Regarding "work out of the box".... I started using Ubuntu with Breezy Badger (5.10). In those days, I had been goofing around with Mandrake (RIP, now Mandriva), Fedora Core 4, Knoppix 3.4, and Suse 10. Back then, it was so frustrating to just play an mp3 file, get Wi-Fi working, etc... Maybe it's because I was a lot younger and didn't know what I was doing. But it was also because a lot of drivers and codecs were protected under Intellectual Property rights. Ubuntu let you click a button to install all the codecs! They said "Hey, you legally aren't supposed to use these codecs. Are you sure you want to install them? [Yes] [ No]" -- and we all just hit yes. That's all it took to get your multimedia to play! Boom, easy! Even if not strictly legal. That was a needle mover for Ubuntu adoption, imho.
the last LTS release 24.04 has had more instability (lockups) than any previous LTS Ubuntu in memory.. even with `snapd` removed; also `snap` has the marks of an anti-feature
I was trying to solve the snaps problem right before I finally abandoned Ubuntu. I was running some Ubuntu de-crapifier script from GitHub, which sort of worked but also caused some weird problems. It occurred to me that if my first steps for a new OS installion were to get rid of all the vendor-forced crap, I was lurching towards a Microsoft experience. I bounced around to a few OSes before settling on Fedora, which as been good but not perfect.
I dropped Ubuntu for Debian, then dropped Debian for Fedora and now I'm frankly very very happy.
Ubuntu had hit the proverbial last straw for me when they started shipping even the dumbest things as snap: the fu--ing calculator. Opening the calculator (a 250kb binary) took 10-15 seconds because snap had to download the images, mount layers etc. I never hated a linux distro so much.
Debian was fine but very stale, and a lot of things i use every day were broken or non functional. Particularly Firefox and bluetooth stuff.
Fedora... It's just great. Software is fresh but very stable. Anything bluetooth works. Whole distro-upgrades don't break my system.
Updating Ubuntu basically always meant reinstalling everything. At some point i was going LTS to LTS.
I run Debian stable on my desktop and haven't really noticed any downside to it being a bit stale.
For the core system I don't mind not having the latest version, and for the apps like 1Password, Tailscale, Firefox, Zed, VSCode, Ollama, Obsidian, Slack or Spotify (to name a few I use), I install them from upstream repo (or unpack into /opt) directly.
The only real constraint is kernel version, which may not have the drivers for the latest and greatest hardware, so new laptops might be a problem. I do use a snapless Ubuntu for that very reason on my laptop.
Fedora is not related to Debian or Ubuntu, so is not a true replacement.
PS I hear this release cycle thing quite a bit, what's the benefit? What software are you using that requires bleeding edge packages that can't be containerized?
For me, it's gaming which means updated Wayland and Nvidia drivers. I'm sure there are ways to do this with Debian, but I just went with Fedora to test it out, and I've liked it enough to keep it.
I did try Debian YEARS ago and Firefox was out of date in quite a scary way. It's unclear to me if I did something wrong there, but badly out of date web browsers can also be quite scary. At the time, I never looked into and just went back to Ubuntu.
Debian unstable is bleeding edge. Tested snapshots of Debian testing are not. Containers have many of snaps' inconveniences and some of their own. And desktop environment and virtual machine software releases have often bug fixes and improvements I don't want to wait for 12 or 18 months longer.
I was a heavy Ubuntu user for a few years as well and had a similar experience. The Fedora way is a little bit different and does take a bit of getting used to, but I've been on Fedora now for many years and am extremely happy.
Besides snaps it has a good mix of things. I am more familiar with apt, it tends to have better hardware support than it's peers, makes it easy to run proprietary codecs or drivers, has a lot of packages and repos.
I recently switched to Debian to get away from Ubuntu CONSTANTLY forcing the Firefox snap over the Deb I purposefully installed. It's fine but I keep running into little things like the kernel being too old for my GPU, missing codecs for Zoom, etc. It's a little irritating in that regard. I guess I could have picked Mint but it still had an older kernel so even then it wouldn't have been trouble free.
I would still be on Ubuntu if it just respected Firefox being a Deb. I tried many guides and times to get it to not use the snap and nothing worked on 24.04 so I gave up. I wouldn't even care if the snap version at least operated the same as the deb version.
I like Ubuntu. I just want stuff to work out the box so I can do my job and Ubuntu does that well enough.
Regarding "work out of the box".... I started using Ubuntu with Breezy Badger (5.10). In those days, I had been goofing around with Mandrake (RIP, now Mandriva), Fedora Core 4, Knoppix 3.4, and Suse 10. Back then, it was so frustrating to just play an mp3 file, get Wi-Fi working, etc... Maybe it's because I was a lot younger and didn't know what I was doing. But it was also because a lot of drivers and codecs were protected under Intellectual Property rights. Ubuntu let you click a button to install all the codecs! They said "Hey, you legally aren't supposed to use these codecs. Are you sure you want to install them? [Yes] [ No]" -- and we all just hit yes. That's all it took to get your multimedia to play! Boom, easy! Even if not strictly legal. That was a needle mover for Ubuntu adoption, imho.
the last LTS release 24.04 has had more instability (lockups) than any previous LTS Ubuntu in memory.. even with `snapd` removed; also `snap` has the marks of an anti-feature
I was trying to solve the snaps problem right before I finally abandoned Ubuntu. I was running some Ubuntu de-crapifier script from GitHub, which sort of worked but also caused some weird problems. It occurred to me that if my first steps for a new OS installion were to get rid of all the vendor-forced crap, I was lurching towards a Microsoft experience. I bounced around to a few OSes before settling on Fedora, which as been good but not perfect.
If you want Ubuntu but without all the crap that Canonical adds, that's literally Debian
I dropped Ubuntu for Debian, then dropped Debian for Fedora and now I'm frankly very very happy.
Ubuntu had hit the proverbial last straw for me when they started shipping even the dumbest things as snap: the fu--ing calculator. Opening the calculator (a 250kb binary) took 10-15 seconds because snap had to download the images, mount layers etc. I never hated a linux distro so much.
Debian was fine but very stale, and a lot of things i use every day were broken or non functional. Particularly Firefox and bluetooth stuff.
Fedora... It's just great. Software is fresh but very stable. Anything bluetooth works. Whole distro-upgrades don't break my system.
Updating Ubuntu basically always meant reinstalling everything. At some point i was going LTS to LTS.
I'm not going back to Debian/Ubuntu.
Debian's release cycle is 2 years. Fedora's is 6 months.
I run Debian stable on my desktop and haven't really noticed any downside to it being a bit stale.
For the core system I don't mind not having the latest version, and for the apps like 1Password, Tailscale, Firefox, Zed, VSCode, Ollama, Obsidian, Slack or Spotify (to name a few I use), I install them from upstream repo (or unpack into /opt) directly.
The only real constraint is kernel version, which may not have the drivers for the latest and greatest hardware, so new laptops might be a problem. I do use a snapless Ubuntu for that very reason on my laptop.
Fedora is not related to Debian or Ubuntu, so is not a true replacement.
PS I hear this release cycle thing quite a bit, what's the benefit? What software are you using that requires bleeding edge packages that can't be containerized?
For me, it's gaming which means updated Wayland and Nvidia drivers. I'm sure there are ways to do this with Debian, but I just went with Fedora to test it out, and I've liked it enough to keep it.
I did try Debian YEARS ago and Firefox was out of date in quite a scary way. It's unclear to me if I did something wrong there, but badly out of date web browsers can also be quite scary. At the time, I never looked into and just went back to Ubuntu.
Fedora was the truest replacement they found.
Debian unstable is bleeding edge. Tested snapshots of Debian testing are not. Containers have many of snaps' inconveniences and some of their own. And desktop environment and virtual machine software releases have often bug fixes and improvements I don't want to wait for 12 or 18 months longer.
Mint is good too, you get a lot of niceties without snap noise.
I was a heavy Ubuntu user for a few years as well and had a similar experience. The Fedora way is a little bit different and does take a bit of getting used to, but I've been on Fedora now for many years and am extremely happy.
PopOS is basically Ubuntu with Snap removed.
I went pop for simplicity and enjoy it.
I've run a bunch of Linux distros since the late 90s. Pop is the sweet spot for me, so far.
It's a lil outdated but it's a rad lil distro.
I moved to 24.04 Alpha and so far haven't had problems.
I've used Ubuntu for many things for many years. I'm not swearing off it, necessarily. But I'm using Arch a lot more these days.
What a wonderful comment to read minutes after I installed it over my previous 20.04 :)
ok but it is not the comment that is your new problem
Oh, that's very true. The bigger problem is all the stuff I forgot to back up :)
Why run Ubuntu if feel so strongly about snap? There are so many other distros that don’t use it.
Besides snaps it has a good mix of things. I am more familiar with apt, it tends to have better hardware support than it's peers, makes it easy to run proprietary codecs or drivers, has a lot of packages and repos.
I recently switched to Debian to get away from Ubuntu CONSTANTLY forcing the Firefox snap over the Deb I purposefully installed. It's fine but I keep running into little things like the kernel being too old for my GPU, missing codecs for Zoom, etc. It's a little irritating in that regard. I guess I could have picked Mint but it still had an older kernel so even then it wouldn't have been trouble free.
I would still be on Ubuntu if it just respected Firefox being a Deb. I tried many guides and times to get it to not use the snap and nothing worked on 24.04 so I gave up. I wouldn't even care if the snap version at least operated the same as the deb version.
Why not use Linux Mint? It’s Ubuntu with additional polish and no snaps.