3w ago

I see the Reddit hivemind has arrived

175 comments

Canonical deserves most of the critics they get.
Ubuntu users on the other hand don't deserve even the slight amount of critic they get for just.. Using Ubuntu. like, at least they use Linux, we should be encouraging them to keep using it.
- I have my own criticism of Canonical, but most of what I hear from the anti-Ubuntu crowd isn't even grounded in reality.
  My favourite one recently was that upstart was Canonical NIHing systemd.
  
  NIHing?
  
  Didn't upstart show up in jaunty jackalope? I don't recall systemd being all that big back then. Also, jaunty booted in 30s to desktop on a 4200rpm spinning rust IDE drive, Intel m processor. In my book they succeeded there but yeah, the attitude they have about contributing to current projects is bullshit.

Q: what does apt install firefox do? Surely it uses apt to install Firefox, right???? A: The command gets highjacked by snap, which promptly crashed and hangs.
Ran into this just a few hours ago, made the mistake of suggesting Ubuntu as a sane default (instead of debian or something else), never making that mistake again hopefully.
- Mint fixes that. Based on Ubuntu, it intentionally disables Snap, and all apt commands actually use apt.
  Or yes, just straight up use Debian if you don't mind older apps outside Flatpaks.
  
  Except I just uninstalled Mint's default Firefox because whatever additional theming they did to my boy fucked up the right click context menu. FF is now flatpak.
  
  You can also install Linux Mint Debian Edition which isn't based on Ubuntu at all.
  
  This is the way. Debian net install. Or even better, boot over iPXE, ephemeral kernel in RAM with only backups and static binaries written to disk. Snapshotting handled by BTRFS
  
  LMDE, Linux Mint Debian Edition was my goto for a long time.
  
  Use debian testing if you want up-to-date software. The name implies it's unstable, but it's really not. Debian stable absurdly stable, and debian testing is regular stable.
- What does apt install firefox do in Debian?
  package »firefox« has no installation candidate
  Firefox isn't in Debian's repository, cause it moves too fast for Debian's release cycle and is too complicated for their security team.
  Debian instead offers firefox-esr
  Ubuntu instead offers firefox snap
- So would you prefer they just remove the firefox package from new releases without offering an upgrade path?
- Here's a thought: Before installing packages you don't understand, go to the Firefox site and follow their instructions which work fine on Ubuntu and doesn't install snap.
  I'm not a fan of snap either, but with all software, people need to RTFM. Not do the dumb thing and then cry on the Internet seeking hive mind rage when the dumb thing happens.
  
  I've followed those directions, only to find snap firefox was reinstalled a few months later.
  Switched to Debian, much happier.
  
  I think expecting people running Ubuntu to RTFM is a longshot. The people installing it want an experience where they don't want to put any effort into learning how things work. If they did they probably would run something else.

Ubutu sucks really bad. I installed it checks notes 17 years ago and I didn't even get internet running out of the box. Fedora 41 is just so much better and I can't see how anyone can argue with that.
- Yes, Fedora 41 is undoubtedly better than a 17 year old version of Ubuntu.
  
  I believe that was the joke

Yeah, I don't get the hate and intentional division being sowed there.
I'm not a fan of Ubuntu since they went all Thanos Snap (the final straw was replacing deb packages in apt with snap stubs), but I can applaud that they're using Linux.
Just seems like low effort, pointless gatekeeping to me.
- Yeah I never understood the hate but today I did read a comment saying Canonical (the company that develops Ubuntu) had injected some amazon telemetry into one of the search functionalities, that and using Snap is what makes some people shit on it. I didn't verify the telemetry thing FYI.
  I can definitely understand people being upset at telemetry injections.
  The above is to say I don't think it's exclusively people gate keeping, dome people have legitimate issues with it.I haven't seen people shit on mint a lot and it's an easy distro. Honestly most people are super supportive of mint. That being said there is definitely some amount of gatekeeping.
  
  That was the point where I stopped using it.
  They included a global search function which in a default installation sent your search terms to Amazon and returned search results from them.
  It also sent them to a web search (with real time results while you typed, including image previews). So it was possible to get shown NSFW images accidentally inside your OS, without opening a browser.
  It was just really bad design, and a heavy-handed attempt of monetizing their OS.
  Of course that could all be removed with a bash one-liner, but it showed where Canonical was headed,
  
  The thing is, that noobs see linux = ubuntu, and ubuntu makes sure it stays like that.
  I do not like that.

i started with Ubuntu. i think it's fair to respect the distro that works towards getting any rando started
- Stock Ubuntu is not the only and possibly not the most sane choice for newbies. An uncomfortably different UI with relatively complicated customization, a lot of catches, myriad of package sources, and little progress in general usability make it only preferable in terms of binaries selection and amount of accumulated knowledge specifically on Ubuntu.
  Linux Mint is the most sane pick for an average newbie, though mileage will vary and other distros can be better entry points for some. For example, what clicked with me against all warnings was Manjaro, and if not for that, I could still be sitting on Windows today.
  Nowadays, I use Fedora KDE Spin, though if a sane Arch-based alternative arises (think Manjaro done right), I would consider going back.
  
  though if a sane Arch-based alternative arises (think Manjaro done right)
  If ever you get the Arch itch, check out EndeavourOS. It's basically vanilla Arch but with a GUI installer and basic defaults/programs preconfigured. They use the main Arch repos, so no weirdness with AUR stuff like in Manjaro.
- But they teach them Linux in a way, that it just feels like cheap MacOS, where you have to hack your own OS in order to get some little stuff as you like.

It's better than Windows at least.
- that's a pretty low bar tbh. i think a programmable calculator would beat windows
  
  And they actively work towards an abomination like windows with the decisions they made.

I get the annoyance around tribalism/elitism, some people in other posts pointed out the fact that silly dramas and bad/dumb linux takes scares out new users but tbh I feel more confortable with a vocal community, even a silly one. Feels healthier and more alive to me than a mute and apathetic one.
If something goes wrong, if something displeases someone we will hear about it, people will get angry, at the worst we get a nice entertainment to watch and a good laugh, at the very best it leads us to some nice changes.
It's something I grew to like about Linux, even the silliness of it all, even how you can't really tell if people are dead serious or not about the stupidest things.
- Amen brother. I'm really hoping a lot of these gotchas get ironed out in some way as more people start choosing Linux over windows. I would be really happy to see some smoother experiences in the coming year or years. Don't get me wrong, things are a bajillion times better than ten years ago, but there's still a ways to go yet.
  
  I switched to fedora cold turkey a few months ago and honestly its a better experience than windows by far. As a bonus games that work poorly or don't work on the os they were made for, work on linux now.

Well Ubuntu os not that bad if you just stick to the ecosystem. I mean... Not everyone... Pffft... Wants to... HmmHMpf... Babysit... Ahahahah I can't...
Just install Mint
- No thanks. The Mint maintainers keeping provable misinformation in their documentation despite being called out on it makes me distrust them.
  
  citation needed

Yeah no it does suck it made me think the Linux experience was at least 3x worse before I tried another distro.
And not just a DE thing, every part of the distro feels like it was slapped on without actually thinking of the consequences.
netplan
apt
default systemd dependencies
ubuntu GNOME
snap
ubuntu pro
cloudinit conf
You can find forums and docs from as old as Fedora 11 that's still relevant yet Ubuntu utterly fails to keep consistency across a single version update because they changed something that's only mentioned in the changelog.
Every downstream of Ubuntu is essentially focused on removing all the BS the upstream has so you can use your computer without something breaking like it's ~~Arch~~ an overused meme about Arch.
There is no right answer to the correct distro, only a wrong answer, and that is Ubuntu because practically anything else including its downstreams like LM are better for you as a user.
- without something breaking like its arch
  I have had seven full-system failures across the last two decades using Ubuntu that could not easily be troubleshooted and fixed.
  I have had exactly zero with Arch.
  Take that as you will.
  
  Fair enough, edited lol
  
  xD
- I had similar bad luck with Linux mint. So many things just didn't work, or didn't work correctly. Wifi issues, sound issues, graphics issues, issues setting up particular things for software development. I've switched to NixOS and I'm having a much easier time. A significant amount of my improved experience could be attributed to more patience or just an improved ability to deal with problems. I also suspect cinnamon was causing some of my problems, somehow whereas now I have GNOME on my main rig and lxqt on my laptop.

I use Kubuntu. No complaints here. Im also not super well versed in linux and my husband installed it for me so that I had something that was well supported for gaming and streaming/vtubing.
(I dont remember what he uses, he switches it weekly)
- Criticizing Ubuntu is hivemind? Wow. Now do Systemd critics.
  
  SystemD critics formed as a cult of anti-personality. This both describes what they are (people with the opposite of a personality) and what they are about (hating that shithead Lennart Pöttering, who is a German man who grew up in South America to his German parents if you're picking up what I'm putting down*).
  Per the wiki, Lennart is well known for being a weird dick about things in the Linux ecosystem and using market power and dominance, rather than a more collaborative or tech-first approach, to push his and only his ideas forward. This rubs people the wrong way, especially in a community predominantly built on the opposite ideals, leading to the universal hatred of everything he's ever built. But it makes creating distros easier so people deal with it.
  Today, he spends his time working for Microsoft and refusing to acknowledge vulnerabilities in his overly complex standards-incompliant code.
  SystemD haters are of course just jealous of his ability to be completely free of self-doubt.
  *To be clear I have no evidence of this and it's probably not true, but it's 2025 let's be honest nobody cares if it's true or not

I like Ubuntu, use it as my main laptop os, and main server's os for a production system that's been upgraded through 3 LTS versions without issue. Three.
I don't think windows can do that, at all.
- Have you ever upgraded the Ubuntu laptop? Cause that's my main gripe with Ubuntu. Server upgrades work, desktop upgrades never did for me.
  
  Have you ever upgraded the Ubuntu laptop? Cause that’s my main gripe with Ubuntu. Server upgrades work, desktop upgrades never did for me.
  I wonder about this. I have been running Ubuntu on one of my laptops for years, and updated it several times withouth hitch. All the way from around 18.10 to 22.04 (non-lts, so I upgraded to every release) until the laptop was replaced.
  Usually the breakage happens if one has tons of shitty third-party repos and thus will get package conflicts when upgrading. And those are solved by removing/replacing all software installed from those repos and then after upgrade reinstalling them again if needed.
  
  I can't speak for plain Ubuntu, but I've got desktops running both Kubuntu and KDE Neon that have been upgraded version to version for over a decade now. (Ok I lie. The Kubuntu one is a laptop.)

Everything I don't like is Reddit
- Where's the lie?
  
  Not sure yet but the fact that the only word your username doesn't contain is "correct" I'm pretty suspicious already... /s

My experience with Ubuntu was filled with bugs and i hated snaps, suggested it to a friend and installed it for him and he kept getting errors and bugs everywhere for some reason, he had the impression that linux is a buggy mess. I'm not suggesting ubuntu to a new user ever again, fedora is the way to go, i just wished they had nvidia drivers in their repos it would have made it easier for new users

ubuntu is an excellent base, but there's no reason to use it over other distros based on it. it does nothing better than others and forces snaps on you to the point of not even having flatpak installed by default unlike almost every other distro that is even remotely modern.
- Meh, I tend to install snap on the non-Ubuntu distros I use. I also think it does a lot of things better, namely "not making me think about my OS when I don't want to." Of course, Kubuntu does that better than Ubuntu does.
  
  I was no fan of Ubuntu. It made me think about the OS nonstop.
  Why is Firefox taking like 8 seconds to load the first time I run it? Much slower than Windows.
  Why do all of my PPA packages break for months straight after a major OS update?
  Why is my CPU using 100% of a core when I connect my Xbox controller? Turns out that was a bug in libusb that had been fixed OVER A YEAR AGO but Ubuntu's packages were so terribly out of date I couldn't have the fix yet. That was the last straw.
  Moved to OpenSUSE and never looked back. My system is basically pristine now.

there's just no reason to start using it when mint exists
- Wayland
  
  true
  what do you actually need Wayland for though? waydroid is the only one i can think of
- Configuring Kubuntu for my liking is way easier than configuring mint for my liking, and some of that mint configuration is going out of the way to undo things the mint maintainers did intentionally.
  
  Then you chose right! Regarding Ubuntu I have been using it for work VMs and it's adequate, my current annoyance is that you can't easily change the UI colours to distinguish different projects, because it's not the "Ubuntu way", maybe I'll find a hack.
  
  Mint not officially shipping with KDE is a source of my personal frustration. Would have checked it out more thoroughly otherwise.

for me it's snaps and the release model that suck. Also, apparently, arch-based distros are more noob-friendly, thanks to ArchWiki
- arch-based distros are more noob-friendly
  I'll take some of whatever you are smoking. And I am typing this on an Arch Linux system.
  Sure, I love that I have a high degree of control; but, if I were planning to ask a new user to install Linux, I would not be handing them Arch. The Install Page may look nice; but, it's a minefield of "oh go chose something" and you come back three hours later having read way too much detail about bootloaders.
  Arch is fantastic for choice, but the KISS principal is not available via pacman. It may be available in AUR. So, go learn what AUR is, spend way too long picking an AUR package manager only to learn it's not available their either and you need to build it from source.
  Joking aside, I do need to try the SteamOS install. That might actually be a noob-friendly Arch distro.
  
  That's why i said "arch-based" not "arch". I don't know about manjaro actually, lots of people on the internet complained how broken it is (or rather was broken, idk), so i decided not to try it. But i've tried and am currently running EndeavourOS. The installation process is as easy as the one of Ubuntu, while OS remains stable, despite me using AURs and manually compiled packages. AURs are far more friendly compared to PPAs. Not to mention the fact that i wasn't always able to find the package i needed among PPAs, and manual compilation often did not work due to Ubuntu's update model.
  I don't quite understand, what do you mean by "KISS is not available via pacman", so please, elaborate. To me pacman is as simple to use as apt.
  Also, didn't know SteamOS is already available for public, good to know. Gonna try it some day.
- I use snaps on multiple non-Ubuntu systems because they solve problems for me in a cleaner way than anything else has done so far.
  I also find arch-based distros to often be quite obnoxious to manage, but that's just me.
  
  what are the usecases for snaps and flatpaks in the home desktop environment anyway? What are their benefits? Isolation?

I got my parents' computer on KDE neon, with "brand new Plasma 5" years ago when Win 7 was going out of support, it had been solid as a rock and relatively problem-free over the years. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS was out of date for over a year, and Netflix stopped working, so I bought a new drive, upgraded from 4GB to 16GB RAM and clean installed KDE Neon with Plasma 6!
This is a 12 year old Toshiba Satellite laptop that is still going strong. (As an email, websurfing and video watching machine).

Why would you need 5 distros?
- Different use cases! One each for: my desktop, my laptop, my home theater PC, my tablet, and my gaming handheld.
  (This is a joke. But, I do use a different distro for my tablet [due to the touchscreen] and my gaming handheld.)
  
  Which tablet do you have?
- I'm using Ubuntu (well Kubuntu everywhere that I have graphical displays) on most devices, but I have:
  SteamOS on my Steam Deck
  Arch on my PinePhone
  Debian on some development boards
  Fedora and OpenSUSE in VMs because I'm interested in their development

I've used Gentoo on my main desktop for decades.
Anything else in the house gets Kubuntu on it, 'cause ain't nobody got time for that.
- I've never considered Gentoo as an unironic daily driver on desktops - more like embedded systems/learning the ropes of Linux kinda thing.
  What made you choose Gentoo in particular?
  
  Not OP, but it's amazing to choose which parts of your software don't enter compilation at all.
  Also it's rock solid, had fewer issues than Lubuntu, can use OpenRC or systemd.
  But I haven't learned as much about Linux as I hoped. The distro just works, and I love everything about it.
  
  My initial attempts at running Linux as a daily threw me off. Had a couple Comp Sci friends in college recommend switching, but they led me to distros with pre-compiled binaries and installation wizards. I'd install, get dumped out at a desktop, then ask "And what do I do now?". I had no idea how the filesystem was organized, etc.
  I stumbled across LinuxFromScratch somehow. Took a few months and ran through the installation three times before I felt I had a good handle on what was going on. Then I tried to tackle compiling X.org and all its dependencies, learning exactly why a package manager is useful.
  That lead me to Gentoo. I haven't found a problem running it in the last ~20 years that I couldn't solve, so I've stuck with it. Now it's just comfortable. I've slapped other distributions on other boxes (Mint, Kubuntu, etc), and even on laptops for family members, but they don't feel like home.

Nothing wrong with Ubuntu.
- Plenty wrong with Ubuntu.
  
  If you use it wrong, sure. There's a use for almost anything; just gotta figure out what's appropriate.
  Ubuntu is perfect for my non-technical, 76 year old father to run his own plex server where I don't have to help too much.

I don't use Ubuntu personally, but it was great to automate for deployment in a corporate setting.
Yes, Debian has some agnostic unattended install, but writing basically cloud-init is just so much better.
- it's also pretty easy to get an Ubuntu machine logged into an Active Directory managed domain these days.
- Cloud-init is way underappreciated IMO. One of the reasons I like using Ubuntu on the gazillion little development boards I have is that they have cloud-init on all their preinstalled images, so I can drop in a file that correctly configures the network (some of my raspis are on wifi due to location), sets up my user (including importing my SSH ID from GitHub so I can keep SSH only key based), adds the relevant packages and even repositories that I want, etc.
  I wish more distros would include cloud-init in more than just their cloud images.

I use (K?)Ubuntu (I installed KDE on Ubuntu so now it thinks it's Kubuntu? Weird) and I don't get the hate. I worked with raspberry pis and such on Linux for a bit so when I got a new computer, I decided to main Linux on desktop as well, since I felt confident enough in it and I went with Ubuntu as I felt it was an obvious choice.
I heard of Linux Mint, but I hate mints and didn't want to live with a distro named after them.
Only regret is that I didn't fresh install Kubuntu as I have some gnome ghouls left behind, but eh, if I really wanted to I think I can get rid of them. Just don't want to risk deleting other preinstalled stuff.
- Ubuntu works just fine, the problematic part about it is how it shoves its proprietary app store down everyone's throats, which is very much against Linux ethos, both in terms of proprietary software and user freedom.
  If you don't mind that and are comfortable with Ubuntu in other ways, hooray, you've just found your distro.
  
  What app store? Apt get?

I don't care what some distro snob thinks.. I use ubuntu and have few problems. I replace the snaps and move on. I've been using Linux longer than most of them have been alive. They can pretend that makes me behind the times but somehow I always seem to be ahead of them. Having made my stance clear.
I don't care what distro they use. Why would I?
- Ironic - one of the reasons I like Ubuntu based distros is the easy access to snaps.
  
  Fascinating. I was just wondering if anyone could actually like snap and I personally knew no one until now.
  FWIW I'm a long time Kubuntu user and I like it very much. But the snap experience has me on the brink of switching to a different distro.
  
  I'll use one if it is something more obscure. I do however replace things like firefox and vlc with the source repo.

The other four distros they use are Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Gobuntu and Mythbuntu.

All operating system elitism is stupid. Just use what you like and are comfortable using. I grew up on Linux and mostly use Mac nowadays.
It's even sillier to make fun of someone for the distro they use.
When you're a boring person and the only thing you have to be snobby about is your operating system I'm not sure that says anything good about you.

How can it suck the least if it has snap?
- Snaps can be annoying, but are no deal breaker. A deal breaker would be having to put a lot of work in over and over, like manually resolving dependencies or compile/install errors, breaking system, etc.
  
  I like user respecting operating systems, that is the deal breaker.
  If you insert snap into apt package management, so that you can go behind the user's back, re-enable snap and install a snap anyway if a user tries to apt install firefox, you don't respect the user's choice. It's the kind of thing we give Microsoft shit for.
  And yes I know it can be worked around and disabled and whatnot by jumping through various hoops, but that's beside the point. As a matter of principle, I will just use something that doesn't do this. KDE on Debian works just as well as Kubuntu anyway.

I personally think Ubuntu sucks, thats why I always reccomend other distros to people starting :3
Productivity: Debian (you dont need up to date packages if all you do is edit documents)
Gaming: Pop_OS (especially when Cosmic releases)

idk, I've been using xubuntu for more than 10 years now, I'm not happy with absolutely everything, but the trouble I do have is definitely less effort to fix than learning a new, more elaborate distro.
So, it's a pretty good, common denominator, and as long as it keeps working it doesn't really need to be anything else?
I'm sure there are differences and niches that other distros fulfill better, but until there is a killer feature I'm interested in that only works on a specific distro or works extremely well on a different distro, I don't see the "push" factor that would make me leave?
(btw, that there is no "report bugs here" button that's just built into the window manager (besides the -,+,x buttons) and takes me to project home pages or bug trackes is wild to me, on any distro as far as I know. Like they don't want to interact with users? I don't get it.)

You clearly didn't try
<insert favorite distro>
then!

Bah. Me, I've been using Debian since 1997. I've tried Ubuntu (and, what was it called, Progeny?) a few times but decided it was just Debian with extra steps.

You either use the distro for its specific use case and suffer as you overreach into other areas of expertise or get comfy switching gears if you need hybrid tasks on minimal hardware

I don't love Ubuntu as a desktop, but i'll fight to let other people try it and make up their own minds.
We have rather substantial tribe mind going on with anti AI, linux distros that suck, and which browsers are awful.
We've had hivemind since forever, but it's starting to get more pronounced.

lol just ignore the karens
- "Don't feed the trolls" has ended up with the trolls running the place. I'd rather Lemmy not become yet another "lol ubuntu sux" echo chamber.
  
  Why would it? It's already an echo chamber for Linux as a whole, so I really, really doubt that's going to happen

Lol, Reddit has nothing to do with ubuntu just being crap.
But as snap lover.. I see all hope is lost in you.
(This is a meme community, please don’t take me too serious)

KDE plasma somehow managed to ship with an old QT version which borked libraries. So back to Ubuntu it was.
- Kde plasma on what distro lol
  
  Kubuntu
  
  Kubuntu ding dong

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