That’s a great advantage of Ubuntu, and they surely brought alot to the table when it comes to desktop Linux in its early days. But it just happens that Ubuntu forks also tend to take that benefit too (like Mint, Zorin or Pop) while also giving to the newer users what is, to me, a more standard Linux experience that follows current trends, like the adoption of Flatpaks over the weird push for Snaps on desktop that Ubuntu has, or actual functioning app stores instead of the rather polemical App Center that almost released without a .deb support recently. That’s why I tend to recommend friends to use Mint or Fedora

I don’t have much experience with servers so I can’t really give an opinion on this take.

But I guess it’s my bad, I should have specified that I was referring to desktop usage

The well-supported thing is in great part only thanks to Debian. And about the desktop, cmon, it’s just Gnome with built in extensions. No issue with that and totally valid to enjoy it, but it’s certainly not “lightyears” ahead of anything.

But if your experience with Ubuntu is good, then great, I’m happy that you enjoy the Linux ecosystem, and I truly believe the best distro is the one that fits best for your personal needs, and if Ubuntu does that, then it’s great 😁

1. my issue lies with it being hardcoded to work with Canonical servers. Yeah, technically you could host your own snap store, but it’s simply not what it’s meant for, so in my views the openess is harmed by this design choice.

2. yeah, I dont disagree with Ubuntu being easy to use, and as I said, I aknowledge its importance for our ecosystem. Also I never said I had issues with peoe who enjoyed “vanilla” Ubuntu, I’m actually happy to see people enjoying Linux as a whole.

But as previously stated, my personal opinion is that modern Ubuntu adds nothing compared to other desktop distros, ot’s DE is just Gnome with extensions bult in. The Snap store is not very well optimized and there was no reason to have it as default over gnome-software, which is more feature-complete. Nowadays, for my use, I only see Ubuntu as Debian with a more modern installer.

But these complaints are in parts because I’m a flatpak > snap guy, and a vanilla gnome > whatever Canonical did guy which are personal tastes.

In my personal opinion: 1- Snap packages. Dont like them for their closed source backend, dont lime them for how canonical has been sneaking then into the system of users who have been originally trying to install a deb.

2- Modern Ubuntu simply has no real benefit compared to other Distros. Nowadays it’s just another Gnome and Debian-based distro, I see no reason to use it over Debian itself, or Fedora, Solus, or any other Ubuntu derivative that simply does better than “vanilla” Ubuntu, such as Pop!_OS or Linux Mint.

I don’t hate Ubuntu, and I recognize it’s importance for Linux as a desktop in it’s early days, but Canonical really lost track of themselves.

LMDE. Not Ubuntu based, but Debian based so its the closest I can think on the top of my head. It got 32 bit support and Cinnamon desktop.