My Linux from Scratch install. It was built by a moron.
You’re going to get a lot of comments about Ubuntu and snaps. Definitely one of the reasons I switched away from it.
For the uninitiated, as someone who’s looking to move from Windows to Linux and Ubuntu is probably my first choice, can you share what’s not to like about this?
Edit - insightful answers. Thank you
Performance and functionality.
When I click the Firefox icon, I expect Firefox to open. Like, right away.
When Ubuntu switched it to a snap, there was a noticeable load time. I’d click the icon and wait. In the background the OS was mounting a snap as a virtual volume or something, and loading the sandboxed app from that. It turned my modern computer with SSD into an old computer with a HDD. Firefox gets frequent updates, so the snap would be updated frequently, requiring a remount/reload every update.
Ubuntu tried this with many stock apps (like Calculator), but eventually rolled things back since so many people complained about the obvious performance issues.
I’m talking about literally waiting 10X the time for something to load as a snap than it did compared to a “regular” app.
The more apps you have as snaps, the more things have to be mounted/attached and slowly loaded. This also use to clutter up the output when listing mounted devices.
The Micropolis (GPL SimCity) snap loads with read-only permissions. i.e., you cannot save. There are no permission controls for write access (its snap permissions are only for audio). Basically, the snap was configured wrong and you can never save your game.
I had purged snapd from my system and added repos to get “normal” versions of software, but eventually some other package change would happen and snapd would get included with routine updates.
I understand the benefits of something like Snaps and Flatpaks - but you cannot deny that there are negatives. I thought Linux was about choice. I’ve been administering a bunch of Ubuntu systems at work for well over a decade, and I don’t like what the platform has been becoming.
Also, instead of going with an established solution (flatpak), Ubuntu decided to create a whole new problem (snap) and basically contributes to a splitting of the community. Which do you support? Which gets more developer focus to fix and improve things?
You don’t have to take my word for any of this. A quick Google search will yield many similar complaints.
For context:
Snaps are a way to build applications so that they can run on any platform with one build method. It makes it easier for developers to publish their apps across multiple different Linux distro without having to worry about dependency issues.
Snaps have been very poorly received by the community, one of the largest complaints is that a snap program with take 5-10 seconds to start, where as the same program without snap will start instantly.
Ubuntu devs have been working for years to optimize them, but it’s a complex problem and while they’ve made some improvements, it’s slow going. While this has been going on, Ubuntu is slowly doubling down more and more on snaps, such as replacing default apps with their snap counterparts.
On the other hand, other methods like flatpak exist, and are generally more liked by the community.
This has led to a lot of Ubuntu users feeling unheard as their feedback is ignored.
One word: snapd
If you like the idea of ubuntu, but wish to avoid ubuntu, you might want to check out Linux Mint.
Zorin is my fav.
how about popos?
Also a great option. I like their tiling window manager and the other gnome extensions they’ve done. I’m also generally excited about the work they’re doing with Cosmic as a new DE.
Been chomping at the bit for cosmic since I learned of it.
I’ve been using Ubuntu for a long time for its out-of-the-box zfs support, but the snap annoyances are getting harder to ignore.
Manjaro, because because the team behind it fuck’s up a bit to often for my tastes. And Ubuntu, because they force snap onto their users.
I spent the last 10 mins reading all the comments and I think we managed to shit on all the distros available.
That’s the Linux community I love, good job people <3No one gets left behind
Akuna Matata or some shit
Nobody shits on MX, it’s a sign 😁
Ubuntu.It’ went from a great beginner distro to a dumpster fire filled with snaps and telemetry.
Serious question: what do you not like about snaps? I find the isolation and dependency desolation to be pretty great.
Snap is vendor lock in. They don’t work on many distros, tooling pushes their platform, and they control the only store.
For desktop apps Flatpak is just technically better anyway so what’s the point.
Ubuntu - It was my first distro and I loved it for many years after 6.06. However, it slowly shifted from a very community focused distro (“Linux for human beings” was the original slogan) to a very corporate distro with lots of in-house bullshit, CLAs, and partially-closed projects that seems to focus on profit and business over actual human beings. I correlate this move to around the time when it became purple rather than brown. Snap sucks, Mir sucks, Unity sucks, integrating Amazon and music store paid bullshit sucks. Just no. Move to Debian.
Manjaro - It’s Arch, but with incompetence!
Red Hat - Do you enjoy paying licensing fees for a Linux distro that very likely violates the open source licenses it uses? RHEL is for you! Just remember not to share the code! Sharing is most certainly NOT caring!
RHEL code is available with git. Stop this FUD.
If that were true then none of this would be news. The CentOS Stream code is available to the public on git, but not the RHEL code. If the RHEL code was available to the public the outrage would have no reason to exist.
Even if paying customers have access to the RHEL code via git, they are forbidden from redistributing it (which is allowed by the FOSS licenses that code is under) or else the customers lose their license. This does not qualify as the code being available in my opinion, and in the opinion of the vast majority of the FOSS community.
Saying everything is fine and dandy in the RHEL world is FUD.
Arch, I want to get some work done not save 3 extra CPU cycles on boot.
I thought that’s gentoo.
Binary speed is really the least reason to use Gentoo.
There are a lot of thorny issues in package distribution that source builds completely sidestep.
Install-it-yourself plus source updates are a lot to ask, but if you can get the hang of it the benefits are pretty sweet.
Lol, how does booting quicker prevent you from doing work?
It doesn’t. All the time you spent reading manuals and tweaking configs to get it to boot quicker does.
And also, I have work to do… I don’t like wasting my time tinkering with config files trying to get the optimum settings. I just want an OS that helps me do my work and gets out of the way.
All the edgelord kids boasting about using Arch are also a big turn off.
Ubuntu: broke my LTS 20 by upgrading to LTS 22, pushes snaps and other ridiculous things over the years while offering relatively little value these days
This is gonna be an unpopular opinion, but Linux mint. It’s great if you’re just getting into Linux, it’s absolutely terrible when you know what you’re doing in Linux. The old package base and kernel just kills me sometimes. I get they want a stable base and use the lts versions of Ubuntu, but my goodness it’s always so far behind it’s not even worth using if you’re on AMD. Thankfully they’ve realized this after so many years and are releasing an EDGE iso with updated packages and kernel and LMDE is getting a version upgrade.
Not really an unpopular opinion. My main desktop runs mint, and we’re well aware of that being an issue. But it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make as long as it works. I haven’t had enough issues to look for replacement yet. ZorinOS looks interesting, though.
For servers and work I use other distros.
I love Zorin, probably for more superficial reasons than most. I like a clean UI and Zorin provides that by default, no fiddling. I get that people like customisability and ricing and all that, and if I could design my OS as easily as I could write CSS then I probably would, but I’ve yet to find something that lets me do that. And even if I do find it, Zorin still looks good and just works, which is most of what I care about.
Yeah there’s just not really a big enough reason to move away from Ubuntu unless you’re really wanting to avoid snaps (which I completely understand)
I’ve never cared for mint because I don’t really want my Linux to look like Windows. Which is what mint does.
I tried it years ago after years and years of Ubuntu. I installed Mint Cinnamon, it was the shit at the time, #1 distro and all. I wanted to like it but was never able to. After less than 2 years I switched to MX/Xfce and still use it, best distro ever.
But Mint is really bleh 🙁
How is MX? What do you like over other distros? I see it at the top of the distrowatch list all the time but I’ve never really found anything special or stand out with the distro.
Ubuntu has been on a downward spiral for the last decade or more, at this point they have spend more years being bad, than being good. Started when they were trying to push their own Wayland alternative, their own Gnome alternative, and now they try to force their proprietary appstore shop on everybody.
Ubuntu was really good when they were just Debian with some much needed updates and polish, but those days are long gone.
And it’s not like I wouldn’t love to get rid of .deb, it’s a terrible packaging format that had it’s best days 25 years ago when it was up against raw tarballs and when packages where shipped on CD-ROM. It’s in dire need of a fundamental upgrade, but Snap really is not the way forward and the way they underhandedly force it on users is just disgusting. Either build a packaging format of the future and just use it for everything, or don’t.
Remember when they included a bunch of Amazon integration in Unity?
Yuck
I have mixed feelings about Mir and Unity. Having competition is a good thing. If we only had gnome, Linux would be far less interesting. But at the same time, they could have spent the effort trying to improve Wayland and Gnome, and they would have made a significant difference.
But snaps being forced upon me, they can fuck right off. I don’t need my browser in a semifunctional container, when it worked perfectly before. And i hate that they made mount barely unusable.
Search for “how to install Firefox in Arch”. Snapstore page which asks you to first install snap from AUR, and then install Firefox through Snap is the second entry, I kid you not!
And they have same pages for Fedora erc.
This predatory behavior is to try and get any potential new Linux users to use their crapstore instead of their distro’s package is disgusting and malicious.
I absolutely hated myself after installing Arch on one of my machines.
Then I discovered EndeavourOS… I still hate myself but at least my laptop works now.
Holy shit, I installed it on my Lenovo tablet laptop, and everything works out the box… Even the gyroscope! I couldn’t believe it. It’s the first arch based I’ve tried and I think I’m hooked.
To note, I think I tried like 8 other distros before finding endeavor.
The touchscreen working right out of the box is what surprised me.
Dude, this 100%. The touch screen was janky on Windows, and non existent in all Linux distros I tried. Endeavor worked perfectly without any set up. I couldn’t believe it.
Out of all the distros that I’ve tried, probably Manjaro. The distro itself is ok, I don’t like how kind of bloated the default installation is, but it’s not too bad.
However what really pisses me off,among their numerous other controversies, was when they replaced perfectly functional open source apps with proprietary ones…twice. Though the former has since been reversed.
I’ve had nothing but problems with Ubuntu. There’s always some random crash that I don’t know what it is but I get a pop up. Sometimes you think you’re installing from apt but it secretly is running snap commands.
The OS should never hide things from me. I’m the user and I’m root.
If I wanted an operating system to be sneaky and do things behind my back I’ll go to Windows.
Manjaro feels like a bit of a mess to me and always ends up with problems.
Ubuntu releases too many buggy updates and dumps their idiosyncratic tastes in software on everyone whether people like it or not.
I really don’t get why they want to push snaps so much. Flatpak does basically the same thing but better and is already used by more people. Their efforts would be better spent improving that. It’s also weird that the server side of snaps is proprietary, I can’t help but think that they may have intentions with that, that go against what the users want.
Redhat. Wouldn’t touch it at this point. All of my servers are Debian.
