• yistdaj@pawb.social
    1·
    17 minutes ago

    Anecdotal, but I have had bad experiences using Ubuntu. I know it’s not a bad distro, and that it contributes a lot (especially historically), but it’s the other distros that take their contributions and add to it that I find worth using or recommending, or sometimes an unrelated distro. It’s the sort of thing I might give money to, but I’ll never want to use directly.

    I think this is what people mean when they say it’s bad - that distros that take what Ubuntu made and add their own touch seem more user friendly.

  • eco_game@discuss.tchncs.de
    45·
    5 days ago

    I was pretty neutral towards Ubuntu, up until an automatic system update removed my deb Firefox and replaced it with the snap version, even though I specifically set the apt repo to a higher priority.

    The entire reason I left Windows is because I don’t want (for example) Edge shoved down my throat after every update, and yet Ubuntu has gone and done the exact same thing with snaps.

    After literal hours of fighting, the only solution I found was to fully disable automatic updates. With Pop OS I have all the benefits of Ubuntu, but I also get a company (System76) that does cool stuff and doesn’t try shoving snaps down my throat.

  • starbrite@lemmy.zipEnglish
    12·
    4 days ago

    I’d love ubuntu, my only real problem with it is it’s owned by a company and not community backed

  • Destide@feddit.ukEnglish
    479·
    5 days ago

    The snaps bad echo chamber

    Snaps bad because proprietary

    Pre installed Nvidia good because propriety no wait video games!

    Ubuntu’s mission was always to build bridges between the user and tech and businesses that the gnu side of Linux wouldn’t.

    It’s a good just works distro that has spawned a ton of just works distros and sane server defaults. I see Ubuntu on the same level as macos.

    • Laser@feddit.org
      305·
      5 days ago

      I don’t like snaps because it’s just another Canonical NIH thing. Everyone else agreed on flatpak which seems to have a good design with portals and all and being fully open.

      On the other hand, you have snaps, which is being controlled by Canonical as the server component is l non-public. The packages sometimes work worse than normal debs and the flatpak version (steam being a notable example IIRC).

      There is 0 motivation for me as a user to look into that. They have solved the problem in one of the worst ways possible. Even Mint, which is Ubuntu’s biggest downstream, has opted against including it by default.

      In addition to all of that, Canonical also installs applications as snap when using the apt\£* command line tools.

      So you have a system that is

      • proprietary
      • worse than the alternatives
      • pushed on users even through unexpected channels

      Ubuntu’s mission was always to build bridges between the user and tech and businesses that the gnu side of Linux wouldn’t.

      Which bridge did they build with snaps?

      It’s a good just works distro that has spawned a ton of just works distros

      Which in turn have removed snaps by default and replaced the affected packages with native ones because it often didn’t “just work”

      • tsugu@slrpnk.netOP
        8·
        5 days ago

        I like Snaps. They can do more than Flatpak and when packaged well they just work. Sadly some apps on Snapcraft are abandoned or they just don’t work, but the same can be said about Flathub.

        Which bridge did they build with snaps?

        Proprietary companies are compelled to release on Snapcraft because it gives them advantages over other packaging methods. I’m just a user but I heard Snaps are easy to work with thanks to the documentation.

        In addition to all of that, Canonical also installs applications as snap when using the apt\£* command line tools.

        Firefox for example isn’t even in their apt repos. So instead of throwing an error, the Firefox meta package installs the snap, and tells you it’s doing that.

        But I understand that Ubuntu isn’t for you if you want to avoid snaps.

        • Laser@feddit.org
          91·
          5 days ago

          Everyone should use what suits them best. My negative opinion on snaps doesn’t mean Ubuntu shouldn’t ship it or that users shouldn’t use it. It’s Canonical’s distribution, they can put into it whatever they want for all I care, and if users are happy with it, good for them. But I can still criticize it for perceived issues. (Edit: kind of a straw man since nobody said I couldn’t, I just wanted to stress that I’m not authoritative on the matter)

          But I understand that Ubuntu isn’t for you if you want to avoid snaps.

          I used Ubuntu in the past, from I think 2004 or maybe 2005 to 2008, but switched away because of other issues that I don’t remember anymore, but I do remember upgrades between major versions were always pain with an Nvidia card (this was before AMD or in the beginning even ATI cards were well-usable under Linux) and I honestly just prefer rolling release nowadays. But snaps are just not at all compelling anyways.

          • bastion@feddit.nl
            2·
            5 days ago

            This is a solid take.

            Personally, I took snap out of my computer and burned it over a fire, but i toasted my marshmallows first, because I didn’t want snap on my marshmallows.

      • lengau@midwest.social
        5·
        5 days ago

        I don’t like snaps because it’s just another Canonical NIH thing. Everyone else agreed on flatpak which seems to have a good design with portals and all and being fully open.

        Snaps both predate flatpak and do things that Flatpaks are not designed to do.

        Canonical have also been a part of the desktop portals standard for a very long time, as they’ve been a part of how snaps do things.

        • Laser@feddit.org
          61·
          5 days ago

          Snaps both predate flatpak and do things that Flatpaks are not designed to do.

          By less than a year judging by the article… and for individual applications, there was AppImage.

          Snaps can do things flatpaks can’t do. Which is true but also kind of irrelevant if we’re talking about a means to distribute applications in a cross-distribution manner as opposed to a base system A/B partition solution.

          Or am I misunderstanding?

          • lengau@midwest.social
            3·
            5 days ago

            The claim that snaps are a Canonical NIH thing is falsified by those two facts. Even if Canonical said “okay, we’ll distribute desktop apps with Flatpak,” that wouldn’t affect the vast majority of their ongoing effort for snaps, which are related to things that Flatpak simply doesn’t do. Instead, they’d have the separate work of making the moving target of flatpaks work with their snap-based systems such as Ubuntu Core while still having to fully maintain that snap based ecosystem for the enterprise customers who use it for things that Flatpak simply doesn’t do.

    • Allero@lemmy.today
      121·
      5 days ago

      Proprietary Nvidia drivers are seen as a necessity, not a “good thing”, which is why Nvidia was repeatedly pressured to give up the code. Open-source Nvidia drivers suck in all applications, and if you don’t need anything demanding, you probably wouldn’t have a solid Nvidia card in the first place.

      Gnu side of Linux tries to change the practices used by said businesses, and the more people embrace it, the more pressured companies become to be compliant.

      Any sane copyleft activist (of which there are many in the Linux world) sees this change as a betrayal; security experts and enthusiasts are also not happy about a program doing something unknown sitting on their system.

    • Naich@lemmings.world
      8·
      5 days ago

      The only reason I don’t like snap is because useful mount information gets buried in 5 million “loop” mounts.

  • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    335·
    5 days ago

    I learned better in 2012 when they tried to put an Amazon search bar in their start menu, the same thing people are complaining about with windows today.

    If I wanted to use corposhit I would have stayed with windows.

    • prettybunnys
      11·
      4 days ago

      Canonical is trying to be Redhat for the rest of the world, like SUSE

    • tsugu@slrpnk.netOP
      66·
      4 days ago

      By doing what exactly? Snap’s server being proprietary doesn’t affect anyone at all, what else?

      • AVincentInSpace@pawb.socialEnglish
        21·
        2 days ago

        If apt-get detects that a package you told it to install is also available as a snap it’ll silently install that instead and you have to edit the Linux equivalent of the registry to get it to not do that

        • tsugu@slrpnk.netOP
          3·
          2 days ago

          Not entirely true. I experienced it with curl. Snap of it exists and it mostly works. But apt install curl will install regular curl. From what I’ve seen on my Ubuntu it installs a snap only if the apt package is set to install a snap. Such as Firefox. It doesn’t exist in Ubuntu’s repo anymore, only as a metapackage.

    • tsugu@slrpnk.netOP
      2·
      3 days ago

      Lmao. As if corporate operating systems were bad. What makes RedHat that much better tho? I want to know. From what I’ve seen they are both bringing a lot of value to the FOSS space.

      • Delilah (She/Her)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        31·
        3 days ago
        • Fedora makes very minimal changes to downstream. The gnome experience on fedora is the experience the devs intended, for better or worse.
        • It often experiments with new technologies. It was the first to ship pulseaudio out of box. And then again for pipewire. And if it wasn’t the first to install wayland by default, it probably was the first to stop shipping XOrg out of box.
        • It doesn’t install snaps instead of native packages when you run rpm install
        • It’s also Linus Torvald’s distro of choice if that’s worth anything
        • tsugu@slrpnk.netOP
          21·
          3 days ago

          • In my humble opinion, the stock experience on Gnome sucks. No desktop icons, no dock, no minimize maximize buttons, no app indicators. I only use Gnome because of the changes Ubuntu made to it, which can be replicated on other distros with a script.

          • That’s valid. Ubuntu has shipped with wayland by default since some time ago but wasn’t the first one. They don’t seem to adopt the latest technology as fast. Which I like. Even the new LTS still gives you the option to use X.org in GDM.

          • Also true. If you don’t like Snaps and aren’t comfortable with more and more packages being replaced by them, Ubuntu isn’t the distro to use. I don’t mind the metapackages installing snaps instead at all honestly. The terminal clearly says it’s installing a snap. And from my experience they work great. I was recently using wsl and needed yt-dlp. I went for the snap right away and it worked great.

          In fact the only broken snaps I have encountered so far are OBS and curl (which can’t access root directories, making it useless for the script I needed)

  • chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world
    309·
    5 days ago

    I don’t get why anybody uses Ubuntu. Just use Debian. It’s basically more stable and functional Ubuntu, but without snaps and you don’t need an entire distro branch for different DEs.

    • Rolling Resistance@lemmy.world
      12·
      5 days ago

      Because it’s a popular distro. Because when you look for “how to X in linux”, there’s a 90% chance the response will be about Ubuntu. Because your workplace said so. The list goes on.

    • pH3ra@lemmy.ml
      14·
      5 days ago

      Because you don’t have to know what to do already if you start with Ubuntu. You have to know your way around the Linux world more if you use Debian

    • wreckedcarzz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      4 days ago

      Rant, but not at you.

      Well I would use Debian, but the last two systems I tried to install it on hung at some point in the install process. I tried multiple times, multiple downloads, multiple versions (across multiple months!), and these are two separate machines from two different vendors.

      Debian is fine on my server boxes, but fuck me it’s dogshit in a consumer environment. One of those laptops has - and is an absolute necessity to have working - WWAN. I tried over a dozen distros, from ‘easy and popular’ to ‘obscure and edge-case’. Ubuntu (actually Kubuntu, I like KDE) was literally the only distro to 1) boot, 2) install, and 3) have working WWAN (after fucking with the fcc-unlock shit and filling my carrier details). Nothing, literally nothing else could do this simple task.

      Linux is great, they say. It’s easy. It’s simple to install and use. It puts you in control. These are ideas that the Linux community wants to believe, that I want to believe, but it’s just not. Given the right circumstances, with the right hardware, and the right use-case, it’s good. Stray anywhere off the beaten path and unless you’re a veteran *nix sysadmin who values their time as $0, sometimes you’re just fucked. I would know, I’ve been using various distros on and off for 20 years. It’s still bad. I don’t understand how, but here we are.

      I don’t like Ubuntu for a few reasons, but in my experience, the situation sucks the least when you use it. Sometimes - see above WWAN bullshit - it’s the only thing that works.

      And that’s fucking bullshit, but it’s a fact. And even interested users, who like to tinker, have a limit to what they will put up with before throwing in the towel and using what works.

    • backgroundcow@lemmy.world
      2·
      4 days ago

      Ubuntu user here. Swapped away from Debian in its early days when Ubuntu made a real effort to stay current with the desktop environment (even coordinating their releases after GNOME), and back then it mattered. Nowadays my few attempts at other distros suggest that the hardware driver situation (especially proprietary) seems better on Ubuntu, for example to get everything working on fairly new laptops.

      There are of course other things I’m less happy about. The snap installs via apt drives me crazy; not that I necessarily hate the technology, but sometimes I need a non-containeraized browser (for example to run inside another container), so I need to be allowed to choose what is being installed.