Dear Ubuntu…

Dear Ubuntu,

I hope this letter finds you well. I want to start by saying that our time together has been one of creativity and entertainment, a time in which you gave me the tools to develop a new career, to run a small electronics business, make fun things, and to write several thousand articles for Hackaday and other publications, but for all that it’s sadly time for our ways to part. The magic that once brought us together has faded, and what remains is in danger of becoming a frustration.

In our early days as an item you gave me for the first time a Linux distro that was complete, fast, and easy to use without spending too much time at the CLI or editing config files to make things happen; you gave me a desktop that was smooth and uncluttered, and you freed me from all those little utilities that were required to make Windows usable. You replaced the other distros I’d been using, you dual-booted with my Windows machines, and pretty soon you supplanted the Microsoft operating system entirely.

Ubuntu and me and a trusty Dell laptop, Oxford Hackspace, 2017.
Me and Ubuntu in 2017, good times.

We’ve been together for close to two decades now, and in that time we’ve looked each other in the eye across a variety of desktop and laptop computers. My trusty Dell Inspiron 640 ran you for over a decade through several RAM, HDD, and SSD upgrades, and provided Hackaday readers with the first few years of my writing. Even the Unity desktop couldn’t break our relationship, those Linux Mint people weren’t going to tear us asunder! You captured my text, edited my videos and images, created my PCBs and CAD projects, and did countless more computing tasks. Together we made a lot of people happy, and for that I will always be grateful.

An Ubunto wait to quit or force quit dialogue
This dialogue has been an unwelcome guest rather a lot of late.

But over the last few years, I’ve noticed that our relationship has slowly become one less of harmony and more of frustration. Like middle-aged spread, you became progressively more bloated, your moments of freezing became obvious and inconvenient, and the delays to open some indispensable pieces of software became too long to simply explain as the result of having other apps running in the background. Our once close relationship has become strained by endless waiting for Snap packaged applications to load, and by my USB peripherals mysteriously refusing to talk to applications they’ve been used with for years.

I understand that Snap is meant to release us from dependency hell and I know why you’ve put each one in its own little sandbox, but honestly, even ChromeOS running a Linux application in its virtual machine is faster than this, and it doesn’t require everything to come from one distribution hub, or mess with access to hardware. I need my machine’s performance back, I need using a peripheral to stop being a lottery. I need more, Ubuntu, I need a distro that understands me and works with me, not against me!

I’ve tried to work around my frustrations, tried to convince myself that maybe if I had a faster laptop we could be happy together, but I can’t help thinking about the older generation PC in my hackerspace running Arch that Just Works, and Just Works without having to wait several minutes for Prusa Slicer to load. I realise that I can’t go on living a lie, I need to move on and find a distro that gives me the performance and stability I crave.

I need you to know that I didn’t jump to this conclusion in an instant. I kept the faith, I kept hoping every fresh distribution update would fix your shortcomings, and I even defended you when confronted with the other, leaner, distros my friends use. But I sense we’ve passed the point of no return, and a relationship built on frustration is no way to live. Let’s remember the good times, writing an article lying in a hammock at BornHack, or cracking how to number-crunch millions of words of corpus text on a mundane laptop. We traveled a long way together, and for that I’m grateful.

The transition will be painless enough, I won’t even uninstall you. Instead I have a new SSD in the mail, and I’ll transfer you in your drive to your own caddy. We’ll still see each other from time to time, and maybe if you can Snap out of your midlife crisis one day we’ll get back together. Meanwhile, thanks for all the good things you allowed me to do over the years, and I hope your maintainers can help you through your current difficulties.

Yours,

Jenny List

280 thoughts on “Dear Ubuntu…

  1. I was a buntu user from the early days of warty up until Ibex… and then I took a very short hop journey and landed on Arch after testing roughly 10 other distros. I’ve been very happy with the move. I never had to deal with snap… but it seemed the buntus were getting too bloated for a Linux distro even in late 2008.

    1. Yeah the OS is the one with the midlife crises…lol this reads like someone on their deathbed patting themselves on the back for their amazing journey in life before seeing themselves out.

  2. I remember years ago running WIN-95 on a DX4-100 I had MOD-PLUG-Tracker installed, and that little 100MHz processor could assemble 8 channels of music from samples in real time. I eventually got a copy of SmartSuite 97, and it had all the functionality I use from office products today, AND it had a database that allowed me to easily store instruction text with various true-type fonts in various sizes, formatted to fit in the window allowed in a form letter at work. It seemed much snappier on an early IDE hard drive than the distro I use these days.
    I also used Mandrake 7. Back then it was snappy, and aside from not having the user friendly database, it did all the stuff that I need in an office suite today. I think that was back in the days of a single core running at 200-300 MHz.
    I suspect that back then, with small hard drives and limited RAM memory, everyone wrote software in compiled C and tried to keep it small. Relying on interpreted languages, and ignoring bloat may be the main reason we have software that’s sluggish even though it has access to two 2 GHz cores (I know many of you have much more than that.)
    I understand that a modern distro has more going on in the background than Mandrake 7 did, but I believe that the goal of keeping it compiled and small could probably cut our size and speed bloat in half.

    1. From limited benchmarking, and mostly subjective experience: Arch is about 20% faster than Ubuntu, and Gentoo is about 40% faster. (Arch downloads arch specific binaries, and Gentoo lets you optimize EVERYTHING especially for your processor… you can download binaries too, but a complete recompile takes a day or two.)

  3. I started with Ubuntu – but abandoned it after the unity debacle. I distrohopped a lot and settled with Kubuntu. Opensuse was great – but something went awry and couldn’t fix it. Perhaps it was the AMD Ryzen 7 at the time, but I moved on. I installed the latest Ubuntu when Windows 10 or 11 won’t run on a older laptop, so installed Ubuntu. I kind of like it. I’m not keen on snap from what I’m reading here, so I hope Kubuntu doesn’t go that way. Oddly enough my home pc mostly runs win 10, due to photography programs that I like. Work however is mainly Kubuntu, as almost everything I need is in Kubuntu.

    1. Linux Mint, ahh yes. A lovely distro. It actually loaded the correct Nvidia kernel first time on. I love it. It is on one of my favorite home brews. I have been using opensuse since 1998. I have agonized for hours, days, years to get the video running with Nvidia. Then I stumble through a fix! Yay! Exhilaration. Next upgrade and it’s broken again. Madness I tell you. Nouveau is OK, Wayland, meh. But I want the full power and speed that Nvidia provides. My Pi with Rapian Puppy runs well, albeit somewhat slower. I hope opensuse will fix this disaster as Linux Mint did. Until then, it is still opensuse for me.
      Dr. Rod Donovan

  4. version 12.04 was the last really good version of ubuntu, the minimal server edition has stayed OKish since..
    As someone commented above, it has become the windows (bloatware) of the linux world..

  5. It’s disappointing what Ubuntu has become recently. It started out as what seemed to be a unicorn distro and is now turned into a monstrosity of application crashes and system freezes. I’ve been using Kubuntu 22.04 for quite some time and sure enough, the stability and quality has decayed over time.

    I used Arch for a couple of years and while it was great at first, it became increasingly unstable and I gave it up in early 2022. Good timing because in mid-2022 onwards, s*** hit the fan.

    I’m currently using Fedora KDE and the lack of some multimedia codecs occasionally drives me batty. And it’s not an LTS distro.

    My next move will be either Debian 12, MX Linux 23, Spiral Linux (based on Debian 12), or LMDE 6. I stick with KDE Plasma because my primary hypervisor, VirtualBox, is a Qt application. If I have to move to another DE, then I will go with LMDE 6 because Linux Mint has always been a great distro and it does justice for Qt applications on the Cinnamon desktop. I could never figure out how to get Qt applications to use my GTK themes on any other distro no matter how much I tried, even on the GNOME desktop.

    1. EndeavourOS has been my go to since I left Ubuntu. It’s a really well packaged Arch with tooling called yay that has just installed and gotten everything working that I threw at it, right out of the box.

  6. I abandoned systemd systems in general and went to Artix, an Arch sub-distro. I had been using Gentoo for almost 10 years but couldn’t take the compiling webkit over and over, and had been using Fedora for years before that(before someone decided to remove ECC from openssl). Ubuntu never ran on my hardware well enough to keep it. I don’t even keep it around in case my Artix version dies because the Artix thumb drive does all that just fine.

  7. I thought it was just ME too! Especially since I would call myself a very long term novice with linux. I have an old pentium laptop w lubuntu 14.x/win7 that just worked when installed. For the last month I have been trying to find a distro that works on an older friends hardware (old dell vostro 220) and it works sort of, but takes 3x longer to start than the win Vista that is on it (go make a pot of coffee and drink it slow. I’ve had to download build-essentials and a usb wireless driver elsewhere to build on the machine (took it as a challenge since I had never done). So they DONT include the tools to get online or periferals running, but even when you select english, they DO install every font used in east asia/indo pacific. And it’s a dog. I realize the hardware is minimal but it exceeded min hardware and memory is 2x min. I loved win xp and 7 but I hate the whole “we own everything you do and think” premise of 10 right down to the phone like desktop and the extra steps/clicks to do the things that were as powerful yet more efficient in the older versions mentioned. I was doing this as a preview to ridding myself of MS on my much newer laptop but now…
    I am open to suggestions. I have always typed slowly due to dexterity issues, love menu driven gui vs icon, need a full featured file manager gui and i dont want to have to open a disks app to eject media, right/left click mouse menus are great…anyone have ideas?
    Jenny let us know what you decide!

    1. Take a look at Distrowatch dot org, that’s where I found EndeavourOS, which is the best packaged Arch (you don’t need to know all the random Arch commands)… just “yay -S” … or use the gui. And don’t change the installation defaults… it doesn’t run off raid out of the box, for example!

  8. I like Ubuntu. There’s some funny stuff with Snap but all you have to do is shut down everything with the word “Snap” in it in Monitor and then you can get the uploads. True, that used to be automatic, but I think there were legal issues that mandated that action. As for speed, I think Ubuntu 22.04 is just fine, even in my Windows 10 computer. I was running Linux Cinnamon Mint, but discovered that no longer received security updates. With Ubuntu I’m good to go for years. I just think that for a free OS, Ubuntu is more than satisfactory. As for CLI, don’t be afraid of it. Just follow instructions. Cut and paste is best. And avoid autoremove. That one killed my system a few weeks ago and I had to reinstall. I won’t make that mistake again. I give Ubuntu 5 stars.

  9. I can’t easily print from Chrome because it’s a Snap, and the bug breaking that has been known but unfixed for years.

    But the straw that breaks my camel’s back? “Hey, there are security updates available. Pay us if you want them.” Yeah, it’s free if you have a half dozen machines and want to register them all. I have more. I’ve paid for other Ubuntu things, but this garbage with “Ubuntu pro” and holding *security patches* hostage? Nope. Done. I’ve used Ubuntu since the second release over 20 years ago, including continuing to use it while I worked for SUSE. This is completely nacceptable.

    1. There are a series of commands in Terminal that will allow you to print from Ubuntu. It’s annoying to install, but if you do cut and paste into Terminal it doesn’t take long. I finally ordered myself to sit still through the process while listening to music. It worked.

  10. Oh, Ms Jenny, I feel your pain. I too started out with Ubuntu thinking I’ve hit pay dirt with open source “freeware,” config’d as I wanted, with stability to boot. And there was that smooth Live CD/DVD (sorry Fedora, sorry SUSE) I could pop into a new laptop I was thinking of buying, just to test it out. And being pleasantly surprised when it ran smoothly on just about anything I threw at it. (Except you, early Thinkpad T series, I’m giving you the stink eye)

    But then times changed and I was forced to use the standard, corporate issued locked down lappy and kept ubu at home. And then I got interested in 3d printing (early days) where I had to build and flash firmware, remote in to an ARM Cortex, so naturally I dusted it off, updated ubu and then…

    What happened? Ubuntu used to be fast and sleek. Ah, Unity. Damn. So after more testing I’ve switched to Debian.

    But it’s not perfect either. Two big regressions have hit USB controllers just hit recently, so it has me thinking the unthinkable… porting my python code and building drivers and services just for Windows. Yeesh.

  11. This thread has confirmed what I knew many years ago. The OS wars were over long ago for the desktop. No one cares, really we don’t care about your magic on CLI or in fact Linux as an option. It is the go to for servers and vertical markets, because it’s free, but is it? It’s always been like a bad relationship you can’t just let go of.

  12. I’m usin Lunux Mint Cinamon, which is very much as an OS shohld be. Still, some software is delivered only as SNAP -test them, throw away and try to find some other way to get work done.
    One particular program takes about three minustes to open as SNAP and about 10sec as a normal apt-packet. And the SNAP packet is huge compared to apt version
    Which reminds me about the programs in the infancy of Windows, when all programs came with all the libraries written in the executable program

  13. Getting rid of Ubuntu is always a good idea. I left it like 10 years ago and it’s only become more bloated (per what I read and the occasional virtual machine I use). What made me move was that they released a new version of the desktop manager (I think it was GNOME) that moved every new window into its own desktop? or something like that, to mimic some sort of tablet design that was truly the worst from both worlds.

    I knew I could install XFCE or whatever but I thought that if I had to keep coming up with alternatives for my software because of Canonical’s neophilia I might as well avoid Ubuntu entirely, and I moved to Fedora and later on (to try something more advanced) Gentoo. Then I realized Gentoo isn’t really that much more advanced, basically the same but compiling packages, and now I’m using and loving Debian.

  14. Snaps are pain and opposition of what well oiled machine of desktop system should be. Snapped Firefox cannot share windows or screens correctly on Wayland – tremendously counterproductive.

  15. I firmly believe it is no coincidence that “crap” and “snap” rhyme.

    I also have a problem with amdgpu crashing at the most inconvenient times and when I go searching for a solution I keep seeing it claimed that the problem has been fixed somehow by more recent versions of mesa. I keep hoping Ubuntu will finally pull in one of these magical versions.

    I originally moved to Ubuntu because they were the first distribution I found that supported some weird hardware I had — this was so long ago that I don’t even remember what that was. I found Ms. List’s article very relatable since I’ve been struggling with the same thought process telling me that it is time to make a change. Ubuntu is still easier to deal with than that first Slackware distribution I had to build from source on a ‘386 decades ago.

  16. Just give it a couple of years Jenny. As with every other Ubuntu project, Snaps will be consigned to the trashcan of history, & then they’ll adopt whatever has already been accepted by the community. However, I’m just not sure, they will recover from this exodus. Although, I’m not a Fedora user, they clearly are in the ascendancy, & becoming the go-to for workstations, & user’s, alike. Ubuntu’s, conversely, a distro in decline…

  17. This simply shows the power of choice given by Linux: you don’t like the direction your distribution is taking? You pick another and problem solved, all your software will be there. Now do that with proprietary OSes.

    1. More like… sacrifice some of that series-watching-time to learn something… and then choose between different sets of problems…….. all of which are better than having to try and copy paste without any mouse buttons on a mac.

  18. My first Ubuntu was Warty Warthog, and my last was probably Precise Pangolin. (2004-2012) The whole Python-is-all-up-in-the-GUI thing was really fun and innovative back then. I’ve done some Centos, some Red Hat, Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, but my first actual distro was Slackware. (There was a time before distros!)

    Love Jenny’s letter, and I’d spill a drop of beverage for any of the above, actually. I get the sentiment.

    Wanting something simple and configurable, I’ve been on Arch for the last decade, and it’s just right for me. Initial install is real work, though, and I hear Manjaro makes that a lot easier. Or you do it once and you get over the fear. Just follow the directions. :)

    Some Ubuntu folks will be afraid of the rolling releases, but I update my system once a week and I’ve not had any showstoppers in 10 years. The advantage is that you’re running the newest stable versions of essentially everything, which is good if you believe that software improves over time. Which I actually do now. (I used to run Ubuntu LTS versions and upgrade infrequently.)

    And that may be the coolest part of Arch, that you are continually reminded of how much the entire ecosystem is evolving, in a good way.

  19. Let’s face it. Windows is bloatware full of spy features with installation size of over 20GB. No need to rub your eyes, it’s true, you read it correctly. They had to put all the frustration of losing the mobile market somewhere. Deep in the folder structure is buried folder with all the dreamless nights of the manager of the mobile phone division.
    It’s a world where drivers actually USE the hardware not just pats it on the back and make it glowing hot and confused.
    But windows works and we all have to use it and hate it.

    Apple is fine-tuned expensive stolen and raped linux where everything works and gives you this feeling like “I am something special……. possibly AN ARTIST. Pls don’t tell anybody I am FAKE ONE who bribed the school jury.”

    Chrome OS…… well…. if you just wanna browse the internet and do simply tasks FAST, here you go, be my guest. Don’t look, don’t look! Nooooooooo you looked!……. hmmmmm……… OK then, let me introduce myself: “I AM GOOGLE AND I AM YOUR MASTER……MASTER OF YOU…..
    and your data
    and your life
    and your location
    and your privacy”
    and gaming…..nooooooo Stadia is dead. Ok then gforce now will be your guide……
    But then again, if you have ‘FB’ or ‘Insta’, it doesn’t really matter does it? ;-)

    And then we have Linux aka:
    -socialism in capitalistic world.
    -Entertaining wars: Init vs Systemd, X-server vs wayland; debian vs fedora.
    -Beautifull fragmented and rigid community, where everyone is pulling the rope together, each in different direction.
    -At clear nights you can spot in the sky THE SHINNING BLACK HOLE. For talent and effort ……….. all which has been put in Linux desktop development.

    For while I thought it’s a matter of time. That one day somebody will rise and behold….in his hands we’ll spot a Linux distro for money. Distro like no other, with drivers, with office, sleek and fast, no spying, gaming out of the box, nvidia friendship hand in hand with smile on their lips, with company which backs it up all. But it’s too late. Today with almighty all eating ms cloud, tablets, foldable mobile phones, the days for desktop are gone. There is no reason to fiddle around with yet another distro, spending evening hours in vi configuring the unconfigurable configs. Get a life, go outside and see the trees, talk to birds. The world has changed. Stay in peace and HARMONY OS. :-)

  20. Let’s face it. Windows is bloatware full of spy features with installation size of over 20GB. No need to rub your eyes, it’s true, you read it correctly. They had to put all the frustration of losing the mobile market somewhere. Deep in the folder structure is buried folder with all the dreamless nights of the manager of the mobile phone division.
    It’s a world where drivers actually USE the hardware not just pats it on the back and make it glowing hot and confused.
    But windows works and we all have to use it and hate it.

    Apple is fine-tuned expensive stolen and raped linux where everything works and gives you this feeling like “I am something special……. possibly AN ARTIST. Pls don’t tell anybody I am FAKE ONE who bribed the school jury.”

    Chrome OS…… well…. if you just wanna browse the internet and do simply tasks FAST, here you go, be my guest. Don’t look, don’t look! Nooooooooo you looked!……. hmmmmm……… OK then, let me introduce myself: “I AM GOOGLE AND I AM YOUR MASTER……MASTER OF YOU…..
    and your data
    and your life
    and your location
    and your privacy”
    and gaming…..nooooooo Stadia is dead. Ok then gforce now will be your guide……
    But then again, if you have ‘FB’ or ‘Insta’, it doesn’t really matter does it? ;-)

    And then we have Linux aka:
    -socialism in capitalistic world.
    -Entertaining wars: Init vs Systemd, X-server vs wayland; debian vs fedora.
    -Beautifull fragmented and rigid community, where everyone is pulling the rope together, each in different direction.
    -At clear nights you can spot in the sky THE SHINNING BLACK HOLE. For talent and effort ……….. all which has been put in Linux desktop development.

    For while I thought it’s a matter of time. That one day somebody will rise and behold….in his hands we’ll spot a Linux distro for money. Distro like no other, with drivers, with office, sleek and fast, no spying, gaming out of the box, nvidia friendship hand in hand with smile on their lips, with company which backs it up all. But it’s too late. Today with almighty all eating ms cloud, tablets, foldable mobile phones, the days for desktop are gone. There is no reason to fiddle around with yet another distro, spending evening hours in vi configuring the unconfigurable configs. Get a life, go outside and see the trees, talk to birds. The world has changed. Stay in peace and HARMONY OS. :-)

  21. I am very confused by all the comments.

    I use Ubuntu as my daily driver. I develop all day on it and do not experience any more issues than others on windows and Mac machines. Probably less.

    I use Ubuntu all around my house, every room. My kids use it, 3 and 5. They love it on the all in one acer laptop. No issues. My wife who has never heard of linux uses it daily.

    I have it in my car built into my dash with a custom esp32 board to talk with the various protocols in my car.

    I also have a high powered windows machines and new arm and Intel macs.

    I just installed 23.04 yesterday and it ran on less than 2gb out of my 64gb of memory. That is peanuts compared to the memory I use for so many other tasks.

    Ofcourse if you use super old hardware then you’ll want a different distro but this is starting to sound like “no child left behind”

    1. seems you’re using ubuntu on brand new hardware. 2GB out of 64GB memory. Your hardware has to be quite new to accommodate 64GB.

      If you’re a student at Eton, you’ll hardly be complaining about class sizes.

  22. Noticed the same thing about Ubuntu – started using it (after Fedora … 5 years ago … ?) because I didn’t want to “have” to use cmd-line. I am very comfortable with command line and unix systems (if I want to eat, I use and administer windows boxes for a living … doesn’t mean I have to use them for “real” IT requirements…).
    Ubuntu seems to have lost “something”, over the last year in particular. Perhaps regression testing, maybe code-review … “windows-like” things (web browsing, editing docs, etc., etc.) are embarrassingly … slow. 10-15 second lapses in basic functionality hint at … what? No idea – but for me, a change is required – probably back to fedora/redhat.
    Windows? You must be joking … :-) Linux has some (design) issues (like the move to overlay networking – “let’s use MAC addresses and make ‘forwarding’ decisions, based on hubs …”) – but the fact that I can get information on/about it, and modify it to meet my needs … done.

  23. This is exactly the way I feel about Ubuntu too. That and there’s more and more random crashes, more often than not a gjs crash after startup. It’s no longer a viable option for me sadly. I’ve started using Fedora since version 33 and have been using it ever since with no issue. And I’m not even talking about all the ways Canonical is becoming more Microsoft-y like imposing snaps, adding ads for their services in the terminal, etc. They’ve been pushing their luck with the Linux community for over a decade and I think they’re reaching the end of our patience, which is already said to be short…

  24. Snap is indeed the worst thing that happened to Ubuntu. It’s especially awful when combined with containers (e.g., Docker) and ruins the very idea of reproducible environments.

    I disable Snap on every new Ubuntu installation as the first thing.

  25. I read through the comments and I have general idea of much of the lingo but I am not a power user by any means. I would just like to express my experiences and maybe find another distro (not 100% sure I need too) since people here seem more smarted and learned than mee.

    Ubuntu – used it for awhile and it was okay but I stuck with with XP because it was simple and stable for what I was doing and I was used to Windows from ME.
    Windows 10 was a system hog using 8gb RAM at idle with only background Windows system stuff running. Had to bump to 16gb RAM to run 50% at idle so I had space to run programs. I forget CPU usage at the moment.
    It finally said that I didn’t have the right chip for a security option that was mandatory in BIOS and I couldn’t afford to build an entirely new system at the time so, I searched around and gave Pop!_OS a try.

    Pop!_os – unlike Ubuntu of old, it worked and didn’t crash and there was much less work for me to do at troubleshooting constantly, as well as not needing a special built-in chip, HOWEVER this was at the cost of it starting just as slow as Windows 10 and needing just much system resources. Not sure what happened to the newer Ubuntu and Pop!_OS but it’s just as slow as Windows so I’m in the market again. Pop! is easy to use, very user friendly and I don’t know the difference between Snap and Flat besides it being some sort of difference between means of getting software and I have no idea about CLI or PPA or whatever besides a very vague (and probably very untrue) idea of what it is. But it’s possible those things could be or a combination could be the/are the problem(s).

  26. By coincidence, what you have written are matching 80+% of my inner monologue this morning at 04:30 or so. I have nothing against text file editing for running a Linux box, that is my preferred way to manage. However even in that aspect Ubuntu is getting worse by the year, as one cannot be sure if a hand edited text file would stay the same after a reboot by an increasing rate of probability 🙁. Snap on the other hand is a disaster at a level that I am not able to describe, but your description is sadly quite realistic.
    One note of hope for your potential migration; One month or so ago I had a catastrophic performance loss due to some snaps run away with CPU and virtual memory allocations. A complete reinstall of the system these days is faster than a few years ago, probably because most mainstream software repos are easier to use, especially in deb land, than they were in the past. Even by excluding as much as possible snaps and using home repos and install sources etc., it took two days only to reach complete setup state, quite earlier than expected one week, based on past experience.

    Soon to be ex user of Ubuntu…

  27. I went from Windows XP to Ubuntu many many years ago. It was fine until they switched to Unity. Then I moved to Mint, been there ever since. If you haven’t tried it, download the image, put it on a flash drive and then boot it. You can check it out without affecting your current operating system. The Cinnamon desktop is a joy to use and no Snap. As the others have said above, it just works.

  28. as someone who is a total amateur – i’ll even humbly go as far as to say arguably, entirely, geriatrically inept & clueless – to the linux distro – OS , system – i don’t even know the terminology… im going to be booted from this forum before i even figure out where the menu is – even i, being all of those things – knew something was extremely amiss after having downloaded & booted linux on my desktop.

    my goal which led to my decision to forego windows – was to hopefully squeeze a little more life(performance) out of my old PC that is borderline irreplaceable these days as it pertains to the specs that 96% of car manufacturers require in order to run, operate, communicate with & most importantly – flash – their vehicles which have now become entirely computerized & depend on the specifically tailored code & software updates & calibration files that the car makers release constantly… but in order to flash them to the vehicles – which, is crucial & cars can ultimately stop running & result in no start ailments without the updates & calibrations – the manufacturers demand the old age, ancient 32-bit machines with specific rom, HHD & SSD specs – or else they won’t even pair with the makers intranet. so – as with the mediocre space reqs, the manufacturers don’t take into consideration the fact that – there are more than just their brand that we service as repair techs & so hardly any more than just one makers files will fit within the hard drives without absolutely annihilating the performance. so i was hoping to find some relief with a dual bolt where i could perform whatever other tasks i needed to when i wasn’t using the PC for the flash purposes.

    it’s slower than the windows version. i cannot have but hardly even one firefox window open without getting the force or wait issue & it’s a headache beyond compare. even without having ever used linux before – this isn’t what i have come to hear in the raving reviews & sworn testimony of the revelations in computing that linux brought to the world.

    i hve no clue where to go from ubuntu. i’m like a kid lost in a business complex. any suggestions as you seem to have written right what i’ve been feeling – aside from all the terms i haven’t a clue what they mean. i can relate to this – it’s slow & i can’t stand it lol.

    – another chick with a small business

    1. Hello Lex, I know this is a late reply but nobody else seems to have replied to you. I f you have a look through this thread (yeah, it’s long!) there are plenty of suggestions to try Linux Mint. More importantly, there aren’t any replies saying DON’T use Linux Mint!

      I started using /Mint after getting sick of Windows 7 back in 2016. I chose Mint because it was reputed to be “easy to migrate from Windows.” I absolutely found it very straightforward. I downloaded a USB image of Mint and dual-booted it with Windows for a few year. Then I realised that I was just never using the Windows partition, because Mint did everything I needed. I’m not a “gamer” so I can’t comment on the gaming aspect, but for actual work I have found it to be wonderful. Stable, fast, updated regularly (but only when *I* want to update!)

      You mention Firefox. This is my daily web browser and it’s fine under Mint. Very fast to load, I haven’t seen any compatibility issues; streaming video etc is all fine.

      The bundled copies of LibreOffice have been fine for me, even when collaborating with others who use Microsoft Office.

      I have since installed Linux Mint on about a dozen computers, from Thinkpads to desktops to no-brand cheapies from ebay. All of them have “just worked” to boot then install from the USB images downloaded from Linux Mint’s website.

      I’m not an expert, but I have found that using Linux Mint does not get in the way of getting my actual work done. I sure as hell don’t miss Windows and it’s mandatory (or almost mandatory) registration, login etc. I’ve tried Ubuntu and a handful of other Linux flavours and not found any compelling feature that makes me want to switch to those.

      I hope you find something that does the job for you!

  29. I used to prefer distros based on Ubuntu until I once tried to install Ubuntu Server on a laptop — and it wouldn’t boot up. I then tried a Debian (Stable) NetInstall — worked like a charm. Oh, and the brouhaha surrounding the Snap package format…I am so happy to have missed that. From what I’ve read, Snap is a JOKE. Debian NetInstall is what I use now, with the Xfce desktop environment on my desktop and the Openbox window manager on my laptop. Plus, if I can figure out how to get past this error I keep running into in the Calamares installer, I’m trying to make my own distro.

  30. I primarily and have been using xubuntu for maybe the past 10 years and I have had zero complaints. Everything works perfectly. I gave up on ubuntu the moment the UI started to take a nose dive. But xubuntu on the other hand, perfect.

  31. :(
    I got into linux because I was tired of having to update and relearn (and lose features of) my *tools*… I long long ago tired of having to try to weed through hundreds of opinions of which new-fangled promise was going to solve this problem. And here we are, again. Again. Again. I often think maybe I’d’ve been better-off if I’d chosen physical tools over this shiz… but even hammers have mostly been replaced by nailguns which break and replacements which don’t even use the same parts. This is no era to bring children into, this is a danged hampster wheel.

  32. This is an age old argument and what us geeks dont really understand is that the vast majority of people and the vast majority of the money in the industry comes from user that do not care what the OS is. They probably are using Office 365 application for email, spreadsheets, and word processing. Most of their other applications are now web based. Their peripherals consist of a mouse, keyboard, and speakers/headphones, all on USB. Other users use their PC to rum a primary demanding application like CAD or other engineering software and the OS is whatever their business app requires, they do not interact with the OS other than moving their files between the apps and storage they use.

    Ubuntu wanting to go to the Apple OS model is probably not surprising given the success that Apple has had. However they miss a key point. People by Apple for the hardware, the OS is simply a consequence of that choice. I would venture to say that only a very small percentage of computer users would ever go through the effort of replacing the OS that came with their computer. Unless Ubuntu becomes an OEM supplier, they will never be more than a niche product.

    Personally I have Windows machines, MacOS machines, and several flavors of Unix varieties. I have to admit that the *nix boxes are where I experiment with cool open source stuff but the Windows box does the day to day business tasks and engineering work (because those are the apps my company chooses to use Autodesk and Solidworks). The MacOS machine is my lightweight laptop for portable web surfing and email. I actually dont like the MacOS that much but the macine itself is great ( yeah, I know it can run Linux but for email and web who cares).

    My advise to any new user wanting to do 3d printing, business, CAD/CAM, programming etc. is pick the best application for what you do and then run the OS that best supports that app. This is not the only computer you can own. Any techy person will have no problem having two or more machines. In fact if you look at the cost of CNC machines and engineering software, the cost of a dedicated PC is insignificant and you will get better performance by not experimenting with that system.

    If its a hobby, have fun with open source stuff, you will learn a lot. You will also waste tons of productivity time on dependency jails and wrestling peripherals. If its a business buy a turnkey system and spend your time making money with the best applications regardless of price of the app. If the best app is open source great, if you happen to need something like Solidworks or Autocad, so be it. The cost of a good application on a stable system has an unbeatable ROI.

  33. Wait, Ubuntu comes with snap already installed/enabled?!? That is funny as heck. Glad I don’t use Ubuntu. I use Debian unstable and use APT as intended and if by small chance there is a program I can’t get from a APT repo I’ll find an AppImage for that program or compile it from source.

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