I used Ubuntu for 10 ish years before moving to Fedora. I switched because the Kde packages were seemingly years out of date with no idea of when the new versions would hit the Apt repos.

Seems like a lot of Ubuntu packages are old compared to Fedora since I’ve experienced way fewer bugs now adays.

Snaps were bad but I never was forced to use them, had it purged and disabled the whole time.

Has anything changed about snap?

It became less slow and I think they considered implementing human verification for new packages but idk if they did.

Have they made any changes in their management that may make sure there won’t be another Amazon search thing?

Even if management changes are done, it’s as easy to revert them. This one is purely a matter of trust.

Is it best to use the default desktop on Ubuntu? I would recommend Kubuntu to them, all else being equal, but don’t know if maybe the default one is better integrated.

I think the default Ubuntu has the best integration in terms of theming and stuff but not having it is absolutely not a problem. I don’t remember the flavours being less user friendly or anything.

if they run hardware that’s not cutting edge, by all means, that’s the best solution as a first distro.

ubuntu is important as a stepping stone. myself and everyone I know that’s on Fedora et al started with Ubuntu. we learned what’s what and how to go about doing things and after hitting the ceiling one too many times, we tried other stuff, found better havens and finally abandoned it forever.

so I’d caution against any action aimed at hurting it. leave it be and know that it’s still the most user-friendly solution out there and the one that’s most likely to “just work” for most people. it’ll convert people over, whether from Windows or MacOS. once they’ve crossed over, they’re more likely to wander further.

I tried to install GrapheneOS from Chromium, but online installation doesn’t work on snaps, I had to go hunting for apks because Ubuntu doesn’t allow you to just choose which version of the program you want

That’s the opposite of what I want from Linux. I installed NixOS on my new laptop

Its not bad, but I don’t like it because it’s ugly brown defaults and it’s gnome.

Admittedly very superficial reasons. But I know that.

It’s fine.

Seriously I’ve run it for years. It’s just fine. No greater or fewer issues than other distros. You can avoid snaps if you like, but I don’t. I simply don’t care and they usually work better than flatpaks for me (snaps can install a cli executable, flatpaks require silly ways of running from the CLI).

server: LTS , desktop: latest point release. keeps the video games happy

Personal main-complaint about Snaps is that they ship Firefox by default with it and some things in it are just broken:

• “Save Image As…” in the right-click menu would just fail to open the file dialog and therefore do nothing.
• It doesn’t use ~/Downloads/ for downloads, but rather some complex folder underneath ~/snap/. You can get to that folder from Firefox’s download list, I believe, but navigating there via file manager is tricky.

Thankfully, Mozilla now offers a DEB repo: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w_install-firefox-deb-package-for-debian-based-distributions

As for Kubuntu, it’s far from the greatest showing of KDE. They frequently have oddball KDE versions, e.g. not quite shipping the KDE LTS version in Ubuntu LTS, because releases didn’t line up, but also just in general weird instabilities and crashes which don’t happen on my openSUSE laptop (my workplace issues Ubuntu laptops).

Having said that, we gave some of our Linux newbie colleagues GNOME and they always seem to struggle more with it than the colleagues with KDE, because usability in GNOME is just whack.
Things like not being able to type a file path into the file manager (unless you know the magic shortcut Ctrl+L), or the file-open dialog highlighting the name field, but when you type into it, it starts searching files instead.
But also just the whole thing not behaving like Windows. I’ll be the last to praise Windows’ usability, but it is what many people know.

Ubuntu has its ups and downs when you’re actually living with it, but they have a fantastic installer experience. I have had my fair share of bizarre dead ends with other distro installers, like Bazzite telling me “you need -860GB more space”. Ubuntu puts you in a solid live-iso OS where the installer is just an app that you can drag to one side and run other tools before continuing. It tends to do sensible things if I go off the beaten path with a more advanced install.

Nowadays, I am happy with debootstrapping or btrfs send’ing an existing Debian install to set up a new system for myself. I still think that Ubuntu is reasonably likely to be a good experience for a newcomer.

I am in the same boat as you. I am still running Ubuntu (with snap removed, so I can’t comment on its current performance overhead) on a few of my machines because I couldn’t be bothered to do a reinstall with something less insane, but I’m not recommending Ubuntu to anyone anymore over the same concerns as you have.

If you want to recommend a system that runs decently out of the box and runs a lot of software, recommend Mint instead. Ubuntu used to be Debian with sane default settings that would run out of the box, nowadays Mint is Ubuntu with sane default settings that will run out of the box. Mint also doesn’t subscribe to this snap madness and is continuing to maintain a few packages Ubuntu has migrated to snap as .deb package (for instance Firefox and Chromium).

Ubuntu is a perfectly usable operating system, there is a LOT of elitism in the Linux community.

De gustibus non est disputandum

In matters of taste there is no dispute

You’d be surprised how many people don’t care about business practices. It’s actually kind of alarming

Snaps sucks, canonical sucks, Amazon integration sucks, KDE updates are years behind which also sucks, pushing snaps over deb sucks, pushing snap over flatpak sucks.

However, Ubuntu is a great distro. Incredibly stable, very well tested and polished. Installation is super easy and hardware support is very good, unless you got some very new hardware.

I recommend Ubuntu to a lot of people even though I’d never use it myself. Most people just want their computer to work.

Not recommending Ubuntu because of those 2 things, both of which can be turned off easily, seems a bit extreme. Like not recommending a Toyota because some of the inside trim attrack dust

As an intro into Linux, I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone even if I myself moved on from it

Ubuntu is a great distro. It’s performant, ,its stable, its well configured it looks nice out of the box. For seasoned Linux users they can be more picky with which their distro but as an intro to Linux I always recommend mint and Ubuntu.