Why do people have such an unreasonable bias against Ubuntu?

Ubuntu
444

I still prefer the arbitrary decisions that Canonical make to those of the Gnome Foundation… I still use Gnome - but - they’re trying to make their stuff more like Windows - when I use Gnome PRECISELY because it is NOT Windows!
They took out slow-double-click to rename a file in Nautilus…

And they’re making it harder and harder to keep X-Select Buffer behaviour across all of the Gnome apps…

Note : I first used slow-double click to rename a file in Mac System 6 (or maybe 7), and also in
X11 on Solaris - then Microsoft adopted it in Windows 95…

So - behaviour that’s almost ubiquitous across DE’s too confusing for new users?

SNAPS really bothered me 10 years ago when I was using an older gen i5 Dell Laptop - I noticed a slowdown… IT’s probably still slower - but my systems are all performant enough - I can’t anecdotally diagnose any performance hit - and - I no longer care… AppImage? FlatPak? Snap? Ho hummm… So long as it works…

445

Well, can we perhaps get all the Gnome fans to unite and find a more palatable substitute.?
Could you define the critical “must have” features. … for example does it have to be GTK based? … does it have to support Wayland?

446

This might be dumb questions but whats the difference between flatpack and snaps and why does so many dislike snaps ?
And in Soplos Linux i can install snaps if i want.

447

What they have in common… along with appimage … is they attempt to overcome dependency issues in package managers like ‘apt’ by bundling all dependencies with each app . … so one app might come with version 1 of a library ( eg like glibc) , and another app might come with version 2. of the same library. Package systems have difficulty with that.

Canonical attempted to build snaps into the package system, znd to force users to choosd the snap version of certain packages.
It is the forcing that linux users did not like.

Flatpak and Snap both use containers … ie they sandbox the app from the rest of your system, but their sandbox methods are different. Flatpak can share a library between containers, Snap cant. Appimage does not use containers.

It is easier for a developer to make a flatpak or a snap than to make separate version of their app for each variety of Linux.

448

Ok Thank you Neville for your answer

449

Not quite true. I asked Copilot to check on that.

Flatpak and Snap both sandbox applications, but Flatpak uses shared runtimes while Snap bundles most libraries inside each snap. Snap apps can share a base snap, but not general-purpose libraries. AppImage does not use containers or sandboxing by default.

450

I found this interesting

“If you use Timeshift with ext4 formatting of your drives, Timeshift will back up and restore flatpaks but will not do that for snaps (choice of Timeshift developer); moreover, restoring a snapshot of a system with snaps could destroy snaps installation while they have not been backed up. If you formatted your disks with btrfs, Timeshift will back up and restore flatpaks and snaps.”

I cant see why the type of filesystem would affect how Timeshift behaves in relation to snaps.
Timeshift backs up filesystems ( not partitions) … surely snaps are somewhere in the your filesystem and therefore able to be backed up?

451

My understanding is Timeshift backups differently depending on file system. Rsync mode (ext4 etc) doesn’t like mount points, loop devices-etc. It is the runtime structures that are problematic to Rsync as ordinary files. BTRFS mode creates a snapshot. In other words RSYNC mode is a file-level approximation and BTRFS mode is a real filesystem snapshot.

452

I suppose one can only use BTRFS mode if one’s filesystems are formatted as BTRFS?

453

I would assume so. I’m pretty sure not only does it have to be BTRFS but it has to be the specific subvolume layout that Timeshift expects. - Which can become problematic possibly with Fedora, Arch etc.. because they use different layouts. -

454

That would be me.

455

I remember snaps used to create pseudo filesystems / mounts - on the fly… It was annoying 'cause you’d see them all in the output of “df” command… I even wrote a bash (zsh) alias :
alias dfx='df -h -x squashfs -x tmpfs -x devtmpfs'
But now “df” doesn’t clutter up the output with pseudo filesystems… But they still show up in “mount” :

╭─x@titanii /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1994-Nirvana-UnpluggedInNewYork  
╰─➤  mount |grep snap
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/bare_5.snap on /snap/bare/5 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/brave_656.snap on /snap/brave/656 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/core18_2979.snap on /snap/core18/2979 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/core18_2999.snap on /snap/core18/2999 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/core20_2769.snap on /snap/core20/2769 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/core20_2866.snap on /snap/core20/2866 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/core22_2339.snap on /snap/core22/2339 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/core22_2411.snap on /snap/core22/2411 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/core24_1587.snap on /snap/core24/1587 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/core24_1643.snap on /snap/core24/1643 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/firmware-updater_226.snap on /snap/firmware-updater/226 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/firmware-updater_224.snap on /snap/firmware-updater/224 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-42-2204_247.snap on /snap/gnome-42-2204/247 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-3-28-1804_198.snap on /snap/gnome-3-28-1804/198 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-3-38-2004_143.snap on /snap/gnome-3-38-2004/143 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-42-2204_263.snap on /snap/gnome-42-2204/263 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-46-2404_153.snap on /snap/gnome-46-2404/153 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-46-2404_164.snap on /snap/gnome-46-2404/164 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/gtk-common-themes_1535.snap on /snap/gtk-common-themes/1535 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/icloud-for-linux_301.snap on /snap/icloud-for-linux/301 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/icloud-notes_3.snap on /snap/icloud-notes/3 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/kde-frameworks-5-99-qt-5-15-7-core20_7.snap on /snap/kde-frameworks-5-99-qt-5-15-7-core20/7 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/kf5-core22_3.snap on /snap/kf5-core22/3 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/mesa-2404_1165.snap on /snap/mesa-2404/1165 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/mesa-2404_1839.snap on /snap/mesa-2404/1839 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/onvif_78.snap on /snap/onvif/78 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/snap-store_1367.snap on /snap/snap-store/1367 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/snapd_27406.snap on /snap/snapd/27406 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/snapd_27591.snap on /snap/snapd/27591 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/snapd-desktop-integration_387.snap on /snap/snapd-desktop-integration/387 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/snapd-desktop-integration_391.snap on /snap/snapd-desktop-integration/391 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/upscaler_42.snap on /snap/upscaler/42 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
tmpfs on /run/snapd/ns type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=6576296k,mode=755,inode64)
nsfs on /run/snapd/ns/snapd-desktop-integration.mnt type nsfs (rw)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/brave_662.snap on /snap/brave/662 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
nsfs on /run/snapd/ns/brave.mnt type nsfs (rw)
nsfs on /run/snapd/ns/firmware-updater.mnt type nsfs (rw)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/teams-for-linux_2192.snap on /snap/teams-for-linux/2192 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/firefox_8702.snap on /snap/firefox/8702 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/snap-store_1390.snap on /snap/snap-store/1390 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
nsfs on /run/snapd/ns/snap-store.mnt type nsfs (rw)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/teams-for-linux_2244.snap on /snap/teams-for-linux/2244 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/firefox_8754.snap on /snap/firefox/8754 type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,threads=single,x-gdu.hide,x-gvfs-hide)
nsfs on /run/snapd/ns/firefox.mnt type nsfs (rw)

That’s very ugly!

456

So a snap is like a filesystem within a file, and you can loop mount it to access the hidden filesystem?

If so, Tshift should treat the file as just another file and back it up… without ever seeing the files within the file.

457

I use Brave Origin personally. Liked it so much I paid for it. That way I can run it on my macboook pro as well (although I didn’t have the macbook before buying Origin).

I’m also trying out Kagi’s Orion browser, since I use their search engine exclusively. So far, I am liking what I see with it!

Email wise, it’s Evolution on linux. My work uses M365 and I am accustomed the the Outlook interface, so Evolution feels natural to me. :slight_smile:

458

Here is yet another love letter to Ubuntu I read this morning on Reddit. It’s also been my experience with Ubuntu, mostly. It just works. But probably the real reason it seems that way is that I like the defaults they use. For others, Fedora or another distro may fit better.

My experience dual-booting Ubuntu and Windows : r/Ubuntu

I’m a computer science student, so I know my way around tech stuff. I had heard about Linux before, but honestly, Windows always got my work done easily enough.

Then I started having some annoying Wi-Fi and Bluetooth driver issues on Windows, and I got fed up. So I thought, “Eh, why not try Linux now?”

I first tried Linux Mint using a USB stick, and honestly, it was pretty nice. I liked it, but for me it felt a little too basic. After that, I didn’t really do much with Linux for a while.

Then I started watching videos about Fedora, Arch, CachyOS, etc., and hearing about how difficult or customizable they could be. I tried Fedora, but it was still a bit hard for me to get into. I also tried CachyOS, but I realized I don’t really want to be doing terminal stuff all the time just to get things working.

I wanted something simple and reliable. Basically, an OS that just works.

Then I heard about Zorin OS. I tried it with GNOME, and it was pretty nice. It felt somewhat like Ubuntu, but gaming was still an issue, and gaming is a big reason I wanted to keep Windows around.

So finally, I decided to give Ubuntu a proper try.

I’d heard plenty of negative things about Ubuntu, but it’s still popular enough that I figured, why not?

And honestly, the installation went smooth as hell.

One thing I really like is the dock. I’m a big fan of the macOS-style dock, and Ubuntu having that out of the box was great.

Even better, things like my laptop’s touchpad gestures just worked. With CachyOS, I had to deal with stuff like getting touchpad gestures working, whereas Ubuntu was basically plug and play.

There are also some small features that I really like, such as the Snap stuff and the corner/window features. Some of these are things I’d genuinely love to see implemented properly in Windows.

Another thing I really liked was the power management. My laptop actually recognizes different power modes like power saving, balanced, and performance, which is something I appreciate.

The software store is also pretty good.

Overall, Ubuntu is probably the first Linux distro I’ve used where I felt like: “Yep, this is an OS that just does things out of the box.”

I’m still going to dual-boot Windows because gaming on Linux is still more of a hassle for me. Proton has made Linux gaming much better, but getting everything set up and working exactly how I want is still more effort than I personally want to deal with.

So for now:

Ubuntu for everyday use + programming.
Windows for gaming.

And honestly, I’m pretty happy with that setup.

459

This is a great read and so true. I came to Ubuntu some years after I was on Linux, and what attracted me was its ease of installation. Over two decades ago, it was a bear to install many distributions (90s versions of Debian being my worst experience and early 2000s Red Hat being my best [at that point]). Then I read and found out about Ubuntu and how convenient it was to install (this was in late 2006), I was tempted to try it. I ordered the CD (back when Ubuntu came on CDs), and the installation process was remarkably easy (this was right at the time, I think, when Ubiquity installer came out).

Of course, I distro hopped, but I have kept myself on Ubuntu as my main Linux distro since then (and my main driver for everything for over a decade) because of just how well it functions, and how easy it is to do my work. Yes, there have been bumps in the road, especially right around the time when Canonical left Unity and went back to GNOME. It seemed there were a couple of years where the company barely paid attention to the desktop, but those days are long behind us. The 26.04 release, in particular, has been outstanding, and I still think it’s the best version of Ubuntu I’ve used and tested. People can accentuate the negatives all they like (on snaps or the hatred of Rust), but much of that is just an excuse because people need a corporate entity to hate on in life sometimes. In the open source world, everyone needs a Microsoft—even though Canonical has done more in the past two decades to advance open source than any other company or project through Ubuntu.

460

The only thing that stops me trying Ubuntu is that they fail to offer any alternative to systemd. I do not think there is even an Ubuntu derivative that offers other init systems.

461

Doing a search with google which called an AI, it found only one exception.

certain flavors of Puppy Linux (such as FossaPup or NoblePup)

entirely bypasses systemd, using a custom, ultra-lightweight, 
script-based init setup instead.

I was going to say but who uses Puppy, but then looked it up on DistroWatch and saw it was 32nd on the ‘Last 12 Months’ list.

462

Not I.
It seems to me to be a modification you can put onto any distro, rather than an independent distro.
Exton Linux is like that too … there are releases based on every major distro.