This is a quick and belated answer to Dedoimedo’s Why Ubuntu? And the answer is, why not.

It’s not a rebuttal. He’s not necessarily wrong. But he can’t fundamentally be right, either. (Or is it the other way around?)

He didn’t actually say that Ubuntu is the best distro. What he did was to explain his “rationale into why Ubuntu is the best desktop choice (and it is)” and “why other distros aren’t as optimal,” while acknowledging that “Linux is in a bad state, regardless of what you select”—and we fully agree on that last statement.

Language note: “why other distros aren’t as optimal.” I thought there’s no such thing as “as optimal as” or “less optimal than”! Apparently, while prescriptivists say that “optimal” means “best possible” or “most favorable,” therefore something can’t be “more optimal” or “less optimal” any more than it can be “more perfect,” in actual usage people regularly treat “optimal” as a gradable adjective. English is much more tolerant here than Romance languages, which preserve the Latin understanding that optimus was already the superlative form of bonus, so it can’t be further modified. But hey, English is the language in which Marco Rubio just said, “It would be a great benefit to the United States if Cuba was no longer governed by an autocratic regime” instead of “if Cuba were no longer,” because many of the rules of English grammar are optional in real life!

I can even nod in assent to Dedoimedo’s mishaps with openSUSE, Manjaro, and “Debian-based distros”—been there, done that.

Beyond that, we should part ways, so to speak.

Funny thing, this doesn’t even have to do with our desktop environments of choice. Dedoimedo strongly favors KDE, or Plasma, as the morons who develop it like to call it since version 4. I had my good(ish) times with KDE Plasma once the disgusting plasmoids became less prominent in KDE Plasma 5 than they were in KDE Plasma 4. This desktop environment has the advantage of mimicking Windows 95 to Windows 10 better than others and the disadvantage of a complexity that sometimes it can’t handle itself (I won’t give links, but I had some issues with LC_* in KDE and with KDE software).

In my view, when all desktop environments are stupid whores, I can’t be faithful to any of them. I’ve never loved KDE, not even in version 3; I merely lived with it. Sex without love, and sometimes with a hint of disgust. Being disenchanted with all of them, I’m trying to opt for the lesser evil, and this is not an easy task. GNOME2 felt so familiar to me in the past, mostly due to Ubuntu and CentOS 5. So MATE was for some time my go-to choice, but with a single panel layout (today’s screens are too wide, meaning they’re not high enough). Very often, XFCE provided a comfortable fallback to another familiar, yet eternally unfinished, desktop. Right now, I settled again for XFCE, but it’s impossible to know for how long.

Even as we don’t use the same desktop, I guess I can still challenge Dedoimedo’s rationale.

Firstly, Ubuntu can’t possibly be “the best desktop choice” as long as its main desktop environment is GNOME forty-something. What with all its initial workarounds (Unity), Canonical resolved to stick its nose in Red Hat’s ass and adopt GNOME as “the” desktop, albeit with some customizations. This is a severe betrayal of Ubuntu’s user base!

OK, I got it. To quote Dedoimedo, “Ubuntu is a commercial product.” They don’t make any money from our laptops running Ubuntu. They sell support to enterprises. They have more installations on servers, in VMs, and in containers than on Joe Sixpack’s computer. They don’t care anymore about challenging Microsoft’s supremacy on the desktop!

But was it really necessary to mimic Red Hat? Why shouldn’t they want to be another Red Hat?

And even if they do, why didn’t they adopt MATE or maybe Cinnamon? How many people have tried all the predefined layouts offered by MATE Tweak before saying that “MATE is antiquated”? Obviously, KDE could have been another great choice. Mark Shuttleworth’s brain must be completely rotten.

Kubuntu might be an official flavor, but KDE Plasma is merely tolerated. All flavors but the official one are released with different degrees of carelessness and with more bugs than the official GNOME edition. They are ALL community editions!

Secondly, everyone seems to constantly forget that Ubuntu cannot exist and would not exist without Debian! While Canonical provides a lot of extra kernels for enterprise users, they can’t be bothered to add even a single package to what they took from Debian testing when they freeze their source packages to prepare the next release. They’re not only parasites, but also extremely lazy at that!

Random examples: no MATE 1.28 in Debian until very recently? No MATE 1.28 in Ubuntu! Does Debian drop a package? It’s abandoned in Ubuntu, too! Is Debian testing too slow? No, Ubuntu won’t fix that, even if that means they’ll release an extremely outdated LTS!

And remember: Canonical only cares about GNOME. I’ll quote an example from an old post of mine: When Debian 12 was released on June 10, 2023, it included FeatherPad 1.3.5. Upstream, FeatherPad 1.4.1 was released on June 12, 2023, and EPEL9 got it on August 4. But Debian only got it in sid on Sept. 6, and in testing on Sept. 12. Consequently, Ubuntu 23.10 was also limited to Featherpad 1.3.5. It would have been rocket science to update a package, right?

Thirdly, Canonical is trying to make snaps unavoidable. They might not achieve that with 26.04 LTS as previously intended, but they’ll do it. At some point, Mint won’t be able to “unsnapify” Ubuntu anymore! If not 26.04 LTS, then 28.04 LTS will mark the death of Mint. (Double parasites, Clem’s gang: parasites of Ubuntu, which is a parasite of Debian. The single point of failure of a huge parasitic ecosystem has a name: Debian.)

Conceptually, snaps have advantages over Flatpaks. And they seem more enterprise-oriented. And yet:

  • Snaps are not necessary, like, at all. Canonical behaves here exactly like Microsoft, pushing something up your ass, should you like it or not.
  • Flatpaks are for everyone; snaps are Ubuntu-only. This is completely abject.
  • Red Hat seems to push Flatpaks on the one hand in order to make people adopt immutable distros, and on the other hand to stop providing major GUI apps as packages in RHEL and CentOS Stream. They specifically only care about enterprise users (Fedora is more unstable in practice than Arch), but Canonical should have known better. They most likely push snaps also to prepare for a future of immutable-only Ubuntu, but the way they’re doing it is morally and technically wrong. Even if something is “good,” it’s not good anymore if it’s forced upon people.

Of course, there are also attractive points about Ubuntu, once we ignore the main live desktop ISO, which is a huge shit that comes with a horrendously crappy desktop environment. Mostly, the aspects unique to Ubuntu are its LTS editions and Ubuntu Pro.

I have personally praised Ubuntu Pro more than once. I even complimented the promptness of patching vulnerabilities in the supported LTS versions of Ubuntu.

But Dedoimedo is wrong here, too. Let me explain.

Yes, people liked running the same OS version for 10+ years, as long as it was about Windows XP, Windows 7, or Windows 10. They wouldn’t do the same with Linux, though.

An LTS edition of Ubuntu, with all its backports and HWE kernels, would not support the latest laptops. It would never offer the latest editions of everything, unless the end user would agree to use Flatpaks, snaps, or upstream repos, supposing that the respective upstream would still offer packages for such an old distro. Typically, nobody supports more than 2-3 LTS distros, which release every two years.

So most home users only need 2 years of support, or two and a half years, tops. A typical Mint user, who is forced to only use LTS, waits a bit after the next major Mint release is available, then upgrades to it. It’s reassuring to know that running an official flavor of Ubuntu LTS with Ubuntu Pro offers you such long support, but let’s face it: only enterprise users would actually use an LTS version for more than 3 years!

But Debian stable also releases once every two years. And the Debian release life cycle encompasses five years: the first three years of full support followed by two years of LTS. Enough for most cases, unless you need “a commercial product.” I don’t.

This is not to say that Debian is “the best distro.” There is no such thing as “the best Linux distro.” It’s what suits your needs that matters.

So, I could also say, “Why Debian? And the answer is, why not?” Especially as I feel betrayed by Canonical on multiple levels. If they had a decent approach and sensible business practices, I’d even pay for it. But they don’t want our money.

And yet, this is, even for me, only the current state of mind. For now, for a less bloated Debian live ISO, I recommend the stable version of Xebian, which isn’t advertised (the unstable one is). Six months from now, I might decide that Debian sucks, and that… wait, after having tried most distros on Earth, I can’t find anything else to recommend. Did you know that openSUSE Leap 16 didn’t release Live ISOs with full desktop environments anymore? They were under “appliances” in the past, but now you either install openSUSE Leap, or you can go fuck yourself. Maybe I could try a parasite—a derivative that fixes some inconveniences of a mainstream distro, but derivatives introduce extra bugs more often than not (see MX, Mint, Lite).

Why isn’t anyone making FreeBSD-optimized (read: fully compatible) laptops? And why doesn’t FreeBSD offer a live ISO with a decent desktop environment? Wayland-free, how else?

If I’m brought to the point where even Debian becomes unusable, I’ll really have to resolve to start purchasing expensive laptops so that running Windows 11 gets less painful. Because I’d rather be fucked in the ass than use anything made by Apple. Especially macOS, with its Finder and Dock, is the death of usability.