Dear Ubuntu
hackaday.com
hackaday.com
They ask insightful questions like, “How did you do in your native language at high school?” or “How did you do in maths, physics or computer science at high school?”, followed by long written essays and “psychometric” personality testing.
That’s a hard nope from me.
You call it long written essays. I felt I needed to write the magnum opus about my life.
It was a hard nope from me too. Must be hard to be a recruiter for them. Everyone dropping out of the funnel at step 1 :)
The insistence doing on contracting rather than FTE roles (especially for senior ones) and other priorities made me say no thanks, though.
The only thing Ubuntu did differently at the time was having a very simple website with a single download button and sending free CDs for free to anyone asking for it which was a big deal when nobody had decent internet connection. Or you'd need to buy magazine offering installation CDs. But the thing is, every single family has an enthusiast cousin, uncle, who in the early 2000's ordereds tenths of CDs from ubuntu for free and gave them out to anyone pulling his hair out of because of an MS windows issue. All that made ubuntu a bit different from Debian like unity, upstart and now snap, only appeared years later after Ubuntu had that reputation of easy distro for beginner.
And this is what really put ubuntu in the limelight and the default goto distro for every new linux user. It was just the most advertised distro, with the simpler website, a general color palette that made it easily recognizable and a nice slogan borrowed from the meaning of its name in Nguni's languages.
I still have Ubuntu CDs from shipit somewhere.
In the mid-2000s, I ordered Ubuntu CDs, my first contact with Linux. The university campus had fast internet, and I could download and try other distros. Mandriva was by far the easiest to set up and use. It had everything included but was also the biggest in size (it required a DVD or 4x CDs if I remember correctly).
I ended up sticking to Ubuntu mainly because the support was better. You could find tutorials for everything you wanted targeting Ubuntu users. Whenever I had issues, I always found answers on forums. Being a total noob in the Ubuntu community was not frowned upon like in the other distros.
Ubuntu also had more up-to-date packages, and updates were coming faster. The UI was nicer in Ubuntu, and everything looked more consistent. Any other distro in that era looked more or less like Windows 98 / 2000. In Ubuntu, Compiz [1] was easy to set up. Compiz blew my mind when I discovered it.
I don't use Linux as my daily driver anymore. I prefer to run Debian on my servers, and I'll like to switch to Arch on my laptop soon. I still consider Ubuntu a distro suitable for someone who starts with Linux.
I think this was the consequence of the network effect brought by the initial push. The webforums weren't full from the first day.
1. Debian's installer is vague about how to install a working system. You have to pick between Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and more, which don't mean anything to a new user. By contrast, Ubuntu's installer contains a single desktop environment, and to use alternative DEs you download a different ISO like Kubuntu or Xubuntu.
2. If you insert a DVD in a Debian PC, by default it's mounted as noexec, preventing you from running any installer on it. Not only that, but when you try to open autorun.sh by double-clicking it in the file manager, it opens in LibreOffice Writer!!! At no point does Debian even try to give a hint to the user what they need to do (not that a novice should be unmounting/remounting). In Ubuntu, you get shown a warning and are asked if you would like to execute the script if you trust it.
3. /bin and /sbin are not in users' PATH, so commands like "reboot" and "shutdown" don't autocomplete unless you edit the environment variables. OK, the terminal isn't for novices, but it's the sort of thing that makes no sense to me.
I didn't spend long using Debian as a desktop but these are the things I remember seeing. I do use it as my server of choice, however.
Be so very careful about this.
Ubu did that for me behind my back on my dell laptop and bricked the thing by silently making it so that if you closed the lid and put it in your bag it would fry. Expensive way to find out about that bios feature, uh, change. I was spending a lot of time by a hospital bed when it happened and needed my laptop to be a goddamn laptop, close the lid, in the bag 10 seconds notice because this is important.
Sure that's 99% dell's fault and you can't even contact them to ask if this is really what they consider acceptable in any way, sure.
But yes I'm angry and bitter about it still. Why are ubu pushing an update like that at me implictly saying "this is fine" when it's not remotely close to fine?
eh bitter.
I'm not too happy with Ubuntu, but it's better then Windows 11.
https://github.com/displaylink-rpm/displaylink-rpm (RPMs in releases)
https://kcore.org/2023/01/01/installing-evdi-fedora37/ (should work on the latest Fedora 38)
Absolutely. Snap is Ubuntu's metaverse. Insisting something is the future doesn't make it any less useless.
Did Ubuntu become Windows?
My most recent sneaky Snap experience happened on my Pop_OS laptop. I decided to enable that extra Ubuntu Pro security repository since it's free for 5 devices. I followed the steps to enable it but then noticed that apt was installing the snapd package and a whole heap of dependencies! I quickly cancelled it, reverted the steps and decided to not bother with the Ubuntu Pro stuff again.
[Shutteworth makes a pretty good argument for snap](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z3yusiCOCk) (and by proxy, flatpack) and the why we need virtual machines/docker/LXD/(snap/flatpack)/package managers.
So I wouldn't say I'm championing snap, but I do believe the concept should be used everywhere. Flatpack? snap? Something new? Dont really care, I just want the containerization benefits at the userspace level.
Which snaps are loading that slow? Granted I'm using AppImage or binaries for so much stuff these days, from Firefox to Openshot to Crystal, but I'm really curious.
One of my machines runs 22.04 and has tons of software installed via repos, so some huge chunk of that experience must be slow, or painful, I think I'm to believe? Yet I'm not noticing anything out of the ordinary compared to my other distros.
What are you seeing? Specific examples?
I’m on fedora now and love it.
This is also with the distro installed with all default choices. If memory serves me right, using btrfs for one can result in any number of weird performance issues.
My first awareness of snaps came when I tried to load the calculator app in 18.04 I think. I couldn't understand why it took so long for such a simple app to start. I thought there was a serious problem on my machine.
After spending some hours, I realised this was due to snap.
EDIT: I now regard snap as a serious problem on my machine!
This mess is why I'll probably never leave NixOS. It ain't heaven, but it's at least not packaging hell.
For a bit of background, I initially started out using Linux with Slax in 2005, moving on to Fedora Core 5 and then installing Ubuntu when Feisty Fawn was released. For a long time, Ubuntu just felt right. Don't get me wrong, in those days there was plenty of work to do to get a system working well (getting working drivers, configuring xorg, etc), but overall it seemed like Canonical had a real focus on delivering an easy to use, stable Linux desktop OS for people that didn't want to build everything from scratch.
Since then I’ve occasionally run other bare metal installed distros/derivaties (elementary, mint, pop, debian) for a while, but I always found my way back to Ubuntu. I’ve tried dozens of other distros through VMs and live disks over the years, just to see what they have to offer too. The world of Linux is vast and wonderful, and there's always the potential for temptation on the horizon.
That said, I've been running Ubuntu 18.04 on my main desktop PC for about 5 years now and it's been a relatively reliable daily driver OS during that time. However, snaps leave a very bad taste in my mouth. Canonical seem dead set on force-feeding this crap down users' throats too, which is another trait that doesn't sit well with me. With 18.04 reaching the end of its shelf life, I decided—like the author of the article—to part ways with Ubuntu (and, by extension, Canonical).
I spent a good while searching for the right replacement OS and finally came up with the following shortlist: Fedora, Nobara, OpenSuse Tumbleweed and Arch.
I wanted a decent low-latency experience for audio production, and to be able to run the Bitwig digital audio workstation software. I wanted Steam, BTRFS, Pipewire, and various other relatively standard packages like Firefox, Kodi, Inkscape, Blender, Spotify, Bitwarden, etc. Initially, I was thinking of using KDE Plasma too. I tried out all of the shortlisted distros above, and finally went with Arch. So far it's been an incredible experience.
There were too many niggles in the end, with KDE, and I decided to give the latest Gnome (44) a shot, once it landed in the Arch repos. That was a surprise, as I wasn't expecting it to be anywhere near as great as it is. So far this is probably the best desktop Linux experience I've ever had. There's close to zero chance I will ever install another Ubuntu OS on any of my machines.
So long, Ubuntu, and thanks for the good times.
Switching distribution is a lot of overhead (I have a too-large and quite diverse collection of iron, with x86 being minority).
I'm glad someone is doing it, but I just want to not fight my computer to get tools I actually use to work.
I've been using Ubuntu 20 years like this author. I tried Pop_OS for a few years out of curiosity, but it kept being buggy. The Debian LiveCD I tried next failed to let me setup the partitions properly to install, so back to Ubuntu I went again...
I wish I had the energy to file a proper bug report, but what are the odds anyone would honestly benefit? It's almost always just a very niche me issue, so may as well not fight it.
It's like no matter what you have to fight the intentions of the maker to get what you want.
On ubuntu you have to expunge snapd and now that ubuntu pro nagger, where in both cases they went out of their way to make these dofficult to remove by making half the os depend on them but only artificially through package manager declarations, nothing really depends on them. You can still get them out, but you're fighting the will of the supplier which did not go away. They or something else will always come back and need to be faught again.
On redhat it's less about the architecture of the distro and more about the company since beingvsold to ibm. destroying centos shows that they really do not want a centos to exist. centos-alikes have sprung up to replace it, but ibm's wishes did not go away, and so as soon as they can figure out a way to, they will make a centos (alma, rocky) users life a pain again.
I'm starting to think the answer to finding a distro that has no interest in controlling you and getting something out of you inwillingly is actually arch. Maybe nix but the indirection seems like the old programmer joke about the overengineered hello world. But they don't seem to be doing their annnoying weird thing to get anything out of you at least, more a genuine engineering experiment.
You can use `alacarte` or manually create a .desktop file to add a menu item for your new Firefox instance if you need it.
The speed is OK (I don’t measure it in mili seconds though).
https://packages.ubuntu.com/jammy/chromium-browser
Both now depend on snapd. Doing apt install gets you the snap version. It didn't use to, and now it does. I'd call that pretty forceful, you're one apt install away from having it if you're not paying close attention to every dependency.