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?

  • laurelraven@lemmy.zipEnglish
    5·
    2 hours ago

    Ubuntu really isn’t the only candidate though… Mint may not have quite as much name recognition, but I don’t think it’s that far off, and it has pretty much all of the benefits of Ubuntu without the issues.

    Mint just works.

    And I absolutely think it’s justified to call Canonical out for things like quietly redirecting apt to install snaps instead or throwing up scare messages to make people think they’re insecure if they don’t pay for a subscription or adding unnecessary packages to the minimal install image that’re only useful for paid subscribers but call home regardless

    Canonical has been toxic and getting worse, not calling them out is basically telling them it’s okay for them to treat the community the way they have.

    • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 hour ago

      Fair points. Admittedly I use a tiling window manager so I never see most of these problems.

      My basic concern is with fragmentation. IMO many techies just don’t grasp how forbidding Linux is to normal people. Or the importance of reputation in people’s choice to take the leap. It’s all but priceless. Ubuntu-bashing has always struck me as a case of an elite group that prefers to split hairs rather than to take the win of getting extra users of FOSS. Idealism vs pragmatism, basically.

      Anyway, I’m repeating myself. If you think that normies have heard of Mint already and that it won’t go away next year, then fine. The important thing is to get them to take the leap. They can always change distro later, the second time is much less forbidding.

    • olympicyes@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Mint isn’t accept able for the server use case and desktop Ubuntu allows you to run a virtually identical configuration to your server for development purposes. Server Ubuntu pays the bills and it’s important to make sure you don’t have any conflicts with your dependencies. If you’re using desktop Linux for aesthetic, personal, or ideological reasons, then you’ve got a lot of options to choose from. Ubuntu pro just adds developer support to universe instead of just main and adds kernel live patch. It’s free so people are really upset about wording instead of any practical problem.