alt Hacker News> after Ubuntu went way downhill and haven't had cause to regret it.
In what way Ubuntu went downhill?
Replies
Snaps? Proprietary package managers are never great.
I forget the exact context but I recall an Ubuntu dev stating they have more users of the Firefox snap alone than trendy distros have entire users.
I think it’s worth keeping that in mind with all the hate Ubuntu gets. Most users are just silently getting their work done on an LTS they update every two years.
IMHO, it also became too complex, with too many things installed by default and too much upstream patching.
This made it more fragile. It was really nice in the late 2000s, but gradually became worse.
all the weird proprietary Canonical stuff they try to put into vanilla Debian and have it replace common stuff.
snap, lxd (not lxc!), mir, upstart, ufw.
It's neverending, and it's always failing.
The alternative question to ask is: in what way has it gone uphill versus just using Debian?
In the early days it had a differing and usually better aligned release schedule for the critical graphics stack.
As a function of time, you are increasingly likely to get rug pulled once Shuttleworth decides to collect his next ransom.
Minutes to start Firefox on one of my machines.
Amazon ads in the Unity application menu (what was it called, 'lenses' or something?).
I'm an old-school user so I'm not exactly Ubuntu's target audience, but for Ubuntu was bad about a lot of the older, lesser-used bits of Linux.
The two things I can remember were problems with NFS out of the box (outside having to install nfs-common, which I'm fine with) and apt-cache not displaying descriptions of packages. There were lots of other, minor annoyances that affected people like me but wouldn't affect someone who got into Linux desktops after, say, 2010. My memory sucks though so those are the two I remember. Yes, there were bug reports filed and yes, they sat in the tracker for years with no attention from Ubuntu.
I wound up back on Debian once I got old enough that I didn't care about being behind the times a couple years.
Oh....snap.
For me, it was a combination of Ubuntu breaking upstream and introducing its own unnecessary systems.
I had a few issues caused by Ubuntu that weren't upstream. One was Tracker somehow eating up lots of CPU power and slowing the system down. Another was with input methods, I need to type in a pretty rare language and that was just broken on Ubuntu one day. Not upstream.
The bigger problem was Ubuntu adding stuff before it was ready. The Unity desktop, which is now fine, was initially missing lots of basic features and wasn't a good experience. Then there was the short-lived but pretty disastrous attempt to replace Xorg with Mir.
My non-tech parents are still on Ubuntu, have been for some twenty years, and it's mostly fine there. I wouldn't recommend it if you know your way around a Linux system but for non-tech, Ubuntu works well. Still, just a few months ago I was astonished by another Ubuntu change. My mom's most important program is Thunderbird, with her long-running email archive. The Thunderbird profile has effortlessly moved across several PCs as it's just a copy of the folder. Suddenly, Ubuntu migrated to the snap version of Thunderbird, so after a software update she found herself with a new version and an empty profile. Because of course the new profile is somewhere under ~/snap and the update didn't in any way try to link to the old profile.
Then there were stupid things like Amazon search results in the Unity dash search when looking for your files or programs. Nah. Ubuntu isn't terrible by any means but for a number of years now, I'd recommend Linux Mint as the friendly Debian derivative.