this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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I know there are lots of people that do not like Ubuntu due to the controversies of Snaps, Canonicals head scratching decisions and their ditching of Unity.

However my experience using Ubuntu when I first used it wasn't that bad, sure the snaps could take a bit or two to boot up but that's a first time thing.

I've even put it on my younger brothers laptop for his school and college use as he just didn't like the updates from Windows taking away his work and so far he's been having a good time with using this distro.

I guess what I'm tryna say is that Ubuntu is kind of the "Windows" of the Linux world, yes it's decisions aren't always the best, but at least it has MUCH lenient requirements and no dumb features from Windows 11 especially forced auto updates.

What are your thoughts and experiences using Ubuntu? I get there is Mint and Fedora, but how common Ubuntu is used, it seemed like a good idea for my bros study work as a "non interfering" idea.

Your thoughts?

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[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Fair points. Admittedly I use a tiling window manager so I never see most of these problems.

My basic concern is with fragmentation. IMO many techies just don't grasp how forbidding Linux is to normal people. Or the importance of reputation in people's choice to take the leap. It's all but priceless. Ubuntu-bashing has always struck me as a case of an elite group that prefers to split hairs rather than to take the win of getting extra users of FOSS. Idealism vs pragmatism, basically.

Anyway, I'm repeating myself. If you think that normies have heard of Mint already and that it won't go away next year, then fine. The important thing is to get them to take the leap. They can always change distro later, the second time is much less forbidding.

[–] laurelraven@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 hours ago

Not sure why you'd think it would go away next year since it's been around for 18 years and adoption seems to be going up rather than down, and a lot of people have switched to recommending it for new converts rather than Ubuntu

I don't think that many normies have heard of Mint, but I don't think that many have heard of Ubuntu either.

Fragmentation is a concern but it's an unavoidable side effect of an open community with many people and opinions