Hello everyone! I would like to know why there seems to be some dislike toward Ubuntu within the Linux community. I would like you to share your reasons for why you like Ubuntu or, on the contrary, why you don’t. Thanks 🙇
In my personal opinion: 1- Snap packages. Dont like them for their closed source backend, dont lime them for how canonical has been sneaking then into the system of users who have been originally trying to install a deb.
2- Modern Ubuntu simply has no real benefit compared to other Distros. Nowadays it’s just another Gnome and Debian-based distro, I see no reason to use it over Debian itself, or Fedora, Solus, or any other Ubuntu derivative that simply does better than “vanilla” Ubuntu, such as Pop!_OS or Linux Mint.
I don’t hate Ubuntu, and I recognize it’s importance for Linux as a desktop in it’s early days, but Canonical really lost track of themselves.
I don’t really agree about no benefit. It’s still the biggest, most well-supported distro, the desktop is really polished, the font rendering is lightyears ahead of others, etc.
The well-supported thing is in great part only thanks to Debian. And about the desktop, cmon, it’s just Gnome with built in extensions. No issue with that and totally valid to enjoy it, but it’s certainly not “lightyears” ahead of anything.
But if your experience with Ubuntu is good, then great, I’m happy that you enjoy the Linux ecosystem, and I truly believe the best distro is the one that fits best for your personal needs, and if Ubuntu does that, then it’s great 😁
It definitely has its roots in Debian, but when you need to use that weird closed source application for work, if it has a “supported” (for a given value of support) Linux distro it’ll be Ubuntu.
I personally prefer straight Debian myself, or something entirely different but when asked for a recommendation by friends it’s Ubuntu.
That’s a great advantage of Ubuntu, and they surely brought alot to the table when it comes to desktop Linux in its early days. But it just happens that Ubuntu forks also tend to take that benefit too (like Mint, Zorin or Pop) while also giving to the newer users what is, to me, a more standard Linux experience that follows current trends, like the adoption of Flatpaks over the weird push for Snaps on desktop that Ubuntu has, or actual functioning app stores instead of the rather polemical App Center that almost released without a .deb support recently. That’s why I tend to recommend friends to use Mint or Fedora
Ubuntu’s modified GNOME desktop feels less polished than base GNOME, and the font rendering is part of GNOME, not something Ubuntu does special. There’s little reason to use it over Fedora.
Ubuntu’s font rendering used to be better than every other distro, because they incorporated patches on freetype that were legally ‘iffy’ as to whether they infringed on microsoft’s patents; later whatever exclusivity requirement that there was with those patents expired, and the patches got upstreamed in freetype itself.
So now all Linux desktops are capable of subpixel font rendering, hinting, whatever. But before that, font rendering really was hideous on other distros.
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Pretty sure it’s not closed source? https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/10/snap_without_ubuntu_tools/
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Isn’t that the purpose though of Ubuntu though? They made it easy, everything is open source, and then people/companies/orgs that want to do things different can just fork it and do their own thing. If they make a better product according to even 1 person, great. Job done. Plenty of people are happy with vanilla Ubuntu.
I don’t even use Ubuntu but I sure appreciate the amount of work they’ve done over the years and I feel they get a lot of stick about it for no good reason.
Isn’t that the purpose though of Ubuntu though?
No, because back in the day when Ubuntu was “Linux for human beings” you could literally feel that in almost every aspect of it, from the ease of its installation to its icon theme and system sounds to its help pages. It was their “selling” point - it made Linux friendly and reachable for many people, as it did for you and me.
It’s been more than 15 years since I used Ubuntu but from that point I really could feel that what @[email protected] says is true - it no longer offered any real benefit compared to Fedora, Solus, Mint or whatever distro targeted at people getting into Linux. You won’t find many people saying that Ubuntu really stands out from their similars about something. It just became another option, forgot what was “Ubuntu” about (remember the Amazon ads scandal?) and seem to be really stubborn into impose to the community their way of doing things (snaps, mir…). Or tell me with a serious face how the snap thing makes the life easier of someone wanting to install a deb.
It’s correct what you say - as many other distros, they have done a great amount of work over the years and most of us are grateful to it because we could get into Linux thanks to it, nobody can deny that. It’s just that said work no longer seems the case nor they seem really interested about that.
their “selling” point
Here’s one place to begin. They’re not selling it, it’s literally free. Speaking for myself but I just cannot bring myself to criticize a free product which is not a monopoly. And this clearly isn’t a monopoly. It just feels entitled.
Amazon ads
The tiny flaw in the above logic. Reminiscent of similar scandalettes involving Mozilla. But these sponsorship deals have always been easy to disable, even before they get dropped like a hot potato because of the backlash. I always come back to the same thought: how much are we actually paying for this product that is apparently valuable because we’re using it and concerned about its flaws? We’re paying nothing.
Or tell me with a serious face how the snap thing makes the life easier of someone wanting to install a deb.
The typical Ubuntu user will not know what a deb is, and should not be expected to. That’s the point. It’s meant to be easy. Whatever else they are, Snaps are definitely easy.
They’re not selling it
Yes they are selling it with help desk subscriptions. But mostly to professionals.
https://ubuntu.com/desktop/contact-usYes yes I know that. But the consumer desktop product is a loss leader. There is no demand for payment and yet It obviously cost them something to make.
That’s true, and it’s amazing we can get it legally for free.
tiny flaw
Canonical deliberately spied on its users without their consent by forwarding search queries to Amazon via a malicious feature. Users searching their computer locally would not expect their queries to be broadcast externally. Following public backlash, Canonical allowed users to disable this behavior. However, Canonical continues to collect certain types of user data for commercial purposes. These practices present significant issues for those who support free software principles.
OK, but that incident was well over a decade ago. I agree it was bad but to call it spyware or “malicious” is just spin. If you read the quotations from the time, it becomes clear they really thought users would love it. After all, it’s the sort of thing Windows exiles were probably expecting. So: bad judgement, mainly. They could have just put the feature behind an opt-in modal and avoided the whole furore.
They’re a private company trying to tune their business model in a delicate area under the watchful eye of privacy hawks like yourself. For the price of an occasional lapse like this, we get a rock-solid OS with literal salaried employees to maintain it and keep it secure. To me it seems like a decent trade-off.
In a capitalist system, finding ethical funding models for free software is challenging but essential. Monetizing user data may seem like a viable solution, but it undermines the very principles of freedom and trust that free software stands for. Instead, we should explore community-driven models, such as donations, grants, or ethical partnerships, to ensure financial sustainability without compromising user rights. Supporting these alternatives is crucial to building a future where free software can thrive ethically.
Ubuntu’s search feature, which sent user queries to Amazon without consent, qualifies as spyware due to its lack of transparency and user control. This was not an accidental oversight but an intentional decision to monetize user data, prioritizing profit over privacy.
Consider the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, where user data collected under the guise of social engagement was exploited for political manipulation. Similarly, the Lavender study reveals how surveillance data has been weaponized to target individuals in Gaza, with profiling systems feeding military operations and resulting in wrongful deaths.
These cases highlight how data collection practices, even if introduced for financial or operational convenience, can spiral into harmful misuse. While Ubuntu may not directly lead to such outcomes, normalizing these practices lowers the threshold for future abuse. Vigilance and ethical standards are essential to safeguard against such risks.
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my issue lies with it being hardcoded to work with Canonical servers. Yeah, technically you could host your own snap store, but it’s simply not what it’s meant for, so in my views the openess is harmed by this design choice.
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yeah, I dont disagree with Ubuntu being easy to use, and as I said, I aknowledge its importance for our ecosystem. Also I never said I had issues with peoe who enjoyed “vanilla” Ubuntu, I’m actually happy to see people enjoying Linux as a whole.
But as previously stated, my personal opinion is that modern Ubuntu adds nothing compared to other desktop distros, ot’s DE is just Gnome with extensions bult in. The Snap store is not very well optimized and there was no reason to have it as default over gnome-software, which is more feature-complete. Nowadays, for my use, I only see Ubuntu as Debian with a more modern installer.
But these complaints are in parts because I’m a flatpak > snap guy, and a vanilla gnome > whatever Canonical did guy which are personal tastes.
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I don’t have much experience with servers so I can’t really give an opinion on this take.
But I guess it’s my bad, I should have specified that I was referring to desktop usage
The general philosophy behind it.
Ubuntu started out as Debian with some improvements.
Once they were established as the primary Linux distro, they pivoted to an MS-like approach. They tried to invent and implement their own solutions for things that an agreed-upon solution already existed, and was in need of manpower to iron out the kinks (best example is developing Mir instead of throwing their weight behind Wayland, or creating Unity instead of improving Gnome).
They also tried again and again to monetize their OS, which they built on top of millions of volunteer work hours from the Debian project.All of these efforts failed so far. Their current “we can do it better” project is Snaps, which again duplicates volunteer work instead of contributing to Flatpak which was there before.
I’m willing to admit this one does make sense, since their goal is to make an OS where everything except the kernel and the init system is a snap, something which you can’t do with flatpak.
But I’m also pretty sure that’ll fail again.If they simply built an OS with a Debian base, newer packages, 2 releases per year, an LTS every 2 years, and a GUI selector for Gnome or KDE in the installer, they’d be the perfect beginner distro. On the other hand, then they wouldn’t make any money.
I like Ubuntu for exactly that: The bravery and manpower to try different things. I remember I loved their Init-System Upstart when it came out in 2006 - long before systemd got established. It made managing services and their dependencies far easier than with the SysV-Init system other distros had at the time.
Unity was miles ahead of Gnome-Shell in the beginning. And I loved the one-menu-bar approach - similar to macOS - as it saved screen space on smaller screens.
It’s easy to flak on Ubuntu for not keeping in line with “tradition”, but I believe we wouldn’t have some newer projects without Canonical trying something new and showing people what’s possible.
My daily driver for ~25 years is still on sysvinit. I have plenty of experience with systemd based distros. I run proxmox on my home server. I don’t hate systemd, but it’s a lot less intuitive for me.
Example: I want to start the tailscale daemon and service at boot. Easy, add it to /etc/rc.d/rc.local . Oh wait, I want my laptop to check for an internet connection before trying to bring up tailscale. Otherwise the boot process halts for 20 seconds until it gives up. Easy, add a bash script in rc.local to test for an internet connection before trying to bring tailscale up.
I know the answer is systemctl something, but I have to look it up EVERY DAMN TIME. and this is just one of many things that have been giving me heartburn for years.
But you are doing the work the computer should do by scripting your own startup process. Also, it will process your
rc.localsequentially whereas systemd does things in parallel. If you have 5 different custom services that need network, your approach would have them started one after another. Systemd would wait for network access and then start them all in parallel. If one of those hangs, the others will still start in a few seconds (unless they depend on the hanging service) and the boot process will still continue.Also, what about if some service fails? systemd can restart them automatically, you have commands to see at a glance whether your desired services are all running (i.e. the system is in your desired state), it manages the log outputs for each service, etc. etc. … it’s a huge comfort win and once you’ve written a few units, you won’t have to look everything up all the time.
[Unit] Description=My service After=network-online.target [Service] ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/myservice -d [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.targetPut this in
/etc/systemd/system/myservice.service, runsystemctl daemon-reloadfollowed bysystemctl enable myserviceand Bob’s your mother’s brother. Optionally, start it directly usingsystemctl start myservice. (On most systems,service myservice startwill work, too.) It doesn’t get any easier than that.And, if you start to automate your system’s configuration(s) using e.g. Ansible, it’s far easier to just place a few files in the filesystem and run a few commands than to modify the
rc.localin an automated fashion without breaking something.While I don’t really like the one-tool-for-everything approach with systemd and its various additional features (timedated, resolvd, etc.), I do like the main feature.
I use slackware btw. Doing work for the computer is half the fun.
But I did learn something here, so thanks for that.
On the one hand, diversity is usually a good thing for its own sake, because it reduces the number of single points of failure in the system.
On the gripping hand, none of Ubuntu’s many projects has ever become a long-term, distro-agnostic alternative to whatever it was supposed to replace, suggesting either low quality or insufficient effort.
I’m . . . kind of torn. Not that I’m ever likely to switch from Gentoo to Ubuntu, so I guess it’s a moot point.
none of Ubuntu’s many projects has ever become a long-term, distro-agnostic alternative to whatever it was supposed to replace, suggesting either low quality or insufficient effort
I’d add irrational hate against Canonical to the list of possible causes.
systemd was in the hands of one single guy with very controversial ideas in the beginning. It wasn’t really better than Upstart, yet got adopted by more and more distributions over time.
Unity worked smoothly when Gnome-Shell was sluggish as hell on the same hardware.
And you have fixed versions every half a year with a set of packages that is guaranteed to work together. On top of that, there’s an upgrade path to the next version - no reinstall needed.
Ubuntu’s slogan is “Linux for human beings” which fits quite well, I believe. Otherwise, it wouldn’t get recommended to newbies so often. If you want all the nerdy stuff, there are plenty of other distributions to choose from. 😉
Thing is, even when Ubuntu’s software has been packaged outside Ubuntu, it’s so far failed to gain traction. Upstart and Unity were available from a Gentoo overlay at one point, but never achieved enough popularity for anyone to try to move them to the main tree. I seem to recall that Unity required a cartload of core system patches that were never upstreamed by Ubuntu to be able to work, which may have been a contributing factor. It’s possible that Ubuntu doesn’t want its homegrown software ported, which would make its contribution to diversity less than useful.
I’d add irrational hate against Canonical to the list of possible causes.
Canonical’s done a few things that make it quite rational to hate them, though. I seem to remember an attempt to shoehorn advertising into Ubuntu, à la Microsoft—it was a while ago and they walked it back quickly, but it didn’t make them popular.
(Also, I’m aware of the history of systemd, and Poettering is partly responsible for the hatred still focused on the software in some quarters. I won’t speak to his ability as a programmer or the quality of the resulting software, but he is terrible at communication.)
And you have fixed versions every half a year with a set of packages that is guaranteed to work together. On top of that, there’s an upgrade path to the next version - no reinstall needed.
I’ve been upgrading one of my Gentoo systems continuously since 2008 with no reinstalls required—that’s the beauty of a rolling-release distro. And I’ve never had problems with packages not working together when installing normally from the main repository (shooting myself in the foot in creative ways while rolling my own packages or upgrades doesn’t count). Basic consistency of installed software should be a minimum requirement for any distro. I’m always amazed when some mainstream distro seems unable to handle dependencies in a sensible manner.
I have nothing against Ubuntu—just not my cup of tea for my own use—and I don’t think it’s a bad distro to recommend to newcomers (I certainly wouldn’t recommend Gentoo!) Doesn’t mean that it’s the best, or problem-free, or that its homegrown software is necessarily useful.
Snaps, they are against one of the main tenants of FOSS. Obscure content validation and reduction in free access.
And also, their singular promise (security and trust) keeps getting undermined by third parties using it to ship malware.
So we’re asked to give up control but we’re not any safer for it.I just hate snaps because they’re dogshit and don’t fucking work.
I made the unfortunate mistake of doing
sudo apt install docker dotnet -yon a dev machine, thinking that I was going to get correctly packaged deb installations of those two tools.After about two hours of having neither fucking tool work, I found that Canonical highjacked the deb installation with their shitty snap packages, which didn’t fucking work thanks to the shit sandboxing that snap tries to do.
Don’t fucking waste your time with Ubuntu. It’s an actual liability.
Canonical, the owners of Ubuntu, love to steal open source projects. They’ll help a project with development power, then force the contributors to sign a CLA (for an example see the fork of LXD called Incus). Canonical also uses and forces proprietary systems onto the user’s, e.g. Snap uses the proprietary and hardcoded Canonical repository, which Ubuntu now defaults to using Snap for installing packages.
Side note, if it wasnt for Snap using a proprietary backend and also depending on AppArmor (generally regarded as a weaker MAC than SELinux), I would prefer Snap over Flatpak. It creates a better sandbox (aka the actually Security of the software), avoids sandbox escapes, blacklists against broad permissions (e.g. $HOME access), and Snap packages generally have stricter permissions (which determines the real-world security of Snap). Sandboxing is very important for Desktop (and server) security. Android is does the best job of this, but it would be nice if projects like Sydbox, Crablock, or Bubblejail were adopted and built-in to the package manager.
But even without any of the previously mentioned problems, I just think Fedora is a better OS. Fedora comes preconfigured with SELinux policies to confine system services they are quicker to adopt new technologies. Fedora is also a semi-rolling distro, meaning packages are quicker to get updated than on Ubuntu. Fedora stays FOSS, where as Ubuntu becomes more locked down. Also, the package Brace made by the developer of DivestOS is great for quickly hardening a Fedora system.
Command Line Argument
For me, Snaps are the thing. Ubuntu has chosen to use Snaps even for things readily available on other distros / in many repos without the need for Snap.
Linux is about choice, and making that kind of decision eliminates some choice. And given that Ubuntu is commonly recommended for new users – partly because it is often one of the few distros with official support for stuff – it’s extra annoying.
Edit: in practice, there are many Ubuntu-like distros that are probably just as good for new users and don’t need the Snaps (e.g. Mint). But new users won’t know this. If Ubuntu were not the behemoth it is in terms of name recognition, many people would care less.
Snaps obscure content from validation also.
Yes. One more reason why they are against a major benefit of Linux.
Snaps also can’t be mirrored locally or lifecycle controlled in an enterprise environment, as the server portion isn’t open source.
They can, through the Snap Store Proxy. You can fully airgap the process and host a local mirror.
As far as I know, you’re still locked into their ecosystem, though.
It’s a corporate distro whose company’s actions are against the linux philosophy.
Snaps, Ads, and how many projects they’ve let go.
Snaps and how they tried to ram it down my throat with firefox lol. Pure shit
This is the worst. Firefox being snap by default has caused so many issues for me making it unusable in multiple ways and if you are not a Linux expert it is impossible to debug and no way you would believe that the default installation snap would be the core issue.
Corporate ownership, but you can have that and still be generally accepted in the community. Like both Fedora when controlled by Red Hat and Suse when controlled by Novell.
One of the real problem is their dual license policy for their open source projects, that grant Ubuntu full license and the power to close in an Open source Project if they want. This is decidedly against the GPL spirit, but can be done with dual licensing.
Another problem is the “not made here” mentality, which undermined Wayland for instance.
Ultimately the problem is I guess, that Ubuntu is (was?) trying to make Ubuntu exclusive to Linux, with Canonical controlling key technologies. Seemingly an effort to reduce other Linux distros to second rate players.
Another example of that (apart from dual license and Mir) is their new package system Snap, which is open source on the client side, but proprietary on the server side.
Obviously it’s not a good idea for Linux to use proprietary package systems.These are of course ideological issues, if you don’t give a shit about those, I suppose Ubuntu is mostly OK. Except minor annoyances like media not working out of the box. And that the PPA system sucks.
Snap. :)
Most of the criticism I have seen online stems from how Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) plays fast and loose with the FLOSS ethos. The earliest controversy I can recall was the inclusion of the ‘Amazon shopping lens’ in its Unity desktop environment. There may have been earlier issues, but this one made mainstream headlines in the early 2010s. More recently, the push for Snap (its application bundle format), which relies on proprietary server-side components, which invited criticism.
That said, I still find the OS ideal for most users. It has been (and still is) a gateway OS for many Windows and macOS refugees, thanks to its strong community. It was for me nearly two decades ago, and I prefer to remember Ubuntu for the good it has done for the community.
Ubuntu is like all other Linux distributions, they add to fragmentation.
Everyone should run Arch Linux
I use arch linux btw
You spend a lot of time fighting snaps. I wanted to install GrapheneOS which needs direct access to USB from the browser. Snaps can’t do that, so I had to hunt for a chromium .deb on the web. Might as well use windows if I’m doing to Google “$software installer”
Here we go again… Some historical reasons, and some technical. Here are a few (strong points) that comes to my mind:
Ubuntu has a track record to do their own thing and splitting community or the entire Linux eco system, such as with Unity, Mir and Snaps. Unity was badly implemented desktop environment in the beginning and lot of people didn’t like it. Although I think it was a great DE over time, it was just another fuel in the fire. More serious problem was Mir. Mir was an alternative to Wayland, because Canonical was not happy with Wayland and they didn’t want to implement what Ubuntu tried to do on phones. But that meant the programs and protocols to support was now X11, Wayland and Mir. And related to it, the focus of mobile user interface on desktop (Mir+Unity) was something lot of desktop fans didn’t like at that time. Canonical gave up on Mir and Unity (and smartphones entirely).
Snaps were very slow at the beginning, some people does not like that it fills the device loops, and not many apps were available as snaps. Snap is a similar but alternative technology to Flatpak. Again, because Canonical was not happy with Flatpak and Snap truly has some advantages over it. But it means splitting the eco system once again. But what made it really upsetting for many is, that not only Snap is pushed by Canonical a lot, but also when installing a native package, the package manager would silently install the snap version instead. That is sneaky. And not only that. The Snap repository from Canonical is proprietary. And if you want support Snap, you have to use that repo or use your own repo. Unlike Flatpak, you cannot have multiple repositories. That means in Snap you can only use Canonicals proprietary Snap repository, because otherwise you would not have all the apps in it.
There was some Amazon related datas send to Amazon with an app, every time you searched in the search bar of Unity. Even though this is gone for long time, it still is something people (me included) remember. Some say it was spyware… which is kind of was, but is up to debate.
Also some do not like that Canonical is a corporation. I personally don’t have a problem with that (and used it for 13 years exclusively), but its something to mention what problems have with. Also Ubuntu is used in Windows too, so people have conspiracies too or do not like their cooperation. I’m fine with that and actually like that Linux gets more exposure this way. But again, some people don’t like it.
Ubuntu has a track record to do their own thing and splitting community
See also Canonical’s upstart init system, when most embraced systemd.
Upstart predated systemd by quite a while. In fact, RHEL 6 used upstart.
If anything, systemd is an example of Red Hat NIHing upstart.
Snaps predate flatpaks (though not by very long - months I think, but not years).
But its not about just how it started. Snap was more focused on phones and servers, not on desktop in the beginning. And there were not much, because Snap was usable over the following years (like Flatpak). Canonical could see how the entire rest of the Linux communities and distributions adopted Flatpak and could have switched to it. But contrary to it, Canonical was very pushy about Snap. So my argument is, Canonical should have dropped Snap early when they still could (just like they did with Mir in example). But they didn’t.
Obviously now its a different situation, but you were talking about the beginning in this reply.
You said Snap is a similar but alternative to Flatpak, implying that it was developed in response to Flatpak, which simply isn’t the case.
Snap predates Flatpak, and it’s clearly a big money maker for Canonical with their commercial customers who want things like confined but upgradable services in an airgapped environment. By the time Flatpak was making enough headway to be considered feasible to use, snaps were already pretty widely used and had several fairly big names like JetBrains, ROS and CircleCI publishing on snapcraft.io.
Flatpak cannot and was never intended to do all the things snap can, such as setting up system services or distributing kernels. So even if the assertion that snaps for desktop apps were a response to Flatpak were true (it’s not), it doesn’t make sense for Canonical to stop developing snap regardless, as desktop apps are only a tiny part of what snaps do.
Oh yes, these are indeed serious reasons to reconsider one’s view of Ubuntu.
I’ll give some anecdotes.
- A friend long ago was setting up VSCode and Java. He wasn’t the most familiar with Ubuntu, or Linux at all – imagine his struggle when his JDK couldn’t be found. Why? Non-obvious to him, it was sandboxed as a
snap. - When I was a noob, I was looking for a package for some app, but when I found a PPA, it was an enormous command to set up. And hunting online for software… how Windowsy.
- When I was a noob, I was theming my system with a mildly rare theme. But Firefox was a
snap. And since the theme didn’t have asnap, I had to try to integrate it myself or de-snapFirefox… shiver
Maybe it’s changed now. But (1) pushed me to Mint, (2) pushed me further to distros with simpler text-based package management, and (3) is hopefully easier nowadays.
Bottom line (as many agree): Snaps are uncomfortable for a lot of levels of Linux.
- A friend long ago was setting up VSCode and Java. He wasn’t the most familiar with Ubuntu, or Linux at all – imagine his struggle when his JDK couldn’t be found. Why? Non-obvious to him, it was sandboxed as a
