My first Linux distro was Ubuntu 8.04 in 2008. Ubuntu helped me get into Linux. I’m very grateful about that.
However, Ubuntu is no longer a desktop-friendly distro. I hopped around a bit and settled eventually on Arch. Here are some of the things I don’t like:
- Ubuntu software repos ship ancient software. You have to live with issues that were solved years ago.
- Ubuntu kernels are also old and have issues with recent laptops…
- Ubuntu was stupid to push snap on everyone. Flatpaks are much better.
I think Ubuntu is a great distro for cloud servers, and they are heavily optimizing for that use case. But it’s meh for laptops.
I was averse to Ubuntu when I first got into Linux because I had the impression that it was the most popular or well known distro, and I was somewhat hipster trash around that concept. That is to say that no, at least for me, my disdain towards Ubuntu was not well justified at all
Eh, ubuntu does okay. Canonical is what people dislike, as the choices made in what is and isn’t going to be part of Ubuntu comes from that entity.
That may seem like splitting hairs, but consider that a lot of people really enjoy Ubuntu once somebody else strips the unpleasant stuff away and replaces it with something else. Get rid of snaps alone, and you’d bump a lot of the haters into neutral or supportive.
But it really is like any company or organisational entity. You do enough shitty stuff that alienates your “customers”, and those customers will go elsewhere if they have a choice.
Imagine a world where Microsoft had their version of Windows, but there were ten other companies, and a half dozen non profits making their version that eliminated one or more of Microsoft’s bad decisions. Mint Windows might be very popular even though Microsoft Windows is hated as much as they currently are. It’s still Windows under the hood, though with different tires and braking systems. The analogy isn’t perfect and anyone wanting to nitpick it will be ridiculed in a humorous, but vigorous manner; it holds up for casual use like this.
Ubuntu is Debian with some adjustments, so there’s only so much Canonical can fuck up if they don’t want to vastly expand the amount of work they do. Not that they don’t try lol.
it’s just a worse debian. it’s not worth hating, it’s just a bit annoying
it’s just gatekeeping and elitism for the most part
The people here have given some reasons of the hate and some are true and some is just no so much. After years observing however this is my take:
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As mannycalavera mentioned, Linux users are “contrarian”; yes we tend to repudiate what is the mainstream, and in the Linux world that is Ubuntu. Ironically, Ubuntu did more for making Linux mainstream than anybody else.
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Ubuntu have amazing technologies but it is usually unable to compete with the competitors that has the no only far more capacity for new development (usually faster, not necessarily more innovative) but also to push it harder into the market.
One thing most people ignore, even among Linux users, is how small Canonical actually is :
- Canonical employees 500 to 800. Red Hat close to 20,000 (and, in top of that, it leverages IBM’s global engine!).
- Canonical makes some $200 million. Red Hat makes $5,300 million.
- Even, SUSE (OpenSUSE) is far larger than Canonical.
- Proportionally, Canonical makes far more contributions to the community than the other 2 companies.
Canonical, if you are listening, here is my recommendation to you:
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You can both cater to large corporation as a competent and resourceful partner, and also to Linux enthusiast as the cool, approachable, and welcoming collaborator you are. Search for that formula.
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Get out of London/ Isle of Man. Make a bold move to a new hub that can expand your horizons… Barcelona, Gibraltar or even a bolder move; Mexico, Indonesia,… the UK is dragging you down in costs, image and even talent.
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Cause they make a lot of decisions that are Canonical only, and don’t take criticism of those decisions well. Most of it I’d say is relatively undeserved, but the pushback against Snaps is definitely deserved. It’s a walled-garden approach to software distribution, which has no place in Linux.
Unity and Mir were interesting tech and had good goals. They were also fully open source, so I didn’t have a problem with either. The Amazon thing was just straight up a bad decision, but they fixed it, to their credit. Snaps are a bad decision, bad tech, and the server portion is closed source. And, they refuse to back down. That makes Ubuntu desktop something I cannot recommend to anyone. It’s a shame. Ubuntu got me into Linux back with Hardy Heron.
Ubuntu server is ok, but I specifically tell people I recommend it to to uninstall snapd. The only reason I still recommend it is because their long term support is phenomenal.
Ultimately, it’s getting harder and harder to recommend anything Canonical.
Because: Snaps
By far the worst part about Ubuntu is snap. Canonical has failed its community and the wider Linux community with it in so many ways.
For Ubuntu users
- Canonical replacing working debs with snaps. Whether it be long launch times, missing functionality, or broken. They have addressed such issues, but they should have been fixed before becoming the default.
- Terrible snap store moderation. Malicious apps have made their way onto the store numerous times. Old abandoned apps are not hidden.
For wider community
- Broken or incomplete sandboxing on anything not Ubuntu. They not only rely on AppArmor, but also downstream patches. You have no sandbox on distros such as Fedora and OpenSUSE.
- Canonical has full control of the store.
There are other smaller controversies, like Mir, Unity, and Upstart, but none are as bad as snap.
But how much is anyone forced to use snaps, outside of maybe a few core applications that might define ubuntu? Flatpak can be installed on ubuntu and I’d say most of the important stuff seems to be from the apt repos. Granted that may be an argument for Debian alone but I’m just trying to make sense of it.
Broken or incomplete sandboxing on anything not Ubuntu. They not only rely on AppArmor, but also downstream patches. You have no sandbox on distros such as Fedora and OpenSUSE.
This is a bit outside my zone. Could you please explain this?
They’re pushing snaps onto users who don’t even want them - when you
apt installsome packages, you get snaps instead. That alone disqualifies Ubuntu in my eyes.I didn’t say people were forced to use snap, just that they’re the default. But if they’re to be made the default, they should be a good experience.
- A couple years ago they switched Gnome Calculator a preinstalled snap and it had very long launch times despite being such a simple app.
- Later on they made Firefox a snap (and removed the deb) despite it having long launch times and no native messaging support (used by stuff like password managers).
- They made a snap version of Steam and pushed it to the stable channel despite it having many known issues. Those using the graphical store only have the option to get the snap version of Steam as the store is snap-only. It took them a while to make games work by removing a bunch of snap’s sandboxing for it.
As for the sandboxing stuff. Ubuntu using AppArmor, a Mandatory Access Control (MAC) that is used to make the system more secure by creating profiles used to confine certain pieces of software. If they try to do something the profile doesn’t allow them to do, it gets blocked.
Snap uses AppArmor to manage the sandbox of snaps. However, AppArmor isn’t the only MAC around. Fedora and OpenSUSE use something else called SELinux, which has a similar purpose. But snap doesn’t speak SELinux, it only speaks AppArmor. So none of the fancy AppArmor profiles used to contain snaps actually work on those distros, the sandbox it does have is so weak it’s insignificant. Canonical could have addressed this by adding SELinux support to snap, but they haven’t, they pretty much only care about Ubuntu and Debian. And as I mentioned before, Ubuntu patches AppArmor to add more functionality. But they have failed to upstream these patches, so only Ubuntu (and maybe Debian?) have access to the strongest sandboxing snap can offer.
On the other hand, flatpak uses bubblewrap to sandbox its applications. Bubblewrap uses standard Linux security features to sandbox apps rather than a specific MAC. That means the flatpak sandbox is strong regardless of which distro you are using. Although it does have some downsides. Flatpak doesn’t speak to either MAC, which can be a problem since the MAC can confine the flatpak application more than is expected. For example, OpenSUSE ships some SELinux policies that allows Wine/Proton to function as expected. However, these policies don’t get installed when you use Steam or any other launcher as a flatpak. It’s something you have to do manually. Meanwhile if flatpak actually talked to the MAC (like snap does with AppArmor), then this wouldn’t be a problem.
You literally don’t adopt Linux unless you’re a contrarian… literally. So in a self selecting audience of contrarians is it any surprise that some speak out rabidly against themselves?
I switched to Linux for a lot of reasons, being contrarian was not one of them.
Personal experience but I’ve found that Ubuntu breaks far more easily if I’m doing anything nonstandard, and doing nonstandard things is the whole reason I’m on Linux. Probably this is because of snaps, but as a new user it’s hard to tell where things were installed and how. Switched to fedora and had a lot more success and didn’t go back, so maybe as a power user I’d be able to figure it out more, but not worth it imo.
Because people tend to get up their own ass over nonsense, and no it really isn’t.
