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?

  • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    171·
    2 months ago

    Yeah, this kind of things drove me batty on Ubuntu. So many things were delivered as Snaps when they just don’t work that way. The funniest one to me was Filebot. It’s a media file naming/organizing tool…that doesn’t have disk access. Are you kidding me, Canonical?

    Flatpak is easier to work with, but has similar issues. Great for simple things, but I’m always worried that at some point I’m going to need some features that just won’t work, and then it’s going to be a hassle to migrate to a native installation. And it has no CLI support.

    And yeah, the bloat is wild. Deduplication on btrfs (or similar) helps but there’s no getting past the bandwidth bloat.

    • Eugenia@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      Yeah, i hear you. I once installed the new version of snap (and later flatpak) of the gnome ide, and it couldn’t find the vala compiler, because it was outside the sandboxing. Totally useless.

      And yes, it’s bloated. Nothing works with less 1.6 gb of ram. But then again, it’s the same on fedora.

      • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
        41·
        2 months ago

        I use Fedora Workstation, and that is not the case at all. I will agree that an Arch based distro will arguably give you much more control over everything, but to compare Fedora to Ubuntu? That’s just silly.

        • Eugenia@lemmy.mlEnglish
          5·
          2 months ago

          I was talking about memory usage, not the rest of the stuff. Yes, Fedora uses as much RAM as Ubuntu.

          • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
            3·
            2 months ago

            Ah, that being the case, you’re also somewhat wrong. For the most part, Fedora actually uses a bit more RAM and resources than Ubuntu.

      • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        I forget the exact terminology but I tried putting it into the most permissive mode available. Is still could not work with external hard drives. This was several years ago so I can’t say what might have changed since then, but I did spend some time troubleshooting and at the time that functionality did not work. I’d read that it was possible in the previous version (maybe 18.04?)

        Edit: Come to think of it, it might not have been as simple as “couldn’t access external drives”. It might have had something to do with how my disks were mounted and their permissions and mount points. I remember that I hit a wall at some point and further troubleshooting would have required more surgery on my system than I was willing to attempt.

        • olympicyes@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 month ago

          Snaps call your atypical drive arrangement “removable media” so even if you saw it, it might have been counter intuitive. This is what you would’ve needed to run:

          sudo snap connect filebot:removable-media

          Since 23.10 setting snap permissions has been easier in the gui.