Why is Ubuntu Getting so Much Hate? - The Linux Experiment

### Data collection Ok, the first thing that comes often first is the fact that Ubuntu spies on its users. This complaint usually is linked to 2 Ubuntu features: the Amazon web app, and the opt-out system information. Ubuntu introduced an integration with Amazon when they started shipping Unity as a default desktop environment, and later, they added a reporting tool that collects sytem information and sends it back to Ubuntu to check on what their users are actually using hardware wise. The Amazon thing was bad. It sent unencrypted search requests to Amazon, for anything the users were looking for in the Unity dash, and it generally returned very bad results. Ubuntu actually allowed users to disable that feature a little later, and in the end, that Amazon integration turned into an affiliate link in the dash, that could be removed easily, and not used. Still, the community generally resented the distro for adding this by default. … While these are valid criticisms, you have to remember that the competing projects, at that time, were far from ready. Ubuntu should have gone with Wayland instead of inventing Mir is a phrase we often read nowadays, and still, Wayland at the time just wasn’t suited for what Ubuntu wanted to do. Wayland is just a protocol, and its implementation at the time, Weston was severely lacking. Mir was supposed to allow a less modular design, with more stuff relegated to the display server instead of the client, to guarantee more performance on ARM environments, which was where Mir would run as well: on smartphones and IoT devices. Wayland didn’t meet these criteria. … These two projects are often criticized as unnecessary, and as having hurt the development of competing initiatives. The problem here is that Ubuntu has a vision that differed from what the other projects had in mind, and these couldn’t be reconciled, so they had to go their own way, or ditch what they felt the desktop should look like, or their plans for convergence. … ### Snaps Snaps are another controversial point, that I would tend to put in the “they invented another way to do things instead of contributing to an already existing model” locker. Snaps are a way of packaging and distributing software. They are generally criticized for being slow to load, creating new mount points in the disk utility, yes, really, and for being proprietary. While snaps are indeed pretty slow to load, don’t always respect the user’s theme, and do use mount points to mount the snaps and allow the apps to run, the proprietary part is complete bogus. Snaps themselves are completely open source, as is the way of creating them, running them. What is proprietary, however, is the snap store, the place where applications are distributed. … Now snaps can be criticized for a lot of things, and I generally agree that I’d rather use regular packages that are smaller, faster, and better integrated, than snaps or even flatpaks. You just have to remember that the decision to use snaps by Ubuntu is more than just a statement that they don’t want to use other people’s stuff. Snaps can also implement server side stuff, like Nextcloud, when flatpaks can’t, or just don’t at the moment.