I started with Ubuntu, but got turned off my lack of stability, Snaps, old kernels, and obnoxious marketing. I switched to Debian, which fixes most of these issues (but not the old kernels). I like that Debian still uses apt-get and has a huge repository. The smaller repo is what keeps me off Fedora. If you're an Ubuntu refugee looking for a compatible distro, give Debian a try.
A long time ago there were good reasons for Ubuntu to exist. Debian releases were very slow, sometimes years apart, and focus was on servers. But slowly Debian has incorporated all the things that make Ubuntu better than Debian. It also has a much faster release cycle.
There hasn't been a good reason to use Ubuntu over Debian for years.
It just works. It's stable, I don't need to worry about breaking updates and changes anymore. I'm at peace for at least 2 years.
And all the software I care about have their own deb repos or are self updating (Firefox, Chrome, VS Code, Cursor, Signal, Slack, etc), so I always have up-to-date versions. There is flatpak as well but I really didn't have any need for it for now.
It's the best combo, stable unchanging base and up-to-date apps.
Been on testing for years without problems. Super reasonable choice for a personal machine if you need recent software versions.
Always use a separate partition for /home, have backups in place and your golden.
I’m no AWK expert but I know just enough to tell when it’s the right tool for a particular job. Most pipelines consisting of `grep`, `sed` and `cut` commands can be replaced with a single AWK command. In this case:
stat / | awk '/Birth:/ { print $2; }'
For the line containing the `Birth:` regex, print the second field (by default, fields are delimited by spaces). Other lines that don’t match the regex are ignored.
stat command gets the detail of when the OS was installed on the machine. uptime doesn't give that. I wanted to say that I have been using the same development machine at work for 4.5 years. "running" was not the right word for it, obviously.
You can also use apt-pinning to set priority for which release to use.
A long time ago I ran stable, and pinned testing at low priority.
Across the decades I've slowly upgraded my stance. Now my machines run Debian Unstable, with testing and experimental pinned at very low priorities. Unstable does sometimes have unsatisfiable dependencies, so it's good to have some other options. And sometimes I just want what's coming for a specific package or kernel, and experimental will often be there.
Although I love Arch and use it on my main laptop, if you’re like me and you have a closet full of geriatric thinkpads, Debian is great. The one thing Arch / pacman struggles with is long intervals between updates, so if I boot a machine every three months, I’d rather have an OS in a state that was planned to persist for years.
NixOS suffers a little from rapid upstream changes like Arch. You can pin nixpkgs and bump when you feel like it (or when a version of something isn’t recent enough), which is great.
However, bumping every three months always renders my configuration broken because of some expression being deprecated. One time it was how pulseaudio got enabled. Last it was how nerdfonts were organised.
I like how nixpkgs gets better. I don’t like thinking “I guess I’m not upgrading packages tonight, I’ll just roll back.”
This is so true. I had wondered if it was just me somehow messing my various manjaro/arch machines.
Coming back to a hobby laptop and finding it unable to function because mirrors have been updated or whatever was a really painful thing to find out after a few months away.
I've used ubuntu on and off for a while now, and I've been debating switching over my main computer from windows to ubuntu. Would you recommend Debian instead? Are there any downsides/incompatibilities I should be aware of before doing so? I've used Raspbian a reasonable amount, but mainly for normal raspberry pi things instead of as a desktop system so I've don't really have much hands-on experience with it
I would recommend Linux Mint first. It's definitely one of the best distros out right now and great for people coming from Windows.
There is also a Debian edition of Mint called LMDE. I would recommend Debian second and I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu at all, mostly because of the SNAPs but also because they really gave up trying to provide a good desktop experience when they stopped Unity many years ago now.
Seeing as everyone seems to be recommending that, I'll give it a look haha. I am pretty comfortable with Linuxes (Linuces?), I'm only on windows right now out of habit and program support, but I believe that Linux has a lot better compatibility these days through things like Proton. And if I really do need something Windows-flavoured again, I can just spin up a VM or something haha
IIRC it was when an Ubuntu update pushed the Unity DE on me that I abandoned it. And that would have been back in like 2012 or 2013 ish.
The reason I use Linux in the first place is because I know what I'm going to get. There may be a few UI tweaks between Mint MATE versions, but there's rarely breaking changes that completely and fundamentally alter the way that I'm meant to be interacting with my machine. As an end user I want stability in all things. Don't move menus or change keyboard shortcuts (and especially don't change the entire freakin' DE) without making a massive fuss that this "upgrade" might not be for all users with an option to .
In any case, Mint MATE gives me the compromise that I want between a smooth and "pretty" user interface that looks relatively modern without being a heavy resource hog like other DEs that strive for that (cough KDE cough).
Mint is great, served me well for many years. Never had an issue. With Debian I would mess things up if I messed with something I should not be touching. There are faster options but it requires more maintenance. Mint gets out of your way and just works.
That's the thing about mint. You don't have to mess with it because it works. Updating, installing, deleting, changing settings, no problems. That's is my experience with mint. Cannot say the same about any other distro.
I did if I wanted to fix issues with WiFi, audio, installations, etc. That never happened to me when using mint.
Another example: I shouldn't be messing with fixing packages after an arch update, but I sometimes have too. It has always been something simple, even less issues than debian, plus other advantages.
Again, that is my experience.
> I did if I wanted to fix issues with WiFi, audio, installations, etc. That never happened to me when using mint.
That might have been due to a bug in some issue that you would have to fix under Mint as well.
> It has always been something simple, even less issues than debian, plus other advantages. Again, that is my experience.
Sure, that's fine, I still don't think it makes sense to put down a distro because you were messing with things you shouldn't have been. If you said you had to, then that's different from messing with something you shouldn't have been, since you should have been to fix it.
It seems the real issue was not that you were messing with something you shouldn't have been, bur rather stuff was not working for you as well out of the box.
As someone who has not used Windows for years now, Ubuntu is fine, but personally I ended up switching to Fedora after a while. But I think people will always have problems with any OS and you'll hear about those more than the people that are running without issue.
It's not just the command that one types. DEB packages are more widely available than RPM. The Debian repositories are larger. And for all its flaws, I find dependency resolution is done better on apt than the alternatives.
But it didn't and it isn't. Debian created DEB three years before RPM was created. Starting out, RPM didn't even support dependencies. I got into Linux before RPM so Debian was the obvious choice. I never understood why RPM was created.
Well yes: if Canonical cared they could make most of their snaps work almost as good as the Debian packages they dropped, and then it would be the same to the user.
But also no: even if they spent years catching up they would not reach the level of not-sucking that .deb get without extra effort, as a result of decades of policy ossified into the supporting tools. Such as the strong expectation that apt deals with packages that can be (re)built from their declared inputs and share common build-essentials. Whereas snapcraft does not even provide the tools yet to easily rule out building from ephemeral inputs or merely-accidentally working rust versions.
I don’t care much about package managers. I left Ubuntu because it put a snap directory in my home folder, put ads in mtod, and made mount output unreadable. It felt like I lost control of my computer.
The sells pitch for apt is "Apt is a newer, more user-friendly version of apt-get." Apt has been around for 10 years at this point, so if they haven't switched they probably aren't going to.
The primary difference between apt and apt-get is apt has better dependency resolution and apt cleans up after itself when you do upgrades (it uninstalls packages that are no longer used).
The apt command also merges functionality from apt-get and apt-cache.
With apt you don't have to use two separate tools to search for packages to install them. That's probably at least a moderate usability improvement for many people since you don't have to figure out whether you need to use apt-get or apt-cache for some particular command.
Speaking for myself: both apt and apt-get are different frontends to the same package management system and repository, which is shared by Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, and other Debian-based distros. I like the package management system; which frontend one uses (apt, apt-get, aptitude, nala, etc) is of secondary importance, as they differ only in user interface and aesthetics.
`apt` (the program) is a relatively recent addition to the APT (Advanced Package Tool) ecosystem - until not that long ago, `apt-get` was the way to install packages, and `apt` is now a "cleaner" way of interacting with APT.
I think they mean the repos. I wouldn't be surprised if apt-get is usually an alias for apt, but I don't know, I just type in apt and what I want to do.
On a server we use nala instead, it's quite nice actually, so maybe I'll start using it elsewhere too.
I moved from debian to ubuntu because stable was too slow and testing was too unstable. Been on ubuntu on my laptop for 15 years, just seems like a hassle to move now, despite the straws (snaps etc)
I started off liking snaps, then ran into all its failure modes. Like constantly getting a warning from IntelliJ IDEA about a new version being available, but only if I quit out and manually upgraded the snap (now I use Jetbrains Toolbox). Or the snap version of Docker taking _minutes_ to shut down on every reboot and resetting the owner/group on the docker socket every time it restarts.
My desktop now runs Aurora, which is itself a respin of Fedora Kinoite. Anything that's genuinely "system" level is installed with rpm-ostree, there's the occasional flatpak, but most things are installed with linuxbrew. But most days I'm just using my MBP (my desktop isn't even powered on right now).
I liked linuxbrew up until it set up python in a way that broke a lot of apps for me. I keep meaning to give it another try, but there are only so many hours.
Ubuntu used to be what Fedora is now - a common-sense desktop distro for regular people. At some point though it completely jumped the shark and started inventing things nobody wanted (typical of corporate-controlled software).
Fedora 22 (released 2015) switched default package managers from yum to dnf. dnf is faster, and better at resolving complex dependency chains. Additionally, its better at rollbacks on the rare occasions these are required. apt-get might still be a hair faster, but they're pretty comparable at this point.
C++ isn't the reason it's blazing fast, moreso that they took the rewrite opportunity to improve the parallelism and be more clever about which metadata actually needs to be downloaded instead of downloading all of it, every time.
Jokes apart, I guess that not all is procedsing yhere is also IO and other stuff going on here so I would not expect C++ to be critical here for most of the workload.
If I had a nickel for every time the Linux community reinvented the wheel for things nobody asked for, but refused to implement a feature everyone asked for...
A scary amount of critical FOSS projects are just some guy's hobby, and a hobbyist will often work on problems they find interesting, regardless of whether or not they're important for the "community".
If you're coming home from work and have one hour of free time, do you really want to spend it investigating why a Meta+Shift+F11 doesn't work in your program under Wayland on Womperloo Linux 11.4?
That's the #1 reason why people need to be paid to work on important software. In a corporate environment (with somewhat reasonable management) boring but important work will land in someone's Jira ticket and they'll be paid to get it done.
OH, trust me - corporate environments are not at all conducive to making sure bugs get fixed for Womperloo 11.4 users. Corporate environments incentivize working on flashy, highly visible work. Bugfixing edge cases is the opposite of that, and usually falls by the wayside (unless it's the kind of company where quality is a metric that is enforced, which is rare).
The flipside of open source maintainers being unpaid (or, at least, their pay not being linked to their output) is that they have time to care deeply about quality, and many really do. Linus Torvalds is not going to sit idly by while an update is shipped out that breaks Womperloo, I'll tell you that.
> OH, trust me - corporate environments are not at all conducive to making sure bugs get fixed for Womperloo 11.4 users.
That's true, but Meta+Shift+F11 will usually be fixed if it breaks on Windows, and ironically will very likely work Womperloo 11.4 as well, because Wine basically runs all Windows software that doesn't make it an explicit goal not to run under Wine perfectly.
> Linus Torvalds is not going to sit idly by while an update is shipped out that breaks Womperloo, I'll tell you that.
Linux is a great example - it's the most arguably the most successful FOSS project, and that's no small part due to the fact that Linus, as well as a ton of other programmers get paid a lot of money to work on it.
https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ makes a good point that the really only stable ABI on Linux is WIN32, especially if you step an inch off the "we have the source and build from it every time" train.
Linus keeps the kernel ABI as stable as he can, but that's only a small part of Linux.
I would argue that he cared deeply about quality long before he was ever making money from Linux. But we're splitting hairs over a tangential argument at this point.
> things nobody wanted (typical of corporate-controlled software).
I mean, can't you say the same thing of Fedora? Podman, Systemd, Wayland and tons of other software was created by or sponsored by Red Hat because everything has to be done their way. Canonical tried the same, to much less success, with LXD, Upstart, Unity. But it's literally the same playbook.
Well, at least all of these efforts were and are open source.
Of the three you mention, the only one where you might have a point is Podman (and even then it's not entirely black and white, for example Podman's most appealing feature is not having a daemon).
Systemd was the second attempt at a new init system. The writing had been on the wall for a while for sysvinit, it just turned out that upstart wasn't really fixable. Later, when systemd started trying to unify more aspects of the distro, a lot of the conventions that were adopted didn't even come from Red Hats distros.
And while Wayland was started by a Red Hat employee on his own time, most of the development was done by Intel if I remember correctly.
It seems to me that you confuse "Red Hat is really good at building communities where everyone can contribute what they'd like" with "Red Hat forces what Red Hat wants onto everyone else". And yes, it helps that everything's open source and without a CLA.
> Systemd was the second attempt at a new init system. The writing had been on the wall for a while for sysvinit, it just turned out that upstart wasn't really fixable. Later, when systemd started trying to unify more aspects of the distro, a lot of the conventions that were adopted didn't even come from Red Hats distros.
It was still mostly driven by Red Hat people, most notably a guy who was terrible at taking feedback, and proposed "solutions" for security vulnerabilities which were bullshit ("just update systemd", as if you can just do that on any distro). For years systemd had pretty terrible downsides (you know how it deals with conflicting dependencies? randomness! Because that's what you need for an init system, random ordering), yet RH and the person in charge refused to listen.
That all the software RH made/sponsored had some advantage or another over alternatives doesn't change my initial point - Fedora, and RHEL, are full of RH alternatives to existing software. Yeah, Podman is better than Docker in some ways, but RH still removed user's choice by forcing their half baked "drop in replacement" that for multiple years couldn't do half of what the predecessor did. Nowadays Podman is decent, but it has been the forced default for how long now?
Why does it matter? They were trying to solve a real problem, and decided to dig themselves out of the hole that was upstart. I'm not even sure if Fedora or Arch adopted systemd first, but it was pretty close either way.
And Podman (which I admitted was at least partly not-invented-here) was a default but not "forced". I used Docker for years on CentOS 7, and only switched to Podman when it got better than the competition.
You mentioned exactly three cases, of which one was not even Red Hat, and that's being "full of RH alternatives to existing software"?
That's not "forcing", it's choosing what you ship and especially (since RHEL is a paid product) for what software you're willing to spend money on customer support and feature requests.
Fedora has always had Docker and on RHEL you could install it with community support only.
> That's not "forcing", it's choosing what you ship and especially (since RHEL is a paid product) for what software you're willing to spend money on customer support and feature requests.
That's forcing an alternative, inferior in terms of features, tool. Canonical were publicly criticised for switching the Firefox apt release to a Snap for their easier maintenance.. Red Hat replacing Docker and telling everyone it' replaced by Podman, even if Podman could do 1/3 of what Docker could, is pretty similar.
And they did the same with the whole ecosystem - buildah is another example of them reinventing the wheel because they just had to. Kaniko exists and works well. Docker build has downsides. But Red Hat just had to build their own one too.
It's giving an alternative that you can support to your paying customers, over one where you have found out after 5 years of contributions that you weren't welcome. Yes it was inferior but the alternative was nothing at all. Should I remind you of the Docker people showing up at a conference with "I say no to systemd PRs" t-shirts (https://lwn.net/Articles/676938/)?
Also, Kaniko was made public in January 2018. Buildah had its first release in February 2018. It's unfortunate that both exist but so is life, they were developed concurrently even though Kaniko came first by a few weeks. Given the previous experience with Docker I am not surprised they chose to build something integrated with podman.
> Podman, Systemd, Wayland and tons of other software was created by or sponsored by Red Hat because everything has to be done their way
Not saying that you are not right, but for clarity, on Podman, and in lesser terms Systemd, there are valid points from RedHat - at least from my perspective as system administrator. I suggest you to make your own mind from this article[1].
> According to Walsh's presentation, the root cause of the conflict is that the Docker daemon is designed to take over a lot of the functions that systemd also performs for Linux. These include initialization, service activation, security, and logging. "In a lot of ways Docker wants to be systemd," he claimed. "It dreams of being systemd."
My key take - Docker's developers cared about moving forward fast and making dev's life easier, not about integrating into existing systems well (which probably alone is the reason why Docker was born - see how FreeBSD guys keep believing they have Jails and it's superior over Docker).
> According to Walsh's presentation, the root cause of the conflict is that the Docker daemon is designed to take over a lot of the functions that systemd also performs for Linux. These include initialization, service activation, security, and logging. "In a lot of ways Docker wants to be systemd," he claimed. "It dreams of being systemd."
This is just someone who doesn't understand what or why Docker is. And when Docker was developed and released (2013), systemd was barely an init system, let alone the monster with 50 tentacles it is today.
> My key take - Docker's developers cared about moving forward fast and making dev's life easier, not about integrating into existing systems well (which probably alone is the reason why Docker was born - see how FreeBSD guys keep believing they have Jails and it's superior over Docker).
100% agreed. That's why it's useless to compare to systemd.
Their Firefox snap is pitifully slow on my relatively high-end PC. It’s an embarrassment that it was shipped so broken as a default to end users.
Distributions are mattering less and less these days, with Flatpaks looking like the path forward for the end-user applications, and docker for many services.
So all I want now is for the distribution to get out of the way, and Ubuntu has become a relatively poor choice for that.
Just curious, why not simply stop using snaps? On my machine, the whole snapd* can be removed, and mozilla offers pretty high-quality ubuntu repo for firefox.
They're doing sly things with snaps, like automatically installing the snap when you try to apt install something. I wouldn't put it past them to try to reinstall snapd without notification. It's easier to just move to a system you can trust.
I don't agree, it's easy to set the mozilla repo as pinned / priority for apt (in fact, mozilla's 2-step instructions help you do that). I'm not sure what the second point means, are you not in charge of the package manager on your system? I can't say I've had apt run without my knowledge :-)
The Ubuntu maintainers have a cohesive vision for their product, and that vision doesn’t align with what I want.
Yes, I absolutely could shoehorn what I want overtop of their vision, but I’d rather just go with something simpler that gets out of the way and lets me do what I want.
If Ubuntu was the only option I’d still use it, but it’s not. Basically any distro can accommodate my needs of providing a base on which to run Flatpaks and docker containers.
Been saying this for a long time - there's a lot of reasons to not like Ubuntu: mine is that they absolutely ditched the "Linux for human beings" motto and you can no longer feel the ubuntu in it. Been more than 15 years since I used it and feels like it has been spiraling down ever since.
But for many of us it is/was the gateway to Linux and I'm grateful to it for that.
Agreed, Ubuntu is poorly engineered, they still use some sysv init scripts behind systemd units, which is embarrassing, and I have never managed a successful update.
Fedora is great, I did not have half the problems with it that I had on Ubuntu. Every single update went super smooth.
The one downside with Fedora is that you don't really have LTS and there is no rolling releaste that is intended for daily use, but otherwise it's perfect.
My first ever Linux distro (years ago) was Redhat 7.2. I LOVED it! Eventually working mostly in the corporate (Microsoft dominated) world I lost track of what was going on the Linux world. Few years ago, when I was trying to get out of Microsoft again, a friend recommended Ubuntu, and I hated it. It felt very bloated, then someone else recommended Linux Mint and I never looked back! I would highly recommend trying it out if you are done with Ubuntu, and it also has LTS releases.
I've never been able to fully use an Ubuntu desktop--the esthetics and UX always felt wrong, and the closest I could deal with was Elementary.
I've pretty much landed on Fedora and vanilla GNOME again for the past two years for many things (including some personal services), with Debian as my go-to for SBCs and servers (and Ubuntu as a fallback if what was available was too old).
Snaps completely turned me off it, and the Fedora Bluefin/Bazzite experience is much better (even if I prefer to run some apps outside flatpack due to too many path re-mappings).
Elementary though, despite the name, is so poorly engineered that distribution upgrades aren't available at all. OS 7 comes out? Format your hard drive. OS 8 comes out? Format your hard drive.
Which kind of defeats the entire point: If you set up Elementary OS for someone with elementary computing knowledge, can you blame your grandparents in 4 years for a wildly out of date Linux computer? What grandson wants to download all their pictures, tax forms, emails, and copy it all back in place every few years?
As I said in another comment, it's ironic that a Linux distribution could be said to take the crown for form over function, more than any other OS.
Here I usually get flak for claiming Linux desktop is simply still not there for my granps, and I think it's (the flak) totally undeserved: the gramps have zero chance to update it, and for me it's a whole afternoon mucking with console and packages and whatnot, regardless of distribution. I got used with the idea though, and said gramps are still more secure even if I get around updating their machines only every few months (but the food you get while updating, yum so worthy).
Yep, this turned me off from Ubuntu as well. Pop!_OS fully removed snaps, which is great, but man they're behind the times.
kde-neon fixes a lot of the problems I have with the UX of Ubuntu, but KDE is getting weirder and weirder, and (for me, specifically with zoom) is still behind other WMs in its Wayland support. Looking at this point to go back to a tiling WM like sway on top of kde-neon, which is so weird to say.
That is a very good point. I was all complainy because I was trying to get a modern version of podman on my Pop home server and can't. It's as much podman's fault as Pop's though, and if I really wanted to stop complaining I'd put Fedora or whatever on it.
I want to love Pop!_OS but every single time I install it, I do something that completely breaks X within the first couple boots. I don't know what I'm doing but I've had this happen across multiple machines. Never had the issue with Ubuntu nor Debian.
I've been a mostly happy Fedora user for about eight years now (counting the two years when I was on the Fedora-based derivative, Korora). I do worry about IBM's increasingly heavy hand on Red Hat, despite Fedora's repeated assurances that they are totally independent of IBM. When a Dev starts talking about putting AI into the Fedora Workstation, that makes me very nervous. [0]
Also, I appreciate Fedora's bleeding edge nature, but once I got done distro hopping and no longer needed "bleeding edge" kernel support for my new-at-the-time hardware, the 6-month release cycle does get to me a bit. Although I've never had an install completely hosed by the upgrade, I still have a mild panic attack every time I've gotta do a version bump because something always breaks at the first or second post-upgrade reboot, causing me to fear that the upgrade has failed. I haven't tried doing the once-a-year two-version upgrade yet (although Fedora says it is officially supported), I might look into doing that on one of my boxes next time.
Is there around a Linux distro that manages to get compartmentalized apps (Snaps / Flatpaks or whatever) right? I feel like they have security advantages, even if people hate them because they don't work out-of-the-box.
Android has compartmentalized apps by design, and it seems like everything work there, but that's because developers are forced to think about it and make it work.
It depends what you mean by "apps" and "works". Phone apps have very limited interaction with each other, by design, so that yes, sandboxing works OK. Android also uses sandboxing technologies not available on plain Linux I believe, but I'm not sure of this part. It also has a full system for defining the types of interactions possible between apps, that is built into the UI kit used by all apps, which is another major bonus.
You can't extend most of this to arbitrary Linux packages. Those are often meant to have complex interactions with other packages, and to do so via arbitrary mechanisms (file paths, Unix sockets, shell variables, etc). You can't easily sandbox something like npm or pip, for example, since their whole point is to be globally accessible. Even less so for something like OpenSSL.
Can't you just use an AppImage (if available) for things you don't want to bother with instalation?
I only use it for emulators, and I don't really explore the OS anymore, so I'm not sure if they have any downsides.
I'm in full agreement that Ubuntu updates suck, and snap sucks, but Fedora? Why would I want to run an unstable-by-design distro, produced by a company that restricts access to their GPL'ed Linux updates? (Note: I did not say they deny access.)
Having gone through update hell just a few months ago when I tried to go from 23.10 to 24.04, and eventually giving up after spending way too much time on it, I'll probably just stick with fresh installs from now on. You may blame me for running a non-LTS release, but at the time, it was the only thing that would run on my new Lenovo Thinkpad.
Snaps are horrible, but I understand that Canonical needs some things to distinguish itself. If I cannot find a repo or a deb file, I would rather install from source than use a snap.
I like Debian, and I like that Ubuntu is Debian based. Setting up a modern dev environemnt on RedHat or Fedora will not give you the latest stable tools. Ubuntu will at least give you some stable tools that were released within the past year or two.
Can't read because of corporate firewall, but I switched from Ubuntu to EndeavourOS, which is Arch based, but the install experience is like installing Ubuntu to an extent, really straight forward and just works. I grew tired of dated packages for things.
If I could redo Ubuntu, I would have a distro that pulls from Debian Sid and does monthly releases where you will have relatively modern tooling and some stability, you freeze it on a version the way Debian / Ubuntu typically do, but you have drastically more stability.
Except for printer driver support in my case. I wasn't able to get an Epson ET working like on Ubuntu (wifi, scanner) where under Ubuntu it works without any configuration.
Ubuntu upgrades, even LTS server, are often problematic. I've had several issues over the years: network interfaces renamed, default route lost, 5 minute delays in boot due to various systemd job timeouts (which weren't a problem in previous releases), etc. All this stuff was "fixable" but it certainly wasn't smooth and all required console access to resolve.
Weird, I have machines that have been upgraded from as far back as 14.04 to the current LTS that have had zero issues. IMHO, you only get that kind of problems if you use non-LTS "interim" releases.
This happened mostly during the 20.04 -> 22.04 era. Perhaps it's my configuration? I have some systems with multiple network cards. I will say on VMs with a single network interface, the upgrades have been smooth.
If I were to rebuild my systems, I'd go for Debian.
My latest LTS upgrade ended up completely breaking my RAID partitions. I had to completely reinstall everything. It took me days. This was not a smooth experience.
Totally an aside from the actual content here, but I love that Pitch Meeting has achieved the level of cultural penetration required for this reference to now be turning up in a rant about operating systems.
Holy shit, I came here to say the exact same thing. One guy, working out of his bedroom apartment in Canada is able to create something culturally relevant on par with "More Cowbell".
In in the same situation, as an Estonian e-resident, I have to rely on the Estonian smartcard software and went with Ubuntu on my work machine. The default experience has more bugs than I've ever encountered with Fedora: update center couldn't update itself but was nagging me about needing an update (a snap package classic), a constant crash popup error after login due to some funky component, some Gnome specific issues that I don't even care to remember (switched to KDE in less than a day).
OP should be aware that using Fedora while relying on DigiDoc is a gamble. It breaks almost every year on Fedora (since 2021 when I've started using it). Last big one I remeber is when DigiDoc devs made some major breaking change right before the deadline for submitting the annual report, and I had to scramble to work around it. Thanks to some Fedora community member that made a copr with fixes ahead of the distribution package.
Now I'm in the posture where I run Ubuntu for the software support, and development inside a Fedora VM.
Also, the smartcard software works with Ubuntu's snap Firefox package, you just need to restart the computer, for some reason to have it picked up.
My distro path was Ubuntu -> Solus -> Fedora. Never looked back. There's nothing stable in the world of linux distros, but Fedora makes this a lot less painful. Most of the time I just don't have any issues with it. Even my MacBook Pro 2015 runs it almost flawlessly. Love it.
I've been on OpenBSD for well over a decade. Nothing ever breaks. It doesn't support everything under the sun, but if it supports what you have, it's generally very solid.
> You can upgrade your Ubuntu installation and then discover that your browser is now contained within a Snap
This. Maybe i am missing something, but Firefox and Thunderbird keep getting replaced with their snap counterparts periodically, even when given priority to the mozilla ppa. Its really frustating.
IMO: on some laptops, Ubuntu installs everything automatically and gets everything working, where on Fedora I end up in painful manual configuration cycles. Most of my laptop work isn't long-lived, so I don't really care about upgradeability. That said, if I was building a server that needed to be stable for a while, I'd go Debian or Fedora.
Ubuntu never appealed to me, but then I was still a Slackware user when it started getting popular.
Throwing everything bleeding edge into a release distro because bug be damned at least the hardware worked, and then as it got more stable it basically just became windows - no longer could config files be edited, you needed to use their wizards. No thanks.
I feel like the part of my text you declined to quote "you needed to use their wizards. " clarifies things, or at least the context. I don't have specific examples because it's been like 15 years since I played with it, although Upstart, their own gui environment, and snaps are all probably at least loosely related examples.
Okay? Would you feel better if I quoted the whole thing?
> I feel like the part of my text you declined to quote "you needed to use their wizards. " clarifies things, or at least the context. I don't have specific examples because it's been like 15 years since I played with it, although Upstart, their own gui environment, and snaps are all probably at least loosely related examples.
I have used Ubuntu a very long time, and I don't remember having to use a wizard for anything.
Also, upstart is no longer a thing. It definitely didn't require a wizard to use. Additionally, snaps didn't exist 15 years ago.
> Okay? Would you feel better if I quoted the whole thing?
It's just weird to omit the part of my text that clarifies what I was talking about in your quote to then ask what it is I'm talking about.
> I have used Ubuntu a very long time, and I don't remember having to use a wizard for anything.
I mean, there definitely are some wizards baked in just for simple stuff, so that's certainly odd. Even Debian has a few wizards. Wizards are not an inherently bad thing that you need to deny their existence in ubuntu completely, lol.
> Also, upstart is no longer a thing. It definitely didn't require a wizard to use. Additionally, snaps didn't exist 15 years ago.
Upstart no longer being a thing and snaps not existing 15 years ago are very, very, very much irrelevant to the point was making. which I think you knew and you're choosing to be very pedantic because you feel the need to defend the software you like and have been using for 20 years.
The point was just to give light examples of Ubuntu-invented and made default solutions to things that require learning the 'ubuntu way' of doing things and are sometimes hidden behind abstraction. The reason my parent comment was upvoted was because the people that agreed understood the gist of what I was saying. I suspect you do as well, you just don't think my point is an issue because it hasn't affected your usage in any way.
There's plenty of examples of what I refer to in this thread, including issues with configuring Unity, snaps being forced without user consent, mount output being unreadable, sys v init scripts hidden behind systemd unit files (which generally include there somewhere being a comment not to edit the file directly). People that just want something simple to use for browsing and office apps and maybe some development don't really care what they use as long as it's stable and don't tinker enough to run into the issues this stuff causes. You probably would have been equally happy on Fedora.
Broken upgrades were one of the biggest reasons I stopped using Ubuntu as well. Granted this was around 10 years ago, but this post suggests things have not improved in that regard.
As an additional data point, I work in an office of 5 who all run ubuntu laptops as developer work stations. None of us had any problems migrating from 22.04.x to 24.04.1 when it became available.
I also went mad from trying to coexist with Ubuntu snapd, so now I'm on Debian. Fedora feels kind of wonky and sometimes broke on upgrades, and when it happened to me it was harder to get out of than when I put a stick in the wrong place in Debian.
Adding non-free and less stable repos to Debian makes it a very slick and robust experience. Most software I want to have newly stitched edge is in their own repos anyway so stable is usually fine too, with a few select things manually installed alongside some asdf and SdkMan installs.
Don't know if touch screens or biometrics work, but Bluetooth and touchpads and sound and so on Just Works on the machines I've tried it on over the last five years or so. Toshiba, Lenovo, HP Elitebook and ZBook, probably something more.
I stopped using Debian/Ubuntu in 2014. Was already tired of all the issues, but I met a RHEL trainer that completely broke down all my old teenage prejudices I had against RH. So I spent that very night reinstalling my laptop from Debian to Fedora, and never looked back.
Just started a new job this year and they gave me a Kubuntu workstation. My impression after one month is that nothing has changed, it's still a very bad OS, and KDE tries to be "fool-proof" like Windows but it fails miserably.
There is definitely an advantage to having a big experienced enterprise behind your distro. RHEL is free for personal use, and Fedora of course, but I'd be willing to pay more for a Fedora license than I ever did for a Windows license.
Man if my workplace gave me a machine with Kubuntu on it I’d be so happy even though I share the same sentiment about Ubuntu. Heck I’m a Linux admin now and my workplace gave me a laptop with Windows 11.
Oh I'm sorry but this was a thread about gripes. I am super happy and I wouldn't have taken the job if I wasn't. I can just reinstall my laptop with Fedora at any point, I've been forcing myself to use Ubuntu this first month just to get an idea of how it works again.
I just came from 13 years at a microsoft gold partner having to tunnel my traffic through my Windows laptop.
But also the reason for that was security, which I completely understand. There was no good alternative for our VPN host checker on Linux. And the VPN host checker is what verified our systems were up2date and up2standard for working with big government clients.
I was a big fan of Fedora until the whole thing was borked by a bug with AMD laptops. Took them way too long to fix that one. I've actually moved back to Ubuntu 24.04 for it's stability. I use flatpak for the most part. But the whole thing is much more stable and I like the fact that it has the left icon bar and I don't have to manually configure dash to dock to get what should be on every OS by default. Why does gnome think that it's not necessary. I feel blind without a dock showing what's running. Too many clicks and nonsense on default gnome.
FWIW: I am switching from Fedora to Debian. Fedora has what amounts to almost daily updates, I prefer more stability/less changes. My work flow is usually being up for weeks in between boots, multiple projects open at the same time.
I'm currently using newest Ubuntu desktop. It works great for me. I also continue maintaining and publishing Snap packages, Snap works great for me. I also use Ubuntu at Server, Raspberry Pi, OrangePi, etc.
Same. I sighed when they continued to run telemetry after disabling it - I blocked it (don't care if it's a dry run or not). Bit the bullet when they discontinued FF/TB in favor of snaps - installed them from tar. But when they installed ubuntu-pro without notice, on existing system, which is impossible to remove without also removing DE - that was the last straw for me. I'm moving all my desktops to Debian.
Unfortunately Debian can't be recommended for beginners due to sheer volume of documentation for Ubuntu on the web.
In 2020 when I was upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, a similar thing happened to me where the upgrade simply froze for 1 hour and upon rebooting the whole installation was fucked. This was the 3rd time when this happened over the years (I've been using Ubuntu on and off since 2008). I'd finally had it with Ubuntu and I quickly flashed a USB drive with ArchLinux, used it to salvage the data from my broken installation ,since my /home partition was still intact and then switched to Arch as a daily driver. Have had very little problems since
I use Ubuntu as my main steam gaming install because it was recommended by Valve. Does anyone know if it's similarly decent on Fedora? I just want a few games, steam, discord, and a browser.
I use Bazzite (https://bazzite.gg) on my laptop since about a year. It is based on Fedora, with KDE built in and a lot of back end configurations for easy gaming that just works.
It is also an immutable distro.
It has been completely smooth for me, that said for Discord, I would recommend installing Vesktop as a flatpak, it is an alternative electron packaging of discord with Vencord (a plugin framework for the discord client) but more importantly it has support for screen sharing, that the official Linux discord client has but with a lot of issues.
I went with Bazzite and after a hiccup (installed Nvidia-open when I needed just Nvidia) it is working great! Was able to install and play a few games already! Thanks for the recommendation, hoping it will carry on as well as it did today.
I run Steam via Flatpak on Fedora and it all seems to work fine. I haven't exactly pushed the machine to its limits, though. Team Fortress 2, Overwatch 2, and various random old or indie games. Stock Proton works fine, and i also use Proton-GE via asdf:
A few years ago, i did have all sorts of problems with graphics performance, but recently it's all worked perfectly. I may also have applied some funky environment variables in my Steam settings; will hopefully remember to check later on.
I have a SteelSeries controller, and at one point used that to play Behold the Kickmen. Worked fine, as far as i remember.
Long-time fedora user here. I don't have any problems with it (though I've been using Linux over 20 years so I might just not be seeing some things as problems) but as all things linux-desktop, ymmv. Nvidia drivers (currently on a system with AMD gpu which has been a breath of fresh air) and hardware accelerated codecs (patent related stuff) tend to be the biggest pain points for people afaik.
For gaming: windows 10 pro had the greatest title coverage, but windows 11 is the standard for most modern steam titles.
Ubuntu does have better non-free driver mystery-blob support, and while that is not necessarily a good thing... it makes it compatible with a lot more hardware.
Anecdotally, Fedora was frustrating as F as a desktop due to limited package ecosystem. Thus, it is better for headless servers due to the security model. =3
Generally, I don't think there's much of a difference once you've got Steam installed.
I've had some crashes of Steam itself in the past and I don't know if those were somehow distro-specific.
I don't think I've run into any issues with games themselves on Steam that would have turned out to be distro-specific. Installing and running games on Steam is the same point and click exercise. Steam uses its own set of runtime library binaries for games anyway, so that probably also unifies things for games regardless of the distro.
Discord worked fine when I used it. I wasn't a heavy user though.
Someone said not to use Fedora if you have an Nvidia GPU and I have no experience with that. Also, I don't know about controllers, but I doubt those come with proprietary Linux drivers so I wouldn't assume there'd be much difference between distros.
My games work great, I actually get better FPS than I do on Windows for many of them. I use the Steam flatpak.
Admittedly I have had some sporadic issues with games not starting or having very bad FPS, but I have no idea who is actually at fault for those issues (and I doubt it's Fedora, maybe an app or a gnome extension or night mode messing with the compositor). Like I said, they're sporadic, so it only happens occasionally. The rest of the time it's smooth sailing.
Steam's recommendations, and their actual "SteamOS", moved to Arch-based around the launch of the Steam Deck.
I've been told Bazzite is a really nice Steam-focused distro: https://bazzite.gg/
Haven't tried it yet, I'm procrastinating moving a gaming desktop to Linux as October gets closer (end of Windows 10 support; end of Windows support for that desktop's CPU/TPM).
Wherever I can, I use FreeBSD (on servers). That's a first class solid operating system.
Your ramblings about Snaps are just lame. I've never seen any real issue with snap apart from a childish whining to show how much of a rebel are you. "Mommy, I won't use that snaps because they're ugly. But what's wrong with them? They're ugly because I don't like them!"
Same experience, switched to Debian last year. Funny enough, things just work. Like we used to say about Ubuntu. Snaps made me wary about flatpaks, but they're ok, much better startup time, though using way too much storage.
I had to take it one step further and switch to Debian Testing to get certain packages, and somehow the experience of installing updates is still better than Ubuntu. Go figure.
As a longtime Windows user I switched to a Fedora Desktop. Prefer using a modern distro with latest software inc. Wayland and latest Nvidia drivers and Flatpacks. No idea what's possessed Ubuntu to go their own way with Snap's, but I didn't leave Windows to move to a curated walled Desktop. Anyway Fedora's a great high quality, well maintained distro with no signs of Enshittification from RedHat's sponsorship yet.
With that said I still use Ubuntu for servers (no intention to pay for RHEL). Although with all our App's deployed as Docker containers, Ubuntu isn't doing too much.
I could have written this post, because I totally identify with what was said. Snap is really absurd. I'm a long-time Debian user, and I've always been happy with it. The problem is that lately I've needed the relatively easy NVIDIA support - which is always a pain in the ass, no matter the system - and I can't stand Windows.
I unfortunately built a brand new gaming desktop with an NVidia card not long ago, just before windows 11 started rolling out
I have been putting up with Windows but 11 is going to be my breaking point I think. After this, no more Windows and no more NVidia unless they get much better support on Linux
Oh my god yes. Fedora was the first distro (tried cinnamon, mint, manjaro and pop_os and arch) that actually feels like it was supposed to be a release-ready distro.
Their community is also great, I'm still subscribed to the welcome newsletter and never felt like unsubscribing. Its fun reading about people's lives
Both Ubuntu and Fedora are fine distros, but as a Slackware user, to me it looks like jumping from the pot into the fire :)
I have tried both and they confused me when compared to Slackware. I like the simplicity of Slackware, maybe that "modified" my brain where other distros seems too complex.
I started using PopOS for basically snapless Ubuntu and a simpler desktop, but I keep thinking of going back Debian. I think AMD GPUs are probably well integrated by now and GPU support was one of my original reasons for moving off of Debian and onto Ubuntu
I’m in a similar boat. I jumped to pop!os from Ubuntu for the nvidia gpu support (and snapectomy) which has worked pretty well. I think I’ll be upgrading to an AMD gpu next though so will likely go Debian after that too. My other non-gaming machines are on bookworm
I left Ubuntu back in 2019 when I bought a new laptop. The kernel on the latest LTS version was so ancient that there was no way of running my laptop on it.
Ubuntu's biggest problem is that you have to live with problems that were fixed years ago.
So you are blaming a two year old LTS for not supporting your brand new hardware and didn't even try the current release? I had many issues with Ubuntu but laptops being unable to provide even basic functionality without custom drivers isn't something I blame on the OS.
No it's really not. I've had enough problems with badly-maintained/broken packages that I've switched to Archlinux (btw). Just go with Debian Sid or Arch.
openSUSE is a great all-around distro, not only for sys-admins. It comes in two main flavors: Leap (stable) and Tumbleweed (rolling), and several others. The main difference between Tumbleweed and other rolling with other distros is the quality control before releases. This is done almost daily. If for some reason the quality check does not pass, the release is hold until it is solved.
I started with compiling from source, moved to redhat , slackware , lfs , Gentoo.
Ubuntu was great as hardware got good enough not to need custom kernels.
The last few years quality has suffered. Upgrading used to be a no-brainer. The last few upgrades hosed my systems each time. Moved to Arch over such losses. Snap and flatpak are giant issues, so is docker crap. Docker is the best of the bunch, but I like to have a choice. If I'm installing a server that does one thing. I don't need docker. Kinda silly
A tangent, but I just realized that there's no OS nowadays that I feel comfortable upgrading at all lol.
- Windows? Make sure to find that script which disables all the preinstalled crap like defender and updates
- MacOS? It's time for apple intelligence boi
- Ubuntu? System encountered a critical error popup on startup
- Android? Your rooted phone is now again detectable by play integrity malware
So my workflow is instead to make some time and do a clean install every 2 years or so. Keeps the clutter out too (re-install only things I actually need).
NixOS. Takes the fear away due to atomic upgrades and rollbacks. Lot of people can't get pass this language nix though. GuixSd is an alternative to check out. There are other immutable distros too if you're looking for something less radical.
NixOS's automatic snapshots and atomic updates take the fear out of nearly everything in my computer. It's so much less scary for me to muck with boot parameters or kernel modules if I know that I can always reboot and choose a previous generation.
I've told this story here before, but a few months ago I bought a laptop and installed NixOS on there. It worked fine except my USB keyboard would take about 5 seconds to "wake up" if I stopped typing for more than a minute.
If this were any other distro, I probably would have just lived with it, because I would be afraid of breaking Grub to a point where I don't know how to fix it, but with NixOS I figured out how to fix it, and now it's fixed, and it's backed up with git so I always have it if I ever need to do this on another computer.
Seconding this; I used solely Ubuntu for 15 years but switched to NixOS a few years ago. Using an immutable system feels like a weight being lifted off my back.
Funny how the most stable-over time OS I've ever used is Arch Linux. I had it running on an old netbook for almost 10 years, until they ended support for i386. I also have a laptop running Arch since I bought it on 2018, so it's been seven years. Never a clean reinstall on any of the machines. Just the usual upgrades, which in Arch means running the package manager every once in a while, and following upgrade guidelines in the rare occasion there's a need for something a bit more involved (90% of the time is simply installing reinstalling a package).
I've been using Manjaro for almost a decade, of course it's not perfect but at least the rolling release model makes it suited for being upgraded instead of reinstalled.
If you install Manjaro using BtrFS + timeshift + timeshift autosnap it creates snapshots after every system upgrade that can be quickly rollbacked if something goes wrong
I run NixOS on my laptop and server, and do updates about once a week. I don’t use Timeshift but I do use the NixOS snapshots if an update breaks stuff.
But I really haven’t had any issues with an update breaking anything. I don’t really want to go back to the major release model.
It's a bit sad that to keep a computer running smoothly you have to jump through these hoops. I end up with applications building up so much crap in my homedir on linux or appdata / winsxs on windows, I wind up feeling like I need to clean things out once every year or two too.
I try to look at a clean reinstall as a good chance to make sure my backups and restore process are working too. Maybe take a chance to experiment with a different distribution or organize things differently, or new bootloader.
I have no qualms with maintaining a Gentoo installation on my desktop, but on my laptop I want something relatively stable (no-rolling release, prefer something similar to LTS) and hassle free. A great out-of-the-box KDE experience would be nice but not necessary. Currently running Kubuntu, not sure what to switch to. Most "it just works" distros seem to be based on Ubuntu, which defeats the purpose a little. I've considered returning to my first love, Slackware.
I found kde-neon to be more stable than Kubuntu, and it has a weird mix of rolling release and LTS. That is, it stays on LTS (22.04 currently) but regularly releases updates to the window manager.
They're Ubuntu based, but it's easy to remove snaps from their ecosystem and just use debs, flatpak, and AppImages.
Agreed. All of my VPS servers now run Debian, except in specific cases where I use CentOS for its kernel stability, predictability, and Yum's rollback capabilities.
I left Ubuntu for the same reason. When I still had a lot of time to tinker with my PC, I didn't mind as much, but these days I just want a computer that is stable for years. For the past four years, that was Manjaro (i3 flavor), and I recently switched to Arch with i3. Don't mess with that system and it will just run forever and I love it.
Interesting that you think arch is more stable. Arch blew up on my system even though I did constant updates to not fall behind too far. I switched to nixOS it it also broke because of a incompatibility between home manager and the latest version of i3-bar. The software expect toml keys in a specific order, the configuration writer can‘t enforce this.
So all in all I managed to break a lot of systems with updates. :(
I don't intend to become one of those Arch-fanatics who victim blames everyone, but I do have to say that this is the one system that actually does not fail on me because of peculiarities between updates. Takes some time, but it is extremely stable if you don't tinker with it too much.
I do also have to say that using i3 makes stuff easier, because it is relatively minimalistic and therefore little changes at all. Perhaps you can try Debian? I have heard very good things about its stability.
What is the most stable system you tried where there are many packages available?
Is that Debian? I want it desktop-focused actually and that works great with multi-monitor and proprietary drivers from NVidia.
Currently on Ubuntu but I see bugs here and there and a software update messed up my desktop a few weeks ago. It is for work. I do NOT want to waste time with unstable stuff.
That still would have to be Arch. From what I have heard elsewhere, I would suggest Debian for its extreme stability. You won't get the newest stuff, but Debian is really focused on making sure nothing breaks between updates.
I would say Linux Mint, very stable, good attention to detail from the devs. I like MATE, have been running this for years now. It's upgradable, lots of packages, no snaps by default.
I have no issues with Ubuntu. It works great and snaps work fine for me. I have used it alongside other distributions for nearly twenty years.
I would wager Ubuntu is probably the most popular Linux distribution for "cloud" computing. Seems to work fine there. Yet, not for all the people commenting in this thread.
I moved to Debian for servers. Ubuntu is no longer the easy option. Ubuntu has forced upgrades more often than any other platform.
Added "Security" that breaks users workflows is crap. You have to trust the code on your pc. Spend effort making it good, rather than jailing it in case it's bad.
Ubuntu got me hooked on GNU/Linux back in 2012. Since then I've tried various different distros, and eventually I wound up bouncing betweet Arch and Tumbleweed. It's a real shame Unity never went anywhere, the universal menu or whatever it was called was really cool.
Yeah, Snaps are crap. I can't seem to get 24.04 to stop replacing .deb Firefox with the snap which breaks things like viewing plotly plots because the snap doesn't have access to the right folder. This one thing has me tempted to ditch Ubuntu. At least in earlier versions you could get the snap to stop auto-installing.
I have installed Fedora back in 2017, since that time I just upgrade it: sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=NN && sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot.
Haven't reinstalled it in 8 years. Everything runs smoothly.
Choice of distro is highly tied to package management. If I was an Ubuntu user, I would have jumped ship the day snaps were required. I use fedora and if they required flatpaks I'd be looking for a new rpm based distro tomorrow.
A few days ago, I ran my usual apt update/upgrade on Xubuntu 24.04 LTS, and it completely broke. Tried troubleshooting, but couldn’t get anywhere. Seriously?
So, I made sure my backups were safe and reinstalled Xubuntu 24.01 LTS. Same story - apt update/upgrade broke it again.
Not exactly how I wanted to start my Monday.
I decided to give Debian a shot instead. The installation process was a bit different, but it went smoothly, and everything’s been running great since.
So far, I’m really happy with it. Goodbye, Ubuntu/Xubuntu, and thanks for all the fish!
The push for the horrible little thing that is snap via systematic dark patterns (eg. force snap down user's throat via firefox only available thru snap) is the last straw AFAIC.
On any OS, I prefer to install a clean system rather than upgrade. It's always a mess. Windows, MacOS, android, whatever. If you're going to do a major version upgrade, so a clean install.
I would have agreed with you until I hit Arch and Nix (for different reasons).
Even back in my windows days, I would say wiping the OS and starting fresh about once a year was fairly common, and often avoided a lot of pitfalls.
But... I've been running about 8 Arch machines at home over the last 5 years (6 servers, one desktop, one laptop), and mostly don't feel the need to wipe them.
There's a little bit of cruft, but it's usually related to me doing things, and not the OS itself. So the system still feels stable and solid.
---
Personally - I think for Arch, it's a combination of "Not changing upstream" and "upgrading constantly" so that they don't have a lot of custom cruft to start with, and they have to deal with the upgrade process all the time, so it's not some "huge lift" that happens once every 2 years.
Nix has a similar free feel, but it's not so much that upgrades are painless (they aren't), it's more that "wiping" the machine takes a different tone when you basically wipe the machine with every config change, and reverts are simple and easy.
I rather use a system where I can update and if something breaks, know what broke and how to fix it, you only get that with Linux, if you are interested in learning how
Despite the article I've always found the Ubuntu upgrade process to be pretty painless. I actually did a minor upgrade this afternoon on my personal laptop from 22.04 to 22.04.1 without issue.
But I agree with the article that snaps are infuriating and next time I replace my laptop I'll be surveying the field to choose a replacement for Ubuntu.
Just stop using LTS for desktop use, please. It’s fine for servers.
People install LTS then get get pikachu face when it turns out the kernel is too old for their hardware, or they are missing some feature in software that has been there for 2 years.
Ubuntu has still the best driver support IMO (printer, fingerprint, etc). And so I only have to replace all snaps with flatpaks which works fine since 2 years.
Yeah Ubuntu sucks compared to what it was around 2012-2016. Problem is Fedora is even worse. If you don't believe me, check it out yourself. For example, Fedora's (unaltered upstream?) gnome desktop requires routinely twice as many mouse clicks to accomplish anything: say you want to search something, then you need to click on the odd "workspaces" thing (a vertical bar without text description in the upper left corner) first, then you can select the app/workspace where you can enter your search, and the same with other apps. Also, Fedora's gnome has no windows minimize/maximize buttons if you can believe it! And a Fedora is only maintained for like 8 month or so compared to Ubuntu LTS' 5 years.
So why not install an alternative desktop instead? Yeah then you can as well use another distro altogether, the point of Ubuntu being within a large group that can be targeted by third party software and integrators.
The idea with gnome 3+ seems to be a tablet-like experience. Ok now I actually do own a tablet (a Surface Go) so I tried Ubuntu and Fedora on it in a dual boot config with Windows. It's not half-bad with device recognition but unpolished; eg. the virtual keyboard isn't localized, gnome's own setting dialogs on actual tablet 3:2 aspect ratios are cut off, can't rely on touch and still need mouse/keyboard, etc. What was tempting with Fedora is that they put some effort into webcam support lately - but then the apps I wanted to use it with (MS Teams or Google Meet on FF) still couldn't use it because pipewire or codecs or whatever, and those web apps officially support Ubuntu only anyway. Ubuntu's current LTS didn't even find it, and if it would find it, FF in a fscking snap or other pointless container dreck would need extra permissions plus AppArmor config nobody is able to figure out. A poor impression considering this is already the .2 iteration of an LTS release (but hopefully the upcoming 24.04.3 update can help).
I thought those problems were a thing of the pre-CoVid past, but unfortunately they aren't, and the Surface Go is ages old. The Linux desktop experience is beginning to feel like an effort of inexperienced developers who put too much refactoring on the plate that they then can't pull off (aka second system effect) with Wayland, containers, and whatnot.
Disliking GNOME is not a Fedora problem, there are plenty of other spins to use than the default Workstation.
I agree that GNOME's defaults aren't great, but with a few extensions and tweaks it's a very nice desktop. I just wish the defaults were closer to my preferences, but so do we all.
I think you mean it might not be Fedora's "fault" but it very much is Fedora's problem. That attitude is exactly why Fedora isn't recommendable. If gnome or gnome's default sucks, and this is recognized by Fedora people, than Fedora people should change it.
There exists an Ubuntu-like distro that doesn't have snaps. It makes regular LTS releases like Ubuntu does, it's more stable, and it upgrades flawlessly every time. It's called Debian.
Reposting my comment from a few days ago to see if there is any difference in the groupthink's opinion, or if it falls back into the "these are all anecdotal opinions" trap.
Linux in a nutshell: Just awful in a laptop, meh in a desktop, and first-class as a server.
Depends on your measure of inconvenience. My laptop's been running Linux for the past 3.5 years, but it's a Framework which is relatively well supported by Linux. I've heard horror stores about in particular laptops with both Intel integrated graphics and a discrete Nvidia graphics card.
On the other hand, my company gave me a Dell with Windows 11, and every once in a while the "Intel® Smart Sound Technology for MIPI SoundWire® Audio" speakers and microphone occasionally just disappears from the system and so I have to restart which takes about 10 minutes each time.
Overall though when Linux breaks I can fix it, or I can change out parts I don't like. That's better for me than, eg, Windows's Start Menu search searching on the internet and being unable to change that
W.r.t. Windows start menu web search, I highly recommend O&O ShutUp10 to disable that and other annoyances. And it's customizable, so you can use it to just disable what you want.
My main computer is a linux laptop, and I've been pretty happy with it for many years. There are inconveniences, but I prefer these inconveniences to the ones I'd have with Windows, Mac, or ChromeOS.
Upgrades are the bane of tech. They are justified by "security" like every law that takes away freedom and privacy is done in the name of "protecting children". It's all BS.
My main machine in on Windows 7. It can't be upgraded anymore. No updates for me! Which is exactly what I want. Pure joy.
> My main machine in on Windows 7. It can't be upgraded anymore. No updates for me! Which is exactly what I want. Pure joy.
It is very cool, Bateman. But that's nothing. I use MS-DOS 5.0, before it got ruined with needless bloat in version 6. Limiting memory to 640K (or 1MB with UMB extenders) means that I'm immune from recent malware attacks. No networking ability reduces my attack surface. I find text-mode user interface to be clean and simple. Lack of multitasking ensures that I remain focused throughout the workday. I will never upgrade.
A lot of times it’s made up because security teams don’t have resources to actually risk assess vulnerabilities especially in upstream sources. They’ll just take the CVE at face value which we know is wrong and sometimes not even reachable. But a lot of times there’s legit problems and a lot of times newer code is safer anyways. You just can’t know unless you spend a lot of time and money. It’s best just to patch and toss stuff that is on the network that isn’t supported anymore.
You're allowed not to take computer security seriously, but if you're doing important things with that computer, such as banking, you will eventually learn the hard way...
You can run Firefox LTS on Windows 7, so I wouldn't worry too much about browsing the Internet. Plus, your residential ISP-provided router has a firewall with no inbound connections allowed. How is my Windows 7 computer going to get hacked?
Im not sure, since i didn't touch ubuntu in years, but when they launched unity they send the search to different websites to find the things you (not) searched.
My typical experience with Linux on the desktop. Install it, get frustrated with lack of compatible games, then something blows up after a week so it won't boot, back to windows.
I enjoy my Mac so much more when I want to to development. Linux just kinda faceplants itself every time i even attempt to use it for anything else than a server.
Never have that problem with Archlinux, 'pacman -Syu' to update everything almost never gives problems (it's actually over 5 years ago it gave a real problem for me). You can control yourself when you run it too, no forced updates.
> get frustrated with lack of compatible games
I have no issue playing whichever modern game I want in Linux on Steam (I don't play competitive games with anticheat features though, but things like Cyberpunk 2077, Satisfactory, Age of Mythology, ... all work. Haven't tried Starfield yet but it's 'gold' on protondb)
I have been Linux desktop user for over 15 years, Gentoo to Arch. Currently being paid to develop on Windows and have more problems with Windows than Linux when it comes to the desktop and OS stability.
Any issue that comes up has been a means to fix with Linux with downgrading a package or editing a config file. Problem with Windows often requires a re-install with the tight integration with registry and buggy drivers that lock up development VMs.
My work laptop has become a space heater controlled by Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry, consumes 1/3 of the CPU, and their Antimalware Service Executable, consumes 4/5 of the CPU for days.
No way will I let Windows bare metal on my personal computers and you have to pay me to use such bad quality software.
PS. Any that says Windows has good backwards capability, that capability is subjective. Still cannot run "Slave Zero" on NT kernel, only Win32.
Another Linux guy here to report that the corporate experience on Macs can suck balls too. Not just Windows.
At $dayjob the corporate issued Macs are locked down (for good solid compliance reasons so there's no point fighting that) but run a variety of incredibly shitty DLP and virus-checking borderline-malware. The developer experience is horrible.
Worse, because they're locked down so tight you can't install any of those myriad utilities that Mac people tell you about whenever you complain how poor the desktop experience is compared to Linux! - I'm not even able to install uBlock Origin on my browser so any web browsing is eye-opening.
Don't get me started on the MITM SSL certs that the DLP software requires us to have set up for everything - it's pretty amazing how terrible the devX is at times.
Your major complaint is the lack of compatible games, but then you say you like your Mac better?
There are WAY more Linux-compatible games than Mac-compatible games, and that's just talking about native builds. With Proton, you basically only won't be able to play games with kernel-level anticheat. Everything else works great.
I'm not doubting that you have had some bad experiences with Linux, but the lack of gaming options is really not a modern issue. Just don't use Wayland (for now) if that is a priority.
Looks gorgeous. It's so simple, it's even got "elementary" in the name. Very simple experience for people who want something macOS-like.
However... they never figured out how to get distribution upgrades working. So, they never did it. Whenever a new version comes out, reinstall the OS is the official guidance. The most elementary task in the world, even for technically minded people.
Ironically, that Linux distribution is the ultimate example of form over function, more than any other OS.
Steam is a video game app store for PCs. Back when MS added their app store to windows, the people who make steam (Valve) started working on Proton (wine based?) to get windows video games to work on Linux. Originally Valve said Ubuntu was the only Linux distro they officially supported. Then they started their own distro based on Debian. then they switched to their distro to arch.
TLDR Valve, the company that makes Steam, works on getting games to work on Linux, but they have been kind of all over the place.
There are distros slightly optimized for games (e.g. Garuda is based on Arch) and the support from Valve and Proton is quite good at the moment.
Problems appear only for games launcher that insist on being Windows-only (anything from EA and Ubisoft, Epic games launcher etc...)
Complete opposite experience for me. With Linux I pare down my system to the bare minimum I need, less software running -> less potential problems -> more stability.
I use a Mac as my primary computer but I run a Linux VM on Unraid just for gaming or other odd tasks I want a VM for. The setup and out of the box support for gaming was actually easier than Windows 10, which was what I tried first.
