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Comment by SlackingOff123 | Hacker News Reader

I'm being slightly offtopic here but I really dislike how slow Firefox is to launch since it became a snap package as a default on Ubuntu 22.04. I know I can uninstall the Firefox snap and install it through APT, but I imagine more and more packages will become snaps by default on Ubuntu.

And finding out now that it's possible that snaps are part of a walled garden, just like app/play stores are is really bumming me out.

I'm rather new to linux and Ubuntu is the distro I'm most familiar with and I also really like using KDE. So I'm wondering if it's feasible to continue using a Ubuntu based distribution while completely avoiding Snaps or should I just switch distros (maybe to another one that runs KDE).

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Switching distros is pretty easy. Debian is a classic that will support KDE and will be familiar in some other ways.

If you're writing software, the switch will be a great way to see that your code is robust and not too closely coupled to the peculiarities of Ubuntu. Portability may not be an explicit goal but it turns out to have some benefits.

For a typical Ubuntu desktop user this is such a PITA. A small app like Spotify client takes around 15 seconds to start up on my beefed up workstation. Canonical pretends this issue doesn't exist but I've had enough and I'm switching to Fedora.

They are openly hostile towards their own users.

> They are openly hostile towards their own users.

Yes, and it's deeply ingrained in their culture so unlikely (IMHO) to change. My eyes first opened to this in April of 2011 when I was (horribly) surprised by Gnome being removed in favor of Unity, when I saw how they treated their users and community on forums and such. It was the same condescending attitude we see today where the user are complete idiots who want to do things the "wrong" way and the canonical employees (especially the "community managers") know the "right" way to do everything.

This is basically my feeling with PopOS as well. I bought a System76 laptop and decided to stick with PopOS (which came pre-installed) to try it out instead debian (which I usually run), but it's felt very much like a "our way or the highway experience". I'm moving off it and back to debian once I have the chance.

They all run KDE, even when they don’t provide it out of the box. You can just install it and use KDE instead of Gnome.

I’m a big fan of Fedora. I primarily work on RHEL systems, though, so I’m biased because it’s what I’m used to using.

I'm also a big fan of Fedora and can recommend. Fedora does things a little differently that will take a bit of getting used to, but all in all it's mostly the same. You'll need to learn to use dnf instead of apt, and system files (like config files) will sometimes be in a different place (as Fedora follows FHS more closely, similar to Arch), but it's really not too bad.

I've never run the KDE spin of Fedora, but from what I understand it's popular and well maintained so shouldn't be an issue.

> They all run KDE, even when they don’t provide it out of the box. You can just install it and use KDE instead of Gnome.

Ubuntu has a lot to answer for, and planting the idea that you have to completely reinstall your OS to switch to a different window manager is right up there at the top. Kubuntu, Xubuntu, god those were terrible ideas.

I use linux mint which is still ubuntu based and doesn't use snaps.

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