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.

  • @cevn
    10•1 month ago

    I used Ubuntu for 10 ish years before moving to Fedora. I switched because the Kde packages were seemingly years out of date with no idea of when the new versions would hit the Apt repos.

    Seems like a lot of Ubuntu packages are old compared to Fedora since I’ve experienced way fewer bugs now adays.

    Snaps were bad but I never was forced to use them, had it purged and disabled the whole time.

    • @[email protected]
      3•1 month ago

      Completely off topic, but: I’ve been trying Fedora (KDE spin) for a few months now, and I’m flabbergasted at how unusable the distro version (not the Flatpak) of Firefox is. I think it’s a codec issue as I’ve checked Firefox is running in wayland mode, but:

      • video calls (Zoom, Slack) don’t work.
      • despite installing every codec I could find through Fedy, a package manager for non-free Fedora repos.

      Meanwhile, the Microsoft Edge flatpak works flawlessly.

      Are you using a flatpak browser too? If not, how did you get your browser to work?

      I really like Fedora otherwise: up-to-date kernel and modern (very efficiently stored) packages, but properly tested with major releases, btrfs and systemd by default and commonality with RHEL is useful at work.

      But these codec issues are pushing me back to Arch…

      • @cevn
        3•1 month ago

        I remember some video sites not loading and having to load a non free codec. Other than that I am using librewolf which works but havent tried teams calls and such.

      • @[email protected]
        2•1 month ago

        yet to use any OS where the default firefox install was good for too much, other than using it to install a clean firefox directly from mozilla

        • @[email protected]
          1•1 month ago

          Distro version of Firefox worked wonderfully for me on EndeavourOS (Arch repo / Wayland / Sway) and Pop!_OS 22.04 (Ubuntu base / X11 / GNOME)