I’m surprised by the comments here, even though the article predicted the opinion of long time Linux users. I had hoped for a more considerate opinion regarding a distro also aimed at new users.

This is a bad move and I hope they reverse their decision for the 24.04 LTS release.i mainly agree on the decision paralysis point and that they had a minimal install opinion available before.

I use arch. Choosing your favorite music player is fun. Choosing your favorite music player, video player, pdf viewer, Browser, file explorer, system monitor, office suite and mail program is not fun. This also completely negates the “faster to productivity, from download to first boot in less time” argument. If you have an install script prepared: yes. If you’re a new user: no.

This article is strange… The author uses “being able to open Microsoft Office documents” as a common example of what an OS that claims to be easy to use should be able to do. Then says…

When people download Ubuntu 23.04 they get an OS that can do everything Windows 95 did - with 23.10 they don’t

No default installation of Microsoft Windows EVER opened Microsoft Office documents. If this was a simple oversight in the write-up it’d be fine, but the point is hammered over and over again.

I don’t have an opinion about Ubuntu including or not including more software in the default installation (my guess is it became too big to fit on a DVD?) but this article failed to make it’s point to me by making a comparison to Windows that isn’t true.

Also…

the world’s most popular desktop Linux operating system (that’s Ubuntu, for those of you playing dumb)

Is this supposed to be a cocky joke? I can’t tell. What metric of “most popular” is the author using?

Distros preinstalling software lol. It should be easy to find, install, uninstall, restrict and configure software. I dont care about that bloat in the ISO. Nice to find stuff sometimes, and maybe useful in areas with bad internet, but thats not what a distros job is