I have been not recommending Ubuntu to people because of obvious reasons (the Amazon search integration and snaps, mainly). The reason I am posting this is because someone I know mentioned that they are considering Ubuntu. They have a degree in cs and generally are competent with computers, but didn’t like mint when they tried it. I would like to know a few things, since I haven’t looked into Ubuntu in a while:

Has anything changed about snap? I know people didn’t like it at first, especially the proprietary server, but I don’t think they will care about that and I mainly just want to know if it will eat all their RAM or something.

Have they made any changes in their management that may make sure there won’t be another Amazon search thing?

Is it best to use the default desktop on Ubuntu? I would recommend Kubuntu to them, all else being equal, but don’t know if maybe the default one is better integrated.

Edit: The person will be 100’s of miles away so helping them with issues will be hard, and Ubuntu LTS should be stable. Plus, basically everything that “supports” linux but doesn’t really usually supports Ubuntu. I do really see where they’re coming from, but want to know if it has a major potential to backfire on them and if they might be better off with Fedora.

  • trollercoasterEnglish
    5•1 month ago

    I am in the same boat as you. I am still running Ubuntu (with snap removed, so I can’t comment on its current performance overhead) on a few of my machines because I couldn’t be bothered to do a reinstall with something less insane, but I’m not recommending Ubuntu to anyone anymore over the same concerns as you have.

    If you want to recommend a system that runs decently out of the box and runs a lot of software, recommend Mint instead. Ubuntu used to be Debian with sane default settings that would run out of the box, nowadays Mint is Ubuntu with sane default settings that will run out of the box. Mint also doesn’t subscribe to this snap madness and is continuing to maintain a few packages Ubuntu has migrated to snap as .deb package (for instance Firefox and Chromium).

    • Frater MusEnglish
      8•1 month ago

      nowadays Mint is Ubuntu with sane default settings that will run out of the box

      There’s also an official version of Mint based on Debian (LMDE)

      • trollercoaster
        3•1 month ago

        I know, but I don’t have any half way recent experience with it, so I don’t know whether I can recommend it. When I last checked it out some years ago, it still lacked functionality regular Ubuntu based Mint had.

    • Fonzie!
      1•1 month ago

      If you want to recommend a system that runs decently out of the box and runs a lot of software, recommend Mint

      OP already stated they tried and disliked Mint.