I am so over getting ads for Ubuntu Pro at login, through apt, and anywhere else they might decide to put them.
Fedora has really been making some great strides over the last decade or so.
After disagreeing with some decisions Canonical/Ubuntu were making, I have been a happy user since 2013 (Fedora 20). Recently started contributing as a package maintainer and quite frankly, Asahi Linux choosing to base on Fedora has just caused me to double down on it being a good call.
I tried Fedora just a couple of years back (34, iirc) and was surprised so much how good it is! I used Ubuntu long before (like Ubuntu 8.10 before) and didn’t like it back then. Debian was (and is) better, but at that time it didn’t include non-open WiFi drivers and now I stay away from Debian mostly because of the outdated software (when I don’t care, I may prefer Debian, it depends). So I use Arch for a very long time, because I can pick what I prefer (except the init system, of course) and it’s not outdated. But at some systems I just need it to work, be balanced with stability and software being updated. But I also don’t want to tinker too much. E.g. my home family computer that is used by other family members. Fedora is so good that it’s my first choice in many places.
After ubuntu made the whole OS depends on the Ubuntu-advantage-tools I quitted using it and used Debian, never looked back.
OT:
There’s a cookie pop up covering 80% percent of the page, asking about “your tracking settings” with one green encouraging button saying “accept all and visit site” and a white button displaying “manage your tracker settings”
As a current ubuntu user, that hostile cookie wall is jarring and makes me question what path ubuntu is on. Either the management never looks at their public website, or they are happy with giving the user a bad experience in exchange for whatever value they think those cookies provide.
We have been considering Ubuntu Pro as an IT team to simplify managing dependencies and security for any of our Linux VMs. Ease-of-use is a big priority in this particular team. I'm working towards getting them some ansible infrastructure in place to mass-configure many of these systems. This team also can't always be expected to be super competent with Linux or a command line.
Any suggestions or alternatives to Ubuntu Pro that I should consider?
After being on Ubuntu for the last half decade, I moved to MacOS. Couldn’t have been happier.
My Ubuntu powered laptops weren’t any significantly cheaper than a comparable Macbook, and the minor annoyances on Ubuntu were starting to outnumber the benefits.
Same here, except with Debian. The Macbook Pro is by far the best laptop I've ever had and MacOS is my preferred OS. Originally I never wanted to use Mac at all but was forced to use one through work and now I'm completely converted.
For all of Canonical's faults (e.g. snap really seems like a bad technology), Ubuntu is still a Linux distribution and if you don't like a certain thing, you can always swap things out. If you don't like GNOME, use KDE, Xfce or any other DE. If the firefox snap takes forever to load, use the flatpak, etc. It's certainly opinionated, but not closed down in the way that macOS or Windows are.
I'm still quite happy using Ubuntu and while it's not perfect, I prefer it to other alternatives I've tried (e.g. Linux Mint is too annoying to update with its "only a backup + fresh reinstall is a safe upgrade" policy, Arch requires too much maintenance, etc.).
My suggestion would be to first give Ubuntu-based distributions a try, like Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, or KDE neon. If there's still too much Ubuntu weirdness for your liking, try Debian. And if that doesn't satisfy your desktop needs, give Fedora a try.
All of these provide good out-of-the-box experience.
I had a far better experience on Manjaro than Ubuntu and variants. AUR seems to have more of what I tend to use and rolling release means I can keep my projects up to date without having to add ppas every 5 minutes. If you're not vehemently against snap, it's also available.
Ubuntu Pro is of course aimed at enterprise users, and here it makes perfect sense to use it. ISO27001 compliance, CIS-Level evaluation with the Ubuntu Security Guide, 10 year security maintenance, live kernel updates for less downtime, better AD integration, automatic software deployment, 24/7 support, etc. These things matter in a company setting.
I'm noticing a retracing of the path redhat took in creating RHEL, which is currently dominant as far as paid installs of Linux. I'm not an Ubuntu person by any means but it's easy to connect the dots looking back on how RHEL happened, and I could see how Canonical looks at this as their chance to be the quasi Debian side of the enterprise linux picture.
Yes, and I think their chances are not bad at all. RHEL is the safe&boring choice for your run-of-the-mill web/file/DB server, I don't think there's any doubt about that. I think however Ubuntu is much better positioned for clients, like Linux laptops for software devs. A new LTS every two years with up-to-date software, the ISO/CIS compliance stuff makes InfoSec happy, the deployment/AD integration features make IT happy, and lots of choice for Ubuntu certified laptops from the big enterprise vendors (Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc.) make procurement happy, so I think it is a really attractive choice for a company. And once you have Ubuntu Pro for these machines, why not use it on the server as well, especially since it's cheaper than RHEL.
Better out-of-the-box desktop experience. Last time I tried Debian for desktop, I tried for 4 hours to get my bluetooth headphones to work. In Linux Mint (or Ubuntu) they just worked out-of-the-box.
They work out of the box on Debian now too. Ubuntu used to do all sorts of upstream work to make Debian unstable work better, but nowadays Debian is on par with Ubuntu for post-install usability.
I installed Ubuntu recently and my experience definitely wasn't "it just works", getting constant notifications that applications need to be restarted to update and multiple "Ubuntu has failed" popups (which seem to mean literally nothing) don't feel like it's just working to me. It actually seems like everything the OS does is janky in some way.
Even putting the OS aside I believe some of the jank is caused by Ubuntu's insistence on trying to usurp applications installed via apt to instead install them via snap. This is why my Firefox install wont allow me to copy text at random, and why I can't drag and drop files into Telegram, and why every file I download has to be dug up from some deep .snap/ directory before any other application can actually load it.
Except the advantage of not having ads in the command line and not having confusing messages that some security updates have been withheld unless you sign up for a pro version.
When I adopted Ubuntu, it was 2004 or so, and the difference from Debian was night-and-day. In fact, it was cks who recommended Ubuntu to me, after listening to various woes with the audio subsystem. I was trying to attack these hardware/driver issues one-by-one and he just said "Install Ubuntu, and be done with it!" and he was right: as soon as I installed Ubuntu, all my commodity hardware just worked, and my concerns became much higher-level, and I was a satisfied Ubuntu user for about 18 years afterward.
I did vow to migrate to Debian eventually. It never completely happened, as my Lenovo went to Fedora and I eventually decided to eliminate Linux entirely from my home network. But nowadays, Debian is totally mature and able to tackle modern hardware much better than it could in 2004, and I believe that this is attributable to a lot of packaging and integration work by Canonical.
I'm happy we live in a world with so many decent desktop Linux distros. I was a happy Ubuntu user since 7.10, but recently with Snap canonical irritated me to the point of switching, and I hopped around a couple distros before settling in Opensuse Tumbleweed. if you want the benefits of a rolling distro like Arch without the bullshit of dealing with Arch, I highly recommend it.
It's Ubuntu, with Snap removed, no Flatpak either, but built-in AppImage support and the improved Nala and Deb-get package management tools for getting and updating native .DEB-packaged software.
And it has Xfce, the least-nonsense-filled light-weight Linux desktop there is.
You won't lose anything. Ubuntu stays ubuntu, but if you want extra support (e.g. Professional level usage) you have to pay to get it earlier and for longer.
The last Ubuntu I ran was with Xfce, with the whole Unity interface being where I lost any interest in anything that Canonical has a hand in steering--adoption of Snaps nailed that coffin. I still have some Ubuntu server cloud VMs which will switch when next rebuilt.
On Desktop I am perfectly happy running Debian sid again after a long detour to Mac OS X until it got enshittified too much. Ubuntu is interesting for enterprise use though, the microcloud and LXC/LXD stuff is at least worth considering if starting to build things up on bare metal. Containers are relatively easy with Nomad/K8s, but if you want to spin up your own VM layer (OpenStack?) then I would consider Ubuntu before going to Nutanix and others
Fedora has really been making some great strides over the last decade or so.
After disagreeing with some decisions Canonical/Ubuntu were making, I have been a happy user since 2013 (Fedora 20). Recently started contributing as a package maintainer and quite frankly, Asahi Linux choosing to base on Fedora has just caused me to double down on it being a good call.