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.
Kubuntu chose to not ship Plasma 6 because it didnt match their release point. While in general a good decision, stable releases are the flaw really.
So a semi-rolling Kubuntu yes, but LTS Kubuntu before Plasma 6? Wouldnt recommend.
Ubuntu is also still full in on Snaps.
Flatpak comes from a PPAI think. Their store is snaps-first.While this is not a bad concept, Flatpaks are better for many reasons. They also may be worse for some others, mainly because Snaps just use Apparmor for sandboxing, like the rest of the system, so you can make easy exceptions.
They ship flatpak with their own repo for 5+ years.
The apparmour thing can get pretty annoying if an app you like breaks because of it.