Ai slop

I have no interest in watching quarter of an hour of clickbait nonsense, what's the tldr besides the licencing non-issue?

This is a distro that received crap because of the transition to snaps and the whole Amazon shopping lens thing. There's pretty stiff competition for "worst release".

I really don't know what to do for my next desktop distro.

I don't use my PC exclusively for gaming. So things like Bazzite or Nobara are not my jam.

Arch-based distros seem too bleeding-edge. I don't have that much free time to troubleshoot my PC. That's why Ubuntu was so appealing to me. It just worked! Now I feel that with the latest LTS I'm going to be trapped into Canonical's ecosystem with Snaps or risk borking my install. I hate this idea.

I might just move to Debian Stable. I don't mind being a big behind if it means having a rock solid system. I'm also very used to the Debian packaging system. Also there's no company behind it that might take it in a certain direction.

Alternatively there could be OpenSUSE Tumbleweed slow roll, but apparently it doesn't play well with NVidia graphical drivers? I'm also not used to their ecosystem at all.

Tough decisions ahead.

Ubuntu being shit for personal users is all but new (Who wants 2 year old software? I want upstream's latest stable release. Who likes snap?). Ubuntu having higher hardware requirements than other distros is also not new (it's the reason why I switched away from it over a decade ago). Ubuntu breaking stuff is also not new (big upgrades of ubuntu flavors have always been disrupting for me). Ubuntu shipping new premature things instead of being stable also feels not new to me.

Ubuntu is doing ubuntu things. It's interesting to see how far it went. The video also has a bit of needless whining though (who cares about the different default for sudo asterisks, just change the setting).

This video is a bit dramatic, nothing can be worse than a Windows 11 update...However, I do have some grievances with the reliance of snaps. Given the recent spate of software vulnerabilities associated with Snaps, if Canonical is going to push them on users. They better get snappy with the security hardening of their pet project, as one cannot be Microslop messy when it comes to creating proprietary software packaging and ecosystem! I also do agree that removing the easy way of setting up PPAs and software sources graphically is a bad move on Canonical's part.

X11 is doomed to die, the discussions were had, and the maintaining that shambling corpse for any longer when Wayland is a good replacement that will become better with time, was deemed pointless. GNOME decided to drop X11 faster than KDE (they will be dropping in the next few releases). However, there will still be distros that take on the effort to maintain X11 despite it being a shambling corpse...

Canonical falling in step with GNOME on that decision isn't the worst thing in the world. Canonical dropping X11 means less work maintaining it, as long as they pour that saved effort into better ventures, bully for them. Honestly, even Wayland isn't going to be forever, and I hope they transition into a better display manager faster than the X11 to Wayland process.

I haven't used Ubuntu in a hot minute, as openSUSE Tumbleweed and Solus has filled my needs so far...I think Ubuntu 26.04 will be a solid release (barring any release day issues, that are known to happen).

Ubuntu releases is personal fine for new or avarage users. But standard snaps is kinda bad. Should always be optional.

The whine about removing X11 is pretty annoying. Fedora has done the same, and the impact of doing so seems to be pretty small; Xwayland provides the compatibility layer needed, and Nvidia driver issues have been pretty much eliminated.

The sudo change is a design choice and from an accessibility point of view a positive thing - people having problems with typing on a keyboard will probably welcome the change to make it visible when they properly hit a key.

But i can get behind the rest of the critique - an LTS release shouldn't have feature incomplete and standard-ignoring core utils, and the audio dependency on snap is bordering on publicly taunting snap opponents. Also, an LTS probably shouldn't opt for a bleeding edge kernel. And what is the reason for the (for a linux distribution) pretty high RAM requirements?

If someone asks me for an recommendation for linux newbies, i will probably go with fedora (or nobara if they game much). It's been rock solid for me, easy to use for a newbie, and still gives you all the freedom you want if you are an advanced user.