I remember that one. The applet that lead to amazon with their referral code. From what I heard from Alan Pope, it did bring in money, but even the manufacturers they worked with always blurred/removed it from their promotional materials. So it got removed for good.

Ah yes. Complaining about the minimal version of the distro not being minimal due to a 2.6mb package. Canonical is a true monster.

Snaps suck so much!

Last time I loaded up Ubuntu, considering it for a server, the moment I saw that, I deleted the VM and took it off my list permanently

I have no interest in that kind of manipulative BS

ubuntu pro is free to just use on one computer

You've been very unlucky. There's plenty of properly working flatpaks.

lol what are you talking about? One of my daily drivers is Kinoite and it works great. What flatpaks are you having issues with? Frankly, you must be being hyperbolic, because tons of people use tons of flatpaks without issue.

Interesting. I use an immutable distro (Fedora Kinoite) so basically everything I use outside of the apps bundled with the OS are flatpaks. Other than learning a few things about FlatPak permissions, file locations, etc, it's been completely painless.

What I experienced is that Snaps/Flatpaks that contain X11 apps will behave very oddly in a Wayland sessions, at least with NVidia GPUs.

Using distros that still use X11, like Linux Mint, seems to help a lot.

One thing I will commend Snaps/Flatpak for however is bundling dependencies, especially deprecated ones. I spent DAYS trying to install an older version of .NET framework that's no longer supported to get a game (Vintage Story), but to no avail. With the appropriate Snap/Flatpak it worked first try, well, once I found the distro that doesn't have the X11 problem that was previously stated.

Yeah, I do know about that. (You're referring to the PPA repo thing, yeah?) But there are a couple of reasons why that isn't a workable solution specifically for me specifically.

• The major reason is that I only use Ubuntu on my work machine and my employer's compliance department won't really answer questions about whether it's allowed to add extra repositories or install things not from the official Ubuntu repositories on company-owned hardware. (And they're always really threatening and assholeish about breaking the rules they won't elaborate on, so my best option is kindof just to interpret the rules as strictly as I can and follow that. Or else flout the rules and dare them to fire me. Heh...) Raising questions like that is always a whole thing.
• "firefox" from the PPA repo and "firefox" from Snap have the same package name which makes things awkward dealing with Apt. (Unless you use "firefox-esr" from the PPA repo, which would otherwise be an acceptable workaround if that was the only issue.)

So I just use Chrome on my work machine. I dislike Chrome more than Firefox for many reasons, but I at least mitigate some of the issues with Chrome by specifically not doing anything personal on my work machine. I don't really care if Chrome invades my employer's privacy. Especially when my employer doesn't give me a choice in browsers. If anything comes of it, it's their own damned fault.

My first was Sun Solaris Unix, but now I’m a middle aged engineer who wants to fix company product issues rather than personal workstation issues, and Mint rocks my socks.

The mundanity of my computer working seamlessly every day is right up there with the mundanity of my car starting every morning, as far as how much it bothers me, lol.

But there’s nothing wrong with messing with your car’s engine or your computer’s OS, obviously. Some people are just in a place where they want to do that and some aren’t.

Don't worry, you'll return to it after almost decade of distro hopping and wanting for your pc to just work

Yeah Mint was great when I first got curious and that hasn't changed. Ubuntu always has little issues and random error reporting dialogues and shit. Never had that issue with Mint. Mint also doesn't force Snaps on you and gives you a more traditional interface. It just seems better for beginners.

These days I feel like Ubuntu should be tried after you have some more experience with troubleshooting and fixing things with Mint.

For anyone dipping their toes into Linux for the first time Ubuntu is by far and large the best place for them to start.

This was true maybe 10 years ago but not any more.

For example, the default gnome desktop is terrible. You have to install gnome tweaks to adjust anything. It requires some Chrome plugin... It's an impossible chore for a n00b to increase the font size. Likewise with other simple adjustments.

Historically, yes, Ubuntu has put in the most effort into being the most user-friendly, most easy-to-use distro.

However, I would argue that is not really the case anymore because as other distros (especially Mint and Pop!) have arisen for a user-friendly experience, Canonical has gradually abandoned this over the past few years in favour of being more server focused. Most of the innovation for user-friendly design just isn't coming from Canonical anymore.

The biggest argument for Ubuntu for beginners is that there are more resources such as tutorials for it - mostly momentum.

Yeah, exactly. I was about to say flatpak exists and isn't proprietary.

Also, the snap for docker/compose is hot garbage.

You can download a .snap package and install it. If you add the author's signing key as trusted in your own snapd, you can even do it alongside their own assertion file.

Flatpak can't run CLI apps. Also, they started around the same time. Flatpak in 2015 and Snap in 2016. This is like saying dnf shouldn't exist because apt is a thing.

Why would Canonical abandon their own solution because some people online complain?

Snaps predate flatpaks though.

So offering 10 years of support for a release is a bad thing now. Got it.

How does Canonical disrespect your rights?

Looking at release dates, just a couple days before Bookworm came out. I'll have to try that one.

Thanks, that's good to know. I wasn't up-to-date since I currently don't run a Debian machine.

That’s the proprietary app container system pushed by Canonical who maintains Ubuntu. That’s as opposed to something more widely accepted like flatpak. I’m not an expert on everything Canonical has done to piss of the FOSS community, but I think snaps are the biggest one.

And in regular old Linux Mint Cinnamon you don’t have to deal with that, and you can still lean on Ubuntu’s apt repositories.

And when Mint is right there too.

I have Ubuntu packages all through my system and I don’t need to care about whatever BS canonical is up to. Worst case scenario is I switch to LMDE one day.

I'm sure it's not literally all of them, and it's almost never preinstalled. But available in the repositories.

Nice.

Sorry, I mixed that up. It was named Canonical partner or something like that and contained only binary packages. Debian contrib are free packages with dependencies in non-free. While non-free are packages with not DFSG compliant source code (but with source code).

I like appimages because they're just a single file/dir and I know where it is on my filesystem at a glance Could also probably add an appimage to bin pretty trivially

The Snap Store server is completely proprietary and fully controlled by Canonical.

Mint is literally a slightly modified Ubuntu.

Is the Snap backend available and open-source? If not, then it's antithetical to software freedom because Canonical is trying to close their users into a walled garden in the ways that Apple and Google are with their app stores.

There are plenty of software packaging systems that work just as well or better than Snap, and promote software freedom (Flatpak, Appimage, or even just traditional package managers). By using and promoting Snap over these, you are working against the growth of digital rights.