linuxmemes

Don't forget Mint.

I’m going to preface this with saying whatever works for you.

It’s 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, that’s their business, right?)

Secondly, Ubuntu tends snoop on you, and certain decisions by canonical raises alarms.

Finally, fuck snap.

Edit: if all you’ve 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 that’s it.

snaps.

oh, and that time that Canonical put Amazon telemetry in the default search application.

oh, and how they just bundle up "bleeding edge" stuff from a year ago and ship it with it's associated bugs.

It's been a few years since I tried but it just really turned me off.

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.

To expand on the hate of snaps:

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.