Linux

I avoid Ubuntu because Canonical has a history of going their own way alone rather than collaborating on universal standards. For instance, when the X devs decided the successor to X11 needed to be a complete redesign from scratch companies like RedHat, Collabora, Intel, Google, Samsung, and more collaborated to build Wayland. However, Canonical announced Mir, and they went their own way alone.

When Gnome3 came out it was very controversial and this spawned alternatives such as Cinnamin, MATE, and Ubuntu's Unity desktop. Unity was the only Linux desktop, before or since, to include sponsored bloatware apps installed by default, and it also sold user search history to advertisers.

Then, there's snap. While Flatpak matured and becoame the defacto standard distro-agnostic package system, Canonical once again went their own way alone by creating snap.

I'm not an expert on Ubuntu or the Linux community, I've just been around long enough to see Canonical stir up controversy over and over by going left when everyone else goes right, failing after a few years, and wasting thousands of worker hours in the process.

People dont hate on ubuntu cause its inherently bad. They hate on it because its a corporate distro and they do some questionable stuff sometimes. The OS runs fine.

Why not debian unstable? Its better than ubuntu in pretty much every way imo. Somewhat less user friendly i guess.

Snap has a locked and proprietary store, even if the client is FOSS. There is no reason to "hate" Ubuntu but there are better choices.

It's pitched as a open source operation system, yet the snap store is closed source and vendor locked, one of the reasons some of us use Liniux is because we prefer open source (and there are rational justifications for that).

Hate is a strong word, but there is legitimate criticism, I also think the closed source nature of snap led to the fact that it has no volunteers and that eventually caused malware to appear on the snap store multiple time, it never happened on flathub as far as i know.

Today for beginner i think opensuse and linux mint are better.

Regarding debian having old packages , i use nix but it is fairly immature, flathub should also work.

Snaps are centralised packaging, a'la Apple App Store or Google Play. Now if someone forked snapd, added third party repo and made It so you could select which repo is the main one, that'd be a start.

But as long as Canonical commits to a centralised form of distribution with no third party support I'm going to advise desktop users to stay away from Ubuntu.

They've embraced Wayland, pipewire, gnome and what not, but snap is really questionable, particularly in the Linux ecosystem.

I gather it can be somewhat annoying to contend with (I.e. some apps on Ubuntu may only be available as snaps?)

I wouldn't call it hate, more like disapprobation with Canonical's choices. No one have to use Ubuntu, we have tons of distro to choose. If someone wants LTS, you can always go pure Debian way, it's not hard to install as it's used to be (for beginners), or there is Linux Mint Debian Edition. You can easily use flatpaks with these and keep your software up-to-date.

Is Ubuntu deserving the hate?

Yes.

Debian version is the only one that seems reliable enough but, again, it is Debian, the packages are “old”.

Install Debian, then install all the software you might need using Flatpak. There you go, solid and stable OS with the latest of with little to no effort. Bonus extra security.

It's because Ubuntu is a company-backed distro consistently wants to go their own way. Not just snap but they've done it before with Unity and Mir (and probably others idk).

Course Fedora does literally the same thing and doesn't get any hate for it so idk. It's just a meme.

Personally I don't like Ubuntu because they didnt go far enough into their own ways but thats just me.

I gave up on Ubuntu before the snaps became a thing. Here's what I hated :

• ugly purple and orange theme
• Upgrades between lts never worked right for me: 14->16 fail and broke, 16->18 lots of problems, 18->20 still not great.

Dietpie is a lightweight debian not ubuntu. And debian is still one of the top choices (if not the) for servers.

Ubuntu is just debian with extra bad decisions.

Most of the problems I've experienced with Ubuntu recently were caused by Snap. I really hate that they insist shipping that buggy mess.

Ubuntu attacted a lot of control freaks because Shuttleworth was originally splashing some money when it started and a bunch of nerds saw dollar signs. As a result they have a culture of "not invented here" syndrome where someone just has to reinvent the wheel in only the way they see it and they don't work well with others or accept their input because they want all the credit.

Personally, I got sick of it having been pretty involved early on in the project. It's easier and saner to just use a distro based on what everyone else is doing.

I use Ubuntu for work and have no issues with it to be honest. I install everything via apt, I think a few things are via snap but nothing that I've installed directly. It's stable and I can get on with stuff. I definitely am not a fan of the move towards snap and the app store: if I was to choose I'd go vanilla Debian.

I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but…

There is no "supposed to" when it comes to distro preferences. Use whatever you like, other people's opinions do not dictate your behavior. If Ubuntu works for you, use that. If anything, that's the freedom of FOSS. You can take other people's views in to account when choosing a distro, but in the end it is your decision. I dislike Ubuntu for a few reasons, but I don't get to dictate to anyone else what they use and why.

If you like rolling release, you could try Debian sid/unstable. I hear it's quite stable and reliable and, of course, isn't Ubuntu.

I loved Unity. Also, I would argue that both Snap and Flatpak are bad. That said, be happy with whatever works for you. Ubuntu always gives me problems, whereas Fedora runs smooth. That said Ubuntu can read my old Passports, Fedora can't. They each have the benefits.

As an operating system Ubuntu is great. It's user friendly, has great hardware support and is up to date enough for most users. Canonical though... That's where the real sore spot lies for a lot of die-hards.

I'm pretty happy using Ubuntu. Its got a decent UI and works well enough with little fuss. As much as I enjoy tinkering, I use my Ubuntu machines for work and I really only need something simple that works out of the box.

In a nutshell, Ubluntu is trying to take user control off its users. And the users are mad because of it.

And yes, I'm talking about snap.

Ubuntu is fine it's just a more bloated Debian geared towards being as user friendly as possible. Nothing wrong with that.

I don't mind it, but I don't really use it for any of its features. I use i3 over Unity, I think Snaps (and flatpaks, appimages, etc) are dumb as shit.l, and don't even get me started on how garbage Nautilus is - drives me nuts trying to type a filename in to jump to it only to have Nautilus run a search instead... No idea who thought that was a good idea, but they need to fix that crap already.

I'd probably get by just fine with a full Debian setup tbh.

Ubuntu is nice. Apt/DEB works as they should. Some default apps, mostly browsers, are snaps now, but this does not bother you at all. You were getting them from your distro anyway.

Flatpak and AppImages work just fine if you need them.

The Ubuntu desktop (any flavour) just works. Others are different, but nothing is bad about Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is trying new things, proprietary to their ecosystem, e.g. Unity or snap. On the big picture, those are experiment. Ubuntu is still Linux.

The community reaction to snap is overblown. So Canonical developed something you don't like? Ignore it. This has mostly been a waste of time for them.

(Yes, maybe that dev time would be better spent on flatpak or open-source apps. But that's their time. I'm not paying Ubuntu developers, so can I really complain?)

I've run Ubuntu Server frequently on VMs for work, but I could kinda go either way on it. The majority of people who have issues with Ubuntu have philosophical differences. I'm inclined to agree for my personal stuff (in principle I'd rather not get my packages from a single source that works on their own whims, in practice I never use anything but Flathub unless I need a package with deeper permissions) primarily because I believe that Linux should be as open as possible. That said, I already mentioned that my principles there only apply to machines I own, so I guess I'm a bit of a hypocrite 😅

Snap is terrible. If you have a bunch of snaps on your system, it becomes very slow and sluggish

I think a lot of people dislike Ubuntu because of Gnome and Snaps, which is weird to me. You can fairly easily change desktop environment and most Snaps have apt or Flatpak alternatives.

If it works for you then use it, however if you want the latest packages you'll have to NOT use the LTS releases in which case be prepared to do a FULL REINSTALL every time a new version comes out.

Or use the LTS but use Snaps for those applications that you want to have the latest versions of. Snaps are getting better and I think eventually you won't notice the difference between them and native apps, except for the space they just up. But that goes for Flatpak too.

Personally I use Linux Mint Debian Edition because I'm not happy with the way Canonical is going. In most cases the "old" apps are fine for me, but if I felt need the newest version I'll use a Flatpak.

Another rolling option is OpenSuse Tumbleweed however, being a Mac which uses proprietary WiFi drivers, your WiFi will break with kernel updates, which can be irritating, unless you have ethernet.

For anything lower-spec (like, <4Gb of RAM), Ubuntu absolutely CHUGS because of Snaps. Flatpak has no such issue.

Ironically, Lubuntu (a lightweight Ubuntu fork) worked the best for me while I was using it. No slowness, but I installed pretty much everything using Apt (didn't know about Flatpak back then).

I ended up having it lock up and freeze on the sign-in page though, so I moved on to the slightly heavier Linux Mint.