The Ubuntu experience:

LIN 👏

NUX 👏

MINT 👏

I've seen plenty of Debian mentions, and no pushback there whatsoever from me.

But if you find yourself frustrated that you can't just have Ubuntu without Canonical's snaps and ads and other ickiness, Mint is exactly that. Or maybe better, I dunno. It's super polished and full featured and stable.

And even better in this era of Windows 10 support ending, the main/default version (Linux Mint Cinnamon) looks like Windows out of the box but it installs, works, and updates at like 10x the speed. (The 10x is an exaggeration for moment to moment desktop work and latency, but for the install and especially for updates I think it's accurate)

+1 for Mint. It's what I give the elders when they need a computer.
- Yeah, it is what I'm going to install on my parents' Win10 machines, but it is also what I use myself at home and work. There are almost no new users I wouldn't recommend it to.
  No distro is going to work for everybody, of course, and having the choice is part of the beauty. The mint project is doing great stuff though.
Linnux?
- Saw it. Decided not to change it because that's how somebody doing the "clapping on the syllable" thing would say it.
Man, this tiktokification just needs to die.
Check out Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE).
- Yep that's also an option if using an Ubuntu derivative at all is an issue for you.

I am literally running Ubuntu right now and I don't get this comic. I have never been asked to subscribe to Ubuntu Pro, if I have it was noninvasive that I didn't notice.

It's only LTS. Desktop users rarely use LTS. Great to have live kernel updates on a developer workstation and servers though.
- Thank you for educating me, but this makes less sense now. The only people who should/need to run LTS are people we a specific reason for staying on an older OS. And if that's the case you should no what you are getting into.

That's why I switched to Ubuntu. It gives me the safe corporate vibes while using Linux.

Why not RHEL then? It even has "enterprise" in the name!
- Okay, sure, but how often does it spam ads?
  Does it keep asking me to register for something that either shouldn't need registering or exist at all? Does it tell me to subscribe for a service every time I open up the terminal?
  We all need one or two ads, as a treat.
- I like the animal wallpapers that come by default
I just dont feel safe without a random corporate office worker having full access to my device.

Did you know "Ubuntu" is Swaheli for "can't get Debian installed"?

The language or the rotary flying machine
🤣🤣🤣🤣
Said the Swaheli in the Swaheli coast

I'm not afraid of Ubuntu, I'm afraid of the need to use the the Ubuntu forums when I have an issue.
I use arch wiki btw.
- I recently switched to Eos and the arch wiki came in clutch many times (don’t try to an arch based system on a Mac without reading a ton of documentation, I learned that the hard way).
  Only Ubuntu I’ve seen rtfm more than actually helpful commands

Intolerable, scammy OS. Everything good in Ubuntu these days can be traced back to other projects, such as debian/Gnome/KDE. Whatever Canonical adds to that is just an attempt to lock you in their ecosystem or wring money out of you.

Just use debian instead.

Or mint, if you're a newbie
Honestly, i don't like debian and it's derivatives because they focus on stability, and that means packages in the repos get outdated really quick. I'd love a distro that combines a debian base and the rolling release model of arch.
- It's called Debian Testing.
- I know it’s not exactly what you’re asking for but fedora is reaaaally nice. I don’t think I’ve had a single “unstable” package and it’s kept up to date really well. The only concern I have with it is red hat, I’m just hoping they don’t decide to enshittify
- You can always use sid. Or debian stable but you do everything that needs bleeding edge in a distrobox.
- I’d love a distro that combines a debian base and the rolling release model of arch.
  Debian Unstable.
- LMDE
- https://rhinolinux.org/
  Not Debian, but closer if you haven't seen it.
- I have been loving Linux mint with KDE plasma! Best of both worlds
- True, the apt packages can get outdated (or are already outdated at release time :) ). But tbh, for me that mainly affects the desktop environment these days and KDE is already pretty neat anyway. The CLI tools I use don't change as much anymore, and the GUI tools are usually available as a flatpak so up-to-date.
That has ALWAYS been the case. I dont know why people are surprised now... ubuntu has alqays been backed by canonical. And it has always been based on the work of debian. What did people expect?
People have always been saying to just skip the corporate bullshit and go straight to the source... debian
Unfortunately there was a very loud group of people online shitting on debian, saying that it's too difficult or user friendly or whatever... may have been true 10 years ago, but not anymore
- I just set up a new home lab server and my first instinct was the latest Debian.
  ... Seemed fine to me.
I haven't given them anything and have been using desktop for almost 3 years now. I run Ubuntu server at work without any issues either. I signed up for pro for free on my home desktop and didnt have to pay anything.
Where do they attempt to get money from me? Asking because I'm legitimately not sure.
- Back when I used ubuntu on my server, it kept telling me there were additional security updates locked behind ubuntu pro.
  Not sure why a message like that would even exist on a free system that's supposed to be secure, so I switched to Debian just to avoid the abusive/corporate nonsense altogether.
  Couldn't be happier.
- 3 years, so I guess you have caught the Linux virus around that time as well?
  They have a history of showing ads and sharing user data with amazon: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-amazon-ads-and-data-leaks
  Some of the other things they tried are a bit difficult to judge, but I lost my trust and count them as lock-in attempts. These include:
  snap packages (for real, just move over to flatpak already like everyone else!)
  mir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software)
  Notable good parts that I have not mentioned, but maybe should out of fairness:
  unity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(user_interface)
  I also think canonical was among the first to try and build some form of Linux mobile OS with some interesting ideas
Yeah, all the good parts of Ubuntu have been backported to Debian years ago.
- What are they?

Proxmox nagging subscription message on login be like

If you're using proxmox in a production environment and making money it doesn't cost much at all compared to VMware. I see it as helping fund production of software that right now still seems very solid
Apparently you can turn those off but I haven't bothered.
- This script does it as one of the steps https://pimox-scripts.com/scripts?id=post-pve-install
- I think it's like 2 lines in a config you gotta comment out
Proxmox devs are so close to making it a nice experience for homelabbers but they just leave a fresh install mangled so badly you need a helper script to give you sane settings. Not to mention if you make an Ubuntu vm with default settings it won’t boot. Plus the Linux user elitism on the forums. I want to like it more so much
- Preach, in using proxmox myself but they still haven't fixed bug when you install it from ventoy it tries to boot system from ventoy when system already installed on main drive, resulting in kernel panic, this bug still persists since 8.* Versions, and i have to fix it manually every time i install proxmox on another second hand pc/laptop for my homelab, for people who think it's ventoy issue i write that i didn't have this bug with any other distro, not even with god forsaken manjaro didn't had this bug when i tried it three years ago
There are also very easy ways of making the nag screen go away.
https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=post-pve-install
But yes if you’re running this in prod, pay for it. It’s not expensive and way less then Broadcom VMWare…

The thing about Ubuntu that kills me (as a user of it) is the other users who comment on reddit/r/Ubuntu.

They are so confidentally incorrect about so much shit.

Talk about removing snaps?

"Core gnome functionality on Ubuntu requires snaps"

That's not even remotely true. Snaps download Gnome* runtime libraries for it, just like Flatpaks do to run the snaps.

Just an example but still. I see so much crap like this.

Yeah, it's the Cognitive Bias fallacy. Reminds me of all the anti Linux users who continue using the "Linux wont be ready for the average user, because no average user wants to write a compiler from scratch just so they can compile their programs". If you don't like something, you don't like it. No problem, no reason to whine and cry about it. You like a different distro, great, go use it. That's how distro's work. Everything eventually helps everybody and you just pick a distro that gets you close to what you want. I started with Slackware 3.4, to me everything is great.
- A friend of mine is a computer illiterate. His laptop doesn’t support Win11 because of the missing secure boot.
  I installed Linux mint and showed him firefox, but he preferred chrome, so I got him Brave. Steam was downloaded, the update center was self explanatory.
  He loves the speed.
Wow, who would have thought the entry level linux distro might be full of inexperienced people who have no idea what they're talking about.
I really hate all these snaps and flatpacks and docker and blah blah blah.
Its about impossible to find a simple series of commands to just install and run some program anymore.
I also keep running into issues, especially with Docker where it assumes its the only thing that exists and everything uses the same port.
- Run a macvlan and give containers their own local IP. Or don't expose the port on the host, and connect via reverse proxy.

This is why I switched back to Debian Stable on my servers, can’t deal with this shit.

Also the fact that if you’re not up to date on updates, you can go fuck yourself as far as Ubuntu is considered. Debian will let you upgrade from any version without complaints

Yep 100%. Ubuntu did this once, googled it, and said aloud “Ah hell no!! …” Between this and Snaps I was like ok I’m done. Started researching things like Mint and PopOs. Decided to just stick with Debian. Especially since ProxMox is basically just specialized Debian designed for KVM virtualization.
Yeah I also had a similar problem with updates. Had an old Ubuntu vm that I could not get to upgrade without lots of pain. It’s like they were trying to piss me off.

Is it really like that or is this a joke

Last I used Ubuntu you do indeed get an ad every time you apt upgrade You can still go into some config file and remove it though
- When was the last time you used Ubuntu though?
  Some people could say "last time I used Ubuntu it was full of Amazon ads!" But that would have been like 13 years ago
I'm an ubuntu user and it was like that for a brief period but then they removed it after an uproar. I think. I double check it once I'm at my laptop
- I got a ThinkPad with Ubuntu 24.04 preinstalled and I haven't seen a single Ubuntu Pro ad. But I saw them a lot on my old laptop with 22 installed. So either they've changed their ways or I suppose it's possible Lenovo has preconfigured some settings.
  Edit. 24.04 LTS
- It's LTS only. If you moved off of LTS, you wont's see it again.
Pretty sure my work laptop tells me every time that I'm not getting some security upgrades, because I'm not using Ubuntu Pro.
I believe, there's some semi-reasonable justification, that they're only holding back upgrades for packages which they wouldn't normally maintain anymore, but yeah, it still looks horrendous from an end-user perspective.
Just on LTS. Desktop users would only run LTS for 6 months or so. Right, and LTS only releases once every two years. I used LTS on my work laptop at my previous company. Great feature, but I can see it wouldn't be as necessary for the end users. Hey, when everything is great, women have to find something to nit pick, am I right?!

I don't recall ever seeing such an ad in Ubuntu. Totally possible I wasn't paying attention or I saw it and forgot.

It's for LTS releases only. So you rarely see it on desktop, but for sure will see it on servers. My previous job, I ran LTS on my work laptop and would laugh at everyone always getting a forced update right before scrum. This new job, I have to use WSL on this Windows laptop and guess what, I'm in forced update hell. I can understand that for some(or most) the pro message would be annoying, but I'd rather see that pro message 100 times a day then get a forced update at random times. Especially right before meetings.
- Hi. I'm a sysadmin as part of my day job.
  I'm here to tell you that there's a local group policy that will, with almost 100% certainty, override the policies set by active directory.
  The issue is that you need to be a local admin to change those settings. If your IT department was smart enough (or dumb enough, depending on your perspective) to give you local admin, then it's possible to go in and change settings that will give you control again.
  There's more settings than I can reasonably put into a Lemmy message, but I'm certain you can use your favorite search engine to find "local group policy settings for Windows update" and adjust them to your liking.
  There's a lot of nuance when it comes to this stuff, and I can't guarantee the outcome. No matter what, good luck with it.
It came up once at the initial install and once when I used the shell, then never bothered me ever again iirc.
Why won't they leave me alone!

just use Debian.

or even Linux Mint

Ubuntu Pro is free for up to 5 machines.

And if that's not enough, you can just make a second account to get another 5.

And if the whole concept of getting extra security updates for packages that are out of support really bothers you, you can dummy out /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf

I'm not opposed to Canonical's monetisation model. I think charging for extra updates and packages is fine as a way to make money. But I can understand why people don't want advertising in their operating system, though I personally think that a simple line of text showing up on my terminal following a flood of package-fetching and script-running results is tolerable.
- Canonical makes plenty of money through corporate partnerships without needing to muddy the basic user experience.
Ubuntu Pro is free for up to 5 machines.
Ubuntu pro Costs handing over your Data to a company.
And if the whole concept of getting extra security updates for unsupported packages really bothers you
And if it Bothers you that a company actually supports the packages it is making availible...
No, Ubuntu pro brings faster Security updates, even for still supported apps.
- Ubuntu pro Costs handing over your Data to a company
  An email address. That's literally all they ask for. And they accept disposable emails. You don't have to hand over anything.
Oh wow, I didn't know that. Thank you for clarifying.
However I have to say I'm not necessarily against self promotion as companies and organisations have to sustain themselves but advertising your service every time the user updates or upgrades is way too much compared to KDE's once-a-year donation request for example (that can be easily disabled).
On another note I have experienced BTRFS and have seen the light, never returning to ext4 😭😭
- I also was annoyed first like ew what the hell is going on here but then subscribed and it was absolutely free no ADs no sms. The style they choose to announce it is still weird tho
- It's just the LTS version, most desktop users don't run that. Just 6 months out of two years probably.
... and live kernel security patches, removing the need to reboot out of schedule.
I've paid $$$ for that in commercial settings. Getting it for free is actually crazy.
..you can just make a second account..
I'm already gone if I have to make an account to run an OS on my hardware. Fuck everything about that.
- I have to make an account to run an OS
  You don't.
  We're discussing Ubuntu Pro.
I can't make an account, because I can't complete a Recaptcha. Google Recaptcha is used on every ubuntu.com signin page. (This means I also can't submit bug reports.)
- Why can't you complete a recaptcha? I totally understand not wanting to (I have Ublock Origin block them myself). But can't?
We got advtisment on lemmy before gta 6
Are you trying to be reasonable and pragmatic? Here? Good luck.

I love how in Garuda linux, the same command as sudo apt update;sudo apt upgrade is just yay. Like "Yay, I'm upgrading my system!" Makes me happy when I run it even though it is a bit like pulling a slot machine lever for if it's going to break something in my system. My plasmashell environment only recently got fixed. It was crashing like crazy for about 2 weeks.

I currently try Bazzite, which is a gaming focused fedora-atomic spinoff. I think this is finally my distro to switch the desktop from windows.

My current plan is to try, how you say...CachyOS?

Mainly, I want a clearer idea of what the "fork bases" are, so that when I inevitably run into some problems, I can google "How do I prevent window docking in Plasma" or "How do I prevent window docking in Arch". Not, "How do I prevent window docking in ObscureCachyFork875".

I think I've had several attempts on "simple" distros, and unfortunately I think the trend of trying to simplify things for me has just cut off customization options that irk me to no end.

If you often find yourself in a position when you can't troubleshoot issues yourself, CachyOS might not be the perfect option. It's Arch far and wide, iirc since I tried it about half a year ago, it doesn't even feature something as basic as the app store, and is heavily terminal-based. Considering how many diverse issues Arch can create, this turns into a nightmare very quickly.
Currently, I ended up running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my machines.
It's an OG distro, so no fork issues
Has decently large userbase
Is nearly as bleeding-edge as Arch
At the same time is rock solid thanks to advanced automatic package testing
Does not brick your system upon poor update
Has good and user-friendly documentation (that can be understood by non-nerds, unlike Arch Wiki)
Unlike newbie-friendly distros, does not assume user is an idiot and gives all power at your fingertips
Has btrfs and snapper properly set up by default to easily revert most mistakes you can make
So, generally, this is the peace of mind rolling release distro that just works, doesn't bother you too much and at the same time allows you to spend as much time under the hood as you like. You're unlikely to break anything, you can always revert if you do, packages are well-tested and unlikely to cause issues, and on this solid foundation, you can do anything you like.
- Hell, I am sold. Is it Debian or Red Hat based or just it's own type?
CachyOS is Arch. It's close enough that any searching about how to modify it will be applicable. You can even install Arch and apply the same modifications that CachyOS has. My personal experience is that it just works. I moved from Bazzite, an immutable distro wasn't for me.

Aside from install and the first welcome screen I don’t recall seeing anything.

So at work they want to switch all our servers from Debian to Ubuntu and now I read this? I'm so confused right now...

If you have pro enabled on an LTS version of Ubuntu, then you get live security updates, too include the kernel, as well as security updates for 10 years. Handy for developer workstations though. These people are whining and crying when desktop users rarely use the LTS version.

Stuff like that is a major reason why I switched to Debian on my servers.

The abusive bullshit needs to stop.

I was annoyed too when I saw the message, but, if I understood it correctly, it's a matter of widening the scope of the LTS version. The extra packages would only be updated on the next release, or are already updated if you don't use LTS. The message make it seem like they are withholding security patches, but it has always been like that and nobody cared. We just want everything to be updated, even if it'll make no difference.

My ubuntu experience since 4.0

Either Something Has Gone Wrong, or Serious system problem detected.

Even Recently! You would think new installs with nothing added wouldnt happen but here we are.

the worst issues I've had with Ubuntu or Ubuntu based distros were little hickups like not being able to suspend and rebooting fixed it. but what you're describing was my experience with fedora every single time i tried it... which is a shame because fedora works so much smoother with heavier tasks