cold turkey a few months ago and honestly its a better experience than windows by far. As a bonus games that work poorly or don’t work on the os they were made for, work on linux now.
That’s really cool to hear! I had a bad Fedora experience on my surface pro 4, it was silverblue - an immutable distro. Not a great start, so I think I’ll be giving it another shot in it’s natural glory some time this year.
i started with Ubuntu. i think it’s fair to respect the distro that works towards getting any rando started
Stock Ubuntu is not the only and possibly not the most sane choice for newbies. An uncomfortably different UI with relatively complicated customization, a lot of catches, myriad of package sources, and little progress in general usability make it only preferable in terms of binaries selection and amount of accumulated knowledge specifically on Ubuntu.
Linux Mint is the most sane pick for an average newbie, though mileage will vary and other distros can be better entry points for some. For example, what clicked with me against all warnings was Manjaro, and if not for that, I could still be sitting on Windows today.
Nowadays, I use Fedora KDE Spin, though if a sane Arch-based alternative arises (think Manjaro done right), I would consider going back.
though if a sane Arch-based alternative arises (think Manjaro done right)
If ever you get the Arch itch, check out EndeavourOS. It’s basically vanilla Arch but with a GUI installer and basic defaults/programs preconfigured. They use the main Arch repos, so no weirdness with AUR stuff like in Manjaro.
I tried Endeavour and Garuda, and they’re bad for me exactly the way Arch is - it’s a bit too bleeding-edge to run exactly as stable as I imagine my perfect system to be, and it’s also too easy to shoot yourself in the foot. It sure is possible to run it smoothly, but that requires a lot of user attention and consideration with updates and tools.
The premise of Manjaro is good - like, let the packets go through some testing before being delivered to a wide audience, this is pretty much common sense. Should they implement something like Chaotic-AUR, but with the delay for dependencies to catch up, AUR could actually work for most of its purposes. Combine that with more careful considerations here and there, and you might get your perfect Arch.
That said, I strongly prefer distros based on Debian (except Ubuntu and its derivatives) or Arch, as they are the only major community-driven options that are not exotic and obscure. Debian is too slow, Arch is too fast, and there’s little in between, which is my personal frustration. For now, the Arch edge was closer to my spirit, but the only sane premise on that front, Manjaro, is essentially even less stable than plain Arch in the long run. So…neither works, and I reluctantly go Fedora.
Your entire comment is screaming for OpenSUSE Slowroll.
Slowroll is certainly on my radar, but as things stand, there are two things that are stopping me:
- It’s still experimental and it does break, which ruins the premise of stability
- It is not community-driven, which, while not being a total dealbreaker, is considered by me to be negative
Thanks for the suggestion, though!
I’ve used Gentoo on my main desktop for decades.
Anything else in the house gets Kubuntu on it, 'cause ain’t nobody got time for that.
I’ve never considered Gentoo as an unironic daily driver on desktops - more like embedded systems/learning the ropes of Linux kinda thing.
What made you choose Gentoo in particular?
Not OP, but it’s amazing to choose which parts of your software don’t enter compilation at all.
Also it’s rock solid, had fewer issues than Lubuntu, can use OpenRC or systemd.
But I haven’t learned as much about Linux as I hoped. The distro just works, and I love everything about it.
I see, thank you!
