this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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I know there are lots of people that do not like Ubuntu due to the controversies of Snaps, Canonicals head scratching decisions and their ditching of Unity.

However my experience using Ubuntu when I first used it wasn't that bad, sure the snaps could take a bit or two to boot up but that's a first time thing.

I've even put it on my younger brothers laptop for his school and college use as he just didn't like the updates from Windows taking away his work and so far he's been having a good time with using this distro.

I guess what I'm tryna say is that Ubuntu is kind of the "Windows" of the Linux world, yes it's decisions aren't always the best, but at least it has MUCH lenient requirements and no dumb features from Windows 11 especially forced auto updates.

What are your thoughts and experiences using Ubuntu? I get there is Mint and Fedora, but how common Ubuntu is used, it seemed like a good idea for my bros study work as a "non interfering" idea.

Your thoughts?

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

The thing is. Snaps isn't the first controversy.

Canonical, with Ubuntu early on was helping drive things forward, but they reached a point where they started to do things their own way with disregard to the broader ecosystem.

Each time they did this, they cause fragmentation, struggled, and then deferred to the choice the rest of the ecosystem has. The problem with this is that they're not sharing their effort, they're just throwing it away.

They merely doubled down hard on snaps which is the latest controversy.

Snaps have their own advantages, but Canonical owns the store. Which becomes its own stalewort

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Unity is one example I cared about.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Same, I was very sad wheb they gave up in Unity8. I do check in often on the project as I felt it provided a very good mobile experience.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Since when is fragmentation a negative around here? Its part of what makes Foss great.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It's also part of what makes FOSS niche.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Personally I don't consider it a con unless rampant. However in many cases they've dumped the projects. It is effort that could have helped along another project.

imo the negative side effect is the wasted effort and the abandonment.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Packages for third party apps is the one place we don't want fragmentation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago

I think there are good kinds of fragmentation (choice and/or competition) and many bad kinds/causes of fragmentation (clinging to abandonware, reinventing the wheel, rejecting reasonable changes, "rewrite it in X-lang", demanding complete control, style/design choices that don't actually matter...)