Hey guys! I’m getting into the open source world and for years, i am finally hoing to try Linux! However, i see a lot of complains about Ubuntu and i just dont know why. What are you guys complains about Ubuntu? My next PC will come with Ubuntu. Do you guys think i should use Mint instead? Need help.
My complaint is that Ubuntu is flirting with becoming proprietary software. Don’t get me wrong they’re nowhere near closed source or such but still.
That and they have some mechanics that feel counter intuitive to me. (But that’s personal taste)
I’d choose mint then. Just because it has a more “traditional windows” (don’t think about 11, don’t think about 11,…vom) styled flow to it.
My problem with Ubuntu is the way snaps are so closely tied to the distro. If they were optional, I would have just stuck with it. But I also like Mint anyway. It’s just good.
Ubuntu has ads in the OS, mint dosnt.
Installed mint on my parents laptops so they didn’t become e-waste when Win11 came out. They have no issues.
Being new(ish) to Linux since that time and I found that the main distortion are better than their sub “flavours”. For me anyway. I didn’t like Mint LMDE or Kubuntu etc.
I tend to agree that the main distribution is better than it’s “sub-flavours”, but by that logic you should be using Debian, not mint/ubuntu
Ubuntu is fine, especially for a new user it’s usually widely supported and has the most resources available.
I can’t stand Gnome, though. I’d very much recommend going with Kubuntu.
Yes Ubuntu is a solid distro, except if you are a hater. Gnome is not suitable for me as a mouse user. Keyboard users like it though. So I use Kubuntu, as it has the Plasma desktop. Which works really well.
I prefer Mint over Ubuntu because of the default desktop environment. Also, in Mint you can unintall apps directly from menu with right-click-uninstall.
Between those two, I would go with regular Debian, or Mint LMDE if it has to be one of the two.
Debian is much better about providing a reasonably updated desktop experience these days.
As for Ubuntu… Their engineering is bad, and they’re shady. They push their solutions over standard stuff, and their solutions are conveniently setup to allow them to close source the code if anything ever reaches wide adoption or are proprietary from the beginning.
Fedora 😀 But seriously… Just install one and if you don’t like it, install the other, it’s free, it’s easy and you will never go back 😊
Fucking love Fedora, it’s my main squeeze.
But I have noticed something. If someone says “I love gnome” then they get the (playful) shit talkers, but if you say “I love Fedora” people are like “ah, an intellectual” haha
Really? I find that Fedora is so popular nowadays that most of the reactions are similar to your first sentence. 😀
I disagree, semi. I started with mint but wanted to try fedora recently. With windows i had stuff set up that i needed minimal configurations on os switches, and that data splitting helped a bit when switching to linux.
But to switch from one distro to another needs prep work if you want to keep data and configs with minimal set ups.
So far ive been refactoring my mint slow but steady to have my home and /opt on partitions and i might need to do more since there is stuff in /var i might need too.
I meant that if a week passes and he doesn’t like it it’s easy to switch. Otherwise it’s always somewhat harder to switch once you are nicely settled. I always keep a step by step what I do after fresh install and I try to keep as many (important) files on my nas as possible. I never liked the shenanigans of keeping my home. First, it means you keep a lots of garbage and I kinda like starting fresh. Second, it’s way too much work. I usually just copy full home to external drive, reinstall and copy stuff back when I need it. This way I really keep from home only what I really need and the rest is ovewritten before next reinstall. That said, I have actually settled on Fedora like 4 years ago and since then reinstalled only once (again Fedora, I just wanted clean start).
Ye my biggest concern is keys, sdk configs, sdk programs, scripts, environment variables, vscodium configs, …
I always take weeks to set all that shit up the way i like it haha.
But ye, im still checking out what i can drop and what i cant. Or maybe create scripts to config something to the way i like it ( like git )
Yeah, had the same, but nowadays I have local dedicated VMs for each development project, to mitigate stuff like supply chain attack. The side effect is that it’s easier to just copy the VM to the new system. I am thinking though on creating ansible scripts for each use case to be able to “reset” the vm’s once in a while.
The only real issue with Ubuntu is it uses Snap app store instead of Flathub app store.
Flathub has more apps, is faster, and has some minor security improvements. Linux Mint uses Flathub.
HOWEVER, you can add Flathub as additional source in Ubuntu app store app, and use Flathub exclusively.
In that case, no real difference between Ubuntu and Linux Mint other than UI.
Also Snap backend is a proprietary crap, unlike flatpak.
Another problem though is the best Flatpak store Bazaar’s Flatpak version is broken due to Ubuntu apparmor. There are workarounds but they don’t really seem to be doing much about it. There’s a deb version in the repos but it is currently very out of date as its a newer app with fairly active development
Flathub sandboxes applications to prevent them from infecting the system if app gets hacked, and lets you control permissions for each app, like microphone, camera etc.
But they are still work in progress and easily circumvented, thus I called them only minor improvements.
Snap is arguably the better sandbox. The bigger issue with Snap is that only Canonical (the company that owns Ubuntu) has the code for the Snap store, so it’s a closed ecosystem and there are no alternative stores, so the minute they enshittify it’s garbage. Flathub is the most popular flatpak repo but the code for a flatpak repo is open source, there are alternative options and will be in the future.
Snap has a better sandbox, but only if you have an AppArmor distro. If your distro of choice uses SELinux or something else, then you’re out of luck.
Use whatever feels comfortable. Both are fine. People are complaining about micro annoyances that should not really affect you at first.
When you get comfortable with Linux, you’ll also get to pick sides in micro battles like KDE vs Gnome, vi vs emacs, systemd vs sysv, flatpak vs snap and all the other wonderful my-side-is-better-than-yours fights.
micro battles like KDE vs Gnome
I don’t think that’s a small thing for someone new to Linux.
I prefer Xfce over MATE, KDE, and Cinnamon because I use old computers. I wouldn’t recommend modern GNOME.
systemd vs sysv
Most of systemd-less distros use openrc, dinit or runit, sysv is mostly dead nowadays. Some distros still utilize it tho.
This is an objectively false statement. There are at least one scenario I can think of where Snap is better than flatpak.
Pick any distro and just start trying to live your life in there. A lot of beginners, including myself, will distro hop on look and feel. Ubuntu looks neat or Mint is more like windows. Elementry OS has that glossy vibe. Which is all a ton of fun, but look and feel goes out the window when you find out that program you need for work is packaged as an RPM but not DEB and now you gotta install it from source. And don’t get me wrong. Always tinker, research and discover solutions. I’m just saying as you get more experienced, the distro hopping decision becomes more focused on ease of use rather than look and feel. So save yourself some time and just focus on using whatever distro you installed. The sooner you start trying to live in a distro the sooner you see what works out of the box, what takes some tinkering, and what is just way harder than it needs to be. As you do research on the issues you run into you may find another distro is better suited to your workflow.
I have some systems with newer hardware that would probably work fine on Debian, but drivers aren’t native and it’s going to require installing from source/recompiling a newer kernel and troubleshooting for an hour or a day or days lol. In these cases it is easier to install a distro that already has the driver packaged in its repo ready to go.
I will say most of those issues lead me to and have been resolved by Fedora. But I still have a couple systems where Ubuntu is just easier for what those systems are doing because it has specific drivers ready to go easier than Fedora.
If you read this and are over there wanting the complete opposite experience to tinker with everything and have it be as hard as possible… See Alpine linux, which I will master someday lol.
Start by trying the desktops (mainly KDE, Cinnamon, gnome…), which are very different, and see which one you prefer. You can try them online.
https://distrosea.com/select/ubuntu/
https://distrosea.com/select/linuxmint/
https://distrosea.com/select/kubuntu/
If you click for cinamon go mint. If you click for KDE go Debian KDE or kubuntu If you click for gnome go Ubuntu.
The rest will become clear later on.
Mint is based on Ubuntu LTS (long-term support) releases, unless you go with LMDE which is based on Debian. There is not a major technical difference but there are political differences between the projects.
The main reason to go with Mint instead of Ubuntu is if you prefer Cinnamon over GNOME as I do, and want a distribution built around the Cinnamon desktop environment.
Honestly, each has a different feel. You just have to get in there and see how it goes. When you land on the right one, you will feel it.
