I know there are lots of people that do not like Ubuntu due to the controversies of Snaps, Canonicals head scratching decisions and their ditching of Unity.

However my experience using Ubuntu when I first used it wasn’t that bad, sure the snaps could take a bit or two to boot up but that’s a first time thing.

I’ve even put it on my younger brothers laptop for his school and college use as he just didn’t like the updates from Windows taking away his work and so far he’s been having a good time with using this distro.

I guess what I’m tryna say is that Ubuntu is kind of the “Windows” of the Linux world, yes it’s decisions aren’t always the best, but at least it has MUCH lenient requirements and no dumb features from Windows 11 especially forced auto updates.

What are your thoughts and experiences using Ubuntu? I get there is Mint and Fedora, but how common Ubuntu is used, it seemed like a good idea for my bros study work as a “non interfering” idea.

Your thoughts?

  • arran 🇦🇺@aussie.zone
    0·
    6 months ago

    Moved from Gentoo to Ubuntu in 2008 as I needed to focus more on my job, moved back to Gentoo in 2022. Snaps were part of it, but really the lack of maintenance and vision around the apt repository was really the issue. More and more I was installing stray debs, or having to use flatpaks / AppImages for what what I wanted the system to manage for me.

    Not that I’ve entirely stopped using flatpaks or AppImages, but the process of creating an ebuild is far simpler than trying to do anything with a deb. For a while I had hope about the ppa, however that became fewer and fewer. I do think that the battle to have a comprehensive software repository is a loosing one because of the way things are currently structured.

  • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
    0·
    6 months ago

    For me, Mint offers everything good about Ubuntu without any of the bad.

    That being said, I don’t hate it, but I also don’t recommend it ever to people. The pitfalls that can come up from Snaps, plus the default layout of Gnome, are reasons why a brand new Linux user might struggle with it unless they are already somewhat of a techie.

    For ex-windows users like my parents who aren’t tech savvy, I just install Mint, set up their shortcuts and desktop icons, and away they go, happy little penquins.

  • bitwolf@lemmy.one
    0·
    6 months ago

    The thing is. Snaps isn’t the first controversy.

    Canonical, with Ubuntu early on was helping drive things forward, but they reached a point where they started to do things their own way with disregard to the broader ecosystem.

    Each time they did this, they cause fragmentation, struggled, and then deferred to the choice the rest of the ecosystem has. The problem with this is that they’re not sharing their effort, they’re just throwing it away.

    They merely doubled down hard on snaps which is the latest controversy.

    Snaps have their own advantages, but Canonical owns the store. Which becomes its own stalewort

      • erwan@lemmy.ml
        0·
        6 months ago

        Packages for third party apps is the one place we don’t want fragmentation.

      • bitwolf@lemmy.one
        0·
        6 months ago

        Personally I don’t consider it a con unless rampant. However in many cases they’ve dumped the projects. It is effort that could have helped along another project.

        imo the negative side effect is the wasted effort and the abandonment.

  • Magicalus@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    It’s the little things. One of my biggest gripes is that EVERY TIME you run apt update, it shoves an add for Ubuntu pro at the bottom of tge output, which shoves all the info I actually care about offscreen. Pure bullshit. It sounds small, but when I need to check which packages are getting updated, it makes my life a bit more inconvenient. And I do most things through CLI, so I see this a lot.

    Shit like that has been my entire experience with Ubuntu. I deeply regret switching to it, and I’m switching off as soon as I can get another hard drive to swap in.

  • GustavoM@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Ub(loa)tu tries to cater to everyone whilst ending up in pleasing no one – it has too much unnecessary clutter.

  • brax@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    6 months ago

    I used to like Ubuntu, but I got so sick for not being able to do things due to packages being out of date, and/or snaps getting in the way.

    I ditched it for arch and I’m so much happier

  • BitSound@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    Canonical lives and dies by the BDFL model. It allowed them to do some great work early on in popularizing Linux with lots of polish. Canonical still does good work when forced to externally, like contributing upstream. The model falters when they have their own sandbox to play in, because the BDFL model means that any internal feedback like “actually this kind of sucks” just gets brushed aside. It doesn’t help that the BDFL in this case is the CEO, founder, and funder of the company and paying everyone working there. People generally don’t like to risk their job to say the emperor has no clothes and all that, it’s easier to just shrug your shoulders and let the internet do that for you.

    Here are good examples of when the internal feedback failed and the whole internet had to chime in and say that the hiring process did indeed suck:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31426558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37059857

    “markshuttle” in those threads is the owner/founder/CEO.

  • tankplanker@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    I still run ubuntu on my main work desktop and will likely do so until I replace it with a new one as I cannot face rebuilding it at this point in time. I like its broad support, its ease of install and use, but its becoming increasingly annoying having to disable all the enforced decisions the maintainers make, such as snap, ubuntu pro ads and so on. My fear is at some point it will not be reversible

  • john89@lemmy.ca
    0·
    6 months ago

    I think Ubuntu made sense back in the day when Debian wasn’t as user-friendly.

    Now that Debian is, it looks like Ubuntu is trying really hard to just be as commercialized as possible.

    I still don’t understand the logic behind their paying for updates for certain programs when Debian doesn’t require it.

    • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      I think Ubuntu made sense back in the day when Debian wasn’t as user-friendly.

      This is a very good point.

      When Ubuntu launched, it was a big moment for linux. Before then, setting up a linux GUI was a lot of pain (remember setting modelines for individual monitors and the endless fiddling that took - and forget about multiple monitors). Ubuntu made GUI easy - it just worked out of the box for most people. It jumped Linux forwards as a desktop a huge way and adoption grew a lot. They also physically posted you a set of CDs or a DVD for free! And they did a bunch of stuff for educational usage, and getting computers across Africa.

      That was all pretty amazing at the time and all very positive.

      But then everyone else caught up with the usability and they turned into a corporate entity. Somewhere along the way they stopped listening to their users, or at least the users felt they had no voice, and a lot more linux distros appeared.

  • wewbull@feddit.ukEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    The distribution is fine, maybe even good.

    The politicking and project management around the distro has annoyed a lot of people.

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
    0·
    6 months ago

    My workplace preinstalls Ubuntu, personally I’m using openSUSE. I don’t even think that Ubuntu is particularly bad, I’m mainly frustrated with it, because it’s just slightly worse than openSUSE (and other distros) in pretty much every way.
    It’s less stable, less up-to-date, less resilient to breakages. And it’s got more quirky behaviour and more things that are broken out-of-the-box. And it doesn’t even have a unique selling point. It’s just extremely mid, and bad at it.

  • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Ubuntu is not terrible and if it works for you then fine. I would be surprised if Debian of mint didn’t also work for you just as well though.

    • boonhet@lemm.ee
      0·
      6 months ago

      Debian can be annoying if you want to install a newish version of something from the package manager. It’s why I can’t use APT to keep Rust up to date and have to use Rustup instead, for an example.

      • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        While I don’t disagree with you, I think it’s a bit funny that you’re bringing up hardships using apt to update software in Debian when the biggest complaint about Ubuntu is having to use snap instead of apt.

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    There was a time when Ubuntu was the distro for the masses. It was the one that “just worked.” It was the one you could use for school. They distributed marketing material with a bunch of diverse young people holding hands.

    Now Canonical’s website is, by area, mostly corporate logos. They’re B2B now, we have lost them, and it shows in their engineering.

    If the system you’re shopping for an OS for isn’t installed in a room with halon extinguishers in the ceiling, you shouldn’t even be thinking Canonical’s name.