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.
Genuine question, because I wasn’t there back in the day, what has changed since then?
It used to be a beautiful, friendly shade of brown and orange, and now it’s a vile shade of purple.
Other than that, if you look at Linux Mint today, you get a rough idea of what it was like. An easy to use desktop, with menus and settings exactly where you’d expect them. It was relatively easy to install, with an easy to understand graphical menu guiding you through the process. It had sane defaults for everything. It was fast, stable and improving all the time. Most things just worked. It was fast and reliable compared to Windows XP/Vista.
Slightly “Rose Tinted Glasses” view of things, but essentially their slogan “Linux for Humans” was true. An inexperienced computer user or previous Windows user could pick it up and use it straight away. There was quite a lot of innovation towards user experience, in line with community wants, hopes and ideas. It was all about customising things to your own needs.
The change was essentially they innovated towards their own ideas and not those of the community. It was all about customising things to their idea of what things should be like.
They designed their own Unity desktop to replace Gnome, changed to a more obtuse “Mac-like” interface, removing menus, settings, options etc. They were trying for this cool “convergent” OS for seamless mobile phone and computer usage. This made a lot of compromises in desktop usability. They eventually binned the mobile phone thing and Unity, then tried to remake everything again in Gnome, but left all the weird defaults and missing options.
Then a few other things in a similar direction.
Then Snaps, but that’s its own story.
Unity was what made me move to Mint.
My two cents - change in priorities over the years
It started as almost a pet project funded by Mark Shuttleworth to make Linux easier to use, and was focused on desktop Linux
Over the years, the focus changed to becoming profitable, and their main focus now is the server and IoT space
I feel the same. I can’t recommend it to anyone anymore.
What are the reasons you advise against it now?Ignore this, iOS app bug.
expand their comment, tbey said
Oh, that whole thing did not show up in Memmy, just the first paragraph. Bug report inccoming!
I was also on Memmy thinking “what a tease…” 😂
I also remember WUBI - that was a brilliant installer. Probably wouldn’t have tried Linux as soon as I did without it.