Hey guys! I’m getting into the open source world and for years, i am finally hoing to try Linux! However, i see a lot of complains about Ubuntu and i just dont know why. What are you guys complains about Ubuntu? My next PC will come with Ubuntu. Do you guys think i should use Mint instead? Need help.
Ubuntu is fine, especially for a new user it’s usually widely supported and has the most resources available.
I can’t stand Gnome, though. I’d very much recommend going with Kubuntu.
Ubuntu has ads in the OS, mint dosnt.
Installed mint on my parents laptops so they didn’t become e-waste when Win11 came out. They have no issues.
Being new(ish) to Linux since that time and I found that the main distortion are better than their sub “flavours”. For me anyway. I didn’t like Mint LMDE or Kubuntu etc.
I tend to agree that the main distribution is better than it’s “sub-flavours”, but by that logic you should be using Debian, not mint/ubuntu
Debian with cinnamon.
I prefer Mint over Ubuntu because of the default desktop environment. Also, in Mint you can unintall apps directly from menu with right-click-uninstall.
Between those two, I would go with regular Debian, or Mint LMDE if it has to be one of the two.
Debian is much better about providing a reasonably updated desktop experience these days.
As for Ubuntu… Their engineering is bad, and they’re shady. They push their solutions over standard stuff, and their solutions are conveniently setup to allow them to close source the code if anything ever reaches wide adoption or are proprietary from the beginning.
Get a few USB sticks (or a larger one and use Ventoy) and you can try a lot of distros live without having to install them. Concentrate on finding a Desktop Environment you like first (Gnome, KDE, Cosmos, etc.) as it is what you will contact daily.
Pick any distro and just start trying to live your life in there. A lot of beginners, including myself, will distro hop on look and feel. Ubuntu looks neat or Mint is more like windows. Elementry OS has that glossy vibe. Which is all a ton of fun, but look and feel goes out the window when you find out that program you need for work is packaged as an RPM but not DEB and now you gotta install it from source. And don’t get me wrong. Always tinker, research and discover solutions. I’m just saying as you get more experienced, the distro hopping decision becomes more focused on ease of use rather than look and feel. So save yourself some time and just focus on using whatever distro you installed. The sooner you start trying to live in a distro the sooner you see what works out of the box, what takes some tinkering, and what is just way harder than it needs to be. As you do research on the issues you run into you may find another distro is better suited to your workflow.
I have some systems with newer hardware that would probably work fine on Debian, but drivers aren’t native and it’s going to require installing from source/recompiling a newer kernel and troubleshooting for an hour or a day or days lol. In these cases it is easier to install a distro that already has the driver packaged in its repo ready to go.
I will say most of those issues lead me to and have been resolved by Fedora. But I still have a couple systems where Ubuntu is just easier for what those systems are doing because it has specific drivers ready to go easier than Fedora.
If you read this and are over there wanting the complete opposite experience to tinker with everything and have it be as hard as possible… See Alpine linux, which I will master someday lol.
Fedora 😀 But seriously… Just install one and if you don’t like it, install the other, it’s free, it’s easy and you will never go back 😊
Fucking love Fedora, it’s my main squeeze.
But I have noticed something. If someone says “I love gnome” then they get the (playful) shit talkers, but if you say “I love Fedora” people are like “ah, an intellectual” haha
Really? I find that Fedora is so popular nowadays that most of the reactions are similar to your first sentence. 😀
I disagree, semi. I started with mint but wanted to try fedora recently. With windows i had stuff set up that i needed minimal configurations on os switches, and that data splitting helped a bit when switching to linux.
But to switch from one distro to another needs prep work if you want to keep data and configs with minimal set ups.
So far ive been refactoring my mint slow but steady to have my home and /opt on partitions and i might need to do more since there is stuff in /var i might need too.I meant that if a week passes and he doesn’t like it it’s easy to switch. Otherwise it’s always somewhat harder to switch once you are nicely settled. I always keep a step by step what I do after fresh install and I try to keep as many (important) files on my nas as possible. I never liked the shenanigans of keeping my home. First, it means you keep a lots of garbage and I kinda like starting fresh. Second, it’s way too much work. I usually just copy full home to external drive, reinstall and copy stuff back when I need it. This way I really keep from home only what I really need and the rest is ovewritten before next reinstall. That said, I have actually settled on Fedora like 4 years ago and since then reinstalled only once (again Fedora, I just wanted clean start).
Ye my biggest concern is keys, sdk configs, sdk programs, scripts, environment variables, vscodium configs, … I always take weeks to set all that shit up the way i like it haha.
But ye, im still checking out what i can drop and what i cant. Or maybe create scripts to config something to the way i like it ( like git )Yeah, had the same, but nowadays I have local dedicated VMs for each development project, to mitigate stuff like supply chain attack. The side effect is that it’s easier to just copy the VM to the new system. I am thinking though on creating ansible scripts for each use case to be able to “reset” the vm’s once in a while.
Mint is based on Ubuntu LTS (long-term support) releases, unless you go with LMDE which is based on Debian. There is not a major technical difference but there are political differences between the projects.
The main reason to go with Mint instead of Ubuntu is if you prefer Cinnamon over GNOME as I do, and want a distribution built around the Cinnamon desktop environment.
The only real issue with Ubuntu is it uses Snap app store instead of Flathub app store.
Flathub has more apps, is faster, and has some minor security improvements. Linux Mint uses Flathub.
HOWEVER, you can add Flathub as additional source in Ubuntu app store app, and use Flathub exclusively.
In that case, no real difference between Ubuntu and Linux Mint other than UI.
Also Snap backend is proprietary crap, unlike flatpak.
Another problem though is the best Flatpak store Bazaar’s Flatpak version is broken due to Ubuntu apparmor. There are workarounds but they don’t really seem to be doing much about it. There’s a deb version in the repos but it is currently very out of date as its a newer app with fairly active development
What are the minor security improvements?
Flathub sandboxes applications to prevent them from infecting the system if app gets hacked, and lets you control permissions for each app, like microphone, camera etc.
But they are still work in progress and easily circumvented, thus I called them only minor improvements.
Snap is arguably the better sandbox. The bigger issue with Snap is that only Canonical (the company that owns Ubuntu) has the code for the Snap store, so it’s a closed ecosystem and there are no alternative stores, so the minute they enshittify it’s garbage. Flathub is the most popular flatpak repo but the code for a flatpak repo is open source, there are alternative options and will be in the future.
Snap has a better sandbox, but only if you have an AppArmor distro. If your distro of choice uses SELinux or something else, then you’re out of luck.
Scroll past *** for what I think is most valuable advice
Ultimately, switching to Linux is preferable, regardless of which distro you choose, from an open source/FOSS mindset. I’m not a super techy person, and made the initial switch due to philosophical reasons and a deep, deep dislike of Windows.
Ubuntu catches a lot of heat for making controversial decisions that go against the beliefs of the FOSS community, such as proprietary app packaging with snaps, and back in the day straight up putting ads for Amazon in the os.
Mint is the golden child, mostly because it is directly based on Ubuntu, so it keeps 99% of the convenience and ease of use that Ubuntu is famous for, while removing the more controversial elements.
There is also LMDE, mint based directly off of Debian. Debian is the distro that Ubuntu, and many others, is based off of. It has a reputation for being very solid, but slow to adapt and offer new features. It is the safe, reliable choice, but “boring,” so people fork it, and make newer more “exciting” distro from it. So Ubuntu is based on Debian, mint is based on Ubuntu. Linux mint Debian edition (LMDE) is based directly on Debian.
Mint’s big thing is cinnamon, it’s desktop environment.
Desktop environments are where I think most newbies should actually be spending their time considering, instead of distros.
You can change the DE on pretty much anything, but some play better with some distros than others.
Cinnamon is very windows like. It is customizable, recognizable to a Windows user, and makes the transition from windows easier.
Gnome, and gnome based DEs, like what ubuntu uses, are more Mac like. Flowy, opinionated, and visually quite modern.
Kde plasma is more similar to Cinnamon, and is the Mac daddy of customization. Wanna do a thing? Likely, Kde will let you or you can brute force it and get it done.
Personally, I am a subby little soyboy who wants Daddy to tell me what to do, so I fucking love gnome. I love the look, I love the feel of it, and the thing I love most is that, when I first made the switch, it wasn’t windows. It was different, and that was fun and let me feel like I had really made a change, and that’s what for the Linux switch to stick after more than a decade of going back and forth.
My actual advice for a distro is Fedora with gnome, and few extensions. But realistically, try mint, try Ubuntu, try whatever, but spin up a virtual machine and specifically try out different DEs (there are a bunch that I didn’t mention) and see which one you like. The distro is secondary, especially for a beginner
Ubuntu is fine. When you get your PC, you can see for yourself and decide. If Ubuntu just works for you, stick with it, if it is a bad experience, try another GNU/Linux distro. Be aware though that the back end of the appstore in Ubuntu is proprietary/closed-source/nonfree/bad.
Start by trying the desktops (mainly KDE, Cinnamon, gnome…), which are very different, and see which one you prefer. You can try them online.
https://distrosea.com/select/ubuntu/
https://distrosea.com/select/linuxmint/
https://distrosea.com/select/kubuntu/
If you click for cinamon go mint. If you click for KDE go Debian KDE or kubuntu If you click for gnome go Ubuntu.
The rest will become clear later on.
ubuntu makes controversial choices. Mint is explicitly user friendly, and its debian edition is like a bike with training wheels, getting you debian with extra “niceties”.
LMDE (Linux mint debian edition) is, from my POV, the gold standard for noob distros. Ubuntu is explicitly like a tricycle but LMDE is like a bike with training wheels. You can eventually take them off for debian next time you change OS with less problems, if you want. I going from LMDE + Cinnamon to Debian + KDE shouldn’t be an issue.
Use whatever feels comfortable. Both are fine. People are complaining about micro annoyances that should not really affect you at first.
When you get comfortable with Linux, you’ll also get to pick sides in micro battles like KDE vs Gnome, vi vs emacs, systemd vs sysv, flatpak vs snap and all the other wonderful my-side-is-better-than-yours fights.
systemd vs sysv
Most of systemd-less distros use openrc, dinit or runit, sysv is mostly dead nowadays. Some distros still utilize it tho.
flatpaks are objectively better though.
This is an objectively false statement. There are at least one scenario I can think of where Snap is better than flatpak.
You can’t run your own snap repo. That goes against the entire point of openness.
If taking minutes to launch one application is a plus?
systemd vs sysv
There is no systemd vs sysv war. It is systemd suck or systemd fine.
Indeed. It seems that everyone dislikes sysv, but a small group can’t decide on what the better option is.
