Ubuntu's Decline

Website Article: christitus.com/ubuntu-decline/

I saved a couple of seconds everyday by switching from Ubuntu. Now I am an immortal with unlimited time.

I noticed these issues. This past week I installed Ubuntu as my first Linux distribution and was confused why the performance with basic applications was so bad.

Fun fact: Snap is indeed so bad, a former canonical employee made a script to replace it with flatpak packages While the official statement says the script is not intended to be taken that way, it's clear in between the lines The repo is (popey/unsnap)

Thank you, Chris. For me, as someone who was involved (not employed) in the community, everything that brought me to Ubuntu with Warty Warthog was slowly dropped by Mark and Canonical. I know that convergence was his real goal and once that was dead his interest in the desktop faded.

is sad that we are at the point that we have to "debloat" ubuntu

Ubuntu Mate does a decent job... The developers take a slightly different path than the other variants, it even includes Flatpack support out of the box to prove the point. However, I agree, Ubuntu is more focused on their corporate/server side now a days. They have some good software, but the standard Gnome desktop isn't one of them.

Canonical did not kill off "Ubuntu One". It was an account service that came with online storage called "One Drive" and was slated for including DRM for media collections to increase Canonical's revenue stream from its desktop userbase. Microsoft got sued by the Sky media network for the use of the term "Sky" in their "Sky Drive" office product. So Microsoft did a deal with Canonical to buy the "One Drive" trademark, as a result Canonical shut down quickly their Ubuntu One service. As a result Canonical made more money from the sale of the trademark than they ever did make from their premium tiers of One Drive storage service. *Bonus Factoid: My hard copy of The Linux Bible (4th edition) has a copy of Ubuntu 4.10 on the attached CD of live distributions. These days I am using Pop!_OS because it has all the hardware advantages of Ubuntu and by default only uses Debian and Flatpak package managers with slimy snot that is 'snap' excised from the system. Ubuntu minus snaps in the form of Pop!_OS is actually very usable, reliable and aesthetically pleasing by comparison

Thanks for the video! I've never liked Gnome or Unity for that matter. I always went with Mate or XFCE even when I used Ubunutu. Currently I like Mint Cinnamon due to it's ease of use and similarity to the Winblows of old that I learned on. I do hope that Ubuntu can recover from their decline in the user experience since I think they could be great again.

Ubuntu 22.04 has seven snap packages installed - one from Mozilla and the others from Canonical. The only delay I notice is with Firefox which isn't really that bad. If snaps are unreliable and not secure then that's a different issue. Ubuntu server 20.04 and 22.04 each have three snaps.

First started using Ubuntu when it first came out with Warty 4.10. Was there for the first Fedora Core also. The glory days were pre unity I think. Ubuntu 10.10 was the last Gnome 2.x and then 11.04 was when Unity first came out. I can say it took a LOT away. I always for fun on the panel had "Eyes" installed. A pair of eyes that followed the mouse around the screen. It was fun. I made folders on the panel to hold multiple files, change the clock format and location if I wanted, all sorts of things. ALL of the customization I liked was thrown out when Unity came out. Now I use Zorin on one laptop, and Mint on another. (Cinnamon and XFCE DE's) The whole point of Ubuntu was to make Linux for humans. Then they got to big, and Mark was spending millions of his own dollars to keep it going so they needed a income source. Enter Amazon integration. Now I actually had no issue with it there, BUT it did slow down the computer a lot, and if you wanted to look for a local file, it would first search Amazon, even if it was not a product. If they could have separated the searches or just used the Amazon app by itself I think it would have been more successful. I ended up like most uninstalling the Amazon shortcut and disabling its search, which made searching instant again. Then the Ubuntu Edge smart phone issue...they tried to raise 50 Million dollars, and I think it got to "Only" about 35/40 Million. That would still should have gotten them a start, as working prototypes were made and out. I can say I was really hoping for the converting from a smart phone to a full desktop. Install the newest Steam and Proton for games and somehow make new versions that can use a E-GPU? It had options, but business is business...

Will you be releasing a how-to video on your Fedora Config? Also is there a way to speed up dnf?

I liked Ubuntu around 14.04 to 18.04. I used it briefly, but ended up settling on Linux Mint (liked the look and feel better). Tried 21.04 in a virtual machine and hated it. I think that was when they started using snaps by default. It felt so sluggish compared to other distros. I thought it might have been the VM, but I guess I was wrong. I never used it as a daily driver (I've been switching between Manjaro and vanilla Arch), so it's interesting to see and read other people's experiences. Great video!

You are right and honestly right. I may not have used Ubuntu for a very longtime like many of you - I started with 14.04 LTS. However by the time we were getting to 18.04 LTS and 20.04 LTS, I realised something: 1. The OS ISO was getting larger with every release 2. The OS was becoming much more buggy and after a while it would Freeze no matter how powerful the PC was. I switched to Debian. And I have been all smiles

Credit where it's due, Ubuntu established me with Linux back in 2012ish. For that, I'm appreciative of Ubuntu / Canonical. After a couple of years I moved away from it and landed on arch based installs for desktops. Not needing bleeding edge packages, I threw ubuntu 21.04 or 21.10 onto a fairly decent pc about 6 mths ago and the delay with opening things like firefox was instantly noticeable. In general it felt slow. I didn't bother looking into at the time, I just knew it wasn't right and reverted to my usual install. This explains it.

I am relatively new to Linux (having dual boot at home for 1.5 years Win10/Linux Mint). I use my PC mainly for VFX. Since CentOS was considered as best fit for VFX artists few years ago and now everybody steers away from it, can you suggest which would be best fit in the future. I want to use on my PC those apps: The Foundry NukeX, SideFX Houdini, Red Giant Silhouette and Mocha Pro, Autodesk Maya. Right now I am ok with Mint, but is there more appropriate distros?

Linux Mint, MX, PopOs. They are probably the best options for beginners and for people who just want their system to work.

Agree with just about everything you say in the video. I find Xubuntu or Linux Mint XFCE far easier to use than the standard Ubuntu. In Xubuntu I don't really notice Firefox being slow to start.

I started using Ubuntu Studio when I got into using Virtual Pipe Organ Software because it came out "out of the box" with a real-time kernel and virtually all the bits needed for that application such as QjackCTL. I am not doing that so much anymore but stayed with it due to inertia. Which brings up the question of whether there are other distros which would be accommodating of those applications. What setups do other musicians use?

I think Snaps is NOT about Ubuntu not caring anymore. In a world of FOSS alternstives, the LAST thing a company would want is to p*ss off its users. Snaps HAS advantages. A company/school/enterprise does not care about a few more seconds of loading a program. Its us neckbeards who complain. Snaps mission isnt speed after all. Ubuntu goes the MS/Apple way of 110% seemless noob user experience. "Good" is a HIGHLY subjective term. I definitely should make a video about Ubuntu "going mad/down". I think it will rise even further.