I’d pick Ubuntu. I don’t really understand why it’s still so popular. Never ever had a successful dist-upgrade with it, so technically if you wanna stay up to date with it, you have to reinstall every six months.
And regarding the technologies they use, they always choose to develop their own (often failing) solution instead of using/improving a well established and popular one. Unity desktop, snap packages, Mir… the list probably goes on. To me, Canonical is kinda like Apple of the Linux world.
Are there any worse distros? Probably yes. But in proportion to its popularity, Ubuntu is the absolute worst, that’s not even a question to me.
Edit: I can see several replies to my comment praising Ubuntu for its role in making Linux platform (and free software) more popular. That’s fine, perfectly valid. In fact, my very first experience with Linux was with Ubuntu as well, through a CD addition to a PC magazine back in 2005.
To clarify myself (since the post itself is not very elaborate), when I posted my comment, I was thinking of the quality/usability/stability of Linux distributions, and due to personal experience I’ve never found Ubuntu usable in the long term. I did try it several times through the years, also installed it on my mom’s laptop (fairly simple setup with no customizations at all on a Dell Latitude, a.k.a good hardware), and even there basic things just didn’t work on the long run.
Ubuntu-hate is an example of FOSS sh**ing its own bed.
If there’s one distro that, after 20 years, most normies might have heard of, it’s Ubuntu. Name recognition is like gold dust and, like it or not, Ubuntu is still de-facto the way a ton of ordinary non-techies are getting introduced to FOSS.
But no, we just cannot help but put it down and say what junk it is and how so-and-so random distro is better.
If we really cared about getting normies into FOSS, then instead of slagging off Ubuntu we would be supporting it with both hands.
Addendum. To counter your personal experience, mine is that Ubuntu is mostly just fine and has been for years.
Yeah that’s fair enough. I have a small tolerance for this, as a quid-pro-quo for getting a stable OS backed by a real company which makes its money in an honest way. The company is just advertising itself, and its business is providing a service for money, so in this particular case there’s no spying or incentives for spying.
If we want to get normies into FOSS and Linux, we’d be much better off supporting something like Mint. It doesn’t have the same name recognition (yet), but it’s even more beginner friendly and operates more like a typical distro. Sure Ubuntu is fine, but it’ll teach newbies stuff the Canonical Way.
So my answer to this is: fine, recommend Mint, and then when Mint goes away, recommend something else instead which is even better. And then watch as normies keep using Windows instead because at least Windows doesn’t change its name every 3 months like this crazy Linux thing.
Canonical’s corporate shenanigans is also Ubuntu’s strength, because Canonical is a business that won’t go away overnight. Same for Fedora and Red Hat. I agree that the rest is not ideal but that’s the real world.
Fragmentation is the achilles heel of Linux. To have a hope of competing with the corporate OSs, we must begin by having an ounce of their stability.
I guess the ideal-world solution is to put all our effort and resources into Debian, which is the FOSSiest FOSS distro on paper. But to me that world looks too ideal to be true.
Normal people seem to be able to deal with their being a million different computers, cars, and breakfast cereals without throwing up their hands and all driving pintos, using HP laptops, and eating dirt.
Which one of the popular distros has been changing its name every 3 months? Mint sure didn’t. Less popular ones maybe did. But those are generally not widely recommended.
I agree about the segmentation as a major issue, and that’s exactly why I brought it up in my original comment how it’s not okay that Canonical keeps re-inventing the wheel instead of improving an existing project.
Which one of the popular distros has been changing its name every 3 months? Mint sure didn’t. Less popular ones maybe did. But those are generally not widely recommended.
My point is that to quite a lot of normies, Linux=Ubuntu. If now Linux=Mint, that is functionally a change of name.
To almost everyone in the world, even the word “distro” means nothing. We have to make this simpler. Personally I would prefer that more people recognized Ubuntu’s name recognition for the huge asset it is.
When I posted my original comment, I had the assumption that someone who uses Linux (or about to use Linux) knows at least the basic terms.
But to be honest, OP didn’t even specify for what purpose they were looking for the worst distro. Maybe they meant for a docker image for their k8s cluster. Who knows. 🤷🏻♂️
The reason I still use Ubuntu, it works just fine and if not, there are so many guides on how to get stuff working. I’m tech savvy, but I’m even more so lazy
I am thankfuk for Ubuntu for what they done to popularize Linux in the past. How thanks to them we have many programs otherwise not interested in porting. It really was a friendly and just-works distro.
But now they focus on servers and desktop version is just an extention. Ubuntu lacks many nooby improvements from recent years while still being the most popular, leaving a bad taste for newcommers.
Ubuntu I feel is a necessary stepping stone for newbie Linux users, myself included. It’s a starting point that some may never leave, but as the user gets more comfortable I would hope they’d branch out to a different distro that better suits their needs. Sometimes it’s Ubuntu, many realize they should just run Debian with their wm of choice. Regardless of where they land, at least they aren’t using Windows
And regarding the technologies they use, they always choose to develop their own (often failing) solution instead of using/improving a well established and popular one. Unity desktop, snap packages, Mir… the list probably goes on. To me, Canonical is kinda like Apple of the Linux world.
This old canard again. It drives me mad every time I see it.
snap
Came first. Flatpak was Red Hat’s “not invented here” rival. Flatpak turned out to be more popular. That’s a) not evidence that Canonical did a NIH, and b) evidence that sometimes doing a NIH pays off.
Unity
For some reason the people who love to hate on Ubuntu for doing Unity never seem to have quite the same disdain for Linux Mint for doing Cinnamon, Pop_OS! for doing COSMIC, Solus for soing Budgie, etc.
Mir
I’ll give you this one. But Mir has since grown into a very capable multi-protocol Wayland+ compositor and is a fine piece of kit, if rather niche.
Upstart
Alright you didn’t actually list this one, but damn it these straw men aren’t going to fight themselves! People often mention upstart in the same list, despite the fact that it was released before systemd, became briefly widely adopted across Linux land, and then when systemd came to maturity Ubuntu dropped upstart almost as quickly as everybody else, showing that the NIH instinct really isn’t all that strong.
Most of these are just a list of things that a big company tried to see if any of it sticks; that’s the very grist to the mill that FOSS thrives on.
It also ignores all the stuff that Canonical either originated or early-adopted which has survived, like LXD, OpenStack, or cloud-init.
Dude, I was just sharing my own opinion. Has anyone mentioned these before? I didn’t know about that.
Came first.
Alright, I’ve just looked up both code repositories. You’re right, the first tagged version of snapd was committed one month before the first tagged version of Flatpak.
For some reason the people who love to hate on Ubuntu for doing Unity never seem to have quite the same disdain for Linux Mint for doing Cinnamon, Pop_OS! for doing COSMIC, Solus for soing Budgie, etc.
Of the mentioned UI shells, I only have experience with Unity and Cinnamon. I can’t argue about the rest. However: COSMIC is actually revolutionary, since it’s entirely made in Rust. I’m actually looking forward to it and I’m eager to try it once it becomes stable. Cinnamon was made for a reason: back in the days, when Gnome 3 was released, its UI was quite controversial. Cinnamon aimed to provide a more classic experience while running on new Gnome. Unity was neither revolutionary (looked the same as Gnome), nor usable (it was slow af). Bottom line here is, if they’re developing and maintaining their own solution for something that has a popular alternative, then better do a good job, otherwise don’t try to force it on the users. Or do force it, and maybe someone will like it… but OP was asking about the worst distro, so I came up with one that I personally didn’t find usable on the long run, and still is unrealistically popular in my opinion.
Mir has since grown into a very capable multi-protocol Wayland+ compositor and is a fine piece of kit, if rather niche.
Well, what I meant was Mir as a display server, but you got the point. Now they turned it into a Wayland compositor. Cool, but then why not do a favor to the open source community and contribute to wlroots instead?
Alright, I’ve just looked up both code repositories. You’re right, the first tagged version of snapd was committed one month before the first tagged version of Flatpak.
Snap is quite a bit older than that; its original codebase was released as “click”, which was part of the Ubuntu Touch project; it’s a project with a fairly long history.
Flatpak’s roots come from OSTree, which has its own depth of history, but the idea to use that to create a containerised packaging format came after clicks and Appimages (and their forerunners) were already on the scene.
Again, not a criticism of flatpaks. On the contrary, it shows that being the latecomer doesn’t mean you can’t be the winner.
Unity was neither revolutionary (looked the same as Gnome), nor usable (it was slow af).
Ubuntu had their own motivation for Unity, which was their at the time focus on full device convergence. That is, a single DE on PCs, smartphones, smart TVs and kiosks. It was something which wasn’t on the cards for GNOME and which was made clear was not going to be a design focus, and there really wasn’t (and still isn’t) any other DE that was built with that focus in mind.
Of course it didn’t work out. Partly because Canonical never had any success marketing Ubuntu Touch (on phones and tablets) or Ubuntu TV; partly because they were never able to get Unity to a place where it worked in that way (the never-released Unity 8, now Lomiri, was due to be the big pay off, but it was stuck in development hell). Canonical pulled the plug on it because it was haemorrhaging money on it and they desperately needed to get back in the black.
But honestly, there’s as much legitimate reason for pursuing that as there was in any of the others. COSMIC being written in Rust isn’t revolutionary; Rust is great, but it’s just a memory-safe C-family language. It’s a fine choice to write a new DE in, but the benefits are mostly on the side of the developer than the user.
Well, what I meant was Mir as a display server, but you got the point. Now they turned it into a Wayland compositor. Cool, but then why not do a favor to the open source community and contribute to wlroots instead?
Canonical’s main focus has been contributing to Mutter rather than Mir. Mir’s usecase is really more for kiosks, signage and thin client devices (where it’s the guts of Ubuntu Frame); although it’s possible to build something like that in wlroots, nobody really has yet. And in any case, I take issue with:
why not do a favor to the open source community and contribute to wlroots instead?
Mir and Ubuntu Frame are open source, and since when have we required the FOSS world to be monolithic around one solution? We have multiple DEs, multiple browsers, multiple office suites and email clients, heck whole selections of different FOSS OSs. The variety, competition, and ability to choose is kinda the whole point. If Canonical think they can do a better job with Ubuntu Frame kiosk software with Mir, they can have at it.
COSMIC being written in Rust isn’t revolutionary; Rust is great, but it’s just a memory-safe C-family language. It’s a fine choice to write a new DE in, but the benefits are mostly on the side of the developer than the user.
I beg to differ. First of all, the fact that the Rust compiler eliminates a bunch of bugs that would cause crashes in other languages, is already a major factor in making the user experience smoother. Secondly, generally speaking, according to my own experience, overall code quality has a proportional effect on the software. If it’s written well, bugs are more likely to be caught during testing and less likely to occur after release. In a badly written software there are always more bugs. This point isn’t Rust-specific, just mentioning that developer-related stuff does have an impact on the user experience. And by the fact that Rust is such a powerful tool compared to others, and COSMIC being the first desktop environment written in RUST, it is revolutionary.
Mir and Ubuntu Frame are open source, and since when have we required the FOSS world to be monolithic around one solution? We have multiple DEs, multiple browsers, multiple office suites and email clients, heck whole selections of different FOSS OSs. The variety, competition, and ability to choose is kinda the whole point. If Canonical think they can do a better job with Ubuntu Frame kiosk software with Mir, they can have at it.
Sure, I didn’t say we can only have one solution for each problem. As long as a new solution is justified (offers unique features, better performance, more stable and reliable, or by other measures), then so be it. That will make the open source world better. For example, if they decided to write the Mir Wayland compositor in Rust, that would be a valid reason to keep pursuing it (although even then wouldn’t entirely be convinced by that). I’m still saying, for the problem of segmentation it isn’t very good that many small teams are creating software that otherwise already exist. I find contributing to the major ones more useful.
(Btw you seem to have a quite deep and extensive knowledge of the history of Ubuntu components. Upvoted for the detailed insights.)
To be fair, people would probably tolerate (or even welcome) snap if Canonical weren’t pushing it so hard to their users by sneakily replacing various packages with snap, and various decisions that piss people of like forcing auto update which can break long running apps randomly. If red hat did similar stuff with flatpack, I bet people would similarly got mad too.
Most users don’t constantly upgrade and would be apt to use LTS releases. Also other folks seem to be able to upgrade from one release to the other. Describing it as if users are actually doing a clean install every 6 months seems to be semi fictional.
The comparison to apple makes no sense to me. Apple is actually successful.
OSX is usable and popular amongst technical and non technical oriole alike.
Now we may not like how apple does business, but I don’t see how the two operating systems are comparable.
I wasn’t comparing macOS to Ubuntu, I was comparing Apple to Canonical in a way how they approach the market. What I found similar is, that both of them are going their own way and making their product as different as possible from others. Not out of innovation, just for the sake of being different. Canonical is somewhat better though, because they’re dealing with free software, so technically you can uninstall what you don’t like, and install what you want. But why would I start to replace and configure components, when I can just have another distro that is working the way I like out of the box?
Gotcha. Your concern is that Ubuntu is behaving in the same way a for profit company like Apple would. That’s valid, especially since Ubuntu is built on the back of OSS.
I’d pick Ubuntu. I don’t really understand why it’s still so popular. Never ever had a successful dist-upgrade with it, so technically if you wanna stay up to date with it, you have to reinstall every six months.
And regarding the technologies they use, they always choose to develop their own (often failing) solution instead of using/improving a well established and popular one. Unity desktop,
snap packages, Mir… the list probably goes on. To me, Canonical is kinda like Apple of the Linux world.Are there any worse distros? Probably yes. But in proportion to its popularity, Ubuntu is the absolute worst, that’s not even a question to me.
Edit: I can see several replies to my comment praising Ubuntu for its role in making Linux platform (and free software) more popular. That’s fine, perfectly valid. In fact, my very first experience with Linux was with Ubuntu as well, through a CD addition to a PC magazine back in 2005.
To clarify myself (since the post itself is not very elaborate), when I posted my comment, I was thinking of the quality/usability/stability of Linux distributions, and due to personal experience I’ve never found Ubuntu usable in the long term. I did try it several times through the years, also installed it on my mom’s laptop (fairly simple setup with no customizations at all on a Dell Latitude, a.k.a good hardware), and even there basic things just didn’t work on the long run.
Ubuntu-hate is an example of FOSS sh**ing its own bed.
If there’s one distro that, after 20 years, most normies might have heard of, it’s Ubuntu. Name recognition is like gold dust and, like it or not, Ubuntu is still de-facto the way a ton of ordinary non-techies are getting introduced to FOSS.
But no, we just cannot help but put it down and say what junk it is and how so-and-so random distro is better.
If we really cared about getting normies into FOSS, then instead of slagging off Ubuntu we would be supporting it with both hands.
Addendum. To counter your personal experience, mine is that Ubuntu is mostly just fine and has been for years.
I don’t know what to tell you, I’m not going to support a distro that runs ads in my sshd.
Yeah that’s fair enough. I have a small tolerance for this, as a quid-pro-quo for getting a stable OS backed by a real company which makes its money in an honest way. The company is just advertising itself, and its business is providing a service for money, so in this particular case there’s no spying or incentives for spying.
But I do agree about advertising in principle.
If we want to get normies into FOSS and Linux, we’d be much better off supporting something like Mint. It doesn’t have the same name recognition (yet), but it’s even more beginner friendly and operates more like a typical distro. Sure Ubuntu is fine, but it’ll teach newbies stuff the Canonical Way.
So my answer to this is: fine, recommend Mint, and then when Mint goes away, recommend something else instead which is even better. And then watch as normies keep using Windows instead because at least Windows doesn’t change its name every 3 months like this crazy Linux thing.
Canonical’s corporate shenanigans is also Ubuntu’s strength, because Canonical is a business that won’t go away overnight. Same for Fedora and Red Hat. I agree that the rest is not ideal but that’s the real world.
Fragmentation is the achilles heel of Linux. To have a hope of competing with the corporate OSs, we must begin by having an ounce of their stability.
I guess the ideal-world solution is to put all our effort and resources into Debian, which is the FOSSiest FOSS distro on paper. But to me that world looks too ideal to be true.
Normal people seem to be able to deal with their being a million different computers, cars, and breakfast cereals without throwing up their hands and all driving pintos, using HP laptops, and eating dirt.
Which one of the popular distros has been changing its name every 3 months? Mint sure didn’t. Less popular ones maybe did. But those are generally not widely recommended.
I agree about the segmentation as a major issue, and that’s exactly why I brought it up in my original comment how it’s not okay that Canonical keeps re-inventing the wheel instead of improving an existing project.
My point is that to quite a lot of normies, Linux=Ubuntu. If now Linux=Mint, that is functionally a change of name.
To almost everyone in the world, even the word “distro” means nothing. We have to make this simpler. Personally I would prefer that more people recognized Ubuntu’s name recognition for the huge asset it is.
Okay, fair enough.
When I posted my original comment, I had the assumption that someone who uses Linux (or about to use Linux) knows at least the basic terms.
But to be honest, OP didn’t even specify for what purpose they were looking for the worst distro. Maybe they meant for a docker image for their k8s cluster. Who knows. 🤷🏻♂️
Android is the one most have heard of and the rest of the points apply as people disown it
The reason I still use Ubuntu, it works just fine and if not, there are so many guides on how to get stuff working. I’m tech savvy, but I’m even more so lazy
I am thankfuk for Ubuntu for what they done to popularize Linux in the past. How thanks to them we have many programs otherwise not interested in porting. It really was a friendly and just-works distro.
But now they focus on servers and desktop version is just an extention. Ubuntu lacks many nooby improvements from recent years while still being the most popular, leaving a bad taste for newcommers.
Ubuntu I feel is a necessary stepping stone for newbie Linux users, myself included. It’s a starting point that some may never leave, but as the user gets more comfortable I would hope they’d branch out to a different distro that better suits their needs. Sometimes it’s Ubuntu, many realize they should just run Debian with their wm of choice. Regardless of where they land, at least they aren’t using Windows
This old canard again. It drives me mad every time I see it.
Came first. Flatpak was Red Hat’s “not invented here” rival. Flatpak turned out to be more popular. That’s a) not evidence that Canonical did a NIH, and b) evidence that sometimes doing a NIH pays off.
For some reason the people who love to hate on Ubuntu for doing Unity never seem to have quite the same disdain for Linux Mint for doing Cinnamon, Pop_OS! for doing COSMIC, Solus for soing Budgie, etc.
I’ll give you this one. But Mir has since grown into a very capable multi-protocol Wayland+ compositor and is a fine piece of kit, if rather niche.
Alright you didn’t actually list this one, but damn it these straw men aren’t going to fight themselves! People often mention upstart in the same list, despite the fact that it was released before systemd, became briefly widely adopted across Linux land, and then when systemd came to maturity Ubuntu dropped upstart almost as quickly as everybody else, showing that the NIH instinct really isn’t all that strong.
Most of these are just a list of things that a big company tried to see if any of it sticks; that’s the very grist to the mill that FOSS thrives on.
It also ignores all the stuff that Canonical either originated or early-adopted which has survived, like LXD, OpenStack, or cloud-init.
Dude, I was just sharing my own opinion. Has anyone mentioned these before? I didn’t know about that.
Alright, I’ve just looked up both code repositories. You’re right, the first tagged version of snapd was committed one month before the first tagged version of Flatpak.
Of the mentioned UI shells, I only have experience with Unity and Cinnamon. I can’t argue about the rest. However: COSMIC is actually revolutionary, since it’s entirely made in Rust. I’m actually looking forward to it and I’m eager to try it once it becomes stable. Cinnamon was made for a reason: back in the days, when Gnome 3 was released, its UI was quite controversial. Cinnamon aimed to provide a more classic experience while running on new Gnome. Unity was neither revolutionary (looked the same as Gnome), nor usable (it was slow af). Bottom line here is, if they’re developing and maintaining their own solution for something that has a popular alternative, then better do a good job, otherwise don’t try to force it on the users. Or do force it, and maybe someone will like it… but OP was asking about the worst distro, so I came up with one that I personally didn’t find usable on the long run, and still is unrealistically popular in my opinion.
Well, what I meant was Mir as a display server, but you got the point. Now they turned it into a Wayland compositor. Cool, but then why not do a favor to the open source community and contribute to wlroots instead?
Snap is quite a bit older than that; its original codebase was released as “click”, which was part of the Ubuntu Touch project; it’s a project with a fairly long history.
Flatpak’s roots come from OSTree, which has its own depth of history, but the idea to use that to create a containerised packaging format came after clicks and Appimages (and their forerunners) were already on the scene.
Again, not a criticism of flatpaks. On the contrary, it shows that being the latecomer doesn’t mean you can’t be the winner.
Ubuntu had their own motivation for Unity, which was their at the time focus on full device convergence. That is, a single DE on PCs, smartphones, smart TVs and kiosks. It was something which wasn’t on the cards for GNOME and which was made clear was not going to be a design focus, and there really wasn’t (and still isn’t) any other DE that was built with that focus in mind.
Of course it didn’t work out. Partly because Canonical never had any success marketing Ubuntu Touch (on phones and tablets) or Ubuntu TV; partly because they were never able to get Unity to a place where it worked in that way (the never-released Unity 8, now Lomiri, was due to be the big pay off, but it was stuck in development hell). Canonical pulled the plug on it because it was haemorrhaging money on it and they desperately needed to get back in the black.
But honestly, there’s as much legitimate reason for pursuing that as there was in any of the others. COSMIC being written in Rust isn’t revolutionary; Rust is great, but it’s just a memory-safe C-family language. It’s a fine choice to write a new DE in, but the benefits are mostly on the side of the developer than the user.
Canonical’s main focus has been contributing to Mutter rather than Mir. Mir’s usecase is really more for kiosks, signage and thin client devices (where it’s the guts of Ubuntu Frame); although it’s possible to build something like that in wlroots, nobody really has yet. And in any case, I take issue with:
Mir and Ubuntu Frame are open source, and since when have we required the FOSS world to be monolithic around one solution? We have multiple DEs, multiple browsers, multiple office suites and email clients, heck whole selections of different FOSS OSs. The variety, competition, and ability to choose is kinda the whole point. If Canonical think they can do a better job with Ubuntu Frame kiosk software with Mir, they can have at it.
I beg to differ. First of all, the fact that the Rust compiler eliminates a bunch of bugs that would cause crashes in other languages, is already a major factor in making the user experience smoother. Secondly, generally speaking, according to my own experience, overall code quality has a proportional effect on the software. If it’s written well, bugs are more likely to be caught during testing and less likely to occur after release. In a badly written software there are always more bugs. This point isn’t Rust-specific, just mentioning that developer-related stuff does have an impact on the user experience. And by the fact that Rust is such a powerful tool compared to others, and COSMIC being the first desktop environment written in RUST, it is revolutionary.
Sure, I didn’t say we can only have one solution for each problem. As long as a new solution is justified (offers unique features, better performance, more stable and reliable, or by other measures), then so be it. That will make the open source world better. For example, if they decided to write the Mir Wayland compositor in Rust, that would be a valid reason to keep pursuing it (although even then wouldn’t entirely be convinced by that). I’m still saying, for the problem of segmentation it isn’t very good that many small teams are creating software that otherwise already exist. I find contributing to the major ones more useful.
(Btw you seem to have a quite deep and extensive knowledge of the history of Ubuntu components. Upvoted for the detailed insights.)
To be fair, people would probably tolerate (or even welcome) snap if Canonical weren’t pushing it so hard to their users by sneakily replacing various packages with snap, and various decisions that piss people of like forcing auto update which can break long running apps randomly. If red hat did similar stuff with flatpack, I bet people would similarly got mad too.
🥱
Most users don’t constantly upgrade and would be apt to use LTS releases. Also other folks seem to be able to upgrade from one release to the other. Describing it as if users are actually doing a clean install every 6 months seems to be semi fictional.
The comparison to apple makes no sense to me. Apple is actually successful. OSX is usable and popular amongst technical and non technical oriole alike. Now we may not like how apple does business, but I don’t see how the two operating systems are comparable.
I don’t understand the use of oriols ( not native English speaker.) I know it’s a bird, and the name of a baseball team.
Never heard this colloquial use
I think it’s a weird autocorrect from people.
iOS likes to autocorrect me randomly. It’s very annoying. Unfortunately, lemmy doesn’t support editing comments.
I wasn’t comparing macOS to Ubuntu, I was comparing Apple to Canonical in a way how they approach the market. What I found similar is, that both of them are going their own way and making their product as different as possible from others. Not out of innovation, just for the sake of being different. Canonical is somewhat better though, because they’re dealing with free software, so technically you can uninstall what you don’t like, and install what you want. But why would I start to replace and configure components, when I can just have another distro that is working the way I like out of the box?
Gotcha. Your concern is that Ubuntu is behaving in the same way a for profit company like Apple would. That’s valid, especially since Ubuntu is built on the back of OSS.