I have been not recommending Ubuntu to people because of obvious reasons (the Amazon search integration and snaps, mainly). The reason I am posting this is because someone I know mentioned that they are considering Ubuntu. They have a degree in cs and generally are competent with computers, but didn’t like mint when they tried it. I would like to know a few things, since I haven’t looked into Ubuntu in a while:
Has anything changed about snap? I know people didn’t like it at first, especially the proprietary server, but I don’t think they will care about that and I mainly just want to know if it will eat all their RAM or something.
Have they made any changes in their management that may make sure there won’t be another Amazon search thing?
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.
Edit: The person will be 100’s of miles away so helping them with issues will be hard, and Ubuntu LTS should be stable. Plus, basically everything that “supports” linux but doesn’t really usually supports Ubuntu. I do really see where they’re coming from, but want to know if it has a major potential to backfire on them and if they might be better off with Fedora.
Honestly I am a huge fan of raw Debian it’s just that I got a new laptop and not all distros have the drivers for it. Even Ubuntu 22.x could not get the audio going but 24.04 boom it all just worked. So I’ve been debating with myself as to whether or not I should give Debian a try on it. I have a few older laptops on which I put Debian and I quite enjoy it. It’s solid and not trying to push the envelope and I’m very fond of that approach. But I’ve also spent a lot of time getting everything setup and just right. I’ve customized the ever-living shit out of the desktop and the appearance settings, widgets, app setups, a bunch of sites I nativefier-ed, and a million other things. So the prospect of redoing it all is daunting.
If a time should come when I feel it’s worth the effort I definitely would.
VLC media player also has this nonsense that their latest stuff seems to only be available as snap lately.
I just had to change a few things - KDE, dark mode, X11 when I couldn’t get screen power off to work under Wayland, and it’s basically good to go. There might be a few other things I changed, but in general out of the box was pretty close to what I wanted. It even installed the AMD driver for my graphics card.
Oh yeah and even with all the drivers working I still had problem with power management. I did read that of all the things it’s probably the most problematic in Linux to get it working properly that often it can’t. Once the system went to sleep it would not wake, had to hard-reboot. However, it’s a laptop and already uses very little so I’m not overly concerned. So my lid close action is just black screen. Actually it has some benefits in that I can close the lid and running operations will finish.
That reminds me - for my Lenovo laptop, no issues at all with suspend and resume (just like Kubuntu). But my desktop was going to sleep when I first installed Debian, and it was NOT waking up gracefully; in fact I had to reboot it each time. Since I didn’t want it to go to sleep at all, I didn’t attempt to diagnose the issue beyond turning off the suspend mode in power management.