Why I don’t recommend Ubuntu anymore

Try OnlyOffice, the best open source office suite for Linux: Get your Linux desktop or laptop here: 👏 SUPPORT THE CHANNEL: Get access to an exclusive weekly podcast, vote on the next topics I cover, and get your name in the credits: YOUTUBE: Patreon: Or, you can donate whatever you want: You can also protect your privacy by using this extension from Startpage, each install helps the channel with a small commission: 🏆 FOLLOW ME ELSEWHERE: Linux news in Youtube Shorts format: Join us on our Discord server: Twitter : My Gaming on Linux Channel: 📷 GEAR I USE: Sony Alpha A6600 Mirrorless Camera: Sigma 56mm Fixed Prime Lens: Logitech MX Master 3 Mouse: Bluetooth Space Grey Mac Keyboard: Logitech Brio 4K Webcam: LG Curved Ultrawide Monitor: Logitech White Speakers: Xbox Controller: *Amazon Links are affiliate codes and generate small commissions to support the channel* 00:00 Intro 00:29 Sponsor: Get maximum MS Office compatibility with OnlyOffice 01:24 The Golden Age of Ubuntu 03:02 Abandoning the Desktop 04:38 The Desktop Problem 06:45 The Apps Problem 09:27 Ease of Use 10:50 Ubuntu is still good 11:56 Sponsor: Get your Linux laptop or desktop! 12:28 Support the channel Ubuntu was glorious, back then. It single-handedly turned the Linux desktop from something that was only usable by really knowledgeable people, into something that was really accessible to the masses, even then. Then in short succession, they dropped Unity, version 7 for the desktop, and version 8 which was meant to be the successor, that brought convergence between device type, they dropped Mir, their display server that was meant to replace and be an alternative to Wayland, and they basically settled for GNOME 3. Ubuntu has a desktop problem. Since it basically abandoned the leadership of the desktop to the community, it also doesn’t seem to anticipate things very much. Which means that the extensions they apply to GNOME pull them backwards. Waiting 6 months to get what everyone else has sucks, and you get a Frankenbuntu mishmash of versions of apps and libraries, that can’t really be as stable as having the whole lot on the same version number. Ubuntu also has fixed repo versions for apps, desktop environments, and libraries. Only security fixes come through, apart from a few apps, like web browsers. This means that this frankenbuntu is locked in place. If you use LTS, you’re never getting the full GNOME 42 in your repos. Ubuntu also has an apps problem. Ubuntu pushes Snaps, their own containerized solution. On the desktop, Snaps have issues. These issues were shared in the past by other similar formats, like Flatpak, or Appimages. But nowadays, it’s really, really late to the party. It doesn’t support dark mode integration. It doesn’t integrate with themes. it doesn’t offer a way to solve these issues, contrary to Flatpak and the Flatseal app for example. Because it uses fixed repos, without feature updates, it needs a way to bring application updates to the desktop, and this way, is supposedly Snaps. The issue is, the snap store doesn’t seem to have as many desktop apps as Flathub has, and snap as a solution is getting increasingly outdated, slow to launch, and less well integrated than Flatpak. It’s also being aggressively pushed to Ubuntu users, and this impacts downstream distros, for example, Canonical decided to only ship Chromium as a Snap, which meant that other distros, like Linux Mint, had to take on the burden of packaging and maintaining it themselves if they didn’t want to adopt the snap version. Ubuntu is still very easy to use. But its crown in terms of “the easiest distro for beginners“ is long gone. Nowadays, plenty of options are better than Ubuntu for complete Linux beginners. Linux Mint has a relentless drive to keep working on what made Ubuntu great in the first place: everything must have a GUI to configure it. Zorin OS does as well, **even though its GNOME implementation is also a frankenbuntu, or frankenzorin or whatever.** These 2 options alone are, in my opinion, much better for beginners than Ubuntu. They have more quality of life features, like built in accent colors, more configuration tools, and they support more software, plus all the software made for Ubuntu.