I installed Arch on my ThinkPad because.............................................................................................. uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh.................... I had an Arch sticker and I felt like I couldn't use it if I didn't use Arch.
Everyone has some reasons for their favorite distro.
Fair enough, but Mint gives you the more up to date base of Ubuntu and some QoL tools that Debian doesn't have. If you prefer Debian, then use it. I just feel Mint is better for beginners or people who want an easier time with less tinkering.
But, as this month's chair of the of the Linux User Group for Letting Everyone Know We Hate Snaps (LUG LEKWHS), I want to clarify that we don't have a problem with Ubuntu users.
No FLOSS loving Linux user is dead to me, not even the GNOME project team, and frankly I suspect it's noobies and non-users pushing these memes lately.
I agree. I don't think I've ever actually received or witnessed the hate that the memes espouse as the norm in the Linux community. I've seen some "oh really, I had trouble with that so I use blank instead" or maybe even "you should try blank" (mostly when people ask though). I think most of us are too busy hating Windows to really truly hate other linux distros. We have our favorites and we will happily share that with anyone that asks, and many that don't.
I've tried to stop talking about it all the time to friends and family as I don't want to scare them off, but I am just using it everyday in front of them and showing them that I don't have infinitely more problems than they do... Hoping it just seeps in via osmosis and at some point one too many "hey, you should buy a new computer, windows 10 is going end of life soon you know" pop-ups will set off that magical chain reaction.
I met a friend of a friend at an event and somehow PCs and Linux came up. He asked if I'm a Linux user (which I like to think you can't immediately tell). I assume to build some nerd cred. I said "yeah, I technically have Linux with me right now". He asked what I meant, so I pulled out the Steam Deck. He was unfamiliar and I briefly explained.
When he heard it's a commercial product (obviously), he actually pretended to faint. And then kept acting as if I had personally insulted him, not in a joking way. I had clearly failed the purity test in that moment.
It was a strange experience. Not even in hackerspaces I'd ever had a conversation like that. So these people are rare but they do exist.
honestly if I heard someone say "I technically have linux with me right now" I would expect them to pull out an Android phone and say that Android is based on the Linux kernel (it is, its just not what anyone means when they say 'linux', its a pretty good example of how 'linux' refers to the OS and not the kernel)
Iβm going to preface this with saying whatever works for you.
Itβs not really about difficulty for most people.
Canonical (the people who manage Ubuntu,) has made some unfortunate decisions.
First, and I feel this has always been true, they approach their users with the assumption that they are in fact idiots. Microsoft has the same design philosophy, and it makes things much harder than it needs to be. (Some people may be idiots, but if they want to wipe the entire drive, thatβs their business, right?)
Secondly, Ubuntu tends snoop on you, and certain decisions by canonical raises alarms.
Finally, fuck snap.
Edit: if all youβve used is Ubuntu, get yourself a moderately large usb stick and try a few others out. No need to remove Ubuntu to try a new flavor. Linux is like ice cream. Find your favorite and stab anyone who disagrees with you. I mean, Stan it. Yeah thatβs it.
I'm sure there are as many reasons as there are people who dislike Ubuntu, but here's a few:
They injected internet ads into search
To many outside of the community if they have any familiarity with Linux on a desktop, it's with Ubuntu which kinda places it in a position to newcomers as being Linux itself rather than one particular flavor
It is very opinionated about look and feel and usability: i.e. their custom launcher and Snaps
It's popular
It has a reasonably large user base so there's more opportunity for people to find things to nitpick over.
Overall it's fine. I've used Ubuntu, Mint, Puppy, DSL, Arch (btw), Fedora, and Debian. I can do pretty much anything I need to on any of them. I've got my preferences about the correct balance between useability, upgrade schedule, and customizability.
They're a packaging solution for apps and dependencies. They're apparently quite comfortable for app developers to use too. There was a hiccup where some apps really struggled to run well as snaps, but AFAIK that was fixed.
The common issues are snapcraft being the only repository and the methods of pushing them:
Snapcraft is where the packages are stored and loaded from, and it's a closed-source repo hosted and controlled by Canonical, with no option to configure snap to use a different source. That has advantages for security, if you trust Canonical to vet and take responsibility for the packages on their system, but some people chafe at that lack of control. Compare to flatpak, where you can add arbitrary repos, so any distro vendor can have their own set of packages and versions they've vetted for stability and compatibility, but if I want a different version than my vendor maintains in their remote, I can use a different remote for certain apps instead.
The second issue is that the classical apt system, which used to install .deb packages, was utilised to install snaps instead, so you'd run apt install package and expect a .deb to be installed, but instead it just downloads a script that runs snap install package and you get a snap instead, which is particularly annoying when you previously had it as a deb and it suddenly gets replaced. The argument here is a smooth transition to the "better" system, on the premise that snaps are better and the assumption that users won't care or notice. In some cases (the hiccups mentioned earlier) that just wasn't the case and people got frustrated, but even if it worked, some people (including me) take issue with expecting a deb and getting a snap - if I want a snap, I'll use snap, and if your deb is deprecated, offer me to switch instead of silently installing the alternate source instead.
Linux distros are just the new "101 flavors of Protestantism," complete with radical zealots who believe you will go to Hell for choosing the wrong one.
I think I have like 4 different distros near me at any given time now that I think about it. A Debian one for Minecraft and some other game servers, my windows PC, a Mac for music stuff, and my arch laptop, I guess the steam deck technically counts too. Even at work I use all three occasionally.
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