ATM I stay at Kubuntu. I checked telemetry, added flatpak resources to Discover (=the app shop there) and customized the OS a bit. I am still happy with it just saying if Canonical has future plans I would not like. .....another downside is that the updates from Canonical repo are slow....for instance Lutris is still on 0.5.9.1 (Oct21), so it's good to have flatpak releases additionally. BTW: I recently tried gaming on Linux again. I have to admit there is a huge progress compared to 4 years ago when you could forget about to play windows games on Linux. Gog games I had purchased for windows surprisingly did now install and run through Lutris. The drawback still is that there is no real control panel for Nividia GPUs......but I definitively try more out.
Constant updates and constantly moving target is the single main reason the vast majority of people don't use Linux in Desktop environment. Just take a random rolling release like Arch/Manjaro/Gentoo/Void set it up perfectly to your liking. then turn it off for for 6 months, then turn it on again and update it, likely on next reboot nothing works... because the kernel dropped a feature, because the package XWX moved the configuration in a different directory, because someone decided it was about time to move from the good old Xorg to the pointless Wayland, or from Sys-V init to the even more pointless systemd and so on. Lack of stability is the problem. My old notebook from the XP era (which is so old that has still PATA drives) runs even Win11 w/o a blink, using a VGA driver made for vista 14 years ago. I didn't have to use a single tweak/special driver/whatever to run W11, just deployed, booted, installed the drivers. To run a modern Linux on it, I need to use a longterm 4.14 Kernel, recompile it with the user mode setting (which is disabled by default in any precompiled one), then downgrade Xorg because they also dropped the user mode setting for radeon cards since 2013 or so, something I cant do effectively using APT GET or similar tools and so on.... In short two weeks of resarch to get to that point, and a couple of hours to get the work done AFTER you know exactly what to do. That may sound as an extreme case, but similar examples are endless. Even a stupid 4$ bluetooth dongle can give you a lot of headaches moving from Debian 9 to Debian 10 or 11 The truth is that most of Linux developers and distro maintainers care a lot about marking the territory with their latest "bright" idea and a lot less about end users. On server side it's way different, in that scenario nowadays most of the work is done by big corporations Intel, AMD, MS, Facebook, IBM are doing most of the work, but that's something related to their own pockets rather than the open source spirit
Well most of the people who want to try Linux, or use Linux just doing some normal tasks do not even know about X11/ Wayland and Sys-V / systemd 'revolution'. I noticed that because some commands (for instance to control services) got an alternative. KDE considers Wayland as still unfinished so you won't find it as default on Kubuntu. Fair enough. Some basic modules/systems need a change for future development (for instance to overcome legacy limits). Some have become complicated over time and a sort of patchwork. It's actually good to change a structure and it's normal that the new one firstly performs worse....but the final goal should be always a slimmer module, easier to handle and more performance. Since then both ways can be realized parallel and one remains as default. The problem to establish a new one is far greater than at monopolists.....finally you need a good communication and a majority of the will to support and to realize it widely. Years ago I would agree. Whenever I ran update commands I was actually not sure if the distro still boots up. Or when I tried things out....especially Nvidia driver or other driver compilations. Today's LTS versions are stable through the entire update cycle till EOL. LTS usually remains at one kernel except you install HWE which is IMHO useless unless you upgrade your hardware in the meantime. I am running Kubuntu on a strange HW configuration. Strange in that way that the chipset and mobo are quite old (X58 / first gen I7 Gulftown hexacore), anything else actually much newer...such as RTX2080s and so on... Kernel 4 performed much weaker than kernel 5...., but I definitively do not need to update to 6.2 or so... One little issue remains, though. And this is an inconsistency of a kind I only know from Linux. I randomly get an error at boot. No matter what I try I cannot figure out when I get it and when not (which circumstances).....it's just saying that my USB-C port on the RTX graphics failed to initialize... A similar issue I had at an older kernel when I had shut down Kubuntu 18.04....sometimes there was an ACPI error , sometimes not.... Yes I heard that from other people, too.
@Yen Indeed LTS are the only decent way to use Linux as a windows replacement, but still problematic. Say Ubuntu Xenial Xerus (aka 16.04), that personally I consider a good distro, modern enough to do some most of the jobs done, while able to run on HW that isn't released "yesterday", is still somewhat supported by Canonical itself but most of the PPA are gone for good. If you insist using it, you end in a similar scenario of using Windows LTSB 2015, which in theory is still supported, but practically is the son of a lesser God, (no official .net 48 support, albeit it's available even for Win7, impossible to use recent NVIDIA cards and so on) BTW it's not just matter of using an old OS version, in Linux is problematic to use an older SW in a recent OS. Just for example I have another notebook that can run Kodi just until 15.2, either in Windows or Linux, (I guess because the OpenGL capabilities of the VGA, anything newer becomes unbearably slow or don't start at all). What I can do in Windows ? (7/8/10/11) I just download Kodi 15.2 and setup it. What I can do in Linux ? Nothing that an average user can do: the 15.2 packages are already hard to find, and even if you find them, the chain of requirements which usually ends to the glibc makes impossible to run it. You may recompile it (i never did that personally but I think is a huge work given the links to ffmpeg, security related components, open gl libraries and so on) Lets assume you compiled it successfully, then you may need a TV front-end plugin (and many of them aren't open source). In windows they are bundled in the setup.exe, in Linux they aren't, also many of them needs to be compiled for a specific distro ( a package meant for say Ubuntu 14.04 hardly will work in Debian Jessie even if they are more or less from the same era). In short the only viable way is to use an almost entire distro in chroot environment, using 700MB of storage instead of 60 or so, and even that option is not always viable, given Ubuntu and Debian have old achieves still up and running, but most of other Minor distro's repo are just gone for good. And even when the archives are there, non open source packages are just not there. Put yourself in the shoes of a not skilled user (or a skilled one that lacks time) and you get the idea. Its a double click in Windows v.s. a couple of days of work in Linux, what would you choose? And we are just taking of a stupid mediacenter, not a complex driver required to connect yourself to the NORAD Speaking about Wayland it started as quick way to avoid fixing the huge amount of cruft that Xorg collected over decades of development. Which sounded as a good thing, there are many solution looking for a problem, but wayland was envisioned after real problems. But now, after 15 years, it's still not ready for prime time. How much code Xorg code they could have debugged/cleaned/improved in 15 years? The problem is always the same. "Hey I'm the author of Wayland!" sounds way better than "hey I'm one the guys who debugged some code of Xorg..."
I understand, absolutely. But these are specific issues and dev quirks you always have at real open source communities. I could also say Game X installs fine on windows and runs, on Linux not. Why still? I think we have to look at Linux from a more general perspective. And Linux distros got better and better over past decade(s). Nobody actually needs to compile stuff anymore, nobody to run a terminal (although some basics are of benefit either way). If you have 'common' hardware from known brands, which is already dated a bit Linux installs mostly well, addressing all hardware. Even my strange config. Hey...who else runs the same config like I do? Another hundred? 10? Only me? LOL. It has to address a chipset / CPU from the year 2008 and a GPU from 2019!!!! Not to speak of a 3rd party USB 3 onboard chip from renesas and the old realtek sound-chip . X58 had no USB 3 yet! All simply works! And the performance is great. It even runs windows games. Another point is software which is closely related to hardware and codecs (when you spoke about kodi for instance)....Games actually, too. Well, finally it's always the same. Nobody deletes windows and runs Linux. Most have dual use in a way. And IF the 'habituation' to win gets weaker and stronger to Linux and you actually use Linux most of the time there is always one question left: "When do I need to boot windows because software X only runs there"....and I still have no alternative found....and I cannot pass it....still need it... I do 95% of all private stuff on Linux. But still not 100%. At my job I have to use what they install. And that's mostly windows. Besides of that I am an admin there, too. Only one expensive device is controlled by CentOS there, the mentioned NMR device. And that's actually a thorn in their (IT dept.) side. They rather would see windows only, lol. I only can motivate the readers again. Try a Linux distro next to windows. It's mostly better than thought. Dual boot it. If you are a privacy concerned person, do all sensitive stuff there, other stuff on windows. Maybe do more and more on Linux, get familiar with it! Also when you still want to use older hardware and STILL get (security) updates. It would be a shame when it vanishes because it cannot or MUST NOT (w11 policy!!!) run current windows anymore.
All correct. But in 2023 most of the paradigms that were good in 2003 are gone. The point is the Linux was (and still is) relevant for personal computing. The point is that the *personal * part is died or is going to die. Frankly what changes today for the average kid that uses Linux because is "cool", and the first thing he does is installing chrome, and posting something something on TikTok? 20/25 years ago the landscape was simple. Windows was the crashy OS, that "forced" you to use IE, made by the evil monopolist MS, while Linux was a community driven project that didn't catch viruses, that was stable, that came with great browsers like Konqueror, and that offered a good share of great alternatives like Opera or Firefox Apple was the underdog that had its share of, elitist, followers, and Google was the company that had the "don't be evil" motto In and that saved us from crap like Altavista, Yahoo, Lycos and alike. Mobile internet was a marvelous revolution, tanks to Ericsson, Nokia, Psion, Americans were in the stone age and few of them had to fight with few rudimentary Palm or BB devices, poor coverage, incompatible standards, hig tariffs and so on In 2023 Windows is rock solid and is made in a relevant share from open source SW. Starting from WSL, WSA, OpenSSL, Webkit and so on. Linux is coded in a relevant share by corporations, as a mean to make money with minimal efforts, If compared to SW built in house from the ground. MS is likely the less evil of the big IT corporations, Google and Apple "evolved" in companies that in 2003 weren't even in dystopian SF movies and books. Social media were added to the explosive mix. In the mobile world American companies entered full steam in the market destroying all the good things were made in the previous decade in Europe, thanks to their economical power, and the large user base. In the mobile world the ugly android and iPhones are now the modern jail bracelet. And last but not least governments (no matter if from democratic or totalitarian flavor) understood the power of the net and the IT in general, and instead of protecting users from the power of corporations are going hand to hand with them because controlling people is something they like a lot as well. Long story short, IMO what OS you use in your PC today is next to irrelevant The browser is the real operating system, people spend 90% of the time on the net, on the cloud, and even if they don't, they have a nice (locked) mobile device in their pockets 100% of the time, and no one knows what an app really does. So I still use Linux because it's fun, not because technical or moral superiority that (mostly) isn't there anymore.
A quick update and updated thoughts about the original topic. Although they have fixed Firefox snap update in the meantime I have completely removed all preinstalled snaps and snapd completely. The snap firefox installation I have replaced with the original firefox directly coming from mozilla.org. I think this will be my last (K)ubuntu based distro. I am afraid but I think sooner or later the Ubuntu flavors become a snapcraft OS. And their tendency to ads / telemetry already sucked. So what's left? Getting back to the topic. Which is the right 'Linux'? You actually do not choose what Linux distro you should use. You (should) choose which desktop do you prefer and THEN where can I get my favorite desktop. Finally the 'interface' between the user and the OS is the desktop at first place, not the Linux distro. Once being a bit familiar with Linux you know which desktop you like. Being a complete beginner you don't yet. So the question is from where do you come (which OS) AND do you rather like a highly customisable desktop or rather not. A general orientation of famous desktops: plain: Xfce plain, clear: Gnome and the forks Mate and Cinnamon. most customisable: KDE Now to get rid of *buntu base / Canonical and without to get into a huge adventure I think it is reasonable to go back to Debian base. If Linux users have the same motivations I think it is best: Xfce users should try MX Linux. Mint users (Cinnamon users) should try LMDE. KDE users (such as me). I think best is to try MX Linux KDE. Or one could switch to plain Debian which comes with all the famous Desktops already. Just my 2 cents nowadays.
Over the years, I used most likely all Linux distros. Ones no longer developed, and the current rage including the ones above. I have used Ubuntu from the beginning and will most likely continue to use it and Xubuntu. Kubuntu and KDE Arch and debian variants I no longer use. I've tried each NEW installment, but not interested. Also, using Ubuntu, first thing I do is remove Snap totally, and completely. There's a few scripts that can do that automatically, but I prefer hand to hand. Than I download Firefox into /opt and run the scripts needed for operations.
I also stick to Kubuntu for now. (Since I love KDE). But my thoughts went further if the Ubuntu flavors continue to move to snapcraft. Yes, I used ready-made scripts to remove snapd completely using flatpaks instead. (Or regarding FF I use the original from mozilla.org). I understand those scripts, but I am not that much familiar when it comes to the right syntax, finally I can be sure using them that I know what they actually do. What's left with that you actually remain being a Canonical customer, though! By that you are still supporting them. So I think in the future to use a different base than Canonical related ones without getting into much adventures it is best to go back to Debian based distros. I searched a lot, but LMDE and MX Linux made the best impressions and they are Debian based. Besides of that they are top ranked. To use Linux as a daily work OS which is stable and easy enough to install a Debian base is best IMHO. Additionally if you want up to date resources to the conservative base you can use the flatpaks. Mint DE and MX Linux come with their handy tools which make daily life a lot easier as an extra bonus. Add: (Another base maybe?) Manjaro is interesting and has a lot to offer. But I'd consider it as more risky / experimental than Debian based distros. I am not quite sure if it's a reliable distro for every day work since it is a rolling release. It's based on Arch, a very up to date base, anyway Manjaro keeps retarding packages for testing reasons. So Manjaro is always a little behind and dependencies may not be satisfied as they should. If you enable AUR and do wild installs you can break your system! It's actually no genuine Arch. Manjaro had internal issues (SSL certificate expired / proprietary office stuff, etc etc..) and it went down the ranks for a year..anyway I'll keep an eye on it.
good to see a halfway logical analysis. clearly; it all comes down to ones` preferred desktop. [ and ones` prefered stabile os.. and how far one can trust the developer team, too..] i have used mx, and i heartily detest xfce. at the moment in still on ubuntu.but i heartily detest Canonical too.and if Clement Lefebvre disapproves of snap, then who am i to question it, lol. plus their telemetry antics, and they seem to remain on speaking terms with m$ too..now running LMDE6; totally happy user.it all seems to be kind of subjective at the end of the day, and this is just my 2 cents..
i've been on Kanotix (Debian/KDE) for ages (nearly 20 years) : clean, well maintained, kernel always uptodate now i've found Neptune (Debian/KDE) : give it a try
I don't want to get into distro hopping, anyway ATM I would like to try new stuff. Trying on a VM IMHO does not gain more info as I would get watching a decent video about the particular distro. Only bare metal is the deal to see if it works over time. I have to find a balance between the curiosity trying new stuff and having a reliable and solid OS which I can use 95% of my 'PC life' My recent Kubuntu does that pretty good. Anyway I would have some things being changed. Next time I need to format btrfs before installing the OS. Only there time-shift and co. can unfold their complete powers. I think fiddling with rolling releases only makes sense when having a proper and reliable rollback function. 4 years ago I never could imagine to use bases besides of a solid Debian / *buntu base. But that has changed. Fedora and even Arch base can work pretty well. Maybe at Christmas holiday I try a new one.
That's why I have several partitions. One for my daily distros, and a spare to try ones that I'm interested in.
I have been running LMDE6 since its launch on my laptop and regular Mint on two other PCs, its hard to tell the difference between them, LMDE6 is very polished. I used MX Linux for a long while and liked it but it did feel a little dated and more bloated than Mint.
I had time to test, but my main Linux is still Kubuntu LTS. I gained valuable knowledge, though. In the meantime I would not recommend a Debian or *ubuntu based distro IF you are running recent hardware. It can happen that your hardware is not (yet) properly addressed / running because Debian is slow on updated kernel / driver. The same applies to people who simply want new stuff and applications. (New versions of them). For now I would recommend to anyone running recent hardware rather to use Fedora or Fedora based distro or even an arch based such as Manjaro. Debian and *ubuntu based distros are stable, yes, but do not get most out of your (recent) hardware. (Especially kernel and GFX performance). So my updated recommendations would be: If you have a performant new hardware based system try anything else of Debian / *ubuntu base. Try Fedora and chose your preferred desktop. If you want even newer stuff go for Manjaro (arch base). I would say Fedora is as stable as *ubuntu, but Fedora has the new stuff first and also acts as 'trendsetter'. If you love vanilla Gnome I guess there is nothing better than Fedora. Also their KDE version is impressing. If you like to want gaming, then maybe try Nobara, which is Fedora based and comes with all the gaming stuff preinstalled and tuned. If you have already aged hardware and do not care about always having recent stuff then stay at Debian base. So why I have not migrated from Kubuntu myself (yet)? ATM the "never change a running system" ideology applies. I simply need it running and I recently designed my KDE desktop to my likes... I almost installed Fedora on my main rig...but then I hesitated. The next Fedora 40 will be Wayland only...not sure if that is a good idea. I decided to wait for Fedora 40...
I agree. Manjaro is more bleeding edge. But that correlates with a higher probability of issues. It also depends how you use Manjaro. When you enable AUR (ArchUserRepository) as source and use a lot of stuff from there, it is only a matter of time until you are running into issues. BUT: Manjaro has a great feature for that. It can be btrfs formatted and then it uses grub-btrfs time shift snapshots. AFAIK it's the only distro that can do bootable snapshots directly from the grub boot loader menu at start. This means you create a snapshot of system and home before you try something / update something. This snapshot then is bootable via grub. By doing so anything gets rolled back exactly that way you had that time of the snapshots. Generally...the more bleeding edge the more chance to get issues. A proper roolback function should be part of any Linux distro, though. Fedora also uses btrfs filesystem by default. Anyway it cannot do grub bootable snapshots out of the box. You have to setup that manually. (Timeshift requires certain names of subvolumes. System (/) must be @ and home (/home) must be @home.)