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Ask HN: Switch to Ubuntu, or Stay with Fedora?

27 points by theycallhermax 3y ago

I've heard Ubuntu has improved over the years, is it worth switching to from Fedora?

brucethemoose2 3y ago
Switch to SUSE or Arch :P Seriously though, the optimal distro just depends on what you are doing on linux.
- Blackstrat 3y ago
  When you say SUSE, I assume you mean Tumbleweed? I’ve been on Leap for years but am skeptical of both their corporate and technical direction. I like the idea of rolling release but I’m cautious about the stability on my main daily computer.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    Eh, I don't run TumbleWeed either. But from my experience on Arch, all my pain from the rolling release model has mostly come from two sources - Self inflicted pain from impatiance and poking things I should not be poking. - Nvidia drivers. If you want a "stable" rolling release, look into Clear Linux as well.
  - sirkiller 3y ago
    I'm running Tumbleweed for both my work machine and at home. It's been going strong with only minor hiccup's for a couple of years. Open Build Service and Btrfs snapshots make for a very forgiving and stable experience.
ukuina 3y ago
Is Debian as compatible as Ubuntu for ML and LLM usage? I see tutorials all over the place for Ubuntu.
- gmassman 3y ago
  This is purely speculation because I don’t work with ML, but I imagine most Ubuntu specific software tutorials can be applied to Debian as well. They use the same package manager (apt) and should effectively be able to compile/run all the same software.
PaulHoule 3y ago
I'm amazed you're still with Fedora after all these years. About a decade ago it seemed every machine I had was either too old or too new to be supported by Fedora. For cloud machines I had a much easier time looking up instructions how to do this or that with Ubuntu so I switched a long time ago.
- dralley 3y ago
  Fedora is a much better distribution now than a decade ago
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
I have no idea about who you are, or what your use cases are, or how you even feel about Fedora currently. I used both of these distros for a long long time. I enjoyed both of them for different reasons although they were both employed as desktop "Daily Drivers". I used Fedora on my Lenovo T580 because that's what it's certified for. I used Ubuntu from 2006-2022 on more than one system. I will tell you that I'd never go back to Ubuntu at this point. I was honestly prepared to "upgrade" to Debian at the next opportunity. I firmly recommend Debian over Ubuntu now. The main reasons about Ubuntu are that it peaked around 2018, and their insistence on Snaps and other more-or-less proprietary stuff began to ruin stuff that was working fine. In contrast, Debian played catch-up and was no longer horrendously outdated or featureless, and as a result it's matured into a really respectable first choice. I typically used the KDE environment, although my Raspberry Pi ran MATE quite nicely.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  > I was honestly prepared to "upgrade" to Debian at the next opportunity. Had the same thought as of recently. Debian + KDE. At the end of the day one can just install whatever they need and WMs are distro agnostic anyway. Having said that i think should go ahead and test run ubuntu for a while see how it feels.
- lioeters 3y ago
  > The main reasons about Ubuntu are that it peaked around 2018, and their insistence on Snaps and other more-or-less proprietary stuff began to ruin stuff that was working fine. That's how I feel also. I had a good run with Ubuntu on numerous machines local and remote, but the past few years have made me question Canonical's technical decisions and the future of this distro. Particularly due to Snap, I can't whole-heartedly recommend it to new users (or onboarding new employees, team members) anymore. Debian, Pop OS, Linux Mint. I'm still exploring my own personal preference. In recent times, I've heard from people that Fedora is a good choice too.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tapoxi 3y ago
In some ways it's improved slightly, they gave up on Mir and Unity and now run a lightly modified GNOME on Wayland. However, they now insist on Snaps so much that they'll install Snaps through apt and have replaced a number of packages this way. Its an incredibly stupid move, and unlike Flatpaks the backend isn't open and it only supports Canonical's own "app store" as a package source.
- mdwalters 3y ago
  > they gave up on Mir and Unity and now run a lightly modified GNOME on Wayland. With Extensions Manager, you can disable all of the system extensions, install the User Themes extension and GNOME Tweaks, and in Tweaks, set every setting that is set to Yaru-* to Adwaita/Default, and you should get yourself a stock GNOME Shell. Except for the Ubuntu Font, of course. (I'll never forget the time I ran GNOME and KDE at once and created KNOME. Lots of my friends got angry and claimed I "took KDE with my greasy GTK fingers." The horror.)
whalesalad 3y ago
I’d choose Debian 12 over Ubuntu. It’s all the good with none of the bad.
- justin_oaks 3y ago
  Seconded. I recently installed Debian 12 on my main desktop computer. So far it has worked well.
- torstenvl 3y ago
  Agree. Ubuntu is slow and authoritarian. For people who want a slightly more polished/user-friendly Debian, I strongly recommend Linux Mint Debian Edition.
nhance 3y ago
I've been really enjoying pop_os and am hopeful for a long life with continued support.
kiawe_fire 3y ago
With no other context, I would not suggest stock Ubuntu. It’s had incremental improvements, but as a desktop OS, it’s a bit rough in my recent (within the last 1.5 years) experience. If there are specific issues you have with Fedora, and/or you simply want something Debian based, I would suggest a stable Ubuntu derivative like pop_os! or Zorin OS. Seeking recommendations is great, but as a desktop Linux user myself, I don’t think there’s any better substitute for having a spare “play” computer (even a junker or a cheap mini PC) that you can just try a few distros out without affecting your main PC until you find your match.
- mdwalters 3y ago
  Thank you, I'll try out Pop_OS! and Zorin.
totallywrong 3y ago
Fedora is objectively the better distribution by a large margin. Do not downgrade to Ubuntu.
- tgma 3y ago
  As a longtime Debian-and-derivatives (translation: mainly Ubuntu) user who switched to Fedora recently on almost everything I very much agree. Ubuntu used to be more usable than Debian and Fedora out of the box back in the day in my opinion but now the differentiation has been eroded except for the negatives. Debian seems superior in all ways than Ubuntu. Fedora is also as good or better than Debian and seems to be more polished and integrated. By far the biggest catch with Fedora is typing apt by mistake over and over and forgetting you're using Fedora.
  - theycallhermax 3y ago
    > By far the biggest catch with Fedora is typing apt by mistake over and over and forgetting you're using Fedora. Never attempted to run apt accidentally, but as a joke, I took a script that was meant for Ubuntu, and ran it. It prompted me if I wanted to install apt, I was like WTF? I hit `y`, thinking it was a joke. Turns out, they apparently had an freaking apt package in the main repo ready for installation. I just found this really cursed. At least I get the Super Cow Powers[1] that comes with apt. [1]: `apt moo`
xedrac 3y ago
I would take Fedora over Ubuntu every time. My biggest gripe with Fedora is a power outage during an upgrade will bork your system. Ubuntu will bork your system without external help.
strzibny 3y ago
Stay with Fedora, much better distributions all around. If you need to switch, than at least go straight to Debian.
mixmastamyk 3y ago
Mint is arguably the most refined Debian variant at this time. I used Ubuntu for many years but got tired of fighting with obnoxious snaps that I didn't ask for. Mint doesn't use them, but supports flatpack instead. Not only that, but if you don't use them, you need not know they exist—unlike snaps. Fedora on the other hand is fine. Although ultimately plays into the hand of Blue Hat, keep that in mind.
commoner 3y ago
Ubuntu has actually gotten worse over the years ever since it started coaxing users into using Snap. It was revolting when Ubuntu forced Chromium to be installed as a Snap when the user attempted to install it through apt. Requiring Snap in this way is fundamentally hostile to Linux as a free and open source operating system, since the Snap Store server is proprietary and controlled only by Canonical. If you are already using Fedora, there's no benefit to switching to Ubuntu. If you want to use something more similar to Ubuntu, I recommend Pop!_OS (downstream from Ubuntu and without Snap) instead of Ubuntu Desktop, and Debian (upstream from Ubuntu) instead of Ubuntu Server.
- safety1st 3y ago
  Just want to chime in as another Ubuntu user who's ready to jump ship after 10+ years because of snaps. I hadn't really considered the philosophical issues around it but you have a good point about that. For me it comes down to QA and QoL. Snaps are shit. I'm still getting those ridiculous "Close Firefox to update Firefox, this will expire in 13 days" nags that can't be dismissed. The other day snapd felt like hanging up my laptop for 90 seconds when I was trying to shut down and get out of the door. Fuck this. 90% of what Canonical has done has never bothered me, oh there's an Amazon lens I don't like? 2 minutes to uninstall it, no prob. Oh there's a plug for Canonical services in the motd? That's fine, they need to make money. But snapd is just trash software that's badly engineered, makes my system worse and is hard to remove (I'd have to replace a bunch of software that Canonical has pushed me into using snaps for). So barring some about face from Canonical I'm switching to another Debian variant on my next reinstall.
  - nateb2022 3y ago
    I as well have left Ubuntu because of the forced snaps debaucle. I wish that snapd was optional, or at least that it was much easier to disable/entirely remove even if Ubuntu made it the default.
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  > the Snap Store server is proprietary and controlled only by Canonical. Has nobody reverse engineered or created a replacement yet? I assume that's because nobody with the ability has the desire. If this spurs anyone into action; make it AGLP3 or some other similar license.
tastysandwich 3y ago
A lot of Ubuntu hate, and I totally understand why. We all remember Mir and Upstart. And now Snap. So if this bothers you, by all means look elsewhere. On the other hand... I've used Ubuntu desktop consistently for about 15 years now. I'm not a power user by any stretch. I just want things to work, and the "just works" factor has improved considerably. Installation is ridiculously easy. It's fast. It never crashes. It finds all the right drivers for me. Suspend works. Audio works great, including with recording software like Reaper/Audacity. I just don't have time to mess around with stuff anymore. Gone are my Arch Linux days. I get about half an hour of time after putting our little one to bed, and I want to spend 0% of that on configuring stuff.
- Proziam 3y ago
  I have the same experience running good old fashioned Debian. It just worked out of the box on both my desktop machine and Framework laptop. Detected all the necessary drivers meanwhile wifi, touchpad, and all the usual suspects just worked. I've been doing most of my work on Debian for a pretty long time, even using Debian in WSL2 when I have to use windows, and I can't recall having met with a single problem that using Ubuntu would have solved.
- happymellon 3y ago
  > We all remember Mir and Upstart What was wrong with Upstart? It was great, it improved boot times and everyone adopted it, even RHEL. It was then superceded but it was a great improvement over SysV Init.
  - tastysandwich 3y ago
    Yeah I actually appreciated how easy it was to create daemons with Upstart. I had no problem with it, I just remember a lot of people pissed off that Canonical wrote their own init service instead of using systemd (which they eventually moved to, and which I recognise people also have very strong feelings about).
    - happymellon 3y ago
weare138 3y ago
Honestly if Fedora is working for you and you don't have some compelling reason to switch I doubt it would be worth it. I had been running Kubuntu up until recently and it's meh. It's not horrible, but not good either. And like others have mentioned the whole snap thing just sucks. It's kludgy, poorly integrated and poorly documented. Even the management tools are broken. I gave Ubuntu one last honest chance and I am done now. I switched back to Debian recently. Seriously I would not currently recommend Ubuntu to anyone. It was okay when Ubuntu was just fancy Debian but it's a hot mess now.
PappGaborSandor 3y ago
Fedora works for me :) But if you love to get fucked by Canonical and their snaps then you should switch.
southwesterly 3y ago
Dropped out of using Ubuntu over the past couple of years. Snaps got annoying. Stick with what you have.
cpach 3y ago
My take: Fedora seems to be going in a good direction. Canonical/Ubuntu does not seem to be going in a good direction. I don’t believe Canonical has a good stream of long-term revenue and I don’t have confidence in how they manage their projects. I wouldn’t switch. YMMV.
hcks 3y ago
I never understood the point of Ubuntu. It always looked like a psyops to make nerdy teenagers install it on their grandmas laptop
aitchnyu 3y ago
I'm an Ubuntu guy eagerly waiting for the latest graphics stack for ever better 5k support (spoiler: they send two signals for each half of the screen and the abstraction breaks at many places). Will I feel stuck with Debian release pace?
aborsy 3y ago
I stay with Ubuntu, because it just works, and life is too short, spending it on debugging Linux issues with hardware, configure this and that, and so on. Snap is a good idea from the security and software packaging perspective, and different approaches are needed to find out what works best. Snap might be better than flatpak in some respects. I prefer apt-based distributions.
0dayz 3y ago
There's always opensuse, but for your request specifically. I got a few grips with Ubuntu. It's very inconsistent with package updates, even on their non lts, certain packages can be quite out of date and take forever to be updated. Apt I feel is a bit outdated, and while generally stable it'll at times do things you didn't want to (config getting updated without input despite having a feature where you can decide if you want). General layout of configuration files in /etc is not my personal preference. However the good of Ubuntu is: Easy to jnstall gpu drivers Multiple fs support at install (including zfs, f2ffs I believe)
plaguepilled 3y ago
If I were recommending a distro today, I would say one of the following: - Linux Mint (Debian version) - Debian - NixOS
- mcdonje 3y ago
  Anyone using nix as a daily driver? Where does it fit on the LFS -> gentoo -> arch -> debian -> mint spectrum in terms of ease of use, ecosystem, and looks?
  - plaguepilled 3y ago
    It really depends on what you mean by ease of use. It's about as hard as Gentoo to pick up, but it is the easiest one to maintain imo. Looks wise, they're all the same (bar mint) since they all use stock GNOME and KDE. Ecosystem, as in the specific tools available to make things a turnkey experience, I'd say NixOS takes care of you really well and is on par with arch and Debian. All three of the above will vary with individual experience though.
airbreather 3y ago
Pop!_OS - way, way better than the name suggests
herbst 3y ago
Late to the party but Ubuntu LTS is nice for servers but on a desktop/laptop it's just pain these days. Fedora is a good choice, Manjaro is fun too if you don't mind breaking things sometimes :)
burglekutt 3y ago
There’s a lot of snap bashing in here, but one thing that seems really appealing is that snaps are run in sandboxes and protected by AppArmor profiles. I don’t know how good the implementation is, but sandboxing would seem to alleviate the risk that one of the hundreds of rando-authored packages that get installed on your system might decide to abuse root privileges during installation and quietly take over your system. Also, sandboxing your programs seems like a good idea in general, so they can’t all access each other’s data.
dagw 3y ago
As a (very) long time Ubuntu user, I'd actually say Ubuntu has gotten relatively worse over the years. Ubuntu used to lead the way in out of the box hardware support, easy to install cutting edge software and generally 'just working', at least more than most other distros. Now however I find Ubuntu has slipped considerably and other distors have caught up. If you're happy with Fedora, stay with Fedora. If you're not happy with Fedora and want to explore a new Linux desktop distro, I'd personally recommend OpenSuSE, Manjaro or PopOS over Ubuntu today.
msvana 3y ago
Not a big fan of Ubuntu since they started forcing snaps on their users. I like many distros based on Ubuntu though. Like Pop!_OS. It was my daily driver for quite some time. But half a year ago I switched to Fedora mainly out of curiosity. The user experience isn't that different. Both distros use GNOME and have Flatpak.

I've heard Ubuntu has improved over the years, is it worth switching to from Fedora?

brucethemoose2 3y ago

Switch to SUSE or Arch :P Seriously though, the optimal distro just depends on what you are doing on linux.

Blackstrat 3y ago
When you say SUSE, I assume you mean Tumbleweed? I’ve been on Leap for years but am skeptical of both their corporate and technical direction. I like the idea of rolling release but I’m cautious about the stability on my main daily computer.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  Eh, I don't run TumbleWeed either. But from my experience on Arch, all my pain from the rolling release model has mostly come from two sources - Self inflicted pain from impatiance and poking things I should not be poking. - Nvidia drivers. If you want a "stable" rolling release, look into Clear Linux as well.
- sirkiller 3y ago
  I'm running Tumbleweed for both my work machine and at home. It's been going strong with only minor hiccup's for a couple of years. Open Build Service and Btrfs snapshots make for a very forgiving and stable experience.

ukuina 3y ago

Is Debian as compatible as Ubuntu for ML and LLM usage? I see tutorials all over the place for Ubuntu.

gmassman 3y ago
This is purely speculation because I don’t work with ML, but I imagine most Ubuntu specific software tutorials can be applied to Debian as well. They use the same package manager (apt) and should effectively be able to compile/run all the same software.

PaulHoule 3y ago

I'm amazed you're still with Fedora after all these years. About a decade ago it seemed every machine I had was either too old or too new to be supported by Fedora. For cloud machines I had a much easier time looking up instructions how to do this or that with Ubuntu so I switched a long time ago.

dralley 3y ago
Fedora is a much better distribution now than a decade ago

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

I have no idea about who you are, or what your use cases are, or how you even feel about Fedora currently. I used both of these distros for a long long time. I enjoyed both of them for different reasons although they were both employed as desktop "Daily Drivers". I used Fedora on my Lenovo T580 because that's what it's certified for. I used Ubuntu from 2006-2022 on more than one system. I will tell you that I'd never go back to Ubuntu at this point. I was honestly prepared to "upgrade" to Debian at the next opportunity. I firmly recommend Debian over Ubuntu now. The main reasons about Ubuntu are that it peaked around 2018, and their insistence on Snaps and other more-or-less proprietary stuff began to ruin stuff that was working fine. In contrast, Debian played catch-up and was no longer horrendously outdated or featureless, and as a result it's matured into a really respectable first choice. I typically used the KDE environment, although my Raspberry Pi ran MATE quite nicely.

gumballindie 3y ago
> I was honestly prepared to "upgrade" to Debian at the next opportunity. Had the same thought as of recently. Debian + KDE. At the end of the day one can just install whatever they need and WMs are distro agnostic anyway. Having said that i think should go ahead and test run ubuntu for a while see how it feels.
lioeters 3y ago
> The main reasons about Ubuntu are that it peaked around 2018, and their insistence on Snaps and other more-or-less proprietary stuff began to ruin stuff that was working fine. That's how I feel also. I had a good run with Ubuntu on numerous machines local and remote, but the past few years have made me question Canonical's technical decisions and the future of this distro. Particularly due to Snap, I can't whole-heartedly recommend it to new users (or onboarding new employees, team members) anymore. Debian, Pop OS, Linux Mint. I'm still exploring my own personal preference. In recent times, I've heard from people that Fedora is a good choice too.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tapoxi 3y ago

In some ways it's improved slightly, they gave up on Mir and Unity and now run a lightly modified GNOME on Wayland. However, they now insist on Snaps so much that they'll install Snaps through apt and have replaced a number of packages this way. Its an incredibly stupid move, and unlike Flatpaks the backend isn't open and it only supports Canonical's own "app store" as a package source.

mdwalters 3y ago
> they gave up on Mir and Unity and now run a lightly modified GNOME on Wayland. With Extensions Manager, you can disable all of the system extensions, install the User Themes extension and GNOME Tweaks, and in Tweaks, set every setting that is set to Yaru-* to Adwaita/Default, and you should get yourself a stock GNOME Shell. Except for the Ubuntu Font, of course. (I'll never forget the time I ran GNOME and KDE at once and created KNOME. Lots of my friends got angry and claimed I "took KDE with my greasy GTK fingers." The horror.)

whalesalad 3y ago

I’d choose Debian 12 over Ubuntu. It’s all the good with none of the bad.

justin_oaks 3y ago
Seconded. I recently installed Debian 12 on my main desktop computer. So far it has worked well.
torstenvl 3y ago
Agree. Ubuntu is slow and authoritarian. For people who want a slightly more polished/user-friendly Debian, I strongly recommend Linux Mint Debian Edition.

nhance 3y ago

I've been really enjoying pop_os and am hopeful for a long life with continued support.

kiawe_fire 3y ago

With no other context, I would not suggest stock Ubuntu. It’s had incremental improvements, but as a desktop OS, it’s a bit rough in my recent (within the last 1.5 years) experience. If there are specific issues you have with Fedora, and/or you simply want something Debian based, I would suggest a stable Ubuntu derivative like pop_os! or Zorin OS. Seeking recommendations is great, but as a desktop Linux user myself, I don’t think there’s any better substitute for having a spare “play” computer (even a junker or a cheap mini PC) that you can just try a few distros out without affecting your main PC until you find your match.

mdwalters 3y ago
Thank you, I'll try out Pop_OS! and Zorin.

totallywrong 3y ago

Fedora is objectively the better distribution by a large margin. Do not downgrade to Ubuntu.

tgma 3y ago
As a longtime Debian-and-derivatives (translation: mainly Ubuntu) user who switched to Fedora recently on almost everything I very much agree. Ubuntu used to be more usable than Debian and Fedora out of the box back in the day in my opinion but now the differentiation has been eroded except for the negatives. Debian seems superior in all ways than Ubuntu. Fedora is also as good or better than Debian and seems to be more polished and integrated. By far the biggest catch with Fedora is typing apt by mistake over and over and forgetting you're using Fedora.
- theycallhermax 3y ago
  > By far the biggest catch with Fedora is typing apt by mistake over and over and forgetting you're using Fedora. Never attempted to run apt accidentally, but as a joke, I took a script that was meant for Ubuntu, and ran it. It prompted me if I wanted to install apt, I was like WTF? I hit `y`, thinking it was a joke. Turns out, they apparently had an freaking apt package in the main repo ready for installation. I just found this really cursed. At least I get the Super Cow Powers[1] that comes with apt. [1]: `apt moo`

xedrac 3y ago

I would take Fedora over Ubuntu every time. My biggest gripe with Fedora is a power outage during an upgrade will bork your system. Ubuntu will bork your system without external help.

strzibny 3y ago

Stay with Fedora, much better distributions all around. If you need to switch, than at least go straight to Debian.

mixmastamyk 3y ago

Mint is arguably the most refined Debian variant at this time. I used Ubuntu for many years but got tired of fighting with obnoxious snaps that I didn't ask for. Mint doesn't use them, but supports flatpack instead. Not only that, but if you don't use them, you need not know they exist—unlike snaps. Fedora on the other hand is fine. Although ultimately plays into the hand of Blue Hat, keep that in mind.

commoner 3y ago

Ubuntu has actually gotten worse over the years ever since it started coaxing users into using Snap. It was revolting when Ubuntu forced Chromium to be installed as a Snap when the user attempted to install it through apt. Requiring Snap in this way is fundamentally hostile to Linux as a free and open source operating system, since the Snap Store server is proprietary and controlled only by Canonical. If you are already using Fedora, there's no benefit to switching to Ubuntu. If you want to use something more similar to Ubuntu, I recommend Pop!_OS (downstream from Ubuntu and without Snap) instead of Ubuntu Desktop, and Debian (upstream from Ubuntu) instead of Ubuntu Server.

safety1st 3y ago
Just want to chime in as another Ubuntu user who's ready to jump ship after 10+ years because of snaps. I hadn't really considered the philosophical issues around it but you have a good point about that. For me it comes down to QA and QoL. Snaps are shit. I'm still getting those ridiculous "Close Firefox to update Firefox, this will expire in 13 days" nags that can't be dismissed. The other day snapd felt like hanging up my laptop for 90 seconds when I was trying to shut down and get out of the door. Fuck this. 90% of what Canonical has done has never bothered me, oh there's an Amazon lens I don't like? 2 minutes to uninstall it, no prob. Oh there's a plug for Canonical services in the motd? That's fine, they need to make money. But snapd is just trash software that's badly engineered, makes my system worse and is hard to remove (I'd have to replace a bunch of software that Canonical has pushed me into using snaps for). So barring some about face from Canonical I'm switching to another Debian variant on my next reinstall.
- nateb2022 3y ago
  I as well have left Ubuntu because of the forced snaps debaucle. I wish that snapd was optional, or at least that it was much easier to disable/entirely remove even if Ubuntu made it the default.
extraduder_ire 3y ago
> the Snap Store server is proprietary and controlled only by Canonical. Has nobody reverse engineered or created a replacement yet? I assume that's because nobody with the ability has the desire. If this spurs anyone into action; make it AGLP3 or some other similar license.

tastysandwich 3y ago

A lot of Ubuntu hate, and I totally understand why. We all remember Mir and Upstart. And now Snap. So if this bothers you, by all means look elsewhere. On the other hand... I've used Ubuntu desktop consistently for about 15 years now. I'm not a power user by any stretch. I just want things to work, and the "just works" factor has improved considerably. Installation is ridiculously easy. It's fast. It never crashes. It finds all the right drivers for me. Suspend works. Audio works great, including with recording software like Reaper/Audacity. I just don't have time to mess around with stuff anymore. Gone are my Arch Linux days. I get about half an hour of time after putting our little one to bed, and I want to spend 0% of that on configuring stuff.

Proziam 3y ago
I have the same experience running good old fashioned Debian. It just worked out of the box on both my desktop machine and Framework laptop. Detected all the necessary drivers meanwhile wifi, touchpad, and all the usual suspects just worked. I've been doing most of my work on Debian for a pretty long time, even using Debian in WSL2 when I have to use windows, and I can't recall having met with a single problem that using Ubuntu would have solved.
happymellon 3y ago
> We all remember Mir and Upstart What was wrong with Upstart? It was great, it improved boot times and everyone adopted it, even RHEL. It was then superceded but it was a great improvement over SysV Init.
- tastysandwich 3y ago
  Yeah I actually appreciated how easy it was to create daemons with Upstart. I had no problem with it, I just remember a lot of people pissed off that Canonical wrote their own init service instead of using systemd (which they eventually moved to, and which I recognise people also have very strong feelings about).
  - happymellon 3y ago

weare138 3y ago

Honestly if Fedora is working for you and you don't have some compelling reason to switch I doubt it would be worth it. I had been running Kubuntu up until recently and it's meh. It's not horrible, but not good either. And like others have mentioned the whole snap thing just sucks. It's kludgy, poorly integrated and poorly documented. Even the management tools are broken. I gave Ubuntu one last honest chance and I am done now. I switched back to Debian recently. Seriously I would not currently recommend Ubuntu to anyone. It was okay when Ubuntu was just fancy Debian but it's a hot mess now.

PappGaborSandor 3y ago

Fedora works for me :) But if you love to get fucked by Canonical and their snaps then you should switch.

southwesterly 3y ago

Dropped out of using Ubuntu over the past couple of years. Snaps got annoying. Stick with what you have.

cpach 3y ago

My take: Fedora seems to be going in a good direction. Canonical/Ubuntu does not seem to be going in a good direction. I don’t believe Canonical has a good stream of long-term revenue and I don’t have confidence in how they manage their projects. I wouldn’t switch. YMMV.

hcks 3y ago

I never understood the point of Ubuntu. It always looked like a psyops to make nerdy teenagers install it on their grandmas laptop

aitchnyu 3y ago

I'm an Ubuntu guy eagerly waiting for the latest graphics stack for ever better 5k support (spoiler: they send two signals for each half of the screen and the abstraction breaks at many places). Will I feel stuck with Debian release pace?

aborsy 3y ago

I stay with Ubuntu, because it just works, and life is too short, spending it on debugging Linux issues with hardware, configure this and that, and so on. Snap is a good idea from the security and software packaging perspective, and different approaches are needed to find out what works best. Snap might be better than flatpak in some respects. I prefer apt-based distributions.

0dayz 3y ago

There's always opensuse, but for your request specifically. I got a few grips with Ubuntu. It's very inconsistent with package updates, even on their non lts, certain packages can be quite out of date and take forever to be updated. Apt I feel is a bit outdated, and while generally stable it'll at times do things you didn't want to (config getting updated without input despite having a feature where you can decide if you want). General layout of configuration files in /etc is not my personal preference. However the good of Ubuntu is: Easy to jnstall gpu drivers Multiple fs support at install (including zfs, f2ffs I believe)

plaguepilled 3y ago

If I were recommending a distro today, I would say one of the following: - Linux Mint (Debian version) - Debian - NixOS

mcdonje 3y ago
Anyone using nix as a daily driver? Where does it fit on the LFS -> gentoo -> arch -> debian -> mint spectrum in terms of ease of use, ecosystem, and looks?
- plaguepilled 3y ago
  It really depends on what you mean by ease of use. It's about as hard as Gentoo to pick up, but it is the easiest one to maintain imo. Looks wise, they're all the same (bar mint) since they all use stock GNOME and KDE. Ecosystem, as in the specific tools available to make things a turnkey experience, I'd say NixOS takes care of you really well and is on par with arch and Debian. All three of the above will vary with individual experience though.

airbreather 3y ago

Pop!_OS - way, way better than the name suggests

herbst 3y ago

Late to the party but Ubuntu LTS is nice for servers but on a desktop/laptop it's just pain these days. Fedora is a good choice, Manjaro is fun too if you don't mind breaking things sometimes :)

burglekutt 3y ago

There’s a lot of snap bashing in here, but one thing that seems really appealing is that snaps are run in sandboxes and protected by AppArmor profiles. I don’t know how good the implementation is, but sandboxing would seem to alleviate the risk that one of the hundreds of rando-authored packages that get installed on your system might decide to abuse root privileges during installation and quietly take over your system. Also, sandboxing your programs seems like a good idea in general, so they can’t all access each other’s data.

dagw 3y ago

As a (very) long time Ubuntu user, I'd actually say Ubuntu has gotten relatively worse over the years. Ubuntu used to lead the way in out of the box hardware support, easy to install cutting edge software and generally 'just working', at least more than most other distros. Now however I find Ubuntu has slipped considerably and other distors have caught up. If you're happy with Fedora, stay with Fedora. If you're not happy with Fedora and want to explore a new Linux desktop distro, I'd personally recommend OpenSuSE, Manjaro or PopOS over Ubuntu today.

msvana 3y ago

Not a big fan of Ubuntu since they started forcing snaps on their users. I like many distros based on Ubuntu though. Like Pop!_OS. It was my daily driver for quite some time. But half a year ago I switched to Fedora mainly out of curiosity. The user experience isn't that different. Both distros use GNOME and have Flatpak.