I have been not recommending Ubuntu to people because of obvious reasons (the Amazon search integration and snaps, mainly). The reason I am posting this is because someone I know mentioned that they are considering Ubuntu. They have a degree in cs and generally are competent with computers, but didn’t like mint when they tried it. I would like to know a few things, since I haven’t looked into Ubuntu in a while:

Has anything changed about snap? I know people didn’t like it at first, especially the proprietary server, but I don’t think they will care about that and I mainly just want to know if it will eat all their RAM or something.

Have they made any changes in their management that may make sure there won’t be another Amazon search thing?

Is it best to use the default desktop on Ubuntu? I would recommend Kubuntu to them, all else being equal, but don’t know if maybe the default one is better integrated.

Edit: The person will be 100’s of miles away so helping them with issues will be hard, and Ubuntu LTS should be stable. Plus, basically everything that “supports” linux but doesn’t really usually supports Ubuntu. I do really see where they’re coming from, but want to know if it has a major potential to backfire on them and if they might be better off with Fedora.

  • limelight79@lemm.ee
    0·
    5 months ago

    That sounds like it’s mostly about the default install, and I don’t have a problem with them making the default a snap - as I said, sandboxing a browser probably is a good idea from a security perspective, and most people probably aren’t going to care about snap vs. deb installs, so why not go with the safer alternative?

    My issue was that it kept switching back to snaps even after I tried to go to .deb installations. It happened at least three or four times. It would be fine for several months, then something would happen during an update, and it would switch back.

    I didn’t have the concerns the article mentions about it automatically updating; it would only update whenever I told software in general to update.