Ubuntu was a big part of my path to full time Linux use. I adore everyone who has contributed to Ubuntu.

But also, Snaps are bullshit, and are why I replaced all my Ubuntu installs with Debian.

Canonical doesn’t get to pretend to be surprised by the backlash for pushing an unnecessary closed proprietary platform on their freedom seeking users.

I still adore everyone at Canonical and I’m the Ubuntu coming, for all they’ve done for the community. Y’all still rock. Thanks!

I don’t like snaps (nor flatpaks for that matter, they’re too big for my slow internet connection here in my Greek village). But I find it absolutely, 100%, crazy to install gimp and darktable via snaps, and not being able to print (the print option is just not there, because they’re snaps and somehow they haven’t implemented that for these apps). As an artist who sells prints, this makes the whole distro completely and utterly USELESS to me. Sure, they can be found as deb packages too, but they’re older. And Firefox is also sandboxed. And when I installed Chromium from the command line as a deb, it OVERWROTE my wish, and installed Chromium as a snap too.

So, no ubuntu for me. The only advantage it has is that many third party apps (usually commercial ones) that release binary tarballs or appimages have tested with ubuntu and they usually work well (minus davinci resolve). I don’t have a big trouble with appimages as they’re generally smaller than the kde/gnome frameworks that flatpaks/snaps use, and they’re one file-delete away from getting rid of them completely. They’re just more straightforward.

While I appreciate the utility of snaps and flatpaks for providing sandboxed, cross-platform apps, I’ve often found them slower than traditional packages. Their tendency to take up more disk space also feels inefficient, especially when system resources are sometimes precious. For these reasons, I generally prefer using apps installed directly through the system’s default package manager, which tend to offer better performance and use space more efficiently…

But it seems like there are other easy distros with lenient requirements that don’t try to force Snaps and ads on their users.

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

While the criticism may be valid, it doesn’t make sense to someone new to Linux.

It’s easy to switch to Ubuntu from Windows, and it’s easier to switch from Ubuntu to another distro.

There are just better noob-friendly distributions, like LinuxMint.

Every time this is asked, I post the same comment. I used Kubuntu for years and liked it, but more recently they started doing things that annoyed me. The biggest was related to snaps and Firefox. Now, sandboxing a browser is probably a great idea, but I wanted to use the regular deb install, so I followed the directions to disable the snap install and used the deb. However, Ubuntu overrode that decision several times - I’d start browsing, then realize I was using a snap AGAIN. Happened a few times over a couple years. If it happened once, eh, maybe an error, but it happened 3 or 4 times. I came to the conclusion I wasn’t in control of my system, Ubuntu was.

I switched to Debian and am happy with my choice.

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.

I only joke about Arch being the superior distro because, well, I use it and because it’s apparently a thing.

I actually don’t have any strong feelings about Ubuntu. It’s a distro. It works. I only use Arch because of the AUR (I’m lazy, okay?). I don’t have strong feelings about it either. Linux is configurable to basically exactly what you want. Once (or if) you get into customization you just pick the distro that allows you to get to what you want faster.

I do have strong feelings about Windows though.

I’m old and my gateway to Linux was Ubuntu 5.10 via a live CD they gave me at uni back in 2006.

I got to experience it when they used to take seriously their “Linux for human beings” motto.

Those were GNOME 2 and kernel 2.x times. Albeit the limitations of the technology (40GB HDD disk, 256 MB RAM, an Intel Xeon processor which I can’t remember it’s exact specs) it felt way snappier (no pun intended) than Windows. You could felt they cared about it in that brown visual theme, the icons, the sounds, the way the documentation was phrased - you could feel the Ubuntu in it.

I ended wiping my entire docs drive while trying to install it but got to learn lots of stuff and feel like my computer was actually mine.

Same as for many people my generation, I switched to Linux thanks to that Ubuntu. It’s really sad what it has become and the poor, selfish decisions they have taken, but still it keeps holding a special place in the Linux memories.

Personally I’m not looking an OS that is “not so bad”, the initial impression should be “this is great” :)

Ubuntu is kind of the “Windows” of the Linux world

That’s also the thing, I switched to Linux because I hated using Windows, and I don’t like how Microsoft operates. The last think I want is a distribution which tries to be Windows made by a company which tries to be Microsoft. It’s of course an exaggeration, and Ubuntu doesn’t do EEE and patent trolling as far as I know, but at least for me it feels like they’re going in the wrong direction when they keep reinventing the wheel, forcing solutions that users don’t want, and generally trying to create a “one size fits all” desktop. I’m not against it, Ubuntu is probably a good choice for some users, it just doesn’t fit me. I used Xubuntu for many years, and I also tried both Gnome and Unity at different points, but currently I use Fedora KDE.

Canonical historically makes bad decisions. Ubuntu any most points in time is simply great. Their LTS is fab. But they’re hungry. And they screw with us over time. the latest Debian just erased most of the reason to go with Ubuntu adding nonfree, and they haven’t screwed us over.

Ubuntu does work and is a decent distro in many ways. The problems are around how canonical leverages things for its own financial benefit for the detriment of users and the Linux community.

A good example is Snap. It is forced on users - even Firefox is a snap on Ubuntu. This is not an efficient way fo end users to run their system or their most used software.

Instead of making the builds available as standard software, users have to use the Snap or go hunting elsewhere for builds. That’s anti-user and is identical to how Microsoft behaves with windows. It doesn’t do things to benefit users, it does things to benefit Microsoft.

It’s arguable whether what snap does is actually worth the overhead - I can see that it is more secure in many ways. But then so it Flatpak, and that is more universally used for desktop software across Linux distros. Snap has some inherent benefits for server side use but then why force it on end users where it is not as good as Flatpak in many ways? Or Appimage?

So Ubuntu is fine in many ways, but why bother when you can go for alternatives and give the best of both worlds? Mint is an Ubuntu based distro without snap and other canonical elements. I used mint for ages, it’s great and there is a reason it’s so popular.

I’ve moved on to OpenSuSE now but the Ubuntu ecosystem is fine, it works well for many, and it’s very well documented and supported which often works downstream in Mint and others. It’s just Ubuntu itself thats a bit crappy due to the decisions made to suite canonical rather than what users want or would suit them best. In the end it all comes down to personal choice and what people are willing to accept from their distro.

Third party package mechanism is fundamentally broken in Ubuntu (and in Debian).

Third party repos should never be allowed to use package names from the core repos. But they are, so they pretend they’re core packages, but use different version names, and at upgrade time the updater doesn’t know what to do with those version and how to solve dependencies.

That leaves you with a broken system where you can’t upgrade and can’t do anything entirely l eventually except a clean reinstall.

After this happened several times while using Ubuntu I resorted to leaving more and more time between major upgrades, running old versions on extended support or even unsupported.

Eventually I figured that if I’m gonna reinstall from scratch I might as well install a different distro.

I should note I still run Debian on my server, because that’s a basic install with just core packages and everything else runs in Docker.

So if you delegate your package management to a completely different tool, like Flatpak, I guess you can continue to use Ubuntu. But it seems dumb to be required to resort to Flatpak to make Ubuntu usable.