I have been not recommending Ubuntu to people because of obvious reasons (the Amazon search integration and snaps, mainly). The reason I am posting this is because someone I know mentioned that they are considering Ubuntu. They have a degree in cs and generally are competent with computers, but didn’t like mint when they tried it. I would like to know a few things, since I haven’t looked into Ubuntu in a while:
Has anything changed about snap? I know people didn’t like it at first, especially the proprietary server, but I don’t think they will care about that and I mainly just want to know if it will eat all their RAM or something.
Have they made any changes in their management that may make sure there won’t be another Amazon search thing?
Is it best to use the default desktop on Ubuntu? I would recommend Kubuntu to them, all else being equal, but don’t know if maybe the default one is better integrated.
Edit: The person will be 100’s of miles away so helping them with issues will be hard, and Ubuntu LTS should be stable. Plus, basically everything that “supports” linux but doesn’t really usually supports Ubuntu. I do really see where they’re coming from, but want to know if it has a major potential to backfire on them and if they might be better off with Fedora.
Yeah that’s kind of where I’m at with Ubuntu now. I personally got tired of using it because I find Canonical tends to fixate on whatever shiny thing they currently think is cool (Unity, that hybrid phone/desktop OS thing, Mir, now Snaps), then they let a lot of other stuff stagnate, get the thing they’re fixated on to the point where it’s almost really good, then they get bored and ditch it and go chasing something else.
But none of that’s a killer technical issue necessarily, if you don’t care about that you can still install it and have a good working/stable computer that’ll still do probably 99% of what you need it to.