Their hideously awful interview process leads me to believe there are deeply rooted problems in Ubuntu’s company culture and it’s not getting better anytime soon.
They ask insightful questions like, “How did you do in your native language at high school?” or “How did you do in maths, physics or computer science at high school?”, followed by long written essays and “psychometric” personality testing.
Lol yeah the insightful questions. I don't remember that much from high school anymore to make it relevant. Like I have been working for 25 years in IT maybe that is a bit more relevant? Another one was the GPA. First of all after a how many years in your career is that number still relevant? Also in my country there is no GPA. You pass your degree or you don't.
You call it long written essays. I felt I needed to write the magnum opus about my life.
It was a hard nope from me too. Must be hard to be a recruiter for them. Everyone dropping out of the funnel at step 1 :)
After reading their interview questions and processes I realized why they now produce easily the worst Linux distro despite having such a strong initial market lead and popularity. Similar-ish story with Firefox/Mozilla.
Well, the process was fun. A few years ago I got as far as the final interview, which was talking to Mark Shuttleworth (a video call, literally over dinner) and we had an interesting conversation.
The insistence doing on contracting rather than FTE roles (especially for senior ones) and other priorities made me say no thanks, though.
Oh wow. The Glassdoor reviews are wild. 15 hours spent (on calls and take homes) and still only half way through? Crazy. And the essay on high school and such is 5,000 words??
Remember to Strongly Agree with things your boss wants to hear and Strongly Disagree with anything that sounds like you might be a functional human being with aspirations outside of the job.
Debian was Very Hard some 15 years ago while Ubuntu was rather easy.
These days there's not much in the way of difference on that facet, or at least not enough to tolerate Snap/Wayland/whatever other madness.
Honestly there weren't that many difference. When first ubuntu was released, it just used the experimental debian installer that anyone could download and use from the Debian website. Besides, ubuntu never provided real tools to free users from command line configuration. Since the late 90's the main distros which provided real control panel for nearly everything were Suse/OpenSuse with Yast and Mandrake/Mandriva. Ubuntu has never been easier or more straightforward to use it, it was just a Debian with a default Gnome, some different colors.
The only thing Ubuntu did differently at the time was having a very simple website with a single download button and sending free CDs for free to anyone asking for it which was a big deal when nobody had decent internet connection. Or you'd need to buy magazine offering installation CDs. But the thing is, every single family has an enthusiast cousin, uncle, who in the early 2000's ordereds tenths of CDs from ubuntu for free and gave them out to anyone pulling his hair out of because of an MS windows issue. All that made ubuntu a bit different from Debian like unity, upstart and now snap, only appeared years later after Ubuntu had that reputation of easy distro for beginner.
And this is what really put ubuntu in the limelight and the default goto distro for every new linux user. It was just the most advertised distro, with the simpler website, a general color palette that made it easily recognizable and a nice slogan borrowed from the meaning of its name in Nguni's languages.
It wasn't "just" that. Debian seems to want to be configured out-of-the-box as a secure server, and expects the user to turn it into a usable desktop, which is impossible for novice users and can be time-consuming even for power users. Ubuntu has much more sensible defaults, especially for a novice user. IIRC:
1. Debian's installer is vague about how to install a working system. You have to pick between Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and more, which don't mean anything to a new user. By contrast, Ubuntu's installer contains a single desktop environment, and to use alternative DEs you download a different ISO like Kubuntu or Xubuntu.
2. If you insert a DVD in a Debian PC, by default it's mounted as noexec, preventing you from running any installer on it. Not only that, but when you try to open autorun.sh by double-clicking it in the file manager, it opens in LibreOffice Writer!!! At no point does Debian even try to give a hint to the user what they need to do (not that a novice should be unmounting/remounting). In Ubuntu, you get shown a warning and are asked if you would like to execute the script if you trust it.
3. /bin and /sbin are not in users' PATH, so commands like "reboot" and "shutdown" don't autocomplete unless you edit the environment variables. OK, the terminal isn't for novices, but it's the sort of thing that makes no sense to me.
I didn't spend long using Debian as a desktop but these are the things I remember seeing. I do use it as my server of choice, however.
I agree with most of what you said. But it wasn't just that.
In the mid-2000s, I ordered Ubuntu CDs, my first contact with Linux. The university campus had fast internet, and I could download and try other distros. Mandriva was by far the easiest to set up and use. It had everything included but was also the biggest in size (it required a DVD or 4x CDs if I remember correctly).
I ended up sticking to Ubuntu mainly because the support was better. You could find tutorials for everything you wanted targeting Ubuntu users. Whenever I had issues, I always found answers on forums. Being a total noob in the Ubuntu community was not frowned upon like in the other distros.
Ubuntu also had more up-to-date packages, and updates were coming faster. The UI was nicer in Ubuntu, and everything looked more consistent. Any other distro in that era looked more or less like Windows 98 / 2000. In Ubuntu, Compiz [1] was easy to set up. Compiz blew my mind when I discovered it.
I don't use Linux as my daily driver anymore. I prefer to run Debian on my servers, and I'll like to switch to Arch on my laptop soon. I still consider Ubuntu a distro suitable for someone who starts with Linux.
> I ended up sticking to Ubuntu mainly because the support was better. You could find tutorials for everything you wanted targeting Ubuntu users. Whenever I had issues, I always found answers on forums. Being a total noob in the Ubuntu community was not frowned upon like in the other distros.
I think this was the consequence of the network effect brought by the initial push. The webforums weren't full from the first day.
Exactly. I switched from Ubuntu to Debian somewhere around 2008 and barely noticed any difference. Before Ubuntu I briefly used Mandriva and, indeed, it had all kinds of custom control panels; Ubuntu was very vanilla in comparison.
Sure. I got seamlessly migrated from X as well, when I upgraded my Debian major release. I am not "that kind of hacker" anymore (hence running GNOME), so I was OK with this. Didn't even notice the change for a while.
And keep running software that is 4-5 years old until the maintainers decide that they're ready for a new stable release, unless you use testing and backports? No thanks. I used Debian for years, and I stopped using it out of frustration when I realized that I couldn't install what was available on basically all other distros without risking breaking the system. It's a good choice if you want to run a stable server, it's an awful choice for desktop users.
I am still using Ubuntu on both my work laptop and my home workstation. Om my laptop I now have disk shortage due to snaps. Plus my workstation has an AMD videocard that had a weird bug. All snaps are glitching, you can not see anything. But I still use Ubuntu. It's the most used and catered for Linux distribution so when I want to use something there is always an Ubuntu deb or snap or whatever. Plus on my work laptop, which is a Dell, I get firmware updates when I do an apt-get no other os does this...
The only reason I have Ubuntu right now is that I was never able to get DisplayLink drivers to work on anything else. Not that I tried that hard, I tested SuSE and then Ubuntu... and stopped since, well, it kind of just worked.
I'm not too happy with Ubuntu, but it's better then Windows 11.
Thanks. I did search myself and found the same results. But as I wrote, it worked when I came to Ubuntu and I gave it a shot. But I feel it's time to try Fedora now. :-)
> I get firmware updates when I do an apt-get no other os does this...
Be so very careful about this.
Ubu did that for me behind my back on my dell laptop and bricked the thing by silently making it so that if you closed the lid and put it in your bag it would fry. Expensive way to find out about that bios feature, uh, change. I was spending a lot of time by a hospital bed when it happened and needed my laptop to be a goddamn laptop, close the lid, in the bag 10 seconds notice because this is important.
Sure that's 99% dell's fault and you can't even contact them to ask if this is really what they consider acceptable in any way, sure.
But yes I'm angry and bitter about it still. Why are ubu pushing an update like that at me implictly saying "this is fine" when it's not remotely close to fine?
I had a funny experience like this. I got a lenovo bios update via ubuntu. I didn't really notice until I rebooted. Which took a bit of time. So I did what every impatient programmer does. I disconnected the power, took out the battery, did a hard reboot. I did everything you shouldn't do during a bios update. Not my smartest moment.
Though, the update worked and everything's been fine since.
If your reasoning is "it sucks but it's the most widely supported" you might as well he using Windows. If you want a distribution that you can mostly use instructions tailored to Ubuntu, use linux mint or even Debian.
I'm using Debian mainly for the last 20 years. I switched my laptop from Ubuntu to Fedora, mainly because Ubuntu snap madness and Debian was not working well on my framework 12gen. I was a bit skeptical due to previous experiences with redhat/fedora, but fedora was solid for the last 6 months. I'm thinking about migrating my desktop from Debian to Fedora.
Came to the same conclusion over the past year. If they got rid of snap, I'd stay. But god damn snap is such a poorly implemented nuisance. It feels barely out of alpha.
> I understand that Snap is meant to release us from dependency hell and I know why you’ve put each one in its own little sandbox, but honestly, even ChromeOS running a Linux application in its virtual machine is faster than this
Absolutely. Snap is Ubuntu's metaverse. Insisting something is the future doesn't make it any less useless.
I have two Microsoft Surface tablets, one on Windows 10 and one Windows 11. The Windows 10 is like a decade ago and Windows 11 is from a year ago. Windows 10 feels faster and more responsive.
I honestly don't know how people can stand Gnome/Unity. I've been running Xubuntu LTS with the Plank dock and have had nothing but smooth sailing save Nvidia drivers.
I recently got my new upgreded notebook at work, which I asked to have GNU/Linux installed instead of Windows. First thing I did was get rid of Gnome/Unity as I did with my last work notebook, what an abomination of a software.
This dependency hell, it never got me because I'm using LTS versions or I never realized that I am deep into it? I've been using Ubuntu 2008 to 2020, then Debian.
Are there any Snap fans out there that are championing the technology? I only ever hear bad things about it (and I too, have experienced pain from it), but perhaps there's a bit of an echo chamber here.
My most recent sneaky Snap experience happened on my Pop_OS laptop. I decided to enable that extra Ubuntu Pro security repository since it's free for 5 devices. I followed the steps to enable it but then noticed that apt was installing the snapd package and a whole heap of dependencies! I quickly cancelled it, reverted the steps and decided to not bother with the Ubuntu Pro stuff again.
"championing" it? probably not, but I'm a huge fan of the goal. Flatpack/Snap both try to take an application and isolate it from the system. Its like docker but for userspace application rather than services. Package managers like apt/yum modify the system at a root level, a bad package here (or a bad library) can cause problems if its a mistake, or compromise if malicious. You should only use them for stuff that needs root hardware access or root permissions at some point- everything else should be sandboxed and isolated from that critical portion of your system.
[Shutteworth makes a pretty good argument for snap](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z3yusiCOCk) (and by proxy, flatpack) and the why we need virtual machines/docker/LXD/(snap/flatpack)/package managers.
So I wouldn't say I'm championing snap, but I do believe the concept should be used everywhere. Flatpack? snap? Something new? Dont really care, I just want the containerization benefits at the userspace level.
Thanks for the link - watching it now. I guess I was referring to complaints about Snap specifically. My distro of choice (Pop!_OS) and many others have specifically excluded Snap in favour of Flatpak and I hardly ever hear complaints about Flatpak.
Which snaps are loading that slow? Granted I'm using AppImage or binaries for so much stuff these days, from Firefox to Openshot to Crystal, but I'm really curious.
One of my machines runs 22.04 and has tons of software installed via repos, so some huge chunk of that experience must be slow, or painful, I think I'm to believe? Yet I'm not noticing anything out of the ordinary compared to my other distros.
Used to be that way for me too, but I believe with the latest LTS the slowdowns just went away. I'm using Firefox through the default Snap packaging every day, and it's just fine.
This is also with the distro installed with all default choices. If memory serves me right, using btrfs for one can result in any number of weird performance issues.
I thought it was fine too until reading this thread. and I tried opening some cpu intensive pages in the snap version and in a standalone version. the Snap version makes my cpu max out at 100% and i get soft frozen out of my desktop, the standalone never went above 80% .. Now we can blame the pages for being shit in the first place but, I dont want to have to restart because I opened the wrong page.
Maybe snaps have improved in performance since I last tried them.
My first awareness of snaps came when I tried to load the calculator app in 18.04 I think. I couldn't understand why it took so long for such a simple app to start. I thought there was a serious problem on my machine.
After spending some hours, I realised this was due to snap.
EDIT: I now regard snap as a serious problem on my machine!
> I understand that Snap is meant to release us from dependency hell and I know why you’ve put each one in its own little sandbox, but honestly, even ChromeOS running a Linux application in its virtual machine is faster than this, and it doesn’t require everything to come from one distribution hub
This mess is why I'll probably never leave NixOS. It ain't heaven, but it's at least not packaging hell.
I empathize, but haven't given up the faith yet. With a little bit of effort, I'm able to strip out the pain an misery (and latency) that is snap from Ubuntu distributions that I use, but I do see a future in which the OS becomes crippled enough that I'll need to finally bite the bullet and join the arch crowd.
For a bit of background, I initially started out using Linux with Slax in 2005, moving on to Fedora Core 5 and then installing Ubuntu when Feisty Fawn was released. For a long time, Ubuntu just felt right. Don't get me wrong, in those days there was plenty of work to do to get a system working well (getting working drivers, configuring xorg, etc), but overall it seemed like Canonical had a real focus on delivering an easy to use, stable Linux desktop OS for people that didn't want to build everything from scratch.
Since then I’ve occasionally run other bare metal installed distros/derivaties (elementary, mint, pop, debian) for a while, but I always found my way back to Ubuntu. I’ve tried dozens of other distros through VMs and live disks over the years, just to see what they have to offer too. The world of Linux is vast and wonderful, and there's always the potential for temptation on the horizon.
That said, I've been running Ubuntu 18.04 on my main desktop PC for about 5 years now and it's been a relatively reliable daily driver OS during that time. However, snaps leave a very bad taste in my mouth. Canonical seem dead set on force-feeding this crap down users' throats too, which is another trait that doesn't sit well with me. With 18.04 reaching the end of its shelf life, I decided—like the author of the article—to part ways with Ubuntu (and, by extension, Canonical).
I spent a good while searching for the right replacement OS and finally came up with the following shortlist: Fedora, Nobara, OpenSuse Tumbleweed and Arch.
I wanted a decent low-latency experience for audio production, and to be able to run the Bitwig digital audio workstation software. I wanted Steam, BTRFS, Pipewire, and various other relatively standard packages like Firefox, Kodi, Inkscape, Blender, Spotify, Bitwarden, etc. Initially, I was thinking of using KDE Plasma too. I tried out all of the shortlisted distros above, and finally went with Arch. So far it's been an incredible experience.
There were too many niggles in the end, with KDE, and I decided to give the latest Gnome (44) a shot, once it landed in the Arch repos. That was a surprise, as I wasn't expecting it to be anywhere near as great as it is. So far this is probably the best desktop Linux experience I've ever had. There's close to zero chance I will ever install another Ubuntu OS on any of my machines.
It's like no matter what you have to fight the intentions of the maker to get what you want.
On ubuntu you have to expunge snapd and now that ubuntu pro nagger, where in both cases they went out of their way to make these dofficult to remove by making half the os depend on them but only artificially through package manager declarations, nothing really depends on them. You can still get them out, but you're fighting the will of the supplier which did not go away. They or something else will always come back and need to be faught again.
On redhat it's less about the architecture of the distro and more about the company since beingvsold to ibm. destroying centos shows that they really do not want a centos to exist. centos-alikes have sprung up to replace it, but ibm's wishes did not go away, and so as soon as they can figure out a way to, they will make a centos (alma, rocky) users life a pain again.
I'm starting to think the answer to finding a distro that has no interest in controlling you and getting something out of you inwillingly is actually arch. Maybe nix but the indirection seems like the old programmer joke about the overengineered hello world. But they don't seem to be doing their annnoying weird thing to get anything out of you at least, more a genuine engineering experiment.
I appreciate the suggestion, but I tend to stay with my choices for decades, so I need something that has been around and will stay around. As best I can tell my options are (in random order): openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu. There are a few that are runners-up, like Arch and Pop_OS! (hate the name).
Switching distribution is a lot of overhead (I have a too-large and quite diverse collection of iron, with x86 being minority).
Yeah, playing with novel distributions is a young person's game =)
I'm glad someone is doing it, but I just want to not fight my computer to get tools I actually use to work.
I've been using Ubuntu 20 years like this author. I tried Pop_OS for a few years out of curiosity, but it kept being buggy. The Debian LiveCD I tried next failed to let me setup the partitions properly to install, so back to Ubuntu I went again...
I wish I had the energy to file a proper bug report, but what are the odds anyone would honestly benefit? It's almost always just a very niche me issue, so may as well not fight it.
Both now depend on snapd. Doing apt install gets you the snap version. It didn't use to, and now it does. I'd call that pretty forceful, you're one apt install away from having it if you're not paying close attention to every dependency.
They kinda do, like if you apt install Firefox it's actually setup to force install the snap version of Firefox (even though you used a apt CLI command). It's getting more and more aggressive about pushing snaps like this with each major Ubuntu release.
I followed some steps to prevent firefox from being installed through snap... it worked (after WAY too long troubleshooting).... and sometime between then and now it re-enabled itself and I'm back to square one. It's so maddening.
Uninstall Firefox snap to end the pain, then d/l Firefox from mozilla.org, unpack to your home directory and launch it from there. It will work just fine and even auto-update itself.
You can use `alacarte` or manually create a .desktop file to add a menu item for your new Firefox instance if you need it.
Isn't it the other way around? In Windows you'd usually download an installer and run it to install software, whereas Linux would have you download, unzip/untar an archive and then just launch it directly.
They ask insightful questions like, “How did you do in your native language at high school?” or “How did you do in maths, physics or computer science at high school?”, followed by long written essays and “psychometric” personality testing.
That’s a hard nope from me.