I’m done with Ubuntu :: ./techtipsy

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I liked Ubuntu. For a very long time, it was the sensible default option.
Around 2016, I used the Ubuntu GNOME flavor, and after they ditched the Unity desktop environment, GNOME became the
default
option.

I was really happy with it, both for work and personal computing needs.

Estonian ID card software was also officially supported on Ubuntu,
which made Ubuntu a good choice for family members.

But then something changed.

Upgrades suck

Like many Ubuntu users, I stuck to the long-term support releases and upgraded every two years to the next major
version. There was just one tiny little issue: every upgrade broke something.

Usually it was a relatively minor issue, with some icons, fonts or themes being a bit funny. Sometimes things went
completely wrong.

The worst upgrade was the one I did on my mothers’ laptop. During the upgrade process from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04,
everything blew up spectacularly. The UI froze, the machine was completely unresponsive. After a 30-minute wait and a
forced restart later, the installation was absolutely fucked. In frustration, I ended up installing Windows
so
that I don’t have to support Ubuntu.

Another family member, another upgrade. This is one that they did themselves on Lubuntu 18.04, and they upgraded to the
latest version. The result: Firefox shortcuts stopped working, the status bar contained duplicate icons, and random
errors popped up after logging
in. After making sure that ID card software works on Fedora 40,
I installed that instead. All they need is a working browser, and that’s too difficult for Ubuntu to handle.

Snaps ruined Ubuntu

Snaps. I hate them.

They sound great in theory, but the poor implementation and heavy-handed push by Canonical has been a mess.

Snaps auto-update by default. Great for security, but horrible for users who want to control what their personal
computer is doing.

Snaps get forced upon users as more and more system components are forcibly switched from Debian-based packages to
Snaps, which breaks compatibility, functionality and introduces a lot of new issues. You can upgrade your Ubuntu
installation and then discover that your browser is now contained within a Snap, the desktop shortcut for it doesn’t
work and your government ID card does not work for logging in to your bank any longer.

Snaps also destroy productivity. A colleague was struggling to get any work done because the desktop environment on
their Ubuntu installation was flashing certain UI elements, being unresponsive and blocking them from doing any work.
Apparently the whole GNOME desktop environment is a Snap now, and that lead to issues.

The fix was super easy, barely an inconvenience:

  • roll back to the previous version of the GNOME snap
  • restart
  • update to the latest version again
  • restart
  • restart again

What was the issue?

Absolutely no clue, but a days’ worth of developers’ productivity was completely wasted.

Some of these issues have probably been fixed by now, but if I executed migration projects at my day job with a
similar track record, I would be fired.

Snaps done right: Flatpak

Snaps can be implemented in a way that doesn’t suck for end users. It’s called a Flatpak.

They work reasonably well, you can update them whenever you want and they are optional. Your Firefox installation
won’t suddenly turn into a Flatpak overnight.

On the Steam Deck, Flatpaks are the main distribution method for user-installed apps
and I don’t mind it at all. The
only issue is the software selection, not every app is available as a Flatpak just yet.

Consider Fedora

Fedora works fine.

It’s not perfect, but I like it.

At this point I’ve used it for longer than Ubuntu
and unless IBM ruins it for all of us, I think it
will be a perfectly cromulent distro go get work done on.

Hopefully it’s not too late for Canonical to reconsider their approach to building a Linux distro.



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