this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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There's a lot of people out there that hate to hear this, but ubuntu is probably the best gateway to Linux we have at the moment. Go ahead, let them come in on the distro that's pretty well supported, preconfigured with everything on and newbie friendly, then once they've cut their teeth, let they have the option to move to something that's a little more tweaked.
I've used Ubuntu for 10 years. I love it for stability, ease, and simplicity If i need to do anything there are plenty of guides. I learned how to do a lot of cool stuff on linux but I don't really need or want to do any of it.
Mostly I just pirate movies, use a vpn, torrent, listen to music, write. My career doesn't require much computer stuff. Why should I try something different?
I'm not working with a huge amount of interest in or energy for complicated customization. I just wanna turn it on and have it work.
Power to you, friend. But with current snap store out of the box it's really hard to recommend Ubuntu to anyone. Linux Mint seems such a better choice to newbies.
At the end of the day it's not really a big deal, people should just use whatever feels best.
What is wrong with the snap store? It's not something I'm aware of.
I go to terminal. I sudo apt-get
I get Firefox, I get my VPN, I get deluge, I get my audio player.
I use those things. I sleep well at night.
If you use apt-get you aren't using snaps, you are unaffected.
Snap is a format created by Canonical which has a really funky proprietary back end. The default application store in Ubuntu uses this format and has been plagued with an impersonation problem. Since everyone could submit snaps there was a lot of spyware posing as legit software. My main gripe was when the snap store just decided to unilaterally close and update my Firefox while I was using it.
Linux Mint does NOT have snaps and even had a debian based version. Pretty neat
Correct me if I am wrong, but
apt-get install firefoxinstalls the snap version unless you go out of your way to fix that?Yep, it installs the snap version
apt uses debians packages and debian repositories. Unless they recently created an alias or something, it should install debian packaged version!
I was under the impression the latest "firefox" package was a kind of "meta" package that caused the snap to get installed instead.
Certainly seems that way according to: https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=firefox
Note that 22.04 is described as a transitional package to snap.
Apt does use debian packages (.deb files), but on ubuntu it uses ubuntus repositories.
Even worse than I thought, then :/
They've introduced a couple of redirects so that the snap version gets installed.
As a windows user who's been doing some research and looking to switch this is really the post I needed to see. I know everyone seems to have their favourite distro and means well when suggesting them but its nice to have someone point out a distinct beginner friendly one with no caveats.
To be perfectly honest they're all fine. Most of the major distributions are install it and run it. If you try one and you don't like it don't get discouraged try another. If you have trouble getting your hardware working on one try a different one.