When I switched to Linux 4 years ago, I used Pop OS as my first distro. Then switched to Fedora and used it for a long time until recently I switched again.
This time I finally experienced Ubuntu. I know it’s usually the first distro of most of the users, but I avoided it because I heard people badmouth it a lot for some reason and I blindly believed them. I was disgusted by Snaps and was a Flatpak Fanboy, until I finally tried them for the first time on Ubuntu.
I was so brainwashed that I hated Ubuntu and Snaps for no reason. And I decided to switch to it only because I was given permission to work on a project using my personal laptop (because office laptop had some technical issues and I wasn’t going to get one for a month) and I didn’t wanted to take risk so I installed Ubuntu as the Stack we use is well supported on Ubuntu only.
And damn I was so wrong about Ubuntu! Everything just worked out of the box. No driver issues, every packege I can imagine is available in the repos and all of them work seemlessly. I found Snaps to be better than Flatpaks because Apps like Android Studio and VS Code didn’t work out of the box as Flatpaks (because of absurd sandboxing) but I faced no issues at all with Snaps. I also found that Ubuntu is much smoother and much more polished than any distro I have used till now.
I really love the Ubuntu experience so far, and I don’t understand the community’s irrational hate towards it.
I never knew Ubuntu was seen as a “hate object” by some people.
I certainly don´t hate it.
The reason I´m using Linux Lite is because I have some rather modest hardware specs on my PC. 4 GB of RAM etc. So I need something lighter than Ubuntu.
But I´m very content with what I have at my disposal, so Linux Lite is the way to go for me.
LL is based on Ubuntu, so there you go.
As far as snaps are concerned, I´m not a huge fan of them.
But for different reasons than others may have.
I very much like to run applications and processes in a sandbox (firejail), which is highly customizable.
Alas for technical reasons I cannot do that with snaps and flatpaks.
But appimages work well with firejail.
I think it comes down to personal taste and requirements.
Personally I dislike Ubuntu. I wouldn’t call it “hate”, but a definite dislike.
It is because of its snaps, and the way it forces to use snaps, and does this more intensive with every new release.
I think it should stick to the native deb packages, but I don’t really care: there are choices, so I could choose Linux Mint for example, if I don’t want snaps. Or Debian (my actual choice).
I´m with you on that one. People should always have the ability to choose.
It´s a pretty sad state of affairs that the snap business extends to the official derivatives like Lubuntu etc as well.
That was one of the reasons I switched over to Linux Lite (which comes without snaps as per default).
My main reasons for making the switch to LL:
no snaps
one of the lighter distros
receives 5 ys of support (Ubuntu and Linux Mint do that as well, but it´s another thing with the official derivatives)
@pdecker
The latest update for Ubuntu kinda-of forced all my old machines unable to run Ubuntu. Guess I could run a Ubuntu VM with my W11 machine, but am exploring other options for my older machines.
That was a quote from the Reddit post. Not from me. I updated my original ITS FOSS post to make it into a quote.
But I do like Ubuntu. Mainly because it just works. Between 15 and 20 years ago I struggled to get various distros working on a couple computers I was using. It was a video driver, sound driver, and/or network driver issue. Eventually I tried Ubuntu, and it just worked. I think lots of people of the same experience.
So you have experienced quite some success with Ubuntu all the same.
Great.
I came into contact with Ubuntu many years ago when trying it out in a virtual machine. I was pretty impressed at the time.
Back then terminals and the update mechanism were new to me. I still was a noob.
In some ways I think I still am.
Seemed very technical and awe-inspiring.
Hate is a strong emotive word and i think wrong to use against the linux product.
I dislike the colour scheme and its system of .locking the desktop layout, i can never find what i want to do easily.
Much prefer linux mint because it looks and feels like I want to use. But been using it for so many years just comfortable like my slippers i can just slide into a find everything I want or need.
I have converted several ubuntu users to mint over the years and they all agree it feels better. But tye same could be saud about mac users.
I think the use of the “hate” word is inappropriate, but is unfortunately typical of the misuse and abuse which occurs on some other forums.
I think Ubuntu suffers from being the first choice distro for new Linux users… new users tend to find more gliches and of course they blame the distro rather than themselves.
I must admit I only ever tried Ubuntu once. It does not fit my criteria
rolling release
non-systemd
and I do have a desire to stay with normal package systems rather than any form of containers, be it snaps, flatpaks, or appimages.
If I use containers, I want to manage it myself, so I would use jail or firejail or distrobox or docker directly, rather than an external container package.
You can change individual colors or go with whole themes. The defaults aren’t very appealing. There is some professional person responsible for the default theme and they chose colors that not very many would prefer I think.
don’t think a default look could scare me or attract too much
Mints default colors are not put in concrete, easy to change. And honestly Debian is not that pretty either out of the box
There are some “inner” values. The way it behaves, how it works: these are attractive.
I can dress up, and face-paint according to my whish
Honestly, even though I switch to openSUSE Tumbleweed almost a year ago, I did not hate Ubuntu when I used it and I would still recommend it along with Linux Mint to a Linux newbie. My problems with it were there were some programs I wanted to use that I wanted more recent versions of than apt could give me. For a lot of people though, I feel like that wouldn’t be an issue, and a rolling release comes with its own headaches sometimes.
App images are (mostly) fine if its for a game or something I don’t need to run often. With the exception of the Firefox snap, in my experience all the snaps ran quite well, but I have not used snaps since I moved from Ubuntu.
The ones I don’t understand are flatpaks. Very often I try a flatpak of software and it just doesn’t work at all. If it does work, it is slow, uses more RAM and doesn’t respect the system theme when compared to other methods of installing software. I still use a few flatpaks, but its mostly for software I can’t bother to install another way.
One of my friend’s uses flatpaks almost exclusively, and at first I thought it was just preference, but after using them and not being happy with it, I am a bit confused about it. Also, this friend is much more of a diva when it comes to system responsiveness than I am, but somehow he is okay with how flatpaks work. Maybe its just luck?
I can see why this would be a problem if you want to use the defaults, but one of the first things I do when I set up a system is change the theme to what I want it to be.
Rosika, I am curious about this. What is the benefit of using firejail for you? How do you so this exactly?
But Debian is what it is… I came to Debian 12 from Ubuntu and I much prefer its clean uncluttered style. I know I can add docks (even remove them in Ubuntu if desired) but this for me just shouts practicality.
With mint, you right click on desktop and you can get a selection of images as your desktop background, when I last tried this in ubuntu or any of its children, lubuntu etc that did not work… ok its some years back so perhaps easy now.
Only slightly that bad.
How come they have to go in that direction to get good drivers?
I am willing to believe that snaps was a genuine attempt to bring the benefits of containers into the desktop world.
That is good. It is the implementation that needs further work.
Well, the firejail sandbox adds another layer of security to your system.
Basically it isolates processes from the rest of your system.
It´s very well documented. See here.
Actually I made it a habit of sandboxing as many processes as I can.
Running them in an isolated environment and restricting what they can access and do is highly beneficial.
There are many degrees of allowing what the sandboxed processes can do.
Most importantly: I run my browser for doing my online-banking this way:
It´s like using a freshly installed browser which has never seen any other site than my banking site before. No histrory, no add-ons, no cookies etc.
It uses a completely empty (newly-created temporary) home directory “mounted” over the actual one.
It represents the highest degree of isolation.
And when you´re done, everything that has changed (like cookies) will be discarded …
… and next time when doing your online banking you begin with a clean sheet again.
There are so many other uses cases.
For managing you sandboxes firetools gives you a great GUI:
don’t think a default look could scare me or attract too much 
