You're going to get a lot of comments about Ubuntu and snaps. Definitely one of the reasons I switched away from it.
For the uninitiated, as someone who's looking to move from Windows to Linux and Ubuntu is probably my first choice, can you share what's not to like about this?
Edit - insightful answers. Thank you
Snaps are technically foss but the server thst hosts them are proprietary to Ubuntu, when flatpak is perfectly reasonable. It’s a bit of a pattern of things they do, finding solutions to things they weren’t really problems (cough netplan cough)
Also they put ads in search long before Windows did and as much as I hate Microsoft we should never forget that.
Performance and functionality.
When I click the Firefox icon, I expect Firefox to open. Like, right away.
When Ubuntu switched it to a snap, there was a noticeable load time. I'd click the icon and wait. In the background the OS was mounting a snap as a virtual volume or something, and loading the sandboxed app from that. It turned my modern computer with SSD into an old computer with a HDD. Firefox gets frequent updates, so the snap would be updated frequently, requiring a remount/reload every update.
Ubuntu tried this with many stock apps (like Calculator), but eventually rolled things back since so many people complained about the obvious performance issues.
I'm talking about literally waiting 10X the time for something to load as a snap than it did compared to a "regular" app.
The more apps you have as snaps, the more things have to be mounted/attached and slowly loaded. This also use to clutter up the output when listing mounted devices.
The Micropolis (GPL SimCity) snap loads with read-only permissions. i.e., you cannot save. There are no permission controls for write access (its snap permissions are only for audio). Basically, the snap was configured wrong and you can never save your game.
I had purged snapd from my system and added repos to get "normal" versions of software, but eventually some other package change would happen and snapd would get included with routine updates.
I understand the benefits of something like Snaps and Flatpaks - but you cannot deny that there are negatives. I thought Linux was about choice. I've been administering a bunch of Ubuntu systems at work for well over a decade, and I don't like what the platform has been becoming.
Also, instead of going with an established solution (flatpak), Ubuntu decided to create a whole new problem (snap) and basically contributes to a splitting of the community. Which do you support? Which gets more developer focus to fix and improve things?
You don't have to take my word for any of this. A quick Google search will yield many similar complaints.
For context:
Snaps are a way to build applications so that they can run on any platform with one build method. It makes it easier for developers to publish their apps across multiple different Linux distro without having to worry about dependency issues.
Snaps have been very poorly received by the community, one of the largest complaints is that a snap program with take 5-10 seconds to start, where as the same program without snap will start instantly.
Ubuntu devs have been working for years to optimize them, but it's a complex problem and while they've made some improvements, it's slow going. While this has been going on, Ubuntu is slowly doubling down more and more on snaps, such as replacing default apps with their snap counterparts.
On the other hand, other methods like flatpak exist, and are generally more liked by the community.
This has led to a lot of Ubuntu users feeling unheard as their feedback is ignored.
Manjaro, because because the team behind it fuck's up a bit to often for my tastes. And Ubuntu, because they force snap onto their users.
I spent the last 10 mins reading all the comments and I think we managed to shit on all the distros available.
That's the Linux community I love, good job people <3
No one gets left behind
Akuna Matata or some shit
Garuda. It feels like being inside a gaming rig full of blinking RGB lights. Way over the top with the "gamer aesthetic".
Same reason but different vibe with Kali for me. I'm sure it's good for its intended purpose, but I get the feeling that there are many who install it in an attempt at being a kewl h4x0r. I used used Parrotsec for work for a while, and it's a lot less flamboyant about it.
Ubuntu.It' went from a great beginner distro to a dumpster fire filled with snaps and telemetry.
Ubuntu - It was my first distro and I loved it for many years after 6.06. However, it slowly shifted from a very community focused distro ("Linux for human beings" was the original slogan) to a very corporate distro with lots of in-house bullshit, CLAs, and partially-closed projects that seems to focus on profit and business over actual human beings. I correlate this move to around the time when it became purple rather than brown. Snap sucks, Mir sucks, Unity sucks, integrating Amazon and music store paid bullshit sucks. Just no. Move to Debian.
Manjaro - It's Arch, but with incompetence!
Red Hat - Do you enjoy paying licensing fees for a Linux distro that very likely violates the open source licenses it uses? RHEL is for you! Just remember not to share the code! Sharing is most certainly NOT caring!
Manjaro, for its incompetence.
I don't hate Gentoo, but will never use it. I hate compiling.
Arch, I want to get some work done not save 3 extra CPU cycles on boot.
I thought that's gentoo.
I ran Gentoo for years. I run Arch now.
You're not wrong, lol.
'Course, I was running Gentoo when hardware was slow enough that you could see the real-time performance improvement from tailored compiles. Now shit's so fast that any gains are imperceptible by a human for day-to-day desktop usage. Arch can also be a bit of a time sink, I get it, especially setting it up takes time and thought. That's also why I like it, and always come back to it: I can set it up exactly how I want it, and it's really good at that. There's always weird shit that seems to happen to me when I try to remove Gnome in Ubuntu or other crazy shit that, yeah, everyone would tell you not to do, but Arch doesn't care. If I want combination of things, I can hunt for a distro that has it, or I can likely just set it up on Arch.
After setup, though, it's not any more effort to maintain than any other distro. shrug
So what you're actually saying is: you don't like Arch because you don't want to take the time to learn how to use Arch.
(Which is fine)
Manjaro because it is a bait and switch trap. Seems really polished and user friendly. You will find out eventually it is a system destroying time-bomb and a poorly managed project.
Ubuntu because snaps.
The rest are all pros and cons that are different strokes for different folks.
Ubuntu, because of their shenanigans with ads in the OS, forcing snap and just generally demonstrating disdain for their userbase.
Manjaro for their office suite debacle, and general instability.
RHEL for their recent attempts to subvert GPL.
Debian because packages are never, ever, ever up to date.
Gentoo because any sane person would get sick of compiling.
Ubuntu: broke my LTS 20 by upgrading to LTS 22, pushes snaps and other ridiculous things over the years while offering relatively little value these days
Ubuntu, dont understand me wrong, the distro is nice but, canonical... My point because i dont like Ubuntu.
Wish Linux Devs help build and polish OS for Pinephone. I really want Linux to go mainstream. Tired of android and Apple.
Ubuntu has been on a downward spiral for the last decade or more, at this point they have spend more years being bad, than being good. Started when they were trying to push their own Wayland alternative, their own Gnome alternative, and now they try to force their proprietary appstore shop on everybody.
Ubuntu was really good when they were just Debian with some much needed updates and polish, but those days are long gone.
And it's not like I wouldn't love to get rid of .deb, it's a terrible packaging format that had it's best days 25 years ago when it was up against raw tarballs and when packages where shipped on CD-ROM. It's in dire need of a fundamental upgrade, but Snap really is not the way forward and the way they underhandedly force it on users is just disgusting. Either build a packaging format of the future and just use it for everything, or don't.
I absolutely hated myself after installing Arch on one of my machines.
Then I discovered EndeavourOS... I still hate myself but at least my laptop works now.
ZorinOS, had lots of problems with it right out of the box that weren't present on any other mainstream distros I tried on the same hardware.
I didn′t like the look and feel either. For a distro that has a paid version, I would expect a very polished a premium feeling experience, but I didn't get that compared to all the mainstream free distros.
It was ultimately a dissapointing experience all around.
This is gonna be an unpopular opinion, but Linux mint. It's great if you're just getting into Linux, it's absolutely terrible when you know what you're doing in Linux. The old package base and kernel just kills me sometimes. I get they want a stable base and use the lts versions of Ubuntu, but my goodness it's always so far behind it's not even worth using if you're on AMD. Thankfully they've realized this after so many years and are releasing an EDGE iso with updated packages and kernel and LMDE is getting a version upgrade.
Ubuntu. I can't stand the way Canonical always decides they know better than everyone else so they reinvent the wheel, only to abandon it two years later. Diversity is good but the history of Ubuntu is littered with garbage that was forced on users and then abandoned.
I've had nothing but problems with Ubuntu. There's always some random crash that I don't know what it is but I get a pop up. Sometimes you think you're installing from apt but it secretly is running snap commands.
The OS should never hide things from me. I'm the user and I'm root.
If I wanted an operating system to be sneaky and do things behind my back I'll go to Windows.
I used Ubuntu for years, but the forcing of snap really killed it for me.
Ubuntu used to be synonymous with stability and compatibility. It was always a little bloated and slower than a bunch of others. But that was the price for stability....
It is probably still stable but compatibility has taken a back seat. This is what really annoyed me enough to switch.
I'm on Mint now, it is really nice. Flatpak is much better than Snap, my only real issue is the MASSIVE size of flatpak downloads.
Anything that includes more software than necessary for the system I want. If I need Steam, I'm gonna install it myself.
That's why I don't run one of those many downstream distros that mainly change appearances or improve little things like GUI driver managers etc. For some people that's the reason to use those distros, I might just to look how they achieve the particular feature (e.g. skin, config).
But in general there aren't really distros I don't like, but many which I prefer. Debian, Fedora, Arch, NixOS are all great, especially the more community run distros.
I am growing to dislike Ubuntu.
Simply because its so old, that anytime I try to find a solution to a problem, I'm wading through 15 years of shit, 99% of which isnt relevant anymore due to age/depreciation.
I can find faults in any of them, but mostly hate working with Redhat/CentOS/Fedora. Strongly prefer Debian over Ubuntu, and I strongly prefer Gentoo over Arch. SUSE is an unknown, not sure about that one.
I have a fondness for BSD, if that matters.
Out of all the distros that I've tried, probably Manjaro. The distro itself is ok, I don't like how kind of bloated the default installation is, but it's not too bad.
However what really pisses me off,among their numerous other controversies, was when they replaced perfectly functional open source apps with proprietary ones...twice. Though the former has since been reversed.
Manjaro feels like a bit of a mess to me and always ends up with problems.
Ubuntu releases too many buggy updates and dumps their idiosyncratic tastes in software on everyone whether people like it or not.
Ubuntu. It's violating many rules of freedom, and just isn't good. Their DE spins aren't good, snaps aren't good
Redhat. Wouldn't touch it at this point. All of my servers are Debian.
Manjaro. Team is really sketch.
For me, it's Ubuntu as well. Canonical continuously integrates stuff to make the whole distribution more complex and hard to maintain. Without going into much detail, Ubuntu always tries to do things where there is a good standardized way different. Why the heck do we need yet another containerized GUI application environment (I'm looking at you, Snap!); Why do you develop lxd, when there is systemd-nspawn, docker and podman?!
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