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.
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. 🤷🏻♂️
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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. 🤷🏻♂️
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.
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
Android is the one most have heard of and the rest of the points apply as people disown it
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?
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.
🥱
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.
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.
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
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.