An unfortunate side of being a proper adult is that occasionally I wake up at 5 AM, and wonder what I should do then.

And with all this Windows 11 turmoil, I have a handful of acquaintances who have switched to Linux. The selection is not huge, but sizable enough. So far everyone settles on Ubuntu — not particularly surprising, Ubuntu remains the face of Linux. Whether it’s the publicity or because indeed certain things work better I don’t know. For me, Ubuntu was the first Linux distribution, some time around 2011. I don’t remember which version it was, only that GNOME2 was still lightly themed, but with a nice orange tint (Andreas@82MHz themes MATE here). I also remember following some guide to purge PulseAudio from the system, because there was no sound in a game under Wine. That game was Emperor: Battle for Dune, that I remember too. Then, quickly enough I was told that real Linux users don’t use Ubuntu, and moved on.

In doctoral school, for my office I asked for a pretty OptiPlex tower. There I installed Ubuntu, as the l33t ][@kep stage had passed. It had to be 14.04 or 16.04, perhaps the former — the Amazon search was still in place. That install supported work for the next 5 years. Ah, I doubt I did a single apt upgrade — I even used the CLI seldom, perhaps only for gnuplot (dear colleagues, there is no GNUplot!) and whenever $\LaTeX$ engines failed miserably, and a little later when the turn into macromolecular crystallography required some responsible interactions with the shell. But this epitomizes the fact that a decade ago Linux was already accessible to a total normie and could drive daily computing; though, accommodating .doc/.docx files was an everlasting and unavoidable headache. Taken together, I do have only good memories about Ubuntu. Nevertheless, never had an occasion to use Ubuntu since, not counting WSL and some server things.

So, I had an evening to spare and a spare M.2 drive, a piece that was salvaged from a disposed laptop, as such a status symbol nowadays. I got 25.10 and spent a day using it, to look around and touch the current iteration.

Foremost, I don’t really mind Canonical and Canonical things. My qualification allows at best to write situational scripts, thus I can’t testify what a disaster Rust (I know that Rust is a programming language, this I know) coreutils are. Neither do I understand fully why systemd ruins everything, for all I know it makes booting fast and lets one manage daemons. I don’t mind snap packages per se either — if the things work, they work. The zoo of distros is rich and diverse — being too vocal about particular decisions doesn’t make sense, alternatives aplenty.

To start, I am a GNOME shill. And it looks like Ubuntu does GNOME right — it does look good. I am not into customization and find Adwaita perfect, but Yaru looks alright. Too dark for my liking, I prefer light themes and lighter colors, but otherwise all these orange and purple bits and all the whistles are not annoying at all, UI is consistent. Then, the Ubuntu dock is the only sensible dock one may think about, why docks are placed at the bottom of the screen I could never understand — wide screens are default for decades. Actually, Dash to Dock is one of the two extensions I use with the vanilla GNOME, though it is a Unity holdover and, bite me, Unity was a fine DE.

Eye-candy aside, getting proprietary drivers and firmware is easy. Myself, I pay the NVIDIA tax, and know that unless some research prior to the installation of the proprietary driver is done (and done), the next kernel update will be sad. Certainly, the reasons for it being so are clear and by no means it is critique, yet the reasons alike are why my distro of choice, which is a user-friendly distro (all big distros are user-friendly nowadays) is not the best option for a first timer.

And for the annoying things, snaps are. As mentioned above, I don’t mind self-contained apps and use flatpaks happily; as for the fragmentation argument — that the alternatives exist is a great good, that Canonical does Canonical things is solely Canonical business. I heard that snaps start slow, but I ran the system on pretty beefy hardware and did not notice anything sluggish. The problem is that I’m served a snap while apt is used explicitly. For real, this isn’t what I’ve asked for. The whole idea of the transitional packages is annoying. Then and to my surprise, quite some entries in the Snap Store are dated, especially so for dual-distributed packages — for a new user, all this must be pretty confusing. Okay, said stuff is published by contributors and is hardly critical. But the community has a clear preference, some conformism (Red Hat do no wrong) won’t hurt. Perhaps, Ubuntu has become more of a server OS indeed.

As for the funny things — fortunately enough, I always had a rather generic very well-supported hardware. To this day I could not recall an occasion when suspend didn’t work out of the box. Well, now I can.¹

[¹]: Something very minor was broken with Wayland, but it was actually broken!