Long story short, I have a desktop with Fedora, lovely, fast, sleek and surprisingly reliable for a near rolling distro (it failed me only once back around Fedora 34 or something where it nuked Grub). Tried to install on a 2012 i7 MacBook Air… what a slog!!! Surprisingly Ubuntu runs very smooth on it. I have been bothering all my friends for years about moving to Fedora (back then it was because I hated Unity) but now… I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but… Christ, it does run well! In fairness all my VMs are running DietPi (a slimmed version of Ubuntu) and coming back to the APT world feels like coming back home.
On the other end forcing myself to be on Fedora allows me to stay on the DNF world that is compatible with Amazon Linux etc (which I use for work), it has updated packages, it is nice and clean…. Argh, don’t know how to decide!
Thoughts?
I am not in the mood for Debian. I like the Mint approach but I am not a fan of slow rolling releases and also would like to keep myself as close as upstream as possible, the Debian version is the only one that seems reliable enough but, again, it is Debian, the packages are “old”. Pop Os and similar are two hops away from upstream and so I’d rather not.
Is Snap really that bad?
Edit: thank you all for sharing your experience !
People dont hate on ubuntu cause its inherently bad. They hate on it because its a corporate distro and they do some questionable stuff sometimes. The OS runs fine.
Why not debian unstable? Its better than ubuntu in pretty much every way imo. Somewhat less user friendly i guess.
Is Debian unstable really unstable or is just like… Ubuntu?
It’s unstable in the sense that it doesn’t stay the same for a long time. Stable is the release that will essentially stay the same until you install a different release.
Sid is the kid next door (Iirc) from Toy Story who would melt and mutilate toys for fun. He may have been a different kind of unstable.
Neither is unstable like an old windows pc.
I still think Ubuntu is the best option (particularly if you want to use the non-LTS releases)
Having said that I do hate snaps and also dislike flatpaks. So what I do is just use the Firefox deb package from the PPA and the chromium package from Linux Mint. Oh, and I have actually replaced ubuntu-advantage-tools with a no-op dummy package.
I’m pretty happy using Ubuntu. Its got a decent UI and works well enough with little fuss. As much as I enjoy tinkering, I use my Ubuntu machines for work and I really only need something simple that works out of the box.
I avoid Ubuntu because Canonical has a history of going their own way alone rather than collaborating on universal standards. For instance, when the X devs decided the successor to X11 needed to be a complete redesign from scratch companies like RedHat, Collabora, Intel, Google, Samsung, and more collaborated to build Wayland. However, Canonical announced Mir, and they went their own way alone.
When Gnome3 came out it was very controversial and this spawned alternatives such as Cinnamin, MATE, and Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. Unity was the only Linux desktop, before or since, to include sponsored bloatware apps installed by default, and it also sold user search history to advertisers.
Then, there’s snap. While Flatpak matured and becoame the defacto standard distro-agnostic package system, Canonical once again went their own way alone by creating snap.
I’m not an expert on Ubuntu or the Linux community, I’ve just been around long enough to see Canonical stir up controversy over and over by going left when everyone else goes right, failing after a few years, and wasting thousands of worker hours in the process.
You’re not wrong, but there’s also value in exploring different ways to do similar things. That’s what’s great about Linux.
Some of Canonical’s efforts may lead to failure, but that doesn’t mean they are a waste.
Long time since I used Ubuntu, remember updates breaking network twice… Peppermint OS, Debian(and devuan if you don’t like systemd) based. all the important bits (not arch level) but nothing more. Rolling, Runs on 1 GB ram. Haven’t distro hopped anymore since I found it.
Stable base , extra on top
“Everything you need and nothing you don’t."
Is it based on debian unstable or testing?
Bookworm stable. https://peppermintos.com/about/
Snaps are centralised packaging, a’la Apple App Store or Google Play. Now if someone forked snapd, added third party repo and made It so you could select which repo is the main one, that’d be a start.
But as long as Canonical commits to a centralised form of distribution with no third party support I’m going to advise desktop users to stay away from Ubuntu.
