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.

  • Caveman@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 months 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.

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
    1·
    2 months ago

    Personal main-complaint about Snaps is that they ship Firefox by default with it and some things in it are just broken:

    • “Save Image As…” in the right-click menu would just fail to open the file dialog and therefore do nothing.
    • It doesn’t use ~/Downloads/ for downloads, but rather some complex folder underneath ~/snap/. You can get to that folder from Firefox’s download list, I believe, but navigating there via file manager is tricky.

    Thankfully, Mozilla now offers a DEB repo: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w_install-firefox-deb-package-for-debian-based-distributions

    As for Kubuntu, it’s far from the greatest showing of KDE. They frequently have oddball KDE versions, e.g. not quite shipping the KDE LTS version in Ubuntu LTS, because releases didn’t line up, but also just in general weird instabilities and crashes which don’t happen on my openSUSE laptop (my workplace issues Ubuntu laptops).

    Having said that, we gave some of our Linux newbie colleagues GNOME and they always seem to struggle more with it than the colleagues with KDE, because usability in GNOME is just whack.
    Things like not being able to type a file path into the file manager (unless you know the magic shortcut Ctrl+L), or the file-open dialog highlighting the name field, but when you type into it, it starts searching files instead.
    But also just the whole thing not behaving like Windows. I’ll be the last to praise Windows’ usability, but it is what many people know.

  • indigomirage@lemmy.ca
    1·
    2 months ago

    I’m about to try Ubuntu again.

    I switched to Fedora for a few months, and really prefer it over Ubuntu . Clean Gnome. dnf is great. Useful COPRs. It just makes sense. But in my Sisyphian attempts to switch to Linux as my platform for music production (with my existing paid vsts and sound libraries), I hit one brick wall too many. Things that worked no longer work. Things that I could never get to work remain unworking.

    So, going to try Ubuntu. I dislike snaps. I dislike the twisted Gnome UI. I will say the Ubuntu fonts are nice though (I actually imported them into Fedora…)

    The further I stray from a default install, the harder it is to maintain going forward. Fingers crossed for Ubuntu.

  • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.netEnglish
    01·
    2 months ago

    I think the bottom line is if they didn’t like Mint they’re not gonna like Ubuntu. Any criticism I can level at mint I can level even harder at Ubuntu. Before anyone can say anything for sure though it’d be important to know what they didn’t like about Mint and what it is that’s drawing them to Ubuntu.

    As far as would I recommend Ubuntu? Honestly, no. I don’t recommend it to anyone. Its not easier to use than Mint if you want an easy to use Linux distro. Its basically no better than Windows if you’re issue with Windows was philosophical. From a technical standpoint I find it to be about the worst distro there is.

    The list of distros I find myself recommending to people is as follows:

    • Mint (for noobs)
    • MX (for experienced users who don’t wanna Futz with stuff)
    • Antix (for constrained systems)
    • Arch (for experienced users who do wanna Futz with stuff)
    • Debian (for people who are on a futzing with stuff spectrum between MX and Arch, regardless of experience level)
    • Artix (for sickos who love the Futz, live for the futz, and found Arch to not be futzy enough)