📝 My Ubuntu experience after a few months
I've been using Ubuntu daily for a few months. I was a bit afraid of having some major issue and having to try another distro before thinking about returning to Arch, but the balance is positive so far.
I admit there have been a few things that've annoyed me. Then again, I've had that on any OS I've used, so... yeah, computers... At least they're not printers, right?! 👀
✔️ The positives
I find the default GNOME experience on Ubuntu to be good. Back in the day, I enjoyed the hell out of Unity, and having a similar experience is nice. Of course, we're talking about GNOME here; extensions are necessary, but I didn't install that many, and some were only to improve the interface's bling (I like pretty things 🤷).
It's also nice to have a free tier for the Ubuntu Pro program. If, for whatever reason, I decide to stick with this version, I'll have 10 years of security updates (at the time of writing). The specifics are on the link above, so don't forget to check it out to know more about them.
When it comes to regular home users, Pro's free tier can be a nice thing to have. This way, they can slowly prepare the migration to a newer LTS and still stay reasonably secure. Well, to be honest, also because they don't tend to like changes, and keeping a stable environment for some time reduces the stress of computing for them.
This, of course, is also beneficial for self-hosters, for example. But it might not be for you, and that's fair, too. 🍻
Snaps have also improved quite a lot. You may find the occasional exception, but they have become quite performant compared to just a few years ago. Even the Steam snap has improved; however, it can take a little bit more time to launch than the native package when you have a lot of games installed and/or they take up a lot of disk space.
Another plus for the Steam snap is being able to change Mesa versions. There might be some games that require more recent versions than the included one, so this is a nice feature to have.
❌ The negatives
There's an issue with the Steam snap, where right-clicking on something to show a menu and then clicking on a menu entry just closes the menu and doesn't perform the action. This one can be annoying as hell sometimes! 💢
I do miss having some utilities I use already packaged or from a trusted enough source on the AUR, but I compiled them from source, and I keep tabs on new updates occasionally.
It's also a shame there is no official gamescope package, and you're left compiling it from source. I do think there are a few issues with that on the 24.04 LTS version, but I'm just remembering this as I type, so I might be misremembering.
I was also having the best KDE experience I've had in ~20 years with Plasma 6.x on Arch, but it's not packaged for Ubuntu 24.04. One time, I tried using a repo from Kubuntu or something, but I ended up borking the package and dependency lists, and couldn't remove the upgraded packages. 💀 I ended up reinstalling, which was faster than spending a day debugging dependency issues and force-installing some packages manually.
I had forgotten how PPAs can be a headache if you just YOLO it. 😅
👋 Conclusion
At least for now, I'm sticking with the latest stable LTS. When I switched, my goal was to have a system that doesn't change much over time and, in doing so, doesn't bother me every day to install a ton of updates. I also wanted something more reliable. While the verdict is yet to be reached on the latter, it has been reached on the former — most days, I only have flatpak updates.
I'll stick with Ubuntu LTS for a few more months, so I can safely say if it is what I'm looking for or if I need to find another distribution. Although I think I'll probably stick to it until the next LTS — unless I have a major issue with it —and then reevaluate it.
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