I know there are lots of people that do not like Ubuntu due to the controversies of Snaps, Canonicals head scratching decisions and their ditching of Unity.
However my experience using Ubuntu when I first used it wasn’t that bad, sure the snaps could take a bit or two to boot up but that’s a first time thing.
I’ve even put it on my younger brothers laptop for his school and college use as he just didn’t like the updates from Windows taking away his work and so far he’s been having a good time with using this distro.
I guess what I’m tryna say is that Ubuntu is kind of the “Windows” of the Linux world, yes it’s decisions aren’t always the best, but at least it has MUCH lenient requirements and no dumb features from Windows 11 especially forced auto updates.
What are your thoughts and experiences using Ubuntu? I get there is Mint and Fedora, but how common Ubuntu is used, it seemed like a good idea for my bros study work as a “non interfering” idea.
Your thoughts?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The thing with Ubuntu / Canonical isn’t that it doesn’t work, it is that they’ve bad policies and by using their stuff you’re making yourself vulnerable to something akin to what happened with VMWare ESXi or with CentOS licensing - they may change their mind at some point and you’ll be left with a pile of machines and little to no time to move to other solution.
For starters Ubuntu is the only serious and corporate-backed distribution to ever release a major version on the website and have the ISO installer broken for a few days.
Ubuntu’s kernel is also a dumpster fire of hacks waiting for someone upstream to implement things properly so they can backport them and ditch their own implementations. We’ve seen this multiple times, shiftfs vs VFS idmap shifting is a great example of the issue.
Canonical has contributing to open-source for a long time, but have you heard about what happened with LXD/LXC? LXC was made with significant investments, primarily from IBM and Canonical. LXD was later developed as an independent project under the Linux Containers umbrella, also funded by Canonical. Everything seemed to be progressing well until last year when Canonical announced that LXD would no longer remain an independent project. They removed it from the Linux Containers project and brought it under in-house development.
They effectively took control of the codebase, changed repositories, relicensed previous contributions under a more restrictive license. To complicate matters, they required all contributors to sign a contract with new limitations and impositions. This shift has caused concerns, but most importantly LXD became essentially a closed-off in-house project of Canonical.
Some people may be annoyed at Snaps as well but I won’t get into that.
Ubuntu is fine. Drivers are annoying on all distros (nvidia updates for me mainly, I don’t update hardware often).
I have daily driven various distros and tested a lot since the 90s and I pay close attention to time spent on customizing and fixes, and ubuntu just isn’t worse than other distros. I make setup scripts and have custom dockerfiles for webtops.
I want to like nixos or whatever fork will prevail, but it’s more work than people want to admit. I personally don’t want to have to pay that much attention to my operating system. It’s why i ditched gentoo almost 20 years ago. I don’t want to lurk forums for fixes and tweaks. I also make sure hardware I buy doesn’t have glaring compatibility issues.
If Ubuntu rubs you the wrong way but you are fine with most of it, just use debian.
I dislike Ubuntu, because it literally never successfully upgraded from one release to the next.
It’s also the buggiest distro I’ve experienced, and I’ve tried quite a few. I’m talking about bugs like:- do a fresh install
- log into Gnome
- first thing that pops up is an error message about a crashed service
or:
- do a fresh install
- open Software Center
- it doesn’t load, keeps spinning the cursor
Stuff like this disqualifies a distro for years in my opinion.
Ubuntu was a successful attempt to make Debian user-friendly. If you don’t remember Linux in 2003, it took a lot of time to configure.
Ubuntu came along and did everything automatically from first install. Some of the polish it had was things like smooth fonts, TrueType font support (remember old XFree86 Bitmap fonts?) a GUI installer, automatically detecting your monitor resolution, setting up sound automatically, and automatic downloading of firmware needed to make your hardware work. In just one reboot after install, you had a usable system that looked really nice, with smooth fonts.
In 2024, Debian already does all of this out of the box. The value add of Ubuntu is minimal. Ubuntu provides a theme, a splash screen when booting up, a custom font, and a modified version of the Dash to Dock extension that you can just download yourself from the Gnome extension site. That’s it. One might argue that snaps make Ubuntu worse than Debian.
Just use Debian. If you want a somewhat more polished system (nice cursors, unique icons, easy to configure animations), there is Mint Debian edition.
It takes less time to just set up Debian to look and behave like Ubuntu (about 10 minutes) than it takes to continually fight against Ubuntu snaps.
Just use Debian.
The Term
The issue is that, no Ubuntu is not “the Windows” of Linux.
First of all this statement makes no sense. You could say “the Samsung of the Android world” as Samsung Android is a Distribution that looks nice and many people think it is nice to use (leaving out that it is the most spyware-riddled software on locked devices with horrible customer treatment)
Windows is just one OS. Android is an easy variant of Linux, and Ubuntu was one too.
Nowadays, uBlue Aurora/Bazzite would be my “best Desktop Linux”, because they implement all the great, easy and modern stuff of Fedora Atomic Desktops, while also removing stupid opinionated things, and adding packages they legally simply cannot ship.
Updates & Upgrades
Ubuntu is not easy anymore. Distro upgrades are a mess and break. I had 12 laptops, all had the same 3 issues and updates took forever.
Ubuntu requires a sudo account for them to even work, a nonsudoer gets an update message but clicking it does nothing.
I.e. they dont use polkit, unlike Fedora for example.The paradigm of
- Needing a user with sudo rights to use a system, otherwise an admin needs to login every week and do the GUI updates
- Updates and upgrades being a privileged action that requires root permission
Is just bad. Android works without root since forever, and I would say it is the easiest Linux distro out there.
Style
They have their own strange icons, which look worse than GNOMEs. They have their own strange store instead of using and improving GNOME Software.
Their design sucks in comparison to Manjaro if you ask me. Most personal point of this list. Many other Distros just ship GNOME, do the packaging and leave the Branding to small changes, and the upstream DE.
Snaps
Snaps are not cross platform, while Flatpak exists and is cross platform.
Ubuntu doesnt even have uptodate flatpak and dependencies in their repos so the Flatpak project maintains like 6 PPAs just to run them on Ubuntu.
Snaps are not cross platform because they rely on AppArmor for sandboxing, and afaik custom AppArmor patches that are not in upstream.
This means Snaps on Fedora and others would run Snaps unsandboxed.
Technically they are fine. Pretty normal approach. But their repo hat big malware issues and they only allow a single one, which is a total nogo for any opensource project.
Snaps installed by other users with sudo cannot be opened by other users. You need to install them per-user, no other option possible.
Flatpak requires wheel/sudo too, I need to make a Fedora Change request to fix that, my previous one got rejected…
Variants & LTS
They only ship KDE on the LTS variant, which means by now it is very outdated. KDE is the most windows-like desktop, and also has the most features, by far. I tried GNOME and made a writeup on Fedora discuss.
Bloat
They bloat (at least) their (LTS) variants with tons of deb packages.
Safety & Snapshots
They dont integrate timeshift or other backup systems. Linux Mint and OpenSUSE are better here. Fedora Atomic Desktops too, while traditional Fedora not.
The distribution is fine, maybe even good.
The politicking and project management around the distro has annoyed a lot of people.
Ubuntu is so bad in supporting deb packages, that the default included UI package installer under Ubuntu 24.04 didn’t support deb packages. See: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2497203
Yes it’s that bad. This is the reason I don’t promote Ubuntu anymore, they went too far. They crossed a line. Just use Linux Mint or something.
The biggest similarity with Windows is that it isn’t a community run project. In my opinion they tried very to represent themselves as an open source community in the early days and downplay Canonical’s role. There is nothing wrong with Ubuntu as a first introduction to Linux but if people are looking for a project to join and make contributions then there are many better options.
Honestly, IMO Mint is just Ubuntu without all the scetchy stuff. The only real major difference (besides the packaging debate) is the default graphical shell.
If you like gnome shell, I wonder if it’s worth installing Mint and then
gnome-shell…Ubuntu started and stayed great for many years. Now I feel it’s coasting on the name it rightly earned. It was my daily driver but I left after frustration with firefox snap and some networking malarkey I don’t care to recall. There are just better maintained distros out there.
I think Ubuntu is very good, if you want quick and easy. It’s incedibly painless.
However, it does forced auto updates by default. They are called unattended-upgrades and run in the background by default. You can pause or disable them though. Also snaps auto update silently, by default. That can also be paused, though.
What really sucks is, if you don’t have a printer it continues to try and install cups, which can be a security concern. However, I successfully blocked it by creating an immutable file where it would put the snap, while it was uninstalled.
