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Comment by bgorman | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu is doing more harm than good to desktop linux at this point in time.

Continuing to push Xorg over Wayland. Removing support for flatpak (cross-distro way of using sandboxed apps) Horrible PPA system that works much worse in practice than the AUR or other ports systems. No daemonless docker (podman)

Lots of people try Ubuntu since it is the "most popular" version of Linux, realize it isn't great and think desktop Linux is in bad shape. The reality is Canonical doesn't seem to have good ideas and refuses to incorporate the good ideas from other distros.

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If it's so bad, then why is it the most popular?

Arch is a no-go for most people and any sane IT department. Fedora doesn't offer LTS and RH/CentOS feel quickly outdated on desktops, let alone laptops.

Ubuntu ships a distribution that works on most hardware and provides a reasonable desktop environment. While snaps aren't the most elegant solution, they do the job when your users need to install stuff like Jetbrains IDEs for instance.

> If it's so bad, then why is it the most popular?

Marketing and brand recognition.

Ubuntu tried shipping wayland on by default already and it was a clusterf* and made that release all but unusable. Wayland isn't ready for an LTS release yet.

Wayland is the default display server for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. I have been running Wayland for the last 2 years and have never had any problems. (Admittedly I haven't used Nvidia)

Can you share a single window in eg. Meet? Do alternative input methods work for accessibility?

FWIW I would like Wayland to finally take off, but each time there some random shit that's still broken despite 12 years of development.

It may well be Canonical's fault and they just screwed things up...but regardless, if they haven't managed to ship it in usable form in an off-cycle release, it's not ready for LTS. In fact after the last time, they said they would only try again when they could go a full cycle of 3 non-LTS releases with reasonable results before it would land in LTS. And their expectations before shipping in the off-cycle didn't seem too crazy (ie the X11 compatibility layer not constantly crashing the whole session and taking out all the user's applications) but still weren't met in time for 18.10. I think they're slated to try again now for 20.10.

> Admittedly I haven't used Nvidia

Yeah, that. Not supporting ~half the video cards in the world sounds like a clusterf*. I know it's largely nvidia's fault, but at the same time, I have a lot of investment with them, and none w/ wayland.

which distros you think are better choice for laptop?

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