Not that this is a surprise to some of us.

  • ExFed@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    For those of us still naive … Why does Lemmy say “Ubuntu bad” now?

    • kadu@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Two things, one they’ll openly admit, one they’ll pretend is not a factor but it’s the main reason.

      The first are snaps. Snaps are a way of package distribution created by Canonical with the goal of solving a few problems on Linux: snaps allow a piece of software to be installed bundling the exact dependencies it wants, run inside a sandboxed container, and be updated with ease regardless of the rest of the system. If you’re familiar with Flatpaks, you might think they sound similar - that’s because they are, the difference being snaps came first and are hosted by Canonical, while Flatpaks came later and are hosted by the community.

      Snaps, like all similar packages on Linux, suffered with slower app launch speeds, issues with drivers or other system components not interacting correctly with the sandbox, and so on. Those issues have been mostly fixed, and snaps are loved by people who use Canonical’s solutions to workstations and servers.

      “Snap bad too slow, canonical le evil” stayed though. It’s worth noting that while enabled by default, snaps can be disabled. So that’s reason number one.

      Reason number two is simple: Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro for desktop usage, and the most often recommended for beginners.

      This means Ubuntu goes against the “we aren’t normies” mentality that dominates a portion of the Linux community. It’s hard to feel like a super genius for using Linux when your neighbor who can barely understand a keyboard can simply install Ubuntu in an afternoon and everything works great. Ubuntu being the home for newcomers also means said newcomers will often appear in Linux forums asking for help, and lots of tutorials are written for Ubuntu - which angers users from other distros.

      So that’s it. That’s why Lemmy hates Ubuntu. Every other argument like “oh no Ubuntu is too closely tied to Canonical’s objectives” or “Oh no, Ubuntu is too opinionated and will change tradition in other to appease newcomers” could be applied to a million other distros, but you won’t see people complaining about them.

      • Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        The problem is also that the hosting software for snaps, the backend that canonical has is P R O P R I E T A R Y and that’s one of the main gripes.

      • virtualbriefcase@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I’ll add one more grip: Amazon integration. It’s been resolved for like 7 years now, but I still hold it against them a bit for placing Amazon search results in my desktop all those years back. Not that I don’t have an Ubuntu server running as we speak, but it still does taint them a tad in my eyes (and probably acts as an anachronism to the “it’s a corporate distro” theme of dislike around here).

      • ExFed@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Ahh, okay, so nothing new under the sun: Hipsters hate normies and September never ended.

        Although I’m under the impression that Mint and Pop have taken a bite out of the “beginner desktop” market, Ubuntu is most of what I observe in the office when everybody else is booting Windows.

        I can understand selecting for novelty; I’m usually in that camp. But novelty shouldn’t come at the expense of an argument to IT departments that they should support at least one Linux distro.

    • GravelPieceOfSword@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Proprietary snap store backend that is controlled by Canonical: that’s it.

      I used Ubuntu for years: installed it for family and friends. I moved away around a year ago.

      Moving packages like Firefox to snap was what first started annoying me.

      If the backend was open source, and the community could have hosted their own (like how flatpak repositories can be), I might have been slightly more forgiving.

      Did a quick Google to find if someone had elaborated, here’s a good one:

      • cmhe@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Snap is just one case where Ubuntu is annoying.

        It is also a commercial distribution. If you ever used a community distribution like Arch, Gentoo or even Debian, then you will notice that they much more encourage participation. You can contribute your ideas and work without requiring to sign any CLAs.

        Because Ubuntu wants to control/own parts of the system, they tend to, rather then contributing to existing solutions, create their own, often subpar, software, that requires CLAs. See upstart vs openrc or later systemd, Mir vs Wayland, which they both later adopted anyway, Unity vs Gnome, snap vs flatpak, microk8 vs k3s, bazar vs git or mercurial, … The NIH syndrom is pretty strong in Ubuntu. And even if Ubuntu came first with some of these solutions, the community had to create the alternative because they where controlling it.