P.S.

MX Linux also looks interesting. Like Ubuntu, it's a Debian derivative. It offers a supported path for avoiding systemd and has an official KDE Plasma edition, both of which appeal to me. I haven't had a chance to try it yet.

> worst Canonicalisms

Do the Mint team treat fixing the other half of the problem, the GNOMEisms, as out-of-scope?

Asking because I maintain my own pile of gsettings and .gtkrc tweaks as mitigations yet pain points remain, apparently unfixable outside the source code.

This is a bad strategy, I fell victim for. I configured so it would use apt instead of snap package, but canonical silently stopped shipping packages and I was running some packages that were not updated for a long time and debugging weird bugs, because I didn't assume that this was a problem. If one wants Ubuntu, one must accept snap. If you use apt with disallowed transition to snap, you might be stuck with old packages that were transitioned to snap.

My choice for now is Debian, didn't finish transition yet, very annoying to plan this in my schedule. I'll churn from Ubuntu after more than 15 years of daily driving... I also don't like ubuntu user with uid:gid 1000 in their Docker images. It's a cancer.

This is what I do, because on my work computer IT imposed Ubuntu.

I initially tried to just use snaps but firefox was crashing quite often so I had to go with adding the mozilla's repository and of course configure the fake "firefox" package that actually installs the snap to be low priority for apt.

Ubuntu keeps adding snap back again and again so I got tired of removing it each time. Someone said to try Pop!_OS so maybe I'll try that.

Hasn't there been reporting recently that Debian development is struggling with a lack of maintainers?

I’m curious about proprietary Nvidia drivers. Ubuntu normally comes with fairly outdated, if not obsolete ones, but there’s a semi-official PPA with more recent versions. How does Debian handle this?

LMDE is Debian-based, I believe you meant Linux Mint itself, which also doesn't use snaps.

You get all the driver support and tools from the Ubuntu base, with some nice additons. However, not all desktop environment are supported.

The issue is them adding it back, sometimes even on apt upgrade, or silently installing it as a dependency for certain apps without mentioning it unless you look closely. That gets tiring after a while and I gave up on Ubuntu as even after having removed snap multiple times it always returned.

Doesn't snap come back on the next OS upgrade?

I was using Ubuntu and installed the apt version of Firefox as the snap version would not open html files in locations like /var/tmp and would not work with USB devices. Every time I ran `do-release-upgrade`, all of that work would need to be redone. It was very annoying.

Ubuntu is the Windows 11 of Linux. You have to do brain surgery on it post install, to remove unwanted crap. At least there's the option of using a different distro.

1. Enable Backports.

2. Install the kernel from Backports.

I don't think of such a simple process as "fiddling", but to each his own I guess.

That statement may have been true in 2014, but

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Jetson#Software

Easier said than done, surprise: apt, who we know and love, is redirected to Snap for an ever-increasing number of packages.

"Don't use Snap", you say? I'll do you one better! Skip Ubuntu. 'Just' use anything else more suitable. Debian is an excellent replacement being upstream, but I hold no illusions over undeclared requirements.

Problem is most things are only snap. You can get them ocherwise but not by default

“Urban myth” kind of suggests that it was never true, which isn't the case, though it is one of those out-dated truths that doesn't go away quickly.

At one time Ubuntu as the easiest distro to get certain hardware running with because of the inclusion of proprietary drivers & codecs (unlike its Debian parent, amongst others, at least at the time) and making them easy, near-automatic, to configure compared to others that did include them. The distinction is long gone, and Ubuntu is simply one of several (many) good ones in that regard, but the perception that others have not long since caught up persists.

It used to be true. I've never had problems using the proprietary Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu. You used to have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get them installed on Debian. Now Ubuntu lags behind on kernel versions leaving new hardware less usable.

This is not correct.

Snap is preinstalled on all official Ubuntu graphical editions.

However, Xubuntu's _Minimal_ install does not include any snap packages at all, not even a browser. This means it's trivial to remove snapd:

sudo apt purge snapd

Then you can install the `extrepo` command, and use it to install Firefox ESR direct from Mozilla's repos, or Chrome from Google's repos.

Once it's online you can copy and paste a couple of commands to "pin" snapd and prevent it from being reinstalled. Then you can switch to current Firefox or anything else without snapd sneaking back in.

Xubuntu Minimal is also available as a separate ISO file, which is not true of any of the other flavours.

This looks like it might be the best solution, no snap, maintained by an actual system integrator and laptop maker, and I also like the new Rust-based desktop environment. I wonder how well it runs on Framework laptops or MacBooks as well.

Isn't that essentially a release of Ubuntu with a different kernel, DE and maybe some userspace utilities?