Long story short, I have a desktop with Fedora, lovely, fast, sleek and surprisingly reliable for a near rolling distro (it failed me only once back around Fedora 34 or something where it nuked Grub). Tried to install on a 2012 i7 MacBook Air… what a slog!!!!! Surprisingly Ubuntu runs very smooth on it. I have been bothering all my friends for years about moving to Fedora (back then it was because I hated Unity) but now… I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but… Christ, it does run well! In fairness all my VMs are running DietPi (a slimmed version of Ubuntu) and coming back to the APT world feels like coming back home.
On the other end forcing myself to be on Fedora allows me to stay on the DNF world that is compatible with Amazon Linux etc (which I use for work), it has updated packages, it is nice and clean…. Argh, don’t know how to decide!
Thoughts?
I am not in the mood for Debian. I like the Mint approach but I am not a fan of slow rolling releases and also would like to keep myself as close as upstream as possible, the Debian version is the only one that seems reliable enough but, again, it is Debian, the packages are “old”. Pop Os and similar are two hops away from upstream and so I’d rather not.
Is Snap really that bad?
Edit: thank you all for sharing your experience !
It's pitched as a open source operation system, yet the snap store is closed source and vendor locked, one of the reasons some of us use Liniux is because we prefer open source (and there are rational justifications for that).
Hate is a strong word, but there is legitimate criticism, I also think the closed source nature of snap led to the fact that it has no volunteers and that eventually caused malware to appear on the snap store multiple time, it never happened on flathub as far as i know.
Today for beginner i think opensuse and linux mint are better.
Regarding debian having old packages , i use nix but it is fairly immature, flathub should also work.
I gave up on Ubuntu before the snaps became a thing. Here's what I hated :
- ugly purple and orange theme
- Upgrades between lts never worked right for me: 14->16 fail and broke, 16->18 lots of problems, 18->20 still not great.
Upgrading between Ubuntu lts releases never fully worked for me either. Something always broke or went wrong....
I also have had trouble during upgrades in the past.
I'll have to disagree about the purple and orange theme though. I'm personally a big fan.
I wouldn't call it hate, more like disapprobation with Canonical's choices. No one have to use Ubuntu, we have tons of distro to choose. If someone wants LTS, you can always go pure Debian way, it's not hard to install as it's used to be (for beginners), or there is Linux Mint Debian Edition. You can easily use flatpaks with these and keep your software up-to-date.
I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but…
There is no "supposed to" when it comes to distro preferences. Use whatever you like, other people's opinions do not dictate your behavior. If Ubuntu works for you, use that. If anything, that's the freedom of FOSS. You can take other people's views in to account when choosing a distro, but in the end it is your decision. I dislike Ubuntu for a few reasons, but I don't get to dictate to anyone else what they use and why.
If you like rolling release, you could try Debian sid/unstable. I hear it's quite stable and reliable and, of course, isn't Ubuntu.
Snap is terrible. If you have a bunch of snaps on your system, it becomes very slow and sluggish
I'm quite happy with Linux Mint Debian Edition. I think it is the future of Mint. It's on a very recent kernel, and more and more software I use nowadays is in Flatpaks anyways. I don't feel like I'm missing out on much new stuff, but maybe I'm just not aware.
I still think Ubuntu is the best option (particularly if you want to use the non-LTS releases)
Having said that I do hate snaps and also dislike flatpaks. So what I do is just use the Firefox deb package from the PPA and the chromium package from Linux Mint. Oh, and I have actually replaced ubuntu-advantage-tools with a no-op dummy package.
Ubuntu attacted a lot of control freaks because Shuttleworth was originally splashing some money when it started and a bunch of nerds saw dollar signs. As a result they have a culture of "not invented here" syndrome where someone just has to reinvent the wheel in only the way they see it and they don't work well with others or accept their input because they want all the credit.
Personally, I got sick of it having been pretty involved early on in the project. It's easier and saner to just use a distro based on what everyone else is doing.
Long time since I used Ubuntu,, remember updates breaking network twice.. Peppermint OS, Debian(and devuan if you don't like systemd) based. all the important bits (not arch level) but nothing more. Rolling, Runs on 1 GB ram. Haven't distro hopped anymore since I found it.
Stable base , extra on top
“Everything you need and nothing you don’t."
Ubuntu is nice. Apt/DEB works as they should. Some default apps, mostly browsers, are snaps now, but this does not bother you at all. You were getting them from your distro anyway.
Flatpak and AppImages work just fine if you need them.
The Ubuntu desktop (any flavour) just works. Others are different, but nothing is bad about Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is trying new things, proprietary to their ecosystem, e.g. Unity or snap. On the big picture, those are experiment. Ubuntu is still Linux.
The community reaction to snap is overblown. So Canonical developed something you don't like? Ignore it. This has mostly been a waste of time for them.
(Yes, maybe that dev time would be better spent on flatpak or open-source apps. But that's their time. I'm not paying Ubuntu developers, so can I really complain?)
They tried Unity and gave up for Gnome 3 - however they ship a heavily customized Gbome 3.
Now they're trying Snap. How long before they give up and use flatpak like every other distro?
What's the point of this?
Well, I'd file this as innovation. Innovation is trying and failing. It's an experiment. And I'm okay with this.
Is it wasteful to have KDE and Gnome? Why don't they give up and merge with each other? Did we really need systemd? Or docker? And why Wayland when every single distro is on X and every single application is on X?
Ubuntu started as a Gnome-based distribution and it is was better than the competition on the desktop at the time. Or good enough. It got popular.
Personally, I wasn't a big fan of Unity or Gnome 3, but it worked. I found snap totally weird and against how things should be on a Linux system. But snap updates (while still annoying) have solved problems with deb-based updates of browser ("Quit all running firefox or you'll experience problems").
Maybe I'd like Debian more. After all I came from Debian to Ubuntu. But it's not worth to make a fuzz.
I don't think it's wasteful to have both KDE and Gnome. It's healthy competition and as you say, innovation.
However the job of a distribution is to gather upstream software into a meaningful OS, and rewriting everything that should be an upstream software shared with other distributions is a distraction.
So Unity was unnecessary "not invented here" syndrome. Just like Snap is.
Personally I don't really hate Ubuntu, but I tend to find that everything it does, there's something else that does it slightly better.
For example, it's supposed to be a good 'beginner' distro or good for something that 'just works', but IMO things like Mint or Pop!OS do it a little better these days. Snap is supposed to be a nice simple way to manage packages without worrying about dependencies, but Flatpak does it better and so on.
So yeah I don't hate it, I just don't see any particular reason to really use it. Opinions may vary though of course.
I use Ubuntu for work and have no issues with it to be honest. I install everything via apt, I think a few things are via snap but nothing that I've installed directly. It's stable and I can get on with stuff. I definitely am not a fan of the move towards snap and the app store: if I was to choose I'd go vanilla Debian.
I recently got a workstation class desktop for my home server and I had so many issues with Debian that I have to search an alternative, Ubuntu supported the hardware natively and I even got a firmware update. I think the hate is really unfounded. Of course there is corporate decisions, but so far it has never get in my way. I have it with a lot of docker containers and a lot hardware integrations. Even the secure boot with nvdia card is easy. I only installed virt-manager via snap, the other things were directly with apt. I did enable the live patch and that’s a nice addition to don’t need to restart a lot.
I think you should give it a try, so far it has worked for me.
