My Linux from Scratch install. It was built by a moron.
I spent the last 10 mins reading all the comments and I think we managed to shit on all the distros available.
That’s the Linux community I love, good job people <3Manjaro because it is a bait and switch trap. Seems really polished and user friendly. You will find out eventually it is a system destroying time-bomb and a poorly managed project.
Ubuntu because snaps.
The rest are all pros and cons that are different strokes for different folks.
Ubuntu: broke my LTS 20 by upgrading to LTS 22, pushes snaps and other ridiculous things over the years while offering relatively little value these days
I absolutely hated myself after installing Arch on one of my machines.
Then I discovered EndeavourOS… I still hate myself but at least my laptop works now.
Ubuntu - It was my first distro and I loved it for many years after 6.06. However, it slowly shifted from a very community focused distro (“Linux for human beings” was the original slogan) to a very corporate distro with lots of in-house bullshit, CLAs, and partially-closed projects that seems to focus on profit and business over actual human beings. I correlate this move to around the time when it became purple rather than brown. Snap sucks, Mir sucks, Unity sucks, integrating Amazon and music store paid bullshit sucks. Just no. Move to Debian.
Manjaro - It’s Arch, but with incompetence!
Red Hat - Do you enjoy paying licensing fees for a Linux distro that very likely violates the open source licenses it uses? RHEL is for you! Just remember not to share the code! Sharing is most certainly NOT caring!
RHEL code is available with git. Stop this FUD.
If that were true then none of this would be news. The CentOS Stream code is available to the public on git, but not the RHEL code. If the RHEL code was available to the public the outrage would have no reason to exist.
Even if paying customers have access to the RHEL code via git, they are forbidden from redistributing it (which is allowed by the FOSS licenses that code is under) or else the customers lose their license. This does not qualify as the code being available in my opinion, and in the opinion of the vast majority of the FOSS community.
Saying everything is fine and dandy in the RHEL world is FUD.
You’re going to get a lot of comments about Ubuntu and snaps. Definitely one of the reasons I switched away from it.
For the uninitiated, as someone who’s looking to move from Windows to Linux and Ubuntu is probably my first choice, can you share what’s not to like about this?
Edit - insightful answers. Thank you
Performance and functionality.
When I click the Firefox icon, I expect Firefox to open. Like, right away.
When Ubuntu switched it to a snap, there was a noticeable load time. I’d click the icon and wait. In the background the OS was mounting a snap as a virtual volume or something, and loading the sandboxed app from that. It turned my modern computer with SSD into an old computer with a HDD. Firefox gets frequent updates, so the snap would be updated frequently, requiring a remount/reload every update.
Ubuntu tried this with many stock apps (like Calculator), but eventually rolled things back since so many people complained about the obvious performance issues.
I’m talking about literally waiting 10X the time for something to load as a snap than it did compared to a “regular” app.
The more apps you have as snaps, the more things have to be mounted/attached and slowly loaded. This also use to clutter up the output when listing mounted devices.
The Micropolis (GPL SimCity) snap loads with read-only permissions. i.e., you cannot save. There are no permission controls for write access (its snap permissions are only for audio). Basically, the snap was configured wrong and you can never save your game.
I had purged snapd from my system and added repos to get “normal” versions of software, but eventually some other package change would happen and snapd would get included with routine updates.
I understand the benefits of something like Snaps and Flatpaks - but you cannot deny that there are negatives. I thought Linux was about choice. I’ve been administering a bunch of Ubuntu systems at work for well over a decade, and I don’t like what the platform has been becoming.
Also, instead of going with an established solution (flatpak), Ubuntu decided to create a whole new problem (snap) and basically contributes to a splitting of the community. Which do you support? Which gets more developer focus to fix and improve things?
You don’t have to take my word for any of this. A quick Google search will yield many similar complaints.
For context:
Snaps are a way to build applications so that they can run on any platform with one build method. It makes it easier for developers to publish their apps across multiple different Linux distro without having to worry about dependency issues.
Snaps have been very poorly received by the community, one of the largest complaints is that a snap program with take 5-10 seconds to start, where as the same program without snap will start instantly.
Ubuntu devs have been working for years to optimize them, but it’s a complex problem and while they’ve made some improvements, it’s slow going. While this has been going on, Ubuntu is slowly doubling down more and more on snaps, such as replacing default apps with their snap counterparts.
On the other hand, other methods like flatpak exist, and are generally more liked by the community.
This has led to a lot of Ubuntu users feeling unheard as their feedback is ignored.
One word: snapd
If you like the idea of ubuntu, but wish to avoid ubuntu, you might want to check out Linux Mint.
Arch, I want to get some work done not save 3 extra CPU cycles on boot.
I thought that’s gentoo.
