Technologically, it’s the best DE out there, no contest. (Maybe with the exception of touchscreen integration)
But some design decisions grind my gears so hard I can’t use it.
I get irrationally angry when I see the bouncing cursor animation, or look at a list of my programs and half the names start with “K”.
It feels too sluggish, overloaded and Windows-y in its default configuration and getting rid of everything that nags me takes too long, when Gnome comes out of the box looking simple and stylish.
It needs to be running all the time you need its services. If it’s not running it can’t serve you music.
Modern PCs and laptops don’t have an issue with that, even with Windows 10/11.
But a Raspberry Pi with a large HDD (with its own power supply) attached would be perfect IMO.
How was this measured? Just asking cause a lot of PCs are sold with Linux there cause it’s cheaper and the user immediately slaps a pirated Windows on after purchase.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux,
is in fact, systemd/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, systemd plus Linux.
Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component
of a fully functioning systemd system made useful by the systemd corelibs, shell
utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by IBM.
Many computer users run a modified version of the systemd system every day,
without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of systemd
which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are
not aware that it is basically the systemd system, developed by Lennart Poettering.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a
part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system
that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run.
The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself;
it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is
normally used in combination with the systemd operating system: the whole system
is basically systemd with Linux added, or systemd/Linux. All the so-called “Linux”
distributions are really distributions of systemd/Linux.
So I grabbed my ventoy-drive, downloaded latest mint ISO on it and instead of doing something productive I planned to do I’ll spend couple of hours at reinstalling the whole system.
With Mint, you should be able to get to a working system that lets you do your paperwork within less than half an hour.
You can set up all your customizations again when you have more time. But it should also be no issue to just copy your old /home folder to the new system between Mint and Ubuntu. Then the only step after installation would be to install the programs you had before.
It’ll boot right into a fully functional Gnome desktop and hardly anything else. The only extra software this installs are yelp, gnome-shell-extension-prefs and network-manager-gnome. Uninstall them with sudo apt purge and sudo apt autoremove --purge if you don’t need them. sudo apt install cups if you need printing and remove your wifi device from /etc/network/devices to let network-manager-gnome handle wifi if you use it.
Ubuntu changes the entire underlying technology too often cause they always try to introduce their own system in place of something that’s already established (Upstart, Unity, Snap, etc.)
My last experiences with Ubuntu were one upgrade that failed to boot after following all the recommended steps, one upgrade where the release notes themselves recommended a fresh install to enable all functionality and a fresh install where the first thing I saw after booting was an error message by Gnome about a crashed service.
I left the distro after that and haven’t looked back. Admittedly, that was quite some time ago. It’s likely they’ve improved since then (but so have all other distros).
It depends. Old Windows games actually work better in Wine than on modern Windows.
Newer games usually work out of the box via Steam and Proton, often with better performance than on Windows. Especially on a pc with ATI graphics.
AAA titles with anticheat often don’t work, but it doesn’t sound like that’s what OP is after.
I do. Gnome is a special case because it doesn’t give you a lot of options. It’s take it or leave it, and it doesn’t follow the traditional mouse-centric desktop workflow.
But in my opinion it’s absolutely perfect for a laptop where you use the keyboard and touchpad. With a few key combos and swipe gestures you can fly through the UI and it only ever shows you what’s relevant at the moment.
There is no problem with using a point release system long term. The problem is using Ubuntu. I’ve never once successfully upgraded it from one release to the next without issues, errors, things breaking or loss of functionality. It’s the main reason why I’ll never use Ubuntu again.