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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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)