Distro wars are silly. If someone is happy using Ubuntu, I'm happy they're a linux user.
this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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Same as the Unix wars and Vim vs. Emacs.
Except the specific distro you use impacts your choices and the future direction and success of Linux as a whole.
If you pick the single enshittified distro then you serve to perpetuate it's influence.
This silly infighting serves to perpetuate people staying on windows or mac os
I agree but the extent of my "silly infighting" is "don't use Ubuntu". If they stay on Windows instead of Ubuntu, everyone is probably better off.
I don't see who would be better off in that scenario, except microsoft, and I feel they're worse for their users and the world than ubuntu
Yall wonder why the desktop Linux community hasnβt grown as much as you wish and then upvote stuff like this
The constant superiority struggles do nothing but alienate most computer users
I'm not sure that's why.
My two cents: I got really annoyed with windows after a random update pushing stuff I don't want or need, so I spun up Ubuntu. I've used a lot in the past, but stopped using it because of anti-cheat in some games, got tired of switching whenever I wanted to play.
Coming back, I find out about snaps. Not a good start, but I found instructions to revert to the good old apt packages I wanted. But then I spent way too long trying to coax the taskbar/system/clock to appear where I wanted them to, plus having things working well in my multi monitor setup, and at some point I just went back to Windows.
I couldn't care less about distro squabbles, but I do care greatly about usability and polish, and it seems like we're taking steps back here.
iβm with you.
there are absolutely multiple things leading to an alienation of users and distro squabbles is just one, which i agree is insignificant.
the real thing posts like this betray is the deeper pattern of disdain and coldness even toward those on the βin group.β there is virtually no sense of camaraderie or mutual respect in the community. rtfm culture and one-up-manship are something of the default here, with user experience, accessibility, and user facing documentation falling deeply into the wayside.
Ubuntu is ok. That's it. Let them get on with their life. An OS is a tool that shouldn't get in the way of the user of trying to achieve a goal. If Ubuntu works for them, Ubuntu is good. Linux has to be a solution, a way to a goal not the actual goal.
Sorry, there's one thing about the OS|software|product|company|person|car that we don't like, so we all have to glom on, downvote it to the basement and tell you why we hate it so much.
/s
Thank you for your informed opinion.
Lubuntu > ubuntu
What happened to Ubuntu?
forcing snaps on people (if you apt-get firefox it'll install the snap even though you didn't install it with snap), adding ads for it, snap having a proprietary backend, snap being essentially just a fundamentally worse version of flatpak.
the only advantage i've heard for snap is that it's easier to package for.
Plus I think if you want the advantages of a stable release, easy for user, distro, they'll also need to be immutable now, what's the usecase for a non-immutable, stable, easy to use distro?
If you didn't care about ease of use, you wouldn't want immutable, but if you do, you absolutely do.
If you don't care about stability, you might not care about immutable, but if you do, you absolutely do.
Ubuntu seems like a prime usecase for an immutable distro, but it isn't for tradition-related reasons rather than it actually being good for users.
It's popular and widely used so people naturally hate it.
I tried mint; it was worse. I was like oh well, guess I'll deal with the snaps.
Itβs pretty rare hearing that Mint is worse than Ubuntu. Genuine question to just know what people may think about it: what made you think itβs worse than Ubuntu?
One immediate thing that irritated me was the process for pairing a Bluetooth keyboard was completely bugged out and it took me a while to even see where and how to enter the code. It looked like it just didn't work for no reason at first and it took a lot of hunting to figure out that I had to enter a code.
There were other things too. Cinnamon crashed. Qt applications didn't work in ways that were difficult to troubleshoot. Sleep seemed non-functional. There aren't any power modes which I used to use heavily on that laptop and on and on.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing and Iβm sorry to hear that itβs been what seems like a lot of trouble for you. I donβt use Mint, but itβs what I hear a lot of people recommending to new people, so Iβm just curious how things have been.
Have you tried getting support from their forums?
Nah I didn't have a lot of time to mess around with that stuff I just wanted my system to work. It's much easier to find answers when things go wrong on Ubuntu too because it's more popular.
Thatβs fair.
I switched from Ubuntu to Linux Mint and I have more issues with Linux Mint. From the top of my head :
-
Sleep simply doesn't work. I have Mint on two different machines and both don't work (it worked fine on Ubuntu)
-
If I do a soft reboot, it reboots to a black screen 100% of the time on both machines. I need to power cycle to reboot.
-
I need to restart Pulseaudio frequently because it starts to make white noise.
-
Cinnamon desktop environment crashing to a black screen and logging me out randomly.
I am just waiting to finish my current game to switch to a new distro because Mint isn't working for me.
Cinnamon is so bad, even Ubuntu got rid of it, and that's saying something.
I like the look, but it has been my worst DE so far
Here to represent the Arch Linux master race!
lolsteamos
I use Arch btw :3
Oh you mean South African Debian. Yeah that's a popular mod, I guess.
Don't snap at me, but it would be more apt of you to make a flat pack, or create an app image, or you might get stuck in a tar ball.
I still use Ubuntu server. Itβs not nearly as atrocious as Ubuntu desktop.
I use Ubuntu desktop for my server! What can I say? I installed it one night on my desktop to see how it felt and my experiment turned into an entire fucking server because "already here. More convenient."
A "server" is just a remote computer "serving" you stuff, after all. Although, if you have stuff you would have trouble setting up again from scratch, I'd recommend you look into making at least these parts of your setup repeatable, be it something fancy ala Ansible, or even just a couple of bash scripts to install the correct packages and backing up your configs.
Once you're in this mindset and take this approach by default, changing machines becomes a lot less daunting in general. A new personal machine takes me about an hour to setup, preparing the USB included.
If it's stuff you don't care about losing, ignore everything I just said. But if you do care about it, I'd slowly start by giving from the most to least critical parts. There's no better time to do it than when things are working well haha!
Snaps make sens from the Ubuntu side.
Only one package to maintain for an application, even if they have different distributions to maintain. If snap is officially supported by the creator of the application, then it's less work for Canonical. Well, it would have make more sens if flatpak didn't exist.
From user side, it makes way less sens :
- the closed source application shop
- if snaps are not officially supported, then Canonical try to create one, and they may be not that great ...
- ...
I'd say snaps are aimed at servers. A big aspect of both Flatpaks and Snaps is the whole sandboxed environment thing.
I think that's a major reason Canonical flubbed snaps, is they shoved them down the throats of casual users instead of focusing on using them in server situations where you want things more "locked down."
Once again, it does seem silly that they reinvented the wheel, but I mean, that's actually really common. So common there is an XKCD comic about it. So due to how commonplace such a thing is, it seems weird to attack Canonical so much over it.
it seems weird to attack Canonical so much over it.
I mean, on the technical side, sure. Canonical's technical choice is just weird. Plenty of fully open app store environments have almost no competition, because self hosting is still hard work.
But all of the business reasons - for having a closed proprietary sole app server - go against everything that Canonical used to claim they stood for.
Canonical's business choice not to open source the snap servers is an open declaration of war against the FOSS community who have previously rallied around them.
It's like inviting someone into my basement and locking the door with a key as they get to the bottom step. The action isn't illegal, but the probable motive is creepy as fuck. (Maybe I just watch too many horror movies. Lol.)
As an application author, Snaps are much easier to create than Flatpaks.
I heard this before. Is it because of its documentation?
Docs are good, but the main thing is that there are just fewer steps due to good tooling.
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