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I remember when Ubuntu decided to reroute apt installations into SNAP installs. So you install a package via apt and there was logic to see if they should disregard your command and install a SNAP instead. Do they still do that?

It annoyed me so much that I switched to mint.

I agree with the sentiment but I keep Snap disabled because I like Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE) for its rock solid stability.

> Do they still do that?

Yes. I know its more than firefox, but I don't have the full list. On 24.04:

  me@comp:~$ apt info firefox | head -n 5
  
  WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.
  
  Package: firefox
  Version: 1:1snap1-0ubuntu7
  Priority: optional
  Section: web
  Origin: Ubuntu
  me@comp:~$

The control is both a blessing and a curse. It’s really easy to accidentally screw things up when e.g. trying to polish some of the rough edges or otherwise make the system function as desired. It also may not be of any help if the issue you’re facing is too esoteric for anybody else to have posted about it online (or for LLMs to be of any assistance).

It would help a lot if there were a distro that was polished and complete enough that most people – even those of us who are more technical and are more demanding – rarely if ever have any need to dive under the hood. Then the control becomes purely an asset.

This is literally Linux Mint, Zorin, and several other distros. I haven't had to "go under the hood" on my daily driver machines that run either of these distros for over 7 years.

I think at this point people are just (reasonably) making excuses not to change.

Those and other big distros are better in that regard, but they're still not perfect. Depending on one's machine and needs, there can still be pain.

One recent example I experienced is jumping through hoops to get virtualization enabled in Fedora… it takes several steps that are not obvious at all. I understand not having it enabled by default since many won't need it, but there's no reason that can't just be a single CLI command that does it all.

Things like that can be unbelievably annoying and confusing on Windows or Macs, too. Even worse, they can just turn out to be impossible: the company can actively be preventing you from doing the thing that you want to do, refuses to give you enough access to your own system to do the thing you want to do, and/or sells permission to do what you want to do as an upgrade that you have to renew yearly.

These are things that don't happen in Linux. Doing what you want to do might be difficult (depending on how unusual it is), but there's no one actively trying to stop you from doing it for their own purposes (except systemd.)

Also, as an aside, a reason that Windows and Macs might have easy virtualization (I have no idea if they do) is because of how often they're running Linux VMs.

One needs to go a fair ways off the beaten path before they'll start running into trouble like that under macOS and Windows.

For macOS in particular, most trouble that more tinker-y users might encounter disappears if guardrails (immutable system image, etc) are disabled. Virtualization generally "just works" by way of the stock Virtualization.framework and Hypervisor.framework, which virtualization apps like QEMU can then use, but bespoke virtualization like that QEMU also ships with or that built into VirtualBox and VMWare works fine too. No toggles or terminal commands necessary. Linux does get virtualized a lot, but people frequently virtualize Windows and macOS as well.

What exactly did you need to do? All I've ever had to do to get QEMU working properly has been to make sure KVM is enabled in the BIOS (which you have to do on all OSs).

Just run a KVM based Windows VM (via GNOME Boxes, virt-manager, etc. On my Fedora install I had to install the @virtualization meta-package and enable dameons among other things, and the only reason I knew to do that is because I looked it up. Without that Boxes, etc just throws an unhelpful error that doesn’t suggest that more packages or config changes are needed.

I had to enable virtualization features in BIOS too, but that’s entirely separate and not the fault of any Linux distro.

Ah, I guess I might be a little unusual in that I use the QEMU CLI directly. I tried some QEMU GUIs in the past but they were annoying to get working so I just learned the CLI.

There's several distros that are fully usable without ever touching a terminal. The control is a gradient, some distros give you all the control and others (eg. SteamOS) lock down your root filesystem and sandbox everything from the internet.

> It’s really easy to accidentally screw things up when e.g. trying to polish some of the rough edges or otherwise make the system function as desired.

'Similar to Windows' System Restore and macOS's Time Machine', the Linux 'Timeshift' tool can be used to do make periodic saves of your OS files & settings. (They can be saved elsewhere.) Restoration is a cinch.

Mint program 'Backup Tool' allows users to save and restore files within their home directory (incl. config folder and separately installed apps).

You do have to know what you're doing. A complete OS has a bunch of components that work together. But an out of the box distro hides all that do you end up fiddling with incomplete knowledge.

Gentoo is great for learning what all the individual components are. You install it by booting a kernel from a USB stick then chrooting into your newly installed system to start installing and configuring everything. Just knowing the existence of individual components helps a lot. Plus Gentoo gives you more control than almost any other distro (much more than Arch, for example).

> I've been running Ubuntu Linux for a long time now...Linux still has it's fair share of bugs...

> I don't see regular users adopting Linux anytime soon...

I can see why you think the second statement is true based on the first statements. When Ubuntu switched their desktop to Gnome, they gave up on being the best Linux desktop distro. I'd recommend you to try Linux Mint.

I'm curious, can you elaborate on why you believe that changing to Gnome meant they were giving up on being the best desktop distro?

Well, to start they tried putting Amazon ads in Unity's Dock which was also doing data collection, but removed them after the backlash.

Then they switched to Gnome, meaning they gave up on their own desktop, Unity, so they were no longer dictating what their desktop was like, so how much did they care?

Since then they have replaced a number of apps with SNAPs which are only available from Canonical so many people see it as an attempt to corner the Linux market. Many see AppImages and Flatpacks as better than SNAPs.

They are a company. They exist to make money. Of course they are going to decide to do things that make more money and annoy their users.

Let me recommend Fedora to you Timbit.

Debian family is outdated and builds with bugs upon release.

I too was corrupted by Ubuntu's marketing strategy of being popular and using the misleading word 'Stable'.

I tried Fedora once. On a fresh install, all it did was clog up all the hard drive space with error logs within 3 days.

I'm not interested in any distro that is controlled by a corporation. IBM is a corporation and they already screwed up CentOS and is eventually going to screw up Fedora someday because that's what corporations do, and I'm not interesting in going through that.

You have your fun running Fedora for now but know you're going to get burned someday.

What exactly is "outdated" about Debian?

> switched their desktop to Gnome, they gave up on being the best Linux desktop distro.

Mint is also based on GNOME.

https://linuxmint-developer-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

>Linux still has it's fair share of bugs

>Linux, for all it's issues

You are confusing debian-family with Linux. Debian family is designed to be outdated upon release. When they say "Stable" it doesn't mean 'Stable like a table'. It means version fixed. You get outdated software that has bugs baked into it.

Fedora is modern and those bugs are fixed already.

Reminder Fedora is not Arch. Don't confuse the two.

Meh, I don't care much about control, I care more about getting my work done with the least amount of friction. Macs do that for me. Linux and Windows have too many barriers to make them a daily GUI driver.