this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
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I just went full linux on my daily driver about a year ago after running a headless linux media server for a few years.
Can someone explain to me why Ubuntu is so terrible? Is it not difficult enough to use or something?
I’m going to preface this with saying whatever works for you.
It’s not really about difficulty for most people.
Canonical (the people who manage Ubuntu,) has made some unfortunate decisions.
First, and I feel this has always been true, they approach their users with the assumption that they are in fact idiots. Microsoft has the same design philosophy, and it makes things much harder than it needs to be. (Some people may be idiots, but if they want to wipe the entire drive, that’s their business, right?)
Secondly, Ubuntu tends snoop on you, and certain decisions by canonical raises alarms.
Finally, fuck snap.
Edit: if all you’ve used is Ubuntu, get yourself a moderately large usb stick and try a few others out. No need to remove Ubuntu to try a new flavor. Linux is like ice cream. Find your favorite and stab anyone who disagrees with you. I mean, Stan it. Yeah that’s it.
snaps.
oh, and that time that Canonical put Amazon telemetry in the default search application.
oh, and how they just bundle up "bleeding edge" stuff from a year ago and ship it with it's associated bugs.
It's been a few years since I tried but it just really turned me off.
I hate snaps too, but search telem was disabled 9 years ago :)
That's that happened closer to Cannocial disabling search telem than today:
I'm sure there are as many reasons as there are people who dislike Ubuntu, but here's a few:
Overall it's fine. I've used Ubuntu, Mint, Puppy, DSL, Arch (btw), Fedora, and Debian. I can do pretty much anything I need to on any of them. I've got my preferences about the correct balance between useability, upgrade schedule, and customizability.
They did? Like filesystem search? I don't see that.
As ferret mentioned it was in the past, but they were prominent:
Woof.
It was the application browser, and they rolled it back after the backlash.
To expand on the hate of snaps:
They're a packaging solution for apps and dependencies. They're apparently quite comfortable for app developers to use too. There was a hiccup where some apps really struggled to run well as snaps, but AFAIK that was fixed.
The common issues are snapcraft being the only repository and the methods of pushing them:
Snapcraft is where the packages are stored and loaded from, and it's a closed-source repo hosted and controlled by Canonical, with no option to configure snap to use a different source. That has advantages for security, if you trust Canonical to vet and take responsibility for the packages on their system, but some people chafe at that lack of control. Compare to flatpak, where you can add arbitrary repos, so any distro vendor can have their own set of packages and versions they've vetted for stability and compatibility, but if I want a different version than my vendor maintains in their remote, I can use a different remote for certain apps instead.
The second issue is that the classical apt system, which used to install
.debpackages, was utilised to install snaps instead, so you'd runapt install packageand expect a .deb to be installed, but instead it just downloads a script that runssnap install packageand you get a snap instead, which is particularly annoying when you previously had it as a deb and it suddenly gets replaced. The argument here is a smooth transition to the "better" system, on the premise that snaps are better and the assumption that users won't care or notice. In some cases (the hiccups mentioned earlier) that just wasn't the case and people got frustrated, but even if it worked, some people (including me) take issue with expecting a deb and getting a snap - if I want a snap, I'll use snap, and if your deb is deprecated, offer me to switch instead of silently installing the alternate source instead.Thank you for explaining that. I'm new to Linux and really didn't understand that snap thing I heard about
In that case, let me add a few more details:
Deb packages have dependencies on other packages. To install and run a given application, you will have to install other packages (typically libraries the app depends on) too. In the case of using apt, you may see it show a list of packages to install, even when you asked for just one - those other packages are things the one you asked for requires.
These packages are shared across apps. If I install one app that requires a specific graphics library, then later install another that requires the same library, it won't have to install it again. On the other hand, if some library introduces changes that break something, updating that shared library because one app requires a newer version may break a different app which required the old version and isn't compatible with the new one.
Snaps on the other hand are self-contained: All the dependencies are included with the snap, frozen into whatever version the snap author chose. You can have multiple different versions of the same snap installed in parallel, and each will have their dependencies isolated from each other and the rest of the system. Additionally, they come with certain security measures like restricting the app's access to the filesystem, network, display etc.
As a downside, snaps can be larger (but don't have to be, as they can be stored compressed because the dependencies don't need to be available elsewhere) and take a little longer to start (though this has apparently been much improved).
So they're not generally a bad thing, all in all. I understand their advantages, I respect that they can be a comfortable solution for devs, I like the idea behind the security measures.
For my personal experience:
I recall that the Firefox snap had issues as opposed to the deb (among other things, the startup time was atrocious for me), which was how my issues with it started, because it took some effort to figure out how to get a deb version again and make sure I kept getting deb versions. Some other app - I don't recall which one - also had persistent lag issues which were apparently due to some permissions problem, where security evidently hamstrung usability.
Accordingly, I was somewhat disgruntled with having my working app ripped out from under me and replaced with a worse one and no comfortable way to get back. I had issues with my Firefox profile too, which turned out to be user error on my part, but obviously still annoyed me in absence of an easy migration mechanism between the two.
Again, these issues may be fixed now, and they might not be issues for everyone in the first place: if you start out with the snap, migration won't be an issue, and if it runs well, it may well be a better solution for you. I personally resent the philosophy of "Here, let me assume you want a different thing and just swap it out for you", but you don't need to share that resentment.
Use whatever you like.
But don't complain "Linux requires constant work" after it breaks in a couple of years, instead, be free to complain "Ubuntu requires constant work".
Also, beware that it may be spying on you.