What are the problems with Ubuntu? - Garuda's Lemmy

In my personal opinion: 1- Snap packages. Dont like them for their closed source backend, dont lime them for how canonical has been sneaking then into the system of users who have been originally trying to install a deb. 2- Modern Ubuntu simply has no real benefit compared to other Distros. Nowadays it’s just another Gnome and Debian-based distro, I see no reason to use it over Debian itself, or Fedora, Solus, or any other Ubuntu derivative that simply does better than “vanilla” Ubuntu, such as Pop!_OS or Linux Mint. … ... *used to*be better than every other distro, because they incorporated patches on freetype that were legally ‘iffy’ as to whether they infringed on microsoft’s patents; later whatever exclusivity requirement that there was with those patents expired, and the patches got upstreamed in freetype itself. ... It’s been more than 15 years since I used Ubuntu but from that point I really could feel that what @[email protected] says is true - it no longer offered any real benefit compared to Fedora, Solus, Mint or whatever distro targeted at people getting into Linux. You won’t find many people saying that Ubuntu really stands out from their similars about something. … But as previously stated, my personal opinion is that modern Ubuntu adds nothing compared to other desktop distros, ot’s DE is just Gnome with extensions bult in. The Snap store is not very well optimized and there was no reason to have it as default over gnome-software, which is more feature-complete. Nowadays, for my use, I only see Ubuntu as Debian with a more modern installer. … I’m willing to admit this one does make sense, since their goal is to make an OS where everything except the kernel and the init system is a snap, something which you can’t do with flatpak. ... Thing is, even when Ubuntu’s software has been packaged outside Ubuntu, it’s so far failed to gain traction. Upstart and Unity were available from a Gentoo overlay at one point, but never achieved enough popularity for anyone to try to move them to the main tree. I seem to recall that Unity required a cartload of core system patches that were never upstreamed by Ubuntu to be able to work, which may have been a contributing factor. It’s possible that Ubuntu doesn’t … Another problem is the “not made here” mentality, which undermined Wayland for instance. Ultimately the problem is I guess, that Ubuntu is (was?) trying to make Ubuntu exclusive to Linux, with Canonical controlling key technologies. Seemingly an effort to reduce other Linux distros to second rate players. Another example of that (apart from dual license and Mir) is their new package system Snap, which is open source on the client side, but proprietary on the server side. … Snap. :) AusatKeyboardPremi@lemmy.world14·2 months ago Most of the criticism I have seen online stems from how Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) plays fast and loose with the FLOSS ethos. The earliest controversy I can recall was the inclusion of the ‘Amazon shopping lens’ in its Unity desktop environment. There may have been earlier issues, but this one made mainstream headlines in the early 2010s. More recently, the push for Snap (its application bundle format), which relies on proprietary server-side components, which invited criticism. … More serious problem was Mir. Mir was an alternative to Wayland, because Canonical was not happy with Wayland and they didn’t want to implement what Ubuntu tried to do on phones. But that meant the programs and protocols to support was now X11, Wayland and Mir. And related to it, the focus of mobile user interface on desktop (Mir+Unity) was something lot of desktop fans didn’t like at that time. Canonical gave up on Mir and Unity (and smartphones entirely).