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?
But why move people from Microsoft to another company that is implementing more and more user-hostile “features”, when there are alternatives like Mint? If all the new Linux users are herded towards Canonical, it’s just giving them even more power to extract profits in the future.
It’s far easier to have them start with a community-led project on the same basis. Imagine Ubuntu being enshittified and forked - how should they decide which fork to use, and how can they know it will still exist in a couple of years?
Yes yes, these are good points. To be clear, IMO Debian is the ideal Ubuntu replacement. They have the pedigree, the credible claim to be the Universal OS. But have you seen Debian’s website? No way. Hopefully that will change one day.
Debian is amazing, but you’re right that they are far from noob-friendly. I recently switched to Fedora due to the fast availability of new packages (e.g. KDE Plasma 6.1 with fixed Nvidia drivers), and even the arguably easiest option - Ublue images - had some issues I wouldn’t have been able to fix without deep Linux experience.
But there definitely has been a lot of progress over the last couple of years, and I’m sure that will continue. We just have to be mindful of not participating in creating the next Microsoft. Ubuntu is already seen as the default Linux distribution - the further it gets entrenched, the worse for all of us.
Believe it or not, I’m being gradually won over by the arguments deployed in this discussion! Incredible but true.
Being open minded in response to new information is an automatic upvote from me