My go to back in The Day was just Ubuntu because I was lazy. We're talking the 14.04/16.04 days. Ubuntu was simple and mostly just worked. I now find myself needing to de-spywareify as the coming administration is likely to force Microsoft into tracking "dissidents" so need to get back into weaning myself off the Windows teat.
I recently dualbooted my main desktop with Ubuntu 24.04 and have been... entirely underwhelmed. The whole separation between APT and snap packages doesn't work well together and is really the big problem I have, as a lot of standard deb packages just refuse to install properly now. the UI is hard to use and doesn't make me happy, and it's not been playing nice with my Zen 4 desktop when it comes to ACPI power states (no sleep, doesn't reliably turn the power off when i ask it to turn off, etc). So overall, I am just not terribly interested in using Ubuntu anymore.
What I primarily want is the sort of "mostly just works" like old 16.04 but still gave you the full ability to monkey under the hood- and is also something based on a normal distro that most people write guides for because I am a smoothbrain. Should I just head to using basic plain jane Debian or something?
Could be snapless in a minimal install, but if you need Firefox, Chromium, Thunderbird or a bunch of other useful stuff they all come as a snap package
I just checked. I don't have
snapor residuals of it on my Kubuntu image from the initial minimal install. I remember putting on LibreWolf (Firefox flavor) viawgetandsudo dpkg -i <librewolfInstallFile>.deb. Also, made installbashscripts for a couple useful other starting apps on my laptop. I haven't used asnappackage once since my re-imaging of my SSD for 24.04 LTS, for what it's worth.