2d ago

Every now and again a voice comes into my head telling me to install Arch.

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185 comments

Unpopular opinion: I love Ubuntu. No, I don't use snaps at all. I have an Nvidia GPU and it's literally the only OS working out of the box. Yes I tried Debian, I'm too busy to fiddle with drivers. No, I can't get rid of the GPU, I depend on it for critical workflows. I love the minimalism of Gnome. Never liked KDE/Cinnamon honestly, they're too busy for my tastes. For 15 years I've tried other distros and I'm always back on Ubuntu. I'll ride the purple penguin to my grave.
Downvotes only please.
- It certainly seems like public opinion changed the tast ten years or so. As an ubuntu user, could you confirm or deny these claims I've seen? One is that firefox is a snap even if you try to install it with apt. Another is that they show ads to get paid ubuntu in the terminal output?
  
  I can confirm them both. I'm considering moving to Debian because of this.
  You can uninstall snap and use flatpak for those apps but it was a slap in the face when Firefox suddenly was replaced by a snap through apt
  
  Oh that's a bit underhand, especially when they must be well aware that snap can be unpopular.
  
  If you really like Ubuntu, Linux mint Ubuntu version comes with the snap defaults removed.
  
  I really liked Ubuntu back when the color scheme was more brown/orange, it seemed so friendly. The last ten years I've been on Debian though, but LMDE seems interesting.
  
  LMDE is great, it's what I recommend to all new Linux users. Lots of tiny things that remove friction, like not requiring Sudo for apt and showing stars when typing a password.
  
  I with they would align LMDE with regular Mint in one aspect though, that there would be an out of the box btrfs layout that matches what Timeshift expects (iirc @ and @home?) which is different from how debian and therefore LMDE sets it up automagically. Maybe this has changed in recent years.
  
  You got me there, firefox is the only snap I really use. Probably can be removed and replaced with apt version but honestly I don't care much. I tend to clean reinstall frequently and I leave as much in the default setup as I can.
  If it works, it works. But it does cause me to have another step to update everything, which is slightly annoying. And yes I don't like Canonical's insistence on snaps. I just try to avoid them really.
  Ads, certainly never seen them.
  
  True and true.
  If you do a minimal install, it will still force apt to install snapd and snaps for certain packages, including Firefox. It can be worked around, but it’s very hard to keep snaps out of your system. This is why I dumped Ubuntu and never looked back. Fedora is my happy place, now.
- Joke's on you, downvotes aren't a thing on my instance, you'll take my upvote and you'll like it
- I tried
  I cannot downvote a GNOME lover
- I've always admired Ubuntu for making installing nVidia driver pretty painless.
  I don't know nVidia gpu you have, but I'm looking at immutable distros and I found Aurora, (based on Fedora Kinonite). Before I even downloaded the iso, they asked if I had an nVidia chipset and which one. I simply selected the driver for my older 1650 chipset and they automatically added the correct driver into the iso. I installed it and everything was working properly on first boot.
  It was without a doubt the most painless nVidia driver install I've ever had on ANY OS.
- I've had 0 problems out of Debian since bookworm.
  That said, I daily drive Nix and use Ubuntu LTS for servers because I'm too lazy to keep up with it otherwise.
  
  I thought Canonical got on board with spying ages ago. May I do not recall correctly.
  
  Historically they have had a lot of funding problems. There's been at least two or three times where they've partnered with somebody for marketing opportunies. And the egregious things were over a decade ago now. They decide to market with somebody, put an ad in there default desktop, or install a default application, or collect user data from dash, being open source it's been noticed immediately and they end up rolling it back. Hell, it's the reason half the forks exist.
  Sure, people still get edgy about everything they do at this point but realistically they've not been all that bad. But I wouldn't trust them with closed source for a second.
  At current I think they're only collecting some super basic user information and it is opt out. And to me from a server standpoint I don't really care what they're doing at the desktop level. I don't even really care about snaps because I'm not installing anything on that box that would use snaps. It's like firewall, kubernetes, and some monitoring tools. They're not doing command line spying on my kubectl.
  They're a good choice for a headless server. They've got a nice long LTS with support for years. Their agile on security fixes. And they keep their repos pretty current.
  My second choice would be Debian. They have an LTS service where people are only encouraged to pay. But imo their repos aren't anywhere near as up to date.
- Nobara works ootb too if you ever want to try a fedora spin. they even have a separate installer for nvidia users.
- Trying to help with the downvote situation. Glad you decided on a distro that works for you and you're not succumbing to the pressure.

185 comments