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?
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.
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.
Not sure why you’d think it would go away next year since it’s been around for 18 years and adoption seems to be going up rather than down, and a lot of people have switched to recommending it for new converts rather than Ubuntu
I don’t think that many normies have heard of Mint, but I don’t think that many have heard of Ubuntu either.
Fragmentation is a concern but it’s an unavoidable side effect of an open community with many people and opinions
Fair enough, and perhaps you’re right. Personally I’m reassured when a for-profit company backstops an open-source project. So many amateur projects turn into abandonware, an OS has to do better than that. But yes, Canonical could get into trouble too.
Personally I see not Mint but Debian as the best claimant to Ubuntu’s mantle. I just wish they would become a bit less amateurish. Maybe move towards the Wikimedia foundation model, get some serious resources, a better website and onboarding funnel, etc. Their ideological position is great, but if you want to change the world then at some point you need to behave at least somewhat like a private business.