You’re going to get a lot of comments about Ubuntu and snaps. Definitely one of the reasons I switched away from it.
For the uninitiated, as someone who’s looking to move from Windows to Linux and Ubuntu is probably my first choice, can you share what’s not to like about this?
Edit - insightful answers. Thank you
Snaps are technically foss but the server thst hosts them are proprietary to Ubuntu, when flatpak is perfectly reasonable. It’s a bit of a pattern of things they do, finding solutions to things they weren’t really problems (cough netplan cough)
Also they put ads in search long before Windows did and as much as I hate Microsoft we should never forget that.
One word: snapd
If you like the idea of ubuntu, but wish to avoid ubuntu, you might want to check out Linux Mint.
For context:
Snaps are a way to build applications so that they can run on any platform with one build method. It makes it easier for developers to publish their apps across multiple different Linux distro without having to worry about dependency issues.
Snaps have been very poorly received by the community, one of the largest complaints is that a snap program with take 5-10 seconds to start, where as the same program without snap will start instantly.
Ubuntu devs have been working for years to optimize them, but it’s a complex problem and while they’ve made some improvements, it’s slow going. While this has been going on, Ubuntu is slowly doubling down more and more on snaps, such as replacing default apps with their snap counterparts.
On the other hand, other methods like flatpak exist, and are generally more liked by the community.
This has led to a lot of Ubuntu users feeling unheard as their feedback is ignored.
Performance and functionality.
When I click the Firefox icon, I expect Firefox to open. Like, right away.
When Ubuntu switched it to a snap, there was a noticeable load time. I’d click the icon and wait. In the background the OS was mounting a snap as a virtual volume or something, and loading the sandboxed app from that. It turned my modern computer with SSD into an old computer with a HDD. Firefox gets frequent updates, so the snap would be updated frequently, requiring a remount/reload every update.
Ubuntu tried this with many stock apps (like Calculator), but eventually rolled things back since so many people complained about the obvious performance issues.
I’m talking about literally waiting 10X the time for something to load as a snap than it did compared to a “regular” app.
The more apps you have as snaps, the more things have to be mounted/attached and slowly loaded. This also use to clutter up the output when listing mounted devices.
The Micropolis (GPL SimCity) snap loads with read-only permissions. i.e., you cannot save. There are no permission controls for write access (its snap permissions are only for audio). Basically, the snap was configured wrong and you can never save your game.
I had purged snapd from my system and added repos to get “normal” versions of software, but eventually some other package change would happen and snapd would get included with routine updates.
I understand the benefits of something like Snaps and Flatpaks - but you cannot deny that there are negatives. I thought Linux was about choice. I’ve been administering a bunch of Ubuntu systems at work for well over a decade, and I don’t like what the platform has been becoming.
Also, instead of going with an established solution (flatpak), Ubuntu decided to create a whole new problem (snap) and basically contributes to a splitting of the community. Which do you support? Which gets more developer focus to fix and improve things?
You don’t have to take my word for any of this. A quick Google search will yield many similar complaints.
You get a lot of recommendations for Mint here, but I’d like to toss in a recommendation for Pop!_OS. Also based on Ubuntu without all the crap. I would say the biggest difference between pop and mint is the UI, as Mint comes standard with cinnamon and pop with Gnome (soon cosmic) as their DE’s.
Just take a look at those two and choose one of them, they are both great distros, and absolutely the two I would recommend to just about anyone. Easy to use and very straightforward for new people trying out Linux.
I’ve been using Ubuntu for a long time for its out-of-the-box zfs support, but the snap annoyances are getting harder to ignore.
Firefox is one of the worst snaps. It pops up an annoying notification everyday reminding you to restarted it. Then came the crashing. It got to a point where I couldn’t keep my browser running more than a few minutes at a time.
I wanted to like snaps, and I’m not overall negative on Ubuntu, but keeping the web browser functional is minimum requirement. The Firefox PPA is much more reliable.
Garuda. It feels like being inside a gaming rig full of blinking RGB lights. Way over the top with the “gamer aesthetic”.
Some people don’t like things that are well made and organized in a sensible manner?
Was going to comment similar. it has all thinks thought about and tweaked so it runa great and functions like it should. Maybe they didn’t enjoy system rollbacks and GUI admin?
Like sudo requiring you to use the root password?
Isn’t one of the principal reasons sudo exists is so you DONT need to know or use the root password to perform root-level tasks?
It’s an idiotic choice on OpenSUSE’s part IMO.
I don’t like OpenSuse because when you install and administer it, you can feel it was made by Germans.
What does that mean?
I don’t like Mint because it’s just Ubuntu with even more stuff added.
Mint removes snaps and card games and replaces some GNOME utility apps like image viewer, video player, store etc. with its own apps. Mint also comes with additional apps like Hypnotix, Transmission, Hexchat, Timeshift but worst case they need additional disk space. Like 500 MiB maximum in a 10+ GiB install. I wouldn’t consider these apps “bloat”.
ZorinOS, had lots of problems with it right out of the box that weren’t present on any other mainstream distros I tried on the same hardware.
I didn′t like the look and feel either. For a distro that has a paid version, I would expect a very polished a premium feeling experience, but I didn’t get that compared to all the mainstream free distros.
It was ultimately a dissapointing experience all around.
That’s my daily driver. I used the lite version on my old computer and Core on my new desktop. I understand it may have problems on other hardware but for me it looks and feels as good as the promotional screenshots.
Huh, this is the opposite of my experience. I’ve used a handful of distros over the years (including fedora and ubuntu) but Zorin was the most stable and user friendly by far out of the box. I also think their Gnome theme is pretty sleek.
Arch, I want to get some work done not save 3 extra CPU cycles on boot.
I ran Gentoo for years. I run Arch now.
You’re not wrong, lol.
'Course, I was running Gentoo when hardware was slow enough that you could see the real-time performance improvement from tailored compiles. Now shit’s so fast that any gains are imperceptible by a human for day-to-day desktop usage. Arch can also be a bit of a time sink, I get it, especially setting it up takes time and thought. That’s also why I like it, and always come back to it: I can set it up exactly how I want it, and it’s really good at that. There’s always weird shit that seems to happen to me when I try to remove Gnome in Ubuntu or other crazy shit that, yeah, everyone would tell you not to do, but Arch doesn’t care. If I want combination of things, I can hunt for a distro that has it, or I can likely just set it up on Arch.
After setup, though, it’s not any more effort to maintain than any other distro. shrug
Removing things others tell you not to do. Yes, that sounds familiar. Maybe I should try Arch sometime.
I’ve just finished my current version of my script to change ubuntu around to my liking. At 4:23 in the night/morning. I’m back on ubuntu because I can never seem to get the graphics working just right on other distro’s. There’s always that screen tearing happening whenever I play youtube videos in firefox. But in ubuntu it just works out of the box.
Binary speed is really the least reason to use Gentoo.
There are a lot of thorny issues in package distribution that source builds completely sidestep.
Install-it-yourself plus source updates are a lot to ask, but if you can get the hang of it the benefits are pretty sweet.
So what you’re actually saying is: you don’t like Arch because you don’t want to take the time to learn how to use Arch.
(Which is fine)
Yeah, that’s pretty much it. I don’t want to use a kit/show car for commuting.
Honestly… I don’t get this. It’s a bit more work than other distros but I think that Linux users often get to a point in their Linux journey where customizing a system with defaults is more difficult than just starting from a blank slate.
I don’t find this the case at all. I barely change the wallpaper, I’m not spending time removing a bunch of stuff I don’t use it just sits there unused. I did my time with Arch and Gentoo (before Arch existed) for years, but I would rather someone else do the work and I will use it as long as it has sane defaults, for my actual work that doesn’t care.
I think reality lies somewhere in the middle. Yes you have to read and yes you have to configure things but the docs are all on the wiki. There’s a point where this is easier than figuring out how to undo the defaults on, say, Ubuntu and do your own thing without official documentation on it.
