Switching to Fedora from Ubuntu
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I always hear how Ubuntu nowadays makes a lot of questionable decisions, how Snaps are bad, and so on. I also hear a lot of criticism about Flatpak. But Fedora 36 more or less "just worked". I disliked GNOME 3, but the GNOME 40 interface is a huge improvement. I also like how Fedora is able to just get out of my way. There are no quirks added to the desktop environment besides a little Fedora watermark. Flatpaks more or less "just works" for me, and I can hardly tell the difference between Flatpaks and "native packages" on GNOME Software. They both are one click, enter password, wait, then ready. DNF is slow as molasses, though, but otherwise Fedora was straightforward to install and use daily for development.
I'm very likely going to run Fedora on a Framework 16 when the time comes to replace my MacBook.
CentOS-stream is a rolling release beta version of the next RHEL.
Centos stream has versions, and it does not automatically switch from one to the other. This is no different from Ubuntu LTS.
And I don't think their QA is any worse than that of Ubuntu.
Ask yourself this, by your definition, what would CentOS stream have to change to no longer be rolling release, and what would Ubuntu LTS have to change to become rolling release?
Then ask yourself the same question about the beta point, what would CentOS steam have to change to no longer be beta and what would Ubuntu LTS have to change to become a beta?
Run dnf with -C / --cacheonly unless you need package metadata that is fresher than your coffee. Much speedier. The fastestmirror setting may help, but unfortunately is based on ping time rather than download time, so results there will vary. A new version of DNF is in beta, to be available in Fedora 38, and be the default in Fedora 39, IIRC.
``` echo 'fastestmirror=1' | sudo tee -a /etc/dnf/dnf.conf echo 'max_parallel_downloads=10' | sudo tee -a /etc/dnf/dnf.conf echo 'deltarpm=true' | sudo tee -a /etc/dnf/dnf.conf ```
More than any single point of criticism in isolation, it's the feeling of a dying platform (for desktop) past its peak. Doesn't help there haven't been new high profile desktop apps for ages either.
RH definitely won't save the Linux desktop, they've abandoned any commercial interest/offering in that space many years ago. IMO using Fedora is just wasting your time alpha-testing RH's enterprise offerings, like CentOS is nowadays.
Personally, I'm in the process of completely transitioning to Mac OS which I've always used on and off since 2003. Hope to be able to run aarch64-native Linux VMs on Mac OS for development.
that's beyond folks like me that run my own linux desktop on my own gaming pc.
just as linus would've predicted.
windows these days is a mess. and now some games are running natively on linux via proton.
the biggest hinderance of course is productivity / professional software
And the most curious thing that the reasons provided are usually very outdated. Like many years old story about Amazon deal (even when it was valid you had to write a single command to remove integration). Or horror stories about snaps that are not valid for many months already. How firefox snap is shit (I'm writing it from snapped firefox and it works perfectly and faster that .deb and flatpak alternatives).
And let's just look on this article specifically. So, the guy ditched Ubuntu for Fedora because he felt that Canonical uses Ubuntu users as testers. And it's true, they do, just like RedHat uses Fedora to betatest for RHEL. So he switched to Fedora and had to fix one problem after another just because previously Canonical was fixing them and now he has to do it himself.
Complains that Ubuntu is a bit behind in Gnome features is true, but it happens specifically because Gnome devs don't care much about stability of a fresh release and tend to break UX because they just felt so, or because they were unable to reintroduce some feature in a shiny new library they just created and had to rewrite entire app with it but dropping features due to lack of time/effort.
Nautilus is notorious for throwing away features people love and use for years, and Canonical had to stick to older versions to not infuriate users. Fedora just provides what Gnome released and you have to deal with that.
Flatpak and Flathub are nice for him, but what stopped him using both in Ubuntu?
He 'feels' that Fedora is more stable, but have to deal with 3rd party software crashes, because devs tend to test everything for Ubuntu. Even the Software center crashes for him all the time (yeah, Gnome devs...)
And he's happy that he switched as he feels more solid.
Quote: "To get to this state I did have to put in some work and research, but not at a level of recompiling kernels.
If you are comfortable googling, using the terminal for some commands and interpreting an occasional error message I would now recommend Fedora over Ubuntu."
It really feels like someone has paid for an anti Canonical media campaign, because this shit is ridiculous.
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/927262/6adb2350e2b0d2ce/
> In the last few months it really looks like someone payed for a web campaign against Canonical/Ubuntu.
maybe canonical's bullshit have caused enough people to hit the tipping point?
I had a similar moment with microsoft with the 2015 windows 10 release
>https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/927262/6adb2350e2b0d2ce/
Have you tried to read what's in the article you posted? Ubuntu never had flatpak installed by default. But you can install and use it if you want. I personally use both flatpak and snaps in Ubuntu.
>maybe canonical's bullshit have caused enough people to hit the tipping point?
I don't think so, as I've been using Ubuntu since 8.04 and there were horrendous releases like 11.04 and 11.10 that was full of nasty bugs, 13.04 was also a shit show. But lately here or in /r/Ubuntu there're lots of people with the same really strange arguments about snaps and how everyone have to uninstall it immediately and/or ditch Ubuntu for a better distro. I've heard that Canonical is hoping for IPO this year though, there may be the answer.
All the Linux distros were rough around the edges. Especially if you elected to use certain hardware (like a graphics card, or non-dell/thinkpad setups etc).
Its really come a long way. And Canonical doesn’t do a terrible job of keeping some legacy stuff in. For example I still have a habit of checking /etc/init.d and using service xxxx yyy to manage services etc despite them being on systemd for like a decade or something.
Heck even the systems at work (and home) I can semi reliably run a do-release-upgrade and most things work, both on my laptop and several of the servers.
Hell even on my laptop Ubuntu is by far the easiest to get my egpu to function as a dock. Its not PnP and requires a reboot to dock/undock but it works.
4.10 here. The first ever release, and every single one since then.
BTW, I have not seen any trace of what @selivanovp called "horrendous releases like 11.04 and 11.10". I ran both. They do not stand out in my memory in any way.
> (I think 2008 is when they moved to the April/October schedule).
Nope, that has always been the case.
4.10, 5.04, 5.10...
The first ever LTS was "Dapper Drake", version 6.06, and it was 2 months late. That is the only release there's ever been of Ubuntu that wasn't either .04 or .10 as far as I can recall over 19 years of using it.
And it was their first try at an LTS release, so I can forgive them.
I do recall the non-LTS releases having some chaos moments, specifically on the desktop versions of the releases. There was definite anxiety on will this upgrade totally bork the system, so much I would typically take a full clonezilla backup of the disk before attempting.
12.04 or so things definately got a bit more....predictable but at the same time, but that point i was sticking STRICTLY to LTS as they seemed to be using packages that were geared toward stability over features. So it may have just been "me" there.
I recall the 9. releases were kinda painful for a few systems I managed at the time, specifically ones that ran scientific instruments in some labs. I believe that was around the time i just went back to 8.04 and said "LTS only is my way"
The boxes that I really want to keep working, boringly and predictably, I run the LTS versions on.
Maybe I am just getting old, but 2 years between LTS releases mostly doesn't feel all that long to me any more. 18.04 feels quite recent, and 20.04 not long ago at all.
I mildly regretted updating to 18.04 because it broke some smallish things and did not give me anything at all I wanted, but it was bigger and slower. I had to reinstall the Unity metapackage, but that got Unity working again fine, and I just ignore GNOME.
20.04 didn't break anything at all as far as I can recall.
22.04 didn't break anything on my desktop but it got me NTFS3, which I wanted. That _did_ break things because of the weird way I dual-boot, but I fixed them and it's fine now.
The Wayland default (and maybe they still default to wayland) is tough for me. Wayland struggles with Nvidia cards and specifically multi-monitor setups on an external dock/gpu.
That said I moved back to X11 and its all cheeky on my laptop. I was on minor released from 20.04 to 22.04 mainly to try and get support for the newer intel graphics drivers on the 11th gen chips etc. Again was touch and go a bit, but it worked, just wonky.
I specifically recall not liking the 16.04-18.04 upgrade path in that it would keep legacy options if you went the do-release-upgrade path, but if you did a fresh install of 18.04, changes were different. I think that was mostly upstart stuff, or maybe the network stack config options but also some of the desktop window management stuff.... Im sure that was to placate some of the complaints and keep the upgrade scripts sane, but it was weird in that certain options worked fine if they were carried over from the upgrade but the same config files did nothing if you copied them to a fresh install of 18.04. TBH though its a nitpick and i dont even think i can tell you more specifics that above at this point and frankly if they see a path thats better....who am I to judge. Im not keeping track of whether upstart or systemd is better maintained or scalable for an OS kernel etc....
22.04 is pretty great honestly. I do need to reboot for the PCIe/eGPU changes but otherwise its pretty much plug and play.
For prod servers even, i typically run a do-release-upgrade and just let er rip these days and worse case its a rebuild on 22.04 or something.
EDIT: heres a good one i caught. 18.04 to 20.04 moves to netplan, and it no longer uses the MAC address for DHCP identifier, instead it uses a guid....thats annoying.
I am no fan of Wayland either, but nobody seems willing to step up and bring us X11R8 or X12, sadly. I think the Linux world needs it.
Most of the world is little-endian now, rightly or not. x86-64, POWERLE, Arm64, they can all handle it.
So if the choice becomes "X dies" or "we have to brutally cut a lot of stuff to keep this alive", let's prune hard. No client font server support any more, only 24-bit colour or higher, no byte-swapped clients, etc. Gods, maybe even IPv6 only. :-)
> its all cheeky on my laptop
What does that mean? I don't recognise the word in that context. (To me "cheeky" means "slightly rude, mildly hostile and uncooperative".)
Netplan... ahaa!
Some of the people on the Ubuntu Users mailing list kept complaining about this. I told them not to fight it: let everything DHCP, get your router resolving names however it wants. They wouldn't have it. They wanted old-school fixed IPs and DNS.
I let networking do its thing and don't fight it. I find it makes life much easier.
Yeah im not one to care much about the tools. Ie:systemd av upstart/init.d
And the networking change isn’t ENTIRELY on canonical. The dhcp rfc says to use a machine identifier over MAC address when possible.
The hiccup is that when you upgrade 18.04 to 20.04, net plan is there but unconfigured. But they now generate machine ids so any dhcp reservations are broken. And I’m not aware of the override that goes into /etc/networking/interfaces. And if there is one like ClientIdentifier=Mac, it’s not easily documented.
So I had to comment out the interface configs and migrate to netplan manually where I can specify the override.
Oh right! I never would have guessed. Is that a regional thing? If so -- just curious -- where from? Aussie?
> so any dhcp reservations are broken.
Ouch!
I'm moving my whole employer's infrastructure and my family members to RockyLinux.
“For one, I only averaged three hours and 35 minutes of battery life, which would be a big problem even if everything else about this device was incredible. But even while on power, I could feel the thing chugging toward the higher end of my workload. For example, while I was operating a second screen over Thunderbolt, loading some files from external drives, running a few downloads, and trying to work over that in 20-ish Chrome tabs, the Latitude had visible slowdown. I don’t see this as an unrealistic office workload, so that’s concerning.”
It’s like what year is this that a laptop like that doesn’t get a 0/10 review?
That's impossible, the snap runs through a loop back image. Which makes the other claims suspect.
Yes, snap spamed my mounts, runs a daemon, forces ~/snap... probably other things I'd like to forget.
I got tired of cleaning that up every time and finally decamped to Mint last year after ~15 years of using Ubuntu.
The experience was so bad with snap I'm actually afraid to try flatpak and so far haven't. So far just download/untar an archive if in a pinch. Also odd, because I'm open to the need for adhoc installs.
But, even on the Ubuntu box, running the deb version is not (generally) possible any more?
Also, I see no reason a compilation flags could be used inside a snap but not out of it, other than a policy choice.
Finally, what about every other program that uses snaps? This doesn't solve any of the other poor design issues.
Like I said, I used Windows for years and ad-hoc is how software is installed there. But even on Windows, installing a program doesn't involve bullshit like spamming Explorer with disk images.
You probably should be. If not personally, then for offences against standards of decency. Cowardly accusations hiding behind 'feels' shouldn't be acceptable public discourse.
This is a really nasty locution, enabling an unscrupulous user to make an accusation without being pinned down to facts, because it's all a matter of their feels.
Either you have evidence that someone was bribed to make a blog post, or you don't. What you claim to 'feel' is irrelevant to anyone other than your family and psychotherapist.
To make an accusation of corruption, you absolutely must have evidence. Out with it, or STFU.
As to my own feelings, it’s just a result of actively participating in /r/Ubuntu and helping people with their problems for years. For quite some months I observe users coming with the same old arguments about how Amazon deal was awful, how snaps are abomination and has to be replaced with flatpaks, how everyone should switch to Fedora or Arch or PopOs, whatever. And I also regularly observe how such users are getting wiped out from reddit, because they’re bots I suppose. The last such case happened just yesterday, when the strange user with strange arguments got deleted by reddit. So, obviously, not everyone who says something negative about Ubuntu is a paid shill, but it definitely looks like a campaign of trashing Canonical and their products in media. And no, obviously, I have no proves of this, it’s just anomalies that I observe.
Ubuntu constantly crashes when listening streams on vlc, Docker vs podman, snap. Skype nor teams video works. The only good thing on Ubuntu are the glibc headers for embedded work. The rest is only marginally better than Windows.
I am also not keen on GNOME’s “our way or the highway” approach to customization, but as long as they still support user themes (which I use to make GNOME look like macOS — because I find it helps me find stuff when I’m fatigued), I’m OK with it.
But considering the nonsensical arguments I've seen elsewhere around a certain OS whenever it is merely mentioned, I am starting to think you're right.
This won't last, because nothing does. Another distro (or even OS) will eventually cast enough shade to tempt a move, or the Fedora project will make a daft decision.
But for now it's great, and I find it peaceful not to think much about the OS I use.
Open source is also an amazing beautiful thing and it's nice to support that as much as possible. It's a revelation to most people that they don't have to be under the control of Apple and Microsoft.
For me, I switched in 2016 because Microsoft borked my upgrade from Windows 8.1 to 10, and I was mad enough to switch to the only competitor I knew of that would run on my hardware. Start menu stopped working, icons would disappear at random, even ctl+alt+del didn't always work.
Supposedly it happened because I selected the "keep my files and programs" option, but my question is why they offered the option to begin with if it wasn't going to work?
Coincidentally, Linux actually converted me into a techie
After Windows XP/7 family originated support requests have declined like 95% being only 1-2 per year for past years. I don't give all credit to Linux/Mint/Mate/apps but to the fact installing any unnecessary bloat to an average Linux requires a bit more than just clicking "Install me" button on any web page and then (generously instructed by the browser) run that .exe in admin privileges.
Yes there are Flatpak and friends and I'm already a bit scared they will evolve easy enough to install bloat increasing family originated support requests to Windows days.
Seriously. Windows 11 is so egregiously intrusive I really don't understand how people can take it.
That alone will give many small organisations such as the library mentioned up thread the choice to adopt Linux or to find money to replace perfectly serviceable PCs.
Linux has been ready for the desktop for a long time. Windows is getting less and less ready for the desktop with every release. What it has gained in stability it has lost in being actively hostile against personal computing. Where Gates spoke about information at your fingertips Microsoft now seems to interpret this as your information at our fingertips.
I installed it on my grandma's laptop to keep her safe from shady malware and scammers, and to keep things simple. Was notably faster than Win11, too.
If I could reliably play my steam and gog library there, I would use nothing else.
At the moment I'm daily driving Ubuntu 20.04 with root on ZFS, but I'm debating really hard whether I should distro hop or not. I dislike Canonical's insistence on "snap", their advertisements in "apt" output, ... But on the other hand Ubuntu gave me mostly a "it just works" experience on my desktop for multiple years. For a while I ran Arch on another system and had quite the opposite experience. Upstream broke dependencies at least twice for example, so a lengthy session of "how the heck do I fix this" ensued.
... and after a few years it kinda grew on me, so it was a pity that Canonical killed it.
- Ads in preinstalled Music Player to buy their apple subscription for music
- Ads in App Store when you search for something
- Ads in System Settings advertising their iCloud
- Ads in Subscription Manager advertising their cloud services
....
So basically MacOS has nothing to offer, except watching endless advertising from apple.
For me, the benefit of macOS or Windows is that I can keep an install running. With Linux I always end up stuck with a system that doesn't boot, and trying to figure out what happened on the command line. Maybe I should try Nix or Fedora Silverblue
- Debian
- AMD or Intel GPU (Nvidia binary blobs sometimes break on kernel upgrades)
- Avoid Snap
It's much more important for me to have functioning GPU acceleration and in particular CUDA, than it is for me to have the latest and greatest kernel. AMD doesn't come close and still has the same problem with binary blobs, and Intel doesn't work at all, so NVidia it is, although I agree that your requirements may be different from mine.
> I can't say I've ever had a problem with NVidia breaking on kernel upgrades…
It’s definitely happened within the past two years—if I were motivated, I could dig up the specific kernel version ranges and Nvidia driver version ranges. Maybe your kernel version was pinned or something. The experience of using Nvidia on Linux is just beyond terrible, and it’s just such a high price to pay for CUDA when I just want to get work done. I suppose if I were doing lots of ML projects at home, maybe the pain would be justified, but I’m not doing ML at home.
I just want the computer to work, and Nvidia makes it difficult. I had originally purchased an Nvidia card because I had bad experiences with AMD on Linux in the early 2010s, and the situation seems to have flipped—I can just use an AMD GPU + Mesa and it will work well enough. I can get work done instead of playing sysadmin.
I do use Nvidia GPUs through cloud services when I want to run CUDA workloads (ML), and it’s a lot more tolerable because the problems don’t interfere with my desktop. For some reason, CUDA doesn’t work sometimes and I have to reinstall Nvidia drivers or reboot or something like that. This is apparently a known problem.
I don't see what's hard about "sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-525", but YMMV I guess.
> I suppose if I were doing lots of ML projects at home, maybe the pain would be justified, but I’m not doing ML at home.
I couldn't give the tiniest amount of a shit about ML. It's not something I'll ever use.
You need GPU acceleration for video editing, and at present NVidia is the only game in town for that.
Seems like a pretty dismissive way to phrase it.
It sounds wonderful, that the experience is like that for you, but it’s not the experience for me. I don’t know what is different about your setup, but I have experienced severe issues on three different Linux distributions, using different Nvidia cards, either at home or in the cloud. When I’ve searched for information about it, I’ve come across recent comments of people experiencing the same issues, so I can only guess that these issues are common enough. Of course I know that these issues are not universal, because I sometimes encounter people who don’t have any problems with Nvidia on Linux (some combination of blessed distros, the right hardware, good luck with timing upgrades, I don’t know—I just know that I’ve run into problems with Nvidia+Linux consistently enough that I’m going to avoid it when reasonable, I’m not going to keep trying different things until it works, that sounds like a massive time sink).
I just use a Mac for video editing because it always works.
I’m aware that lots of people get work done with Nvidia hardware on Linux, but lots of people also have IT departments fixing these issues for them and managing software updates + hardware configurations. I don’t have that.
Of course, you are going to see Ads in an app store.
As for Fedora - I prefer it to Ubuntu mainly because the packages are more fresh. Eventually replaced with Arch and Pacman + AUR but for Arch the overhead to set it up is much greater than Fedora. At least was a few years ago, now from what I know there is some installer shipped with the image.
Imo, when working with corporate environment with mostly windows, .deb distros are hard to beat for general availability of packages. It also just works (even if Firefox snap sucks)
Also Ubuntu is generally the most supported Linux distro from my experience.
I've used fedora for work, but it's often more friction to get something installed.
For example: teams dropped its .deb release officially not too long ago. A week later, some kind soul releases a snap with an electron wrapper of the webapp.
Lately though Canonical has made a lot of choices that I personally dislike. A few weeks ago I remember hearing about how they were planning on putting non-removeable packages into their distros and official flavors, so I decided to jump ship. Mint and Pop!_OS, while not official Ubuntu flavors, still take quite a bit from the distro IIRC. Arch can be a mess sometimes if you are not careful with your setup, and Manjaro has a slew of problems on their own, so I decided to try something new.
Fedora has been interesting. It feels very basic. I used to avoid flatpak quite a bit because I disliked its sandboxing, but lately I have been warming up to it. It is probably going to be my main distro if I don't try setting up Arch again
Ubuntu is still the best overall desktop distro imo, and it's still linux so you can customize it the way you want.
Fedora has a release every 6 month which laughable honestly, Ubuntu has 5 years of LTS support.
Why? If you want a LTS go for Ubuntu, if you are more for a rolling distro experience go for Fedora. They have different approaches.
Also LTS for desktop serves me nothing. I prefer to use the latest kernel for a wider hardware support so I’d prefer Fedora. Also Fedora tents to adopt newer technology first which I’d also prefer.
It is up to your needs.
Not to nitpick on the phrasing, but I find laughable grating. Are you aware that Fedora supports two releases at a time? You get a year of support for newer software.
The ancient kernels on Ubuntu are 'laughable' at times.
There are real benefits to newer kernels (and userspace), particularly for consumer hardware. It's not all good - there are quirks too.
Point is, everyone has different priorities - and while LTS leans to stability, it also imitates "long term stuck".
I've been watching this bug for years: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firewalld/+bug/183...
18.04 is going EOL very soon if not already, so this incompatibility between their releases of iptables and firewalld will never be fixed.
Enjoy the stability from an upgrade. Wonderful 'support' for a clear distribution defect.
I close with this: not all old software is stable, nor new/scary. It's hard thankless work, and such widely painted brushes are unhelpful. There's nuance to the nuance.
There have been several cases where the provided kernel was insufficient to get the one I needed, because it didn't support my networking device
ESM is a further step down from the dusty situation it's been in -- more backports, continued incompatibility because now it's explicitly security updates.
I'd probably recommend the first config though, testing with unstable pinned on. It's definitely nowhere near as fresh as unstablr, but still often much better. And you can install fresh versions of things you care about, via apt-pinning.
Unstae has never caused a real problem. Sometimes a dependency might not be resolvable, and you have to either wait a bit while a dependency makes its way to availability (days or sometimes rarely weeks), or you can go dig up slightly-older unstable versions of packages on the website, or you just apt-pin testing on (at low priority) and install the significantly older version.
All in all Sid (unstable) has been quite lovely and I'd never switch back. But being unable to install something has been an issue I see a couple times a year. Testing, with Unstable pinned on gives you a nice position of getting what you want fresh & everything else being pretty dammed reliable. I also wouldn't discourage anyone from running Sid either, but it has some pretty small caveats.
When Debian Bookworm comes out I'm going to, as an experiment, give it a go paired with Distrobox. I'll install my CLI and GUI applications via an Arch Distrobox. Stable base, rolling and portable apps.
https://www.ypsidanger.com/toolboxes-are-not-just-for-specia...
Tried in a VM. Seems to work, but needs more evaluation to see how it works in real life. You can even make a Distrobox the default in your terminal.
Just checking: you mean the unpackaged tarball, not a .deb or anything?
The only minor catch is, if you want a pretty icon, you might have to create a menu entry with alacarte by yourself with the following config:
Name: Firefox Command: /where/you/untared/firefox/firefox --name=firefox %u
And pick the icon from /where/you/untared/firefox/browser/chrome/icons/default/, there are multiple pngs.
Do you keep it in your home directory?
Or do you run with root permissions all the time? (Scary!)
Do you have problems with the packaging system thinking you don't have a browser installed, as I described here?
https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/debian_firefox_issues...
Or do you have some other browser(s) installed as well?
I wanted to make some changes in the UI and wanted to add some custom command utility , but I am not sure how to build it and see the changes locally.
Could someone please guide me, I will be obliged from the insight and will definietly help me to start with open source contribution journey
Thanks
It is singularly hard to modify, and the official way is by writing extensions in Javascript, which is a very hard way. There are lots of extensions to play with on https://extensions.gnome.org but watch out -- your desktop will break the next time you upgrade your distro.
If you want a user-modifiable desktop, try KDE or Xfce. Personally I much prefer Xfce: it's smaller, faster, and easier, IMHO.
Just install Kubuntu or Xubuntu, and enjoy.
Edit: I also like Alpine
For the unaware, ostree treats your root filesystem somewhat like a git repo, and you add/remove packages with rpm-ostree or by using containers.
Wow, really? I think I see available updates everyday if I run dnf or open GNOME Software. I just checked right now and got the 6.2.8 kernel. I guess it wasn't available on Fedora until 28 March, after being announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman on 22 March?
It's the cost of so very much choice and of having 500 entities all separately defining what "the Linux desktop" means at any given time, though I'm not sure it's always appreciated just how steep the price is. For fairly a broad category of "nice things", it's literally why we can't have them (in Linux land). IMO it's the core reason we still haven't seen the "year of the Linux Desktop".
Any other distro at the time, I'd have to install & uninstall a bunch of crap on first boot, or spend time selecting packages in the installer. Ubuntu was the only one I could just hit "install" on and end up pretty close to a reasonable initial set-up.
[EDIT] Of course, that went to hell pretty much immediately when they started trying to "lead" on Linux desktop with their own projects, rather than curating & tweaking existing community software. I despise most of what Red Hat's created and done along the way, but they've played the same game and clearly come out on top—Ubuntu both made their distro worse and burned resources getting their ass whupped by Red Hat at the influence-and-control-the-Linux-desktop game, over and over. Ubuntu's init system competitor? Dead, Red Hat's systemd won. Their GTK alternative DE to Red Hat dominated Gnome? Dead, Gnome won. Mir? Dead, Red Hat backed Wayland won. Snap? I dunno but it sucks and everyone hates it so I assume it's heading the same way, and Flatpack or AppImage will win instead (probably Flatpack, though I prefer AppImage).
was pretty hard for me to read after that, tbh.