I have been not recommending Ubuntu to people because of obvious reasons (the Amazon search integration and snaps, mainly). The reason I am posting this is because someone I know mentioned that they are considering Ubuntu. They have a degree in cs and generally are competent with computers, but didn’t like mint when they tried it. I would like to know a few things, since I haven’t looked into Ubuntu in a while:

Has anything changed about snap? I know people didn’t like it at first, especially the proprietary server, but I don’t think they will care about that and I mainly just want to know if it will eat all their RAM or something.

Have they made any changes in their management that may make sure there won’t be another Amazon search thing?

Is it best to use the default desktop on Ubuntu? I would recommend Kubuntu to them, all else being equal, but don’t know if maybe the default one is better integrated.

Edit: The person will be 100’s of miles away so helping them with issues will be hard, and Ubuntu LTS should be stable. Plus, basically everything that “supports” linux but doesn’t really usually supports Ubuntu. I do really see where they’re coming from, but want to know if it has a major potential to backfire on them and if they might be better off with Fedora.

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    It’s fine.

    Seriously I’ve run it for years. It’s just fine. No greater or fewer issues than other distros. You can avoid snaps if you like, but I don’t. I simply don’t care and they usually work better than flatpaks for me (snaps can install a cli executable, flatpaks require silly ways of running from the CLI).

  • BaalInvoker@lemmy.eco.br
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    1 month ago

    Ubuntu is even more aggressive with snaps. However it’s a ok package manager, I would not be very annoyed by it if I have to use

    I mainly just want to know if it will eat all their RAM or something

    Kinda the same as Flatpaks… Actually it’s not a big issue, once spare ram is money thrown away…

  • trollercoaster@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    I am in the same boat as you. I am still running Ubuntu (with snap removed, so I can’t comment on its current performance overhead) on a few of my machines because I couldn’t be bothered to do a reinstall with something less insane, but I’m not recommending Ubuntu to anyone anymore over the same concerns as you have.

    If you want to recommend a system that runs decently out of the box and runs a lot of software, recommend Mint instead. Ubuntu used to be Debian with sane default settings that would run out of the box, nowadays Mint is Ubuntu with sane default settings that will run out of the box. Mint also doesn’t subscribe to this snap madness and is continuing to maintain a few packages Ubuntu has migrated to snap as .deb package (for instance Firefox and Chromium).

    • Frater Mus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 month ago

      nowadays Mint is Ubuntu with sane default settings that will run out of the box

      There’s also an official version of Mint based on Debian (LMDE)

      • trollercoaster@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        I know, but I don’t have any half way recent experience with it, so I don’t know whether I can recommend it. When I last checked it out some years ago, it still lacked functionality regular Ubuntu based Mint had.

  • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    Has anything changed about snap?

    It became less slow and I think they considered implementing human verification for new packages but idk if they did.

    Have they made any changes in their management that may make sure there won’t be another Amazon search thing?

    Even if management changes are done, it’s as easy to revert them. This one is purely a matter of trust.

    Is it best to use the default desktop on Ubuntu? I would recommend Kubuntu to them, all else being equal, but don’t know if maybe the default one is better integrated.

    I think the default Ubuntu has the best integration in terms of theming and stuff but not having it is absolutely not a problem. I don’t remember the flavours being less user friendly or anything.

    • Noo@jlai.lu
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      1 month ago

      Default is garbage for me interface wise (weird app menu/panel made for touchpad not desktop), so I prefer Lubuntu or Xubuntu.

      Kubuntu is… Well it’s KDE.

  • limelight79@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    I just switched away from Kubuntu to Debian.

    The snap thing was annoying, but not a major problem for me, except for one thing: I switched Firefox back to a debian package, following the directions online to do so, and every few months it seemed somehow I had been switched back to a snap version. I removed the snap and all of that, but every now and then I’d realize I was using Firefox in a snap. (It became obvious when I tried to unlock 1Password - the snap version relies on the plugin, but the non-snap version fires up the standalone 1Password program.)

    In general, I’m not opposed to the concept of snaps, and a browser is probably something that should be in a sandbox. But, I preferred the standard Debian package installation, and somehow that kept getting overridden. And that is the kind of thing that I hate about Windows.

    The install was smooth, or would have been if I hadn’t had a slightly unusual setup with my drives. It works just like Kubuntu, by switching to KDE with X11 (I had a few minor issues with Wayland), but without Canonical. I don’t need bleeding edge, I just want my system to work reliably.

    My Linux background: Spent a lot of time with Slackware starting in the late 90s, both on server and desktop. Switched desktop and laptop to Kubuntu around 2010. Server got switched to Debian in 2017 or so.

    • AndrewZabar@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      THANK YOU!! I started to think I was going crazy with Firefox!! Their updates kept messing around with where the program and profiles were aligned to, the path and files sometimes the way they would be with a .deb and sometimes they were where you’d find a snap package. Also have to keep unpinning it or it would start launching new windows without current settings.

      Does their dev team have both being done and they keep fucking around with which is going to be used next? I still can’t figure out what’s going on there.

      • limelight79@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        You know, I assumed Canonical was pulling something, but it’s possible it was also just incompetence. I didn’t think they even distributed a .deb version of Firefox, so it definitely felt like they WANTED me to use snap Firefox…and then I’d start wondering why it was so important. What vested interest would Canonical have in me using snap Firefox? Maybe it was just honest mistakes.

        Linux is about freedom to make our own choices, and whatever is happening with Canonical (malice or ineptitude) was getting away from that. Kubuntu feels like, “We’ve made this garden for you and we recommend you stay inside it.” Debian feels like, “Hey, man, you wanna go hose your system? Here’s the apt command to do that. Have a good day.” (Apparently, I measure true power as ability to screw things up.)

        Slackware: “You have all of the power. Right now. And all of the responsibility.”

        • AndrewZabar@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Honestly I am a huge fan of raw Debian it’s just that I got a new laptop and not all distros have the drivers for it. Even Ubuntu 22.x could not get the audio going but 24.04 boom it all just worked. So I’ve been debating with myself as to whether or not I should give Debian a try on it. I have a few older laptops on which I put Debian and I quite enjoy it. It’s solid and not trying to push the envelope and I’m very fond of that approach. But I’ve also spent a lot of time getting everything setup and just right. I’ve customized the ever-living shit out of the desktop and the appearance settings, widgets, app setups, a bunch of sites I nativefier-ed, and a million other things. So the prospect of redoing it all is daunting.

          If a time should come when I feel it’s worth the effort I definitely would.

          VLC media player also has this nonsense that their latest stuff seems to only be available as snap lately.

          • limelight79@lemm.ee
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            1 month ago

            I just had to change a few things - KDE, dark mode, X11 when I couldn’t get screen power off to work under Wayland, and it’s basically good to go. There might be a few other things I changed, but in general out of the box was pretty close to what I wanted. It even installed the AMD driver for my graphics card.

            • AndrewZabar@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              Oh yeah and even with all the drivers working I still had problem with power management. I did read that of all the things it’s probably the most problematic in Linux to get it working properly that often it can’t. Once the system went to sleep it would not wake, had to hard-reboot. However, it’s a laptop and already uses very little so I’m not overly concerned. So my lid close action is just black screen. Actually it has some benefits in that I can close the lid and running operations will finish.

        • Varyag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 month ago

          “Who has power to destroy something, is the one who holds true control over it.” Or something, I never conquered a planet. Thank you Paul Atreides, very cool.

          That is a nice way of measuring control over your own devices and systems, though.

          • limelight79@lemm.ee
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            1 month ago

            I can’t find it at the moment, but a few weeks ago I made a comment that I didn’t really care for the paddle shifters in our car (it’s an automatic, but you can switch to “manual mode” and shift it manually), because I know it’s not going to let me do something stupid, whereas a stick shift will usually let me do stupid things that can damage the engine. That’s partially what prompted the measuring power as ability to screw things up comment. :)

          • limelight79@lemm.ee
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            1 month ago

            That sounds like it’s mostly about the default install, and I don’t have a problem with them making the default a snap - as I said, sandboxing a browser probably is a good idea from a security perspective, and most people probably aren’t going to care about snap vs. deb installs, so why not go with the safer alternative?

            My issue was that it kept switching back to snaps even after I tried to go to .deb installations. It happened at least three or four times. It would be fine for several months, then something would happen during an update, and it would switch back.

            I didn’t have the concerns the article mentions about it automatically updating; it would only update whenever I told software in general to update.

  • Caveman@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Snaps sucks, canonical sucks, Amazon integration sucks, KDE updates are years behind which also sucks, pushing snaps over deb sucks, pushing snap over flatpak sucks.

    However, Ubuntu is a great distro. Incredibly stable, very well tested and polished. Installation is super easy and hardware support is very good, unless you got some very new hardware.

    I recommend Ubuntu to a lot of people even though I’d never use it myself. Most people just want their computer to work.

  • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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    1 month ago

    Ubuntu is a great distro. It’s performant, ,its stable, its well configured it looks nice out of the box. For seasoned Linux users they can be more picky with which their distro but as an intro to Linux I always recommend mint and Ubuntu.

  • d0ntpan1c@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 month ago

    While I found ubuntu’s business practices (all the upsells, mostly) the most grating, really the thing that pushed me off of Ubuntu was packages being behind inexplicably and all the forking/modifying they did to gnome and just always being like 1-2 major versions behind, especially since gnomes been shipping tons of features the last few years and Ubuntu wouldn’t get them for ages.

    Outside of the snaps that Ubuntu seems to force you back into if you purposely try to turn it off, its not the worst to avoid otherwise. Or just deal with for a few apps.

    If they want the ubuntu stack of tooling, suggest debian. If they feel intimidated by Debian, Ubuntu is fine. Debian is really solid out of the box for a primary devices nowadays. no need to wait for Ubuntu to bless packages since the Debian ppa’s are usually much faster to update. But as long as they aren’t doing really weird stuff, they can always move off of Ubuntu to Debian or any other debian descendant easily if they want a smooth transition since its the same package manager.

    As long as the immutable distro paradigm isnt a turn off for them, Vanilla OS is also really neat, including cross-package manager installs. V1 is Ubuntu based, v2 will be Debian based (if it isnt already GA’d… I know thats soonish)

    I’ve mostly switched to using Debian for dev containers and servers, and 99% of the time any ubuntu-specific guides are still perfectlh helpful. I moved to Arch for main devices.

    (Side note: I abandoned manjaro for similar reasons as I abandoned Ubuntu: too much customization forced upon me, manjaro’s package repo was always behind or even had some broken packages vs the arch repos, and some odd decisions by the maintainers about all sorts of things. EndeavourOS has been just way better as someone who likes to have a less-dictated setup that is closer to the distro base and faster to get package updates)

    Edit: I guess my tl:dr is… If one thinks “Ubuntu”, first ask “why not debian?”, and then proceed to Ubuntu if there are some solid reasons to do so for the situation.

  • rotopenguin@infosec.pub
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    1 month ago

    Ubuntu has its ups and downs when you’re actually living with it, but they have a fantastic installer experience. I have had my fair share of bizarre dead ends with other distro installers, like Bazzite telling me “you need -860GB more space”. Ubuntu puts you in a solid live-iso OS where the installer is just an app that you can drag to one side and run other tools before continuing. It tends to do sensible things if I go off the beaten path with a more advanced install.

    Nowadays, I am happy with debootstrapping or btrfs send’ing an existing Debian install to set up a new system for myself. I still think that Ubuntu is reasonably likely to be a good experience for a newcomer.

  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
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    1 month ago

    Kubuntu chose to not ship Plasma 6 because it didnt match their release point. While in general a good decision, stable releases are the flaw really.

    So a semi-rolling Kubuntu yes, but LTS Kubuntu before Plasma 6? Wouldnt recommend.

    Ubuntu is also still full in on Snaps. Flatpak comes from a PPA I think. Their store is snaps-first.

    While this is not a bad concept, Flatpaks are better for many reasons. They also may be worse for some others, mainly because Snaps just use Apparmor for sandboxing, like the rest of the system, so you can make easy exceptions.

    • astro_ray@lemdro.id
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      1 month ago

      They ship flatpak with their own repo for 5+ years.

      The apparmour thing can get pretty annoying if an app you Luke breaks because of it.

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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    1 month ago

    I use it. It’s fine. Livepatch is nice, not needing to reboot to apply kernel updates can make the “boot computer, install updates, reboot computer” cycle a bit shorter. Maybe Fedora also has that? Arch and friends certainly don’t do it.

    Snap is an annoying feature that mostly just makes life harder for people starting out on Ubuntu. If you’re here, chances are you can run the three or four commands to rid yourself of Snap. Snap has also gotten better in terms of performance, though the store situation still sucks.

    Snap’s RAM impact is minimal. You end up with multiple versions of the same dependency in memory (wasting tens to hundreds of megabytes) but the same is true for Flatpak or Docker or AppImage. My biggest annoyance is snaps mounting on boot and taking a few seconds, but it’s really not that bad. Actually, that’s a lie, my biggest annoyance is the (ノಠ益ಠ)ノlowercase “snap” folder in my home directory ლ(ಠ益ಠლ) that you can’t remove or snap will break.

    The Amazon search thing was what, ten years ago? Just click no on the “do you want to submit debug logs” prompt.

    I personally use the default desktop. Gnome is fine. Some people are married to their Windows clones, for those Cinnamon or KDE is also fine.

    I would indeed recommend Ubuntu stable. Being able to install the OS and not risk breaking anything for half a decade is pretty nice. Certainly beats my Arch-derivatives experience. Ubuntu and Kubuntu both come with the standard suite of tools you’d expect for those desktop environments. You can even install both (though you’ll have tons of duplicate applications if you do).

    Fedora does more frequent updates, with more changes over time and more stuff possibly breaking. If you want the latest and greatest, Fedora may be better. Software is generally less supported on Fedora though. I also kind of trust IBM even less than I do Canonical to do the right thing, so there’s that.

    The biggest problem with Ubuntu is that it’s popular and has been for years. A lot of old “helpful” forum topics will have you open up a terminal, paste some random commands, and break your OS next time you try to update. I’d recommend avoiding any terminal commands for as long as possible when it comes to troubleshooting. The GUI does most things pretty well these days.

    • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
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      1 month ago

      No Fedora doesnt at all have livepatching. I think APT distros are great at not needing reboots, Fedora sucks. Its offline installer doesnt work well enough to excuse the reboots.

      Fedora Atomic Desktops meanwhile offer awesome unbreakability. I use Kinoite daily and dont plan on switching. Even though using latest Plasma, it just doesnt break.

      I would choose a different Distro though, if I didnt want rpm-ostree. Just not sure what? Kubuntu? No. Arch? Hell no. OpenSUSE Slowroll with KDE probably, yes that would be it.

      • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        Apt will install a package but if a service is in use the kernel still runs the old until you stop the services and restart. its just not apparent to the user. This is not live patching, live patching is when kernel will load a new patch and you temporarily have two states and during a momentary blip pass all control to new kernel…this is typically for mission critical server that can’t have downtime. Just running a regular update does not do this.

        Source for live patching https://tuxcare.com/blog/developer-tutorial-live-patching-debian-10-linux-kernel-with-kpatch/

          • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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            1 month ago

            Not sure how to check on apt, but zypper uses ps -s arguments and shows you all the running processes/services that need a restart before the system is fully using all updates

  • iopq@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I tried to install GrapheneOS from Chromium, but online installation doesn’t work on snaps, I had to go hunting for apks because Ubuntu doesn’t allow you to just choose which version of the program you want

    That’s the opposite of what I want from Linux. I installed NixOS on my new laptop