Is Ubuntu deserving the hate?

Long story short, I have a desktop with Fedora, lovely, fast, sleek and surprisingly reliable for a near rolling distro (it failed me only once back around Fedora 34 or something where it nuked Grub). Tried to install on a 2012 i7 MacBook Air… what a slog!!! Surprisingly Ubuntu runs very smooth on it. I have been bothering all my friends for years about moving to Fedora (back then it was because I hated Unity) but now… I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but… Christ, it does run well! In fairness all my VMs are running DietPi (a slimmed version of Ubuntu) and coming back to the APT world feels like coming back home.

On the other end forcing myself to be on Fedora allows me to stay on the DNF world that is compatible with Amazon Linux etc (which I use for work), it has updated packages, it is nice and clean…. Argh, don’t know how to decide!

Thoughts?

I am not in the mood for Debian. I like the Mint approach but I am not a fan of slow rolling releases and also would like to keep myself as close as upstream as possible, the Debian version is the only one that seems reliable enough but, again, it is Debian, the packages are “old”. Pop Os and similar are two hops away from upstream and so I’d rather not.

Is Snap really that bad?

Edit: thank you all for sharing your experience !

Montagge,
@Montagge@kbin.social avatar

Snap isn't that bad
Ubuntu is fine
People are not

beanson,

I use Ubuntu for work and have no issues with it to be honest. I install everything via apt, I think a few things are via snap but nothing that I’ve installed directly. It’s stable and I can get on with stuff. I definitely am not a fan of the move towards snap and the app store: if I was to choose I’d go vanilla Debian.

lefaucet,

I’m daily driving Ubuntu and my experience aligns with this.

My only gripe is snaps can break copy/paste and prevent me from saving files where I want. This might make Ubuntu unusable for people using Linux for the first time and makes no sense if you dont understand how snaps are sandboxed and how permissions work. The solution is install with apt.

The installer, system configuration programs and UI experience is really good. I argue it is a much superior experience to Windows and arguably better than OS/X. A lot less garbage being shoved down customers throats.

hydroel,

The solution is install with apt.

I checked on my machine, and out of all the packages I had on snap, only Inkscape, VLC and Slack were also available on apt. Spotify, Whatsdesk (a WhatsApp client) and Signal were among the most commonly used missing.

lefaucet,

Oh word! I forgot about Signal. I use the snap for that. It works well. I think copy/paste works with it.

I used apt for Firefox, Krita, ffmpeg, Blender and Ksnips

I think the big commercial programs I use were installed with vendor scripts

GustavoM,
@GustavoM@lemmy.world avatar

In a nutshell, Ubluntu is trying to take user control off its users. And the users are mad because of it.

And yes, I’m talking about snap.

clb92,

Most of the problems I’ve experienced with Ubuntu recently were caused by Snap. I really hate that they insist shipping that buggy mess.

_edge, (edited )

Ubuntu is nice. Apt/DEB works as they should. Some default apps, mostly browsers, are snaps now, but this does not bother you at all. You were getting them from your distro anyway.

Flatpak and AppImages work just fine if you need them.

The Ubuntu desktop (any flavour) just works. Others are different, but nothing is bad about Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is trying new things, proprietary to their ecosystem, e.g. Unity or snap. On the big picture, those are experiment. Ubuntu is still Linux.

The community reaction to snap is overblown. So Canonical developed something you don’t like? Ignore it. This has mostly been a waste of time for them.

(Yes, maybe that dev time would be better spent on flatpak or open-source apps. But that’s their time. I’m not paying Ubuntu developers, so can I really complain?)

erwan,

They tried Unity and gave up for Gnome 3 - however they ship a heavily customized Gbome 3.

Now they’re trying Snap. How long before they give up and use flatpak like every other distro?

What’s the point of this?

_edge,

Well, I’d file this as innovation. Innovation is trying and failing. It’s an experiment. And I’m okay with this.

Is it wasteful to have KDE and Gnome? Why don’t they give up and merge with each other? Did we really need systemd? Or docker? And why Wayland when every single distro is on X and every single application is on X?

Ubuntu started as a Gnome-based distribution and it is was better than the competition on the desktop at the time. Or good enough. It got popular.

Personally, I wasn’t a big fan of Unity or Gnome 3, but it worked. I found snap totally weird and against how things should be on a Linux system. But snap updates (while still annoying) have solved problems with deb-based updates of browser (“Quit all running firefox or you’ll experience problems”).

Maybe I’d like Debian more. After all I came from Debian to Ubuntu. But it’s not worth to make a fuzz.

erwan,

I don’t think it’s wasteful to have both KDE and Gnome. It’s healthy competition and as you say, innovation.

However the job of a distribution is to gather upstream software into a meaningful OS, and rewriting everything that should be an upstream software shared with other distributions is a distraction.

So Unity was unnecessary “not invented here” syndrome. Just like Snap is.

the_q,

As an operating system Ubuntu is great. It’s user friendly, has great hardware support and is up to date enough for most users. Canonical though… That’s where the real sore spot lies for a lot of die-hards.

BiggestBulb,
@BiggestBulb@kbin.social avatar

For anything lower-spec (like, <4Gb of RAM), Ubuntu absolutely CHUGS because of Snaps. Flatpak has no such issue.

Ironically, Lubuntu (a lightweight Ubuntu fork) worked the best for me while I was using it. No slowness, but I installed pretty much everything using Apt (didn't know about Flatpak back then).

I ended up having it lock up and freeze on the sign-in page though, so I moved on to the slightly heavier Linux Mint.

erwan,

I don’t hate Ubuntu, and it was my distribution from nearly 20 years. Meaning since it was first released until recently. I loved it for a long time because it was based on dpkg which was much better than rpm at the time AND it was way more user friendly than the others. Even as a software developer I like my distribution to move out of the way to let me focus on using it, not babysitting it.

But I moved away because of Snaps. Currently on Fedora and it’s pretty good. I know it’s possible to get rid of Snaps or use a derivative but I prefer to stay close to stock for whatever distribution I use.

If Ubuntu works for you and you don’t mind snaps, then just use that!

So if

PseudoSpock,
@PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Snaps pushed me to mint on one and endeavour on the other box.

Loucypher,

Same. The idea is to have a machine to code, not to babysit

pineapplelover,

Snap is terrible. If you have a bunch of snaps on your system, it becomes very slow and sluggish

neonred, (edited )

Or just use Debian sid, which effectively is Debian in a rolling variant. 🚀

brax, (edited )

I don’t mind it, but I don’t really use it for any of its features. I use i3 over Unity, I think Snaps (and flatpaks, appimages, etc) are dumb as shit.l, and don’t even get me started on how garbage Nautilus is - drives me nuts trying to type a filename in to jump to it only to have Nautilus run a search instead… No idea who thought that was a good idea, but they need to fix that crap already.

I’d probably get by just fine with a full Debian setup tbh.

cmeerw,

I still think Ubuntu is the best option (particularly if you want to use the non-LTS releases)

Having said that I do hate snaps and also dislike flatpaks. So what I do is just use the Firefox deb package from the PPA and the chromium package from Linux Mint. Oh, and I have actually replaced ubuntu-advantage-tools with a no-op dummy package.

sabreW4K3,
@sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf avatar

I loved Unity. Also, I would argue that both Snap and Flatpak are bad. That said, be happy with whatever works for you. Ubuntu always gives me problems, whereas Fedora runs smooth. That said Ubuntu can read my old Passports, Fedora can’t. They each have the benefits.

iopq,

Flatpak is good because I don’t need to check whether the program is available for my distro.

Before: click Linux icon. They offer a .deb and maybe .rpm

Now: click Linux icon, they tell you how to get it on flathub

And it’s probably available on my distro too, but why bother? Didn’t even search it

sabreW4K3,
@sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf avatar

The beauty of Linux, at least for me, is that there’s inter-dependability and so you can run apps using less space than you would on Windows. Linux is like a metaphor for society, if your neighbour has something you need, they should share and vice versa. But alas, some twats with a Windows fetish decided to introduce the likes of Flatpak and Snap 🤮

iopq,

Then you don’t use it, THAT is the beauty of Linux

Loucypher,

Yeah I guess it really comes down to that.

Decker108,

I think a lot of people dislike Ubuntu because of Gnome and Snaps, which is weird to me. You can fairly easily change desktop environment and most Snaps have apt or Flatpak alternatives.

bear,

Most Snaps have apt or Flatpak alternatives.

I’m simply not going to support a distro that creates a proprietary service and ships it as the default source of software. I will support and use distros that open source their code so that everyone can benefit from it. Whether workarounds or alternatives exist is unimportant, my prime issue with Ubuntu and Canonical is with their principles, not Ubuntu’s quality as a product to be consumed by me.

erwan,

It’s just simpler to pick a distribution that matches your choices out of the box, rather than hacking a distro. And I’m talking about Snap in particular.

cmgvd3lw,

Yes you can, afterall its based on debian. But its manual labor, and not to mention telemetry data sent to canonical.

banneryear1868,

Ubuntu is fine it’s just a more bloated Debian geared towards being as user friendly as possible. Nothing wrong with that.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • linux@lemmy.ml
  • localhost
  • All magazines
    •
    Loading…
    Loading the web debug toolbar…
    Attempt #