I was digging through some stuff and stumbled on this. To think it’s been 15 years. Crazy what you used to be able to get a free CD of back in the day.
I was digging through some stuff and stumbled on this. To think it’s been 15 years. Crazy what you used to be able to get a free CD of back in the day.
I miss the days, when Ubuntu was still a fun distribution to recommend to anyone.
Their initial idea of creating “Linux for human beings” was great and they were leading the way in user-friendly installers, graphical distribution upgrades and making the Linux desktop more accessible to everyone in general! I especially loved their predictable release cycle. Having the choice between an LTS and a more recent version is very useful and with Ubuntu you can make that decision again every two years. Very practical!
The negative part ...
Unfortunately things started to change in the 2010s and by the 2020s I started to advise against it.
Their new installers (subiquity and ubuntu-desktop-installer) can’t do simple partitioning anymore, e. g. they can’t create a boot partition (or better: encrypted boot) + an encrypted btrfs partition that fills the rest of the space. Since the discontinuation of the mini.iso (Debian Installer) and Ubiquity (old desktop installer) images, I am therefore no longer able to install Ubuntu.
Snapd can still only manage a single repository and Canonical is therefore the only one in control of snap package distribution. This makes snapd a no-go in my opinion. But Ubuntu is still transitioning towards it, even though every other distribution is going to Flatpak because of snapd’s walled garden approach. With Flatpak you can add as many remotes as you want or you can decide to stick to Flathub, if it meets your needs. The same is true for Docker / Podman on the server: Sure there’s Docker Hub, which is very popular, but you are able to add any container repository, if you so choose.
I’m now using Fedora Silverblue on my desktops and will soon transition my Ubuntu server from 20.04 to Debian 12. I’ve already archived all my Ubuntu documentation. Sad times …
Hopefully new distributions, like Vanilla OS 2, will soon be able to fill the gaps that Ubuntu left.