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?
The distribution is fine, maybe even good.
The politicking and project management around the distro has annoyed a lot of people.
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.
Just wanted to add something for future reference of anyone reading your post: after Canonical did this, LXD was forked by Linux Containers into a new project named Incus.
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.
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.
Ubuntu is a fine “nice to meet you” distro – the criticisms I’ve gathered happen a few months in. Nvidia+Xorg updates dropping GUI to TUI, MDADM shitting the bed and dropping RAID, the awkward 6 month upgrades where you go from old weird issues in apps to new weird issues – thou snap and flatpak improve this a lot over stock.
Canonical NIH, Canonical CLA agreement, history of charging forward only to abandon in house tech over and again after users get comfy.
Then there are inner politics and the occasional hankyness inside, or discourteousness like when they shit the bed dropping lib32 without talking to partnrrs like Valve on how this would effect their business after they made Ubuntu their target.
Criticisms typically are based in something. I had started using Ubuntu since 2004 IIRC and its been an interesting ride.
Oh also, PPA’s, avoid those, they’re not stock and don’t be surprised if your OS doesn’t boot with the less than stellar ones not staying in sync with the latest kernel updates.
YMMV and this is by no means advice on your personal fit.
Personally I am not fond of most casual user low barrier distros but I still recommend them. Manjaro, PopOS, LinuxMint, Endless, are all fine options depending on what kind of user.
I recently recommended one to a GameDev and considering SteamOS is Arch he decided on Manjaro over Debian.
YMMV, and its important to listen first to people to see what they want their machine to do.
One last criticism of Canonical and Ubuntu. Their HQ is UK based and I honestly wonder how the culture effects development. Germany, UK, California all have different “feels”, its hard to be more specific.
Choice is good, always keep your data backed up and the @home on a different partition. The differences across distros are largely not a big deal like they used to be. People find solus in being captain of their Linux adventure and even Ubuntu will do just fine at the basics, just know if you hit a snag it may not be like that on every distro.
