Ubuntu has been in the distro news lately with it’s nascent release of 20.04. Ubuntu has long been touted as the beginner friendly distro. And while there have been some historical gaffes and strange decisions I’ve never been one to actively discourage the use of Ubuntu for those that were interested in it. I never even dinged them for basically doing nothing that Debian didn’t do already. Every one of their releases is basically a pull of Debian testing to fit a time window. Unfortunately, I can no longer defend Ubuntu.
I tried out the latest release on a spare Thinkpad. One I use to check out distros occasionally as they come out. The t450s has a Broadwell generation i7 and 12GB of RAM. It shouldn’t be slow, especially as the installs go to a Intel DC series SSD. But this time around I found Ubuntu to feel laggy. Window animations and the opening of some programs would halt and hitch and generally run poorly. A little digging reveals that part of this is due to Ubuntu’s use of SNAP packages by default. If you install chromium from the official repos, for instance, you aren’t getting a native binary for the browser. You are getting a SNAP application. While SNAPs are a good idea I think they are a poor implementation. Flatpak tend to be much faster. Other applications have been replaced by SNAPs seemingly with no rhyme or reasoning:
gnome-calculatorgnome-charactersgnome-logsgnome-system-monitor
Why do this? Why these applications? Why is my calculator taking so long to open? You might want to just remove them. But then they have a nasty habit of coming back. As YouTuber DistroTube discovered after his gaffe in the comments. He uninstalled snapd only to have it reinstall itself as a dependency moments later.
So I’ve prattled on about SNAPs, why I don’t like them, and why I think they were implemented in a sneaky and illogical way. Is that my only problem with Ubuntu? Goodness no.
Another example is the default DNS configuration. Since about 1991 /etc/resolv.conf has been where you go to declare your DNS nameservers. It’s worked just find all that time, so clearly it needed to be broken. Now you get autogen nameservers defined in /run/resolvconf/resolv.conf that need a symbolic link to /etc/resolv.conf. dpkg-reconfigure can fix your broken symbolic link. It took me 10 minutes of searching to fix something that was broken for no well explained reason.
So I’m done with Ubuntu. There are just too many other options that don’t do silly things for silly reasons.