Ubuntu is my default choice. It's very easy to use, polished and doesn't require tweaking.
I just installed Ubuntu Server earlier this week on my home server, and I was surprised at how nice the installer has gotten.
They aren't content to just make a good product, it has to be disgustingly profitable. Once a company starts down that path, it's only a matter of time until the end user experience becomes completely intolerable. We've seen it happen so many times we had to coin the word enshittification to describe it.
Apart from very specific complaints like snaps, the hate is not for Ubuntu, the hate is for Canonical the company. People obviously still like and use Ubuntu, it's one of the pillars of the Linux community. Canonical has forgotten that in their plays for more money.
Really, Canonical has been going downhill for a long time. It just hasn't been bad enough to provoke this kind of outcry until the premium ads in the apt package manager.
If Canonical continues what they're doing, they'll see a prodigious loss of free users. That won't hurt them directly, but it will begin a slow and steady decline in enterprise usage. If it's so unpleasant to use Ubuntu at home, why would you use it at work if given the option? Ubuntu will stick around for a good long while and slowly get worse and worse as Canonical becomes more and more desperate.
Canonical as a whole has some very serious problems and I really don't expect them to survive long term. I'm not sure it's possible to fix a company once they're in that state.
Oh well, at least we have ten thousand other Linux distros to choose from.
It turns out many don't like trying out thousand of other Linux distros and how each of them decides to be different from everyone else.
I've used Debian, but the installs feel so barebones. I love that Ubuntu has many of the common packages I need, yet it doesn't feel bloated.
Additionally, most software that supports Linux has instructions for Ubuntu, or Ubuntu just feels better supported.
FlatPak instead of Snap. No telemetry or DRM.
IMO you get to “stay with Ubuntu” but are also isolated from Canonical’s increasingly strange decisions.
I personally use OpenSUSE and Manjaro as my daily drivers after switching from Ubuntu 3 years ago, and have yet to encounter any package problems that directly stemmed from not using Ubuntu. For everything else, there's always Flatpak.
These are hypothetical scenarios and irrelevant to the context of this thread, which is about asking for Ubuntu alternatives now. The alternative doesn't have to be 100% community driven or completely detached from Ubuntu. It just needs to be usable without the nonsense of Ubuntu Pro or Snap.
Personally I've been using Arch for a long time. I prefer it in basically every way, except the pacman interface is hot garbage compared to apt. I wouldn't recommend Arch for everyone, and I don't recommend the base Arch distro for anyone. Get one of the nicer arch variants like Garuda or Cinnamon.
Then install the packages you want? If it's not in Debian repos then yeah that's compelling, but otherwise you're describing one extra apt-get command (per OS install) that you stick in your notes and reuse every few years.
It's free for individuals for 5 machines.
It’s pretty good, but adding two ESP devices gives the impression you’re getting boot redundancy and you’re not. Only one of them will end up with GRUB. Then, once you fix that, only the primary device will have an entry in fstab and SystemD will have a nervous breakdown if you try to boot off the secondary with the primary missing. Good luck supplying the root password for emergency mode because you probably don’t have one.
How do you do that? The only way I know of is to use mdadm to RAID1 the partitions[0], but I wouldn't expect that to break the way you've described.
[0] This is also a bit fiddly; IME you have to pick a specific configuration so the firmware will read the result.
But I thank them, they helped me move to Debian and I haven't looked back.
This isn't unique to Ubuntu. So there's no strong incentive for users to stick with Ubuntu in the face of repeated alienating acts like this.