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 !

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Is Ubuntu deserving the hate?

Yes.

Debian version is the only one that seems reliable enough but, again, it is Debian, the packages are “old”.

Install Debian, then install all the software you might need using Flatpak. There you go, solid and stable OS with the latest of with little to no effort. Bonus extra security.

superbirra,

or, you know, use testing or sid. Or just stop lamenting for old packages and just enjoy stability while making something productive :)

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Or just stop lamenting for old packages and just enjoy stability while making something productive

I’m not the one lamenting old packages, I run on stable perfectly happy. No issues there.

Kushia, (edited )
@Kushia@lemmy.ml avatar

Ubuntu attacted a lot of control freaks because Shuttleworth was originally splashing some money when it started and a bunch of nerds saw dollar signs. As a result they have a culture of “not invented here” syndrome where someone just has to reinvent the wheel in only the way they see it and they don’t work well with others or accept their input because they want all the credit.

Personally, I got sick of it having been pretty involved early on in the project. It’s easier and saner to just use a distro based on what everyone else is doing.

LoveSausage, (edited )

Long time since I used Ubuntu, remember updates breaking network twice… Peppermint OS, Debian(and devuan if you don’t like systemd) based. all the important bits (not arch level) but nothing more. Rolling, Runs on 1 GB ram. Haven’t distro hopped anymore since I found it.

Stable base , extra on top

“Everything you need and nothing you don’t."

logir,

Is it based on debian unstable or testing?

LoveSausage, (edited )

Bookworm stable. peppermintos.com/about/

java,

Use whatever you want, why do you care about what feelings other people have towards Ubuntu?

chemicalwonka,
@chemicalwonka@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    dewritoninja,

    Boy do I have news for you

    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.

    skullgiver,
    @skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

    You don’t have to use Snap (except for LXC, I think?). It’s not enabled by default, but you can enable Flatpak and everything will work fine. Flatpak has Firefox and Chrome and all the other applications thst Canonical foolishly moved from their apt repos to their Snap repos.

    There are some frustrating things about Snaps (loading all of them at boot time rather than at runtime, for quicker app start but slower boot, for example, and that stupid snap folder that can’t be moved) but honestly I don’t really see what the fuss is about as an end user. Nobody sets up a purely Snap based system anyway.

    The problem with Snap is an ideological one. If you don’t care who runs your software store and if you don’t care about having the ability to add more software stores then the default, you’ll be fine with Snap. If you’re ideologically driven towards Linux, you’ll probably dislike the way Snap is set up.

    Like it or not, Ubuntu is still one of the best supported distros out there. If you want drivers from any manufacturer, you get to pick between drivers tested for Ubuntu or Fedora. Every other distro repackages those drivers using their own scripts and compatibility layers because nobody over at Intel is going to spend company time specifically getting Garuda to work when its customers don’t sell hardware with it preinstalled.

    Software like Discord and VS Code having the “.deb, maybe .rpm, or you figure it out yourself” approach of official distribution is pretty standard, I’d say, for better or for worse. It also helps that a lot of entry level Linux questions and answers online are about Ubuntu. Askubuntu may not be as vast and up to date as the Arch wiki, but at least the askubuntu people aren’t going to tell you off for not knowing advanced Linux stuff.

    There are upsides and downsides to any Linux distro. You’re not “supposed” to think anything, try it out, keep an open mind, and pick what works for you.

    Loucypher,

    Thank you for the through answer, really put things in perspective

    The_Zen_Cow_Says_Mu,

    I gave up on Ubuntu before the snaps became a thing. Here’s what I hated :

    • ugly purple and orange theme
    • Upgrades between lts never worked right for me: 14->16 fail and broke, 16->18 lots of problems, 18->20 still not great.
    furycd001,
    @furycd001@lemmy.ml avatar

    Upgrading between Ubuntu lts releases never fully worked for me either. Something always broke or went wrong…

    AnUnusualRelic,
    @AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world avatar

    I also used it and dropped it years ago because it tended to break a lot in updates.

    That, their poor kde support, their constant reinventing the wheel (poorly) drove me away.

    Now I run opensuse as a rolling distro that’s always up to date and just never breaks even when there are 6000 packages to update. It’s boring and safe.

    xyguy,

    I also have had trouble during upgrades in the past.

    I’ll have to disagree about the purple and orange theme though. I’m personally a big fan.

    taanegl,

    Snaps are centralised packaging, a’la Apple App Store or Google Play. Now if someone forked snapd, added third party repo and made It so you could select which repo is the main one, that’d be a start.

    But as long as Canonical commits to a centralised form of distribution with no third party support I’m going to advise desktop users to stay away from Ubuntu.

    TheFriendlyArtificer,

    It’s more than just centralized control.

    They have the ability to arbitrarily push out Snap updates.

    That’s right! Your production server is getting patched without your knowledge or consent. Thankfully they magnanimously decided to let admins delay it by a few weeks.

    Linux is about control. I decide what my machine does. When it updates. What it updates. The feedback from Canonical regarding Snaps was so tone dead and condescending it made Steve Balmer look sane. It boiled down to, don’t worry your pretty little head off. We know what’s best.

    Shareni,

    They have the ability to arbitrarily push out Snap updates.

    That’s right! Your production server is getting patched without your knowledge or consent.

    What deranged donkey is using snaps for infra?

    rwhitisissle,

    If you run Ubuntu on a production server, you better having snapd disabled.

    muhyb,

    I wouldn’t call it hate, more like disapprobation with Canonical’s choices. No one have to use Ubuntu, we have tons of distro to choose. If someone wants LTS, you can always go pure Debian way, it’s not hard to install as it’s used to be (for beginners), or there is Linux Mint Debian Edition. You can easily use flatpaks with these and keep your software up-to-date.

    Hexarei,
    @Hexarei@programming.dev avatar

    disapprobation

    TIL a new word. Thanks, stranger! 🙂

    _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.

    TrivialBetaState,

    Snap has a locked and proprietary store, even if the client is FOSS. There is no reason to “hate” Ubuntu but there are better choices.

    cmeerw,

    There is no reason to “hate” Ubuntu but there are better choices.

    What are those better choices then (for those who currently use the non-LTS Ubuntu releases and don’t want to move to rolling releases or LTS-only releases)?

    joojmachine,

    You pretty much described Fedora. Non-LTS stable 6-month release cycle with 1 year of support for each release.

    Auli,

    Never touching Fedora again. It’s a corporate distribution. As much as people might say otherwise redhat has a lot of pull over it. Look at the lawyers getting involved over pulling out the codecs.

    joojmachine,

    Your loss, it’s a great distribution and if you spent even a couple of minutes in our forums you’d see that the RedHat pull is due to them actually collaborating and being and active part in the community.

    huskypenguin,

    I was an Ubuntu person for a long time, and when reading criticism about the inability to upgrade versions, I realized that had been my entire experience. I decided to give a rolling release a chance, and it’s been amazing.

    I use arch(installer)btw. 🐧 AURs are pretty ingenuous, which is just pulling and compiling a git. Maybe a little less secure, but look at what happened to the snap store this year.

    If you want to try a rolling release but didn’t want to use Arch, there’s always Fedora, & OpenSuSE Tumbleweed.

    Outside of that, for non Ubuntu distros you could do OpenSuSE regular, or for true LTS use Rocky. Or take the red pill and go with Hannah Montana’s Linux.

    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.

    wiki_me,

    It’s pitched as a open source operation system, yet the snap store is closed source and vendor locked, one of the reasons some of us use Liniux is because we prefer open source (and there are rational justifications for that).

    Hate is a strong word, but there is legitimate criticism, I also think the closed source nature of snap led to the fact that it has no volunteers and that eventually caused malware to appear on the snap store multiple time, it never happened on flathub as far as i know.

    Today for beginner i think opensuse and linux mint are better.

    Regarding debian having old packages , i use nix but it is fairly immature, flathub should also work.

    banazir,
    @banazir@lemmy.ml avatar

    I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but…

    There is no “supposed to” when it comes to distro preferences. Use whatever you like, other people’s opinions do not dictate your behavior. If Ubuntu works for you, use that. If anything, that’s the freedom of FOSS. You can take other people’s views in to account when choosing a distro, but in the end it is your decision. I dislike Ubuntu for a few reasons, but I don’t get to dictate to anyone else what they use and why.

    If you like rolling release, you could try Debian sid/unstable. I hear it’s quite stable and reliable and, of course, isn’t Ubuntu.

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