Ubuntu Is Good?

Ubuntu gets a bad wrap for a couple of reasons, but there are quite a few things that it does remarkably well, which get overlooked. I have a few nitty gritty things that I personally dislike about Ubuntu but some other things do outweigh these and make it a "good distro".

Cons

Although there are many pros to using Ubuntu, I'm going to start with the cons.

1. Snaps are pushed onto you - the apt package manager has many packages in the repos and has the ability to add extra repos and PPAs, BUT , they do like to push Snaps mostly without even telling you. For example: sudo apt install firefox. This would install Firefox Snap package. Now the theory behind Snaps is a great one, but the execution is terrible, the apps are as slow as it gets, even on a beefy machine.

2. Backed by a big company - Some people don't like the fact that Ubuntu is backed by Canonical (a large company, which in my eyes is basically the Microsoft of Linux). This is a problem for some folks because they don't want their data and information stored or monitored by such a large company.

Pros

Now with the bad things out of the way, let's talk about the good things.

1. Gnome Shell theming - Gnome Shell is (for the most part) not easy to theme user side, but Ubuntu has made that simpler using Yaru theme (now discontinued) but, they continue to allow users to change accent colours and other appearance settings that vanilla Gnome doesn't offer.

2. Ubuntu Dock - Ubuntu's dock is amazing, it is Windows-esque which makes it a perfect distro for Linux noobs.

3. Base - Ubuntu is based on Debian, which makes it very stable which is good for beginners. The Debian package manager, apt, is also used, it installs .deb files but also allows the use of snaps, through some magical way which I don't have any knowledge of :). The package manager is amazing, really simple to use and very intuitive, for example, to install something you just do sudo apt install <package-name>, to uninstall sudo apt uninstall <package-name>, to update sudo apt update, etc. This is very helpful for lazy people, sorry, people who prefer things easier and beginners.

4. Well documented - Ubuntu is the most commonly featured distro when it comes to install instructions and packages for software. This means that it is easy to follow along with tutorials and manuals.

Conclusion

Ubuntu is overall a decent distro. Choosing a distro is all to do with personal preferences and needs. But if you want a simple, well documented, beginner friendly distribution Ubuntu may be for you.

_{!DISCLAIMER! Cover Image is Fedora 37 dressed up as Ubuntu 22.04 LTS}