Hello everyone! I would like to know why there seems to be some dislike toward Ubuntu within the Linux community. I would like you to share your reasons for why you like Ubuntu or, on the contrary, why you don’t. Thanks 🙇
In my personal opinion: 1- Snap packages. Dont like them for their closed source backend, dont lime them for how canonical has been sneaking then into the system of users who have been originally trying to install a deb.
2- Modern Ubuntu simply has no real benefit compared to other Distros. Nowadays it’s just another Gnome and Debian-based distro, I see no reason to use it over Debian itself, or Fedora, Solus, or any other Ubuntu derivative that simply does better than “vanilla” Ubuntu, such as Pop!_OS or Linux Mint.
I don’t hate Ubuntu, and I recognize it’s importance for Linux as a desktop in it’s early days, but Canonical really lost track of themselves.
I don’t really agree about no benefit. It’s still the biggest, most well-supported distro, the desktop is really polished, the font rendering is lightyears ahead of others, etc.
The well-supported thing is in great part only thanks to Debian. And about the desktop, cmon, it’s just Gnome with built in extensions. No issue with that and totally valid to enjoy it, but it’s certainly not “lightyears” ahead of anything.
But if your experience with Ubuntu is good, then great, I’m happy that you enjoy the Linux ecosystem, and I truly believe the best distro is the one that fits best for your personal needs, and if Ubuntu does that, then it’s great 😁
It definitely has its roots in Debian, but when you need to use that weird closed source application for work, if it has a “supported” (for a given value of support) Linux distro it’ll be Ubuntu.
I personally prefer straight Debian myself, or something entirely different but when asked for a recommendation by friends it’s Ubuntu.
Ubuntu’s modified GNOME desktop feels less polished than base GNOME, and the font rendering is part of GNOME, not something Ubuntu does special. There’s little reason to use it over Fedora.
Ubuntu’s font rendering used to be better than every other distro, because they incorporated patches on freetype that were legally ‘iffy’ as to whether they infringed on microsoft’s patents; later whatever exclusivity requirement that there was with those patents expired, and the patches got upstreamed in freetype itself.
So now all Linux desktops are capable of subpixel font rendering, hinting, whatever. But before that, font rendering really was hideous on other distros.
-
Pretty sure it’s not closed source? https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/10/snap_without_ubuntu_tools/
-
Isn’t that the purpose though of Ubuntu though? They made it easy, everything is open source, and then people/companies/orgs that want to do things different can just fork it and do their own thing. If they make a better product according to even 1 person, great. Job done. Plenty of people are happy with vanilla Ubuntu.
I don’t even use Ubuntu but I sure appreciate the amount of work they’ve done over the years and I feel they get a lot of stick about it for no good reason.
Isn’t that the purpose though of Ubuntu though?
No, because back in the day when Ubuntu was “Linux for human beings” you could literally feel that in almost every aspect of it, from the ease of its installation to its icon theme and system sounds to its help pages. It was their “selling” point - it made Linux friendly and reachable for many people, as it did for you and me.
It’s been more than 15 years since I used Ubuntu but from that point I really could feel that what @merci3@lemmy.world says is true - it no longer offered any real benefit compared to Fedora, Solus, Mint or whatever distro targeted at people getting into Linux. You won’t find many people saying that Ubuntu really stands out from their similars about something. It just became another option, forgot what was “Ubuntu” about (remember the Amazon ads scandal?) and seem to be really stubborn into impose to the community their way of doing things (snaps, mir…). Or tell me with a serious face how the snap thing makes the life easier of someone wanting to install a deb.
It’s correct what you say - as many other distros, they have done a great amount of work over the years and most of us are grateful to it because we could get into Linux thanks to it, nobody can deny that. It’s just that said work no longer seems the case nor they seem really interested about that.
their “selling” point
Here’s one place to begin. They’re not selling it, it’s literally free. Speaking for myself but I just cannot bring myself to criticize a free product which is not a monopoly. And this clearly isn’t a monopoly. It just feels entitled.
Amazon ads
The tiny flaw in the above logic. Reminiscent of similar scandalettes involving Mozilla. But these sponsorship deals have always been easy to disable, even before they get dropped like a hot potato because of the backlash. I always come back to the same thought: how much are we actually paying for this product that is apparently valuable because we’re using it and concerned about its flaws? We’re paying nothing.
Or tell me with a serious face how the snap thing makes the life easier of someone wanting to install a deb.
The typical Ubuntu user will not know what a deb is, and should not be expected to. That’s the point. It’s meant to be easy. Whatever else they are, Snaps are definitely easy.
-
my issue lies with it being hardcoded to work with Canonical servers. Yeah, technically you could host your own snap store, but it’s simply not what it’s meant for, so in my views the openess is harmed by this design choice.
-
yeah, I dont disagree with Ubuntu being easy to use, and as I said, I aknowledge its importance for our ecosystem. Also I never said I had issues with peoe who enjoyed “vanilla” Ubuntu, I’m actually happy to see people enjoying Linux as a whole.
But as previously stated, my personal opinion is that modern Ubuntu adds nothing compared to other desktop distros, ot’s DE is just Gnome with extensions bult in. The Snap store is not very well optimized and there was no reason to have it as default over gnome-software, which is more feature-complete. Nowadays, for my use, I only see Ubuntu as Debian with a more modern installer.
But these complaints are in parts because I’m a flatpak > snap guy, and a vanilla gnome > whatever Canonical did guy which are personal tastes.
Does it have problems? I mean, some may prefer other distros to Ubuntu or may not like some stuff that come with Ubuntu, that doesn’t mean Ubuntu has any issue ;)
I don’t like bananas, no issue at all with bananas. I prefer Debian (on which is based Ubuntu) and I prefer Mint (based on… ubuntu) because they suit me much better, that’s all. At least for me. edit: one thing I don’t like for example are snaps, me not liking them does not mean they’re necessarily bad.
Corporate ownership, but you can have that and still be generally accepted in the community. Like both Fedora when controlled by Red Hat and Suse when controlled by Novell.
One of the real problem is their dual license policy for their open source projects, that grant Ubuntu full license and the power to close in an Open source Project if they want. This is decidedly against the GPL spirit, but can be done with dual licensing.
Another problem is the “not made here” mentality, which undermined Wayland for instance.
Ultimately the problem is I guess, that Ubuntu is (was?) trying to make Ubuntu exclusive to Linux, with Canonical controlling key technologies. Seemingly an effort to reduce other Linux distros to second rate players.
Another example of that (apart from dual license and Mir) is their new package system Snap, which is open source on the client side, but proprietary on the server side.
Obviously it’s not a good idea for Linux to use proprietary package systems.
These are of course ideological issues, if you don’t give a shit about those, I suppose Ubuntu is mostly OK. Except minor annoyances like media not working out of the box. And that the PPA system sucks.
As well as what has already been mentioned, when I used it, it crashed a lot.
You spend a lot of time fighting snaps. I wanted to install GrapheneOS which needs direct access to USB from the browser. Snaps can’t do that, so I had to hunt for a chromium .deb on the web. Might as well use windows if I’m doing to Google “$software installer”
