I think you’re right. But, I’m trying to make my memes inclusive: I don’t bash ubuntu users for the same reasons I don’t beat people already on the ground and refrain from mocking the handicapped.
But what makes ubuntu better as a first distro than mint or fedora? It installs snaps even when you specifically invoke apt, a new user who doesn’t understand the messages will press yes, see that it seemed to work and have issues later that can scare them away from linux.
What I’m trying to say is that we should bash the people still recommending ubuntu.
Eh. Using Ubuntu is nothing like having a mental or physical handicap, or having fallen and gotten knocked down/pushed down.
My issue with Ubuntu is that there’s better distros- even for newbs coming from windows for the first time. The sole argument for Ubuntu is the first reason not to use it. People are installing it because they want something different than windows, after all, and canonical makes the same critical error (IMO) that MS makes: it assumes their users are stupid.
To be honest, I grew up in red hat; I remember trying Ubuntu when it first came out, being told how awesome it was. I found it to be infuriating and horrible. And it has always been so. To me, it’s popularity seems derived more from marketing than from merit.
Documentation is always outdated and useless. GNOME is crap. apt has a dependency issue every week. Repos have software ranging from bleeding edge to horrendously outdated. Netplan is next level stupid and also decides to break for no reason. Systemd waits for network to boot by default because reasons. Versioning and LTS adds more magic fun to doing anything because of the aforementioned documentation. Last time I used it, still had crap interoperability when switching DEs for some weird reason. Canonical is the big dumb dumb. All the downstreams inherit the same problems like PopOS and elementary.
I took all of that experience and thought it was the default linux expectations until I got to try Debian for server and Fedora for desktop.
Unfortunately, people make the same mistake as me and then assume broken Ubuntu is just how linux is.
Credit though, it did get to teach me the general ins and outs of linux because I needed to fix or change something every other week.
Not OP, I like gnome and all but I Ubuntu’s extensions/custom version of gnome is awful and makes trying to change settings so much worse because the gnome documentation doesn’t always match with all of the changes Ubuntu adds on top. Maybe they’re talking about that?
That’s true, but installing a whole new desktop environment also kind of goes against the whole “ease of use” part. If someone’s going to go to a whole different flavor they might as well just use something like Mint or Mint DE unless they specifically need Ubuntu for a dev environment or program/driver compatibility. That way they can still get the ease of use benefit but without dealing with all of the weird oddities that Ubuntu can introduce.
Yeah I just find for newer users the amount of Ubuntu support has always been a huge plus if you’re just getting in to messing with Linux. It’s a lot better now but it used to be things like “how to do x on Ubuntu,” there would always be some super easy to follow tutorial. My personal preference is just a Debian install but the more catered experiences like Mint and Ubuntu do a great job at presenting Debian to daily users without any hassle.
It most certainly does. It’s the only distro that I do not trust anymore to do a proper job of automatically partitioning your drive during setup, after getting complaints from my parents that Ubuntu refused to install updates. Turned out it had created a rediciously small boot partition and was now complaining that it had not enough space left to install new kernel versions as they kept around all old ones. “Because users might want to use those”, according to their documentation. Bitch, you market yourself as the distro suitable for absolute beginners, but you not only expect them to know what a kernel is, but also that they clean them up their selves? What an absolutely moronic decision.
I’ve had broken installations after upgrades to a major version in the past and I’ve seen a number of colleagues switch to plain Debian or Arch derivatives after Ubuntu decided to crap out after a major upgrade.
I’ve seen Ubuntu systems not being able to upgrade due to circular dependencies that couldn’t be resolved by Apt, package Foo requires Bar, Bar requires Baz, Baz requires Foo. Or even packages from their own repository that couldn’t be upgraded because some dependency wasn’t available anymore.
Just a handful of the issues I’ve encountered with Ubuntu. Personally I’m done with that distro. If it works for you, by all means use it. But I don’t help friends and colleagues (we all get to choose our own distro fortunately, but also have to fix issues ourselves) anymore when they decide to go Ubuntu. Use a proper distro if you want my help, not that Fisher-Price ‘My First Linux’ crap.
Docker images should really be distroless most of the time. There’s way too much junk in the majority of Docker images when in most cases, you really just need your app and whatever dynamic libraries or runtimes it requires (if you can’t statically compile it). You don’t need an OS in there!
Also there’d be way more servers running Debian compared to Ubuntu.
You often (if not most of the time) need some infrastructure in OCI containers (while we’re at it, let’s get rid of the misnomer Docker image). And that’s going to be some subset of a distribution hand-crafted for that purpose. Most of the time, that should be Alpine, because they provide the slimmest base image.
Most of the time, that should be Alpine, because they provide the slimmest base image.
Distroless containers (e.g. github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless, Chiselled Ubuntu, etc) are often smaller than Alpine ones. Google’s smallest Debian-based one is around 2MB.
I have a Dockerized C# app… I’m going to try .NET Native AOT (which was improved a lot in .NET 8, released today) to compile it into a self-contained binary, and see how well it works with a distroless base container.
I’m curious to hear how that works out. I’m a big fan of C#; not so much the Microsoft ecosystem. I’d say for maximum scalability you’d want languages which compile to small binaries. So, Go, Rust, C++, C, and theoretically some others. The approach with Java and C# to bundle the framework, JIT, etc, and then try to shave off as much as you can get away with feels kind of backwards. And I get the excitement of the Java folks when they manage to create a self-contained binary with GraalVM and co of 12mb. Like, that’s impressive, but had you developed the same thing with Go it would be .5mb. Curious to see how .NET fares in that comparison to Java.
I’d love to agree but unfortunately with them pushing snaps I can’t. When I used snaps I found them to be extremely buggy and if I didn’t already know there were other distributions with other better package managers I would’ve straight up assumed it was a Linux problem and I’d just have gone back to windows. If there was no other Noob-friendly distro out there I could say “sure it’s an ok distro” but there are better alternatives that don’t do the same shitty decisions as canonical (like Linux Mint which is the one I recommend to every noob coming from windows or Pop_OS! for those who want something similiar to MacOS).
Just because it’s Lemmy, I’m gonna share my “shitty Ubuntu” story, which is less about Ubuntu being shitty and more about me being a noob.
I had a 2004 MacBook that my grandmother gave me for college when she upgraded. I didn’t hate it, but this being my first experience with a laptop, when the bottom 2/3 of the screen started blinking in and out, I thought maybe it was a software problem, so with the help of an SD card and my buddy’s old CRT setup I downloaded Ubuntu onto a thumb drive. When I went back to my parents’ place I decided that that was the moment to install, because my dad was really into jailbreaking his iPhone at the time, so I thought it’d be cool if we did kinda similar things together. Unfortunately because I couldn’t see the bottom of the screen, I had no idea about the progress of the install, got impatient, and just decided to turn the thing off. This had the effect of deleting the partition tables, and it would have been like $200 to get a new hard drive. I would have paid it, but before I could, the guy I had helping me fix the thing moved away and took my lappy with him.
I’d have gone with a spork. Not particularly good at anything it was built to do, but functional enough to get the job done, and pretty straight forward to use.
Please put an NSFW tag on this. I was on the train and when I saw this I had to start furiously masterbating. Everyone else gave me strange looks and were saying things like “what the fuck” and “call the police”. I dropped my phone and everyone around me saw this image. Now there is a whole train of men masterbating together at this one image. This is all your fault, you could have prevented this if you had just tagged this post NSFW.
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