Long story short, I have a desktop with Fedora, lovely, fast, sleek and surprisingly reliable for a near rolling distro (it failed me only once back around Fedora 34 or something where it nuked Grub). Tried to install on a 2012 i7 MacBook Air… what a slog!!! Surprisingly Ubuntu runs very smooth on it. I have been bothering all my friends for years about moving to Fedora (back then it was because I hated Unity) but now… I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but… Christ, it does run well! In fairness all my VMs are running DietPi (a slimmed version of Ubuntu) and coming back to the APT world feels like coming back home.
On the other end forcing myself to be on Fedora allows me to stay on the DNF world that is compatible with Amazon Linux etc (which I use for work), it has updated packages, it is nice and clean…. Argh, don’t know how to decide!
Thoughts?
I am not in the mood for Debian. I like the Mint approach but I am not a fan of slow rolling releases and also would like to keep myself as close as upstream as possible, the Debian version is the only one that seems reliable enough but, again, it is Debian, the packages are “old”. Pop Os and similar are two hops away from upstream and so I’d rather not.
Is Snap really that bad?
Edit: thank you all for sharing your experience !
I avoid Ubuntu because Canonical has a history of going their own way alone rather than collaborating on universal standards. For instance, when the X devs decided the successor to X11 needed to be a complete redesign from scratch companies like RedHat, Collabora, Intel, Google, Samsung, and more collaborated to build Wayland. However, Canonical announced Mir, and they went their own way alone.
When Gnome3 came out it was very controversial and this spawned alternatives such as Cinnamin, MATE, and Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. Unity was the only Linux desktop, before or since, to include sponsored bloatware apps installed by default, and it also sold user search history to advertisers.
Then, there’s snap. While Flatpak matured and becoame the defacto standard distro-agnostic package system, Canonical once again went their own way alone by creating snap.
I’m not an expert on Ubuntu or the Linux community, I’ve just been around long enough to see Canonical stir up controversy over and over by going left when everyone else goes right, failing after a few years, and wasting thousands of worker hours in the process.
You’re not wrong, but there’s also value in exploring different ways to do similar things. That’s what’s great about Linux.
Some of Canonical’s efforts may lead to failure, but that doesn’t mean they are a waste.
Pretty much this, they don’t deserve hate but i won’t recommend them either
Snap has a locked and proprietary store, even if the client is FOSS. There is no reason to “hate” Ubuntu but there are better choices.
Snaps are centralised packaging, a’la Apple App Store or Google Play. Now if someone forked snapd, added third party repo and made It so you could select which repo is the main one, that’d be a start.
But as long as Canonical commits to a centralised form of distribution with no third party support I’m going to advise desktop users to stay away from Ubuntu.
It’s more than just centralized control.
They have the ability to arbitrarily push out Snap updates.
That’s right! Your production server is getting patched without your knowledge or consent. Thankfully they magnanimously decided to let admins delay it by a few weeks.
Linux is about control. I decide what my machine does. When it updates. What it updates. The feedback from Canonical regarding Snaps was so tone dead and condescending it made Steve Balmer look sane. It boiled down to, don’t worry your pretty little head off. We know what’s best.
If you run Ubuntu on a production server, you better having snapd disabled.
It’s pitched as a open source operation system, yet the snap store is closed source and vendor locked, one of the reasons some of us use Liniux is because we prefer open source (and there are rational justifications for that).
Hate is a strong word, but there is legitimate criticism, I also think the closed source nature of snap led to the fact that it has no volunteers and that eventually caused malware to appear on the snap store multiple time, it never happened on flathub as far as i know.
Today for beginner i think opensuse and linux mint are better.
Regarding debian having old packages , i use nix but it is fairly immature, flathub should also work.
They’ve embraced Wayland, pipewire, gnome and what not, but snap is really questionable, particularly in the Linux ecosystem.
I gather it can be somewhat annoying to contend with (I.e. some apps on Ubuntu may only be available as snaps?)
Snap is a steaming pile of excrement. So much of the crap on the Snap Store is obsolete and out of date. Anyone and their monkey can post a snap on snapcraft, and… they do. Canonical is just as bad. They took it upon themselves to package up a lot of commercial-level open-source software 3 or 4 years ago… and then have done fuck all with it ever since. Zero updates to the original snaps they put there in the initial population of the Snap store (yes they do maintain a select few things, but only a small percentage of the flood of obsolete software in the Snap store). The result is people looking to install apps who poke the Snap store, go “oh hey, the application I want is there”, install it, and then get all pissy with the vendor… who looks about in surprise wondering how a potential customer managed to find such an old version (happened with at least 2 of my employers, and I’ve come across many more). Go search Reddit (or Google) for obsolete snap discussions. There’s no shortage people pointing at the same issue.
I wasn’t aware of this situation, that’s really good to know.
I’m not keen on the snaps being centralised behind a proprietary server. I don’t really get why anyone would put up with that in light of Flatpak.
This doesn’t seem to be a problem with snap. Canonical probably tried to show vendors a way how to distribute software commercially. But vendors are on the level of cavemen and don’t know shit about Linux even after serving a solution. Or they simply don’t care about building up a market opportunity.
I don’t want to defend Ubuntu. I don’t like Ubuntu especially, but it might be a simple explanation.
It’s a problem with Canonical. They stepped up and created the snaps and then abandoned them instead of maintaining them. They still maintain the core that they include with the distro… it’s all the extras they created to pad out the store… and then abandoned. “Look the snap store has so many packages”… yeah… no… it doesn’t.
Why would a company who makes a commercial level open source package want to add snaps to their already broad Linux offering? They typically already build RPM (covering RHEL, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, etc.) and DEB (covering Debian, Ubuntu, all Ubuntu derivatives, etc.)… and have a tar.gz to cover anything they missed. Why should they add the special snowflake snap just to cover Ubuntu which is already well covered by the DEB hey already make?
Sure, show vendors what’s possible, but if Canonical stepped up to make the snaps, then they should still be maintaining them. It’s not a business opportunity… its more bullshit from Canonical that no one wants.
Is Ubuntu deserving the hate?
Yes.
Debian version is the only one that seems reliable enough but, again, it is Debian, the packages are “old”.
Install Debian, then install all the software you might need using Flatpak. There you go, solid and stable OS with the latest of with little to no effort. Bonus extra security.
or, you know, use testing or sid. Or just stop lamenting for old packages and just enjoy stability while making something productive :)
Or just stop lamenting for old packages and just enjoy stability while making something productive
I’m not the one lamenting old packages, I run on stable perfectly happy. No issues there.
It’s because Ubuntu is a company-backed distro consistently wants to go their own way. Not just snap but they’ve done it before with Unity and Mir (and probably others idk).
Course Fedora does literally the same thing and doesn’t get any hate for it so idk. It’s just a meme.
Personally I don’t like Ubuntu because they didnt go far enough into their own ways but thats just me.
Dietpie is a lightweight debian not ubuntu. And debian is still one of the top choices (if not the) for servers.
Ubuntu is just debian with extra bad decisions.
Ubuntu is a tough one. I don’t like it. I don’t like snaps, but more than that I don’t like their direction in general.
But I have some respect for them too. I think they played a pretty significant role in Linux being as popular (relatively speaking) as it is, and I don’t feel like they have any ill intent.
So I don’t personally care for it but I’m glad it’s around I guess is my point?
In a nutshell, Ubluntu is trying to take user control off its users. And the users are mad because of it.
And yes, I’m talking about snap.
Ubuntu attacted a lot of control freaks because Shuttleworth was originally splashing some money when it started and a bunch of nerds saw dollar signs. As a result they have a culture of “not invented here” syndrome where someone just has to reinvent the wheel in only the way they see it and they don’t work well with others or accept their input because they want all the credit.
Personally, I got sick of it having been pretty involved early on in the project. It’s easier and saner to just use a distro based on what everyone else is doing.
For anything lower-spec (like, <4Gb of RAM), Ubuntu absolutely CHUGS because of Snaps. Flatpak has no such issue.
Ironically, Lubuntu (a lightweight Ubuntu fork) worked the best for me while I was using it. No slowness, but I installed pretty much everything using Apt (didn’t know about Flatpak back then).
I ended up having it lock up and freeze on the sign-in page though, so I moved on to the slightly heavier Linux Mint.
I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but…
There is no “supposed to” when it comes to distro preferences. Use whatever you like, other people’s opinions do not dictate your behavior. If Ubuntu works for you, use that. If anything, that’s the freedom of FOSS. You can take other people’s views in to account when choosing a distro, but in the end it is your decision. I dislike Ubuntu for a few reasons, but I don’t get to dictate to anyone else what they use and why.
If you like rolling release, you could try Debian sid/unstable. I hear it’s quite stable and reliable and, of course, isn’t Ubuntu.
Use whatever you want, why do you care about what feelings other people have towards Ubuntu?
I use Ubuntu for work and have no issues with it to be honest. I install everything via apt, I think a few things are via snap but nothing that I’ve installed directly. It’s stable and I can get on with stuff. I definitely am not a fan of the move towards snap and the app store: if I was to choose I’d go vanilla Debian.
I’m daily driving Ubuntu and my experience aligns with this.
My only gripe is snaps can break copy/paste and prevent me from saving files where I want. This might make Ubuntu unusable for people using Linux for the first time and makes no sense if you dont understand how snaps are sandboxed and how permissions work. The solution is install with apt.
The installer, system configuration programs and UI experience is really good. I argue it is a much superior experience to Windows and arguably better than OS/X. A lot less garbage being shoved down customers throats.
The solution is install with apt.
I checked on my machine, and out of all the packages I had on snap, only Inkscape, VLC and Slack were also available on apt. Spotify, Whatsdesk (a WhatsApp client) and Signal were among the most commonly used missing.
Oh word! I forgot about Signal. I use the snap for that. It works well. I think copy/paste works with it.
I used apt for Firefox, Krita, ffmpeg, Blender and Ksnips
I think the big commercial programs I use were installed with vendor scripts
