I get it.
I don't love Snaps either.
However, a thing I try to remember and wish others would as well is simply this: Canonical is a company. Their goal is to make money. They are not out to create the ultimate free as in freedom Linux distribution.
This does (to my mind) not make them evil, and ESPECIALLY doesn't make the folks who work there evil. It makes them participants in the great horrible game that is Capitalism, and expecting anything else from them is going to lead to heartache, as you've seen.
If you want a Linux distro that shares your preferences and won't try to jam snaps down your throat, you might consider giving Debian a whirl as many others have.
Continuing to ride the Ubuntu train and raging against the dying of the light when it continues chugging in the direction it's been headed for YEARS seems ... futile :)
Nice to see that KDE is so well supported! I'd been running Manjaro KDE the last time I had Linux installed on my desktop but I may give Debian a try this time around.
It's astonishing.
Fedora introduced a whole new distro where you can't install anything with dnf anymore and people love it. People love using flatpaks instead (yes I know of all the shortcomings, but you can always choose another install method for that broken package). And ubuntu users just hate ubuntu for what they do. The difference may also be that fedora gives a choice to the user and does not directly force it
It is absolutely a different situation if it is opt-in. If Ubuntu made Snaps opt-in, people might not like them but it'd be a minor critique instead of fleeing the distro.
The sheer audacity and arrogance of giving me something for free and not caring* about me.
* "Not caring" presumably means "not doing something about my pet issue", but I'm not going to take the clickbait.
giving me something for free
What are you talking about? It is not even "for free", they get a lot value from the community.
They're nothing without the users, it's not that they would be making it if nobody uses it anyways. Users used to love them, they trusted them, they went on spreading their system, reported issues, created tutorials, flavors, videos, tools, and so on, they helped Cannonical become what it is now.
I don't think they're giving us anything "for free."
Idk, I probably haven't used Debian derivatives long enough, but isn't installing random .deb-s somewhat of a bad practice? I mean, repos exist for a reason (ignoring the fact they usually have like 3 packages in the official repos)
A lot of software wont be distributed with a PPA to add.
Additionally, debs are useful for offline installations, with apt you're able to recursively download a package and all of it's dependencies as deb files, then transfer those over to the offline machine and install in bulk.
That being said I've never had great luck with the software center, it's always felt broken. I'll typically just
dpkg -I <pkg>.
"I understand that Canonical has every right to make the decision about their product."
That seems fair. There are loads of distros available so why not try something else if you don't like Ubuntu?
Linux and other mainstream Unices such as FreeBSD or OpenBSD int al (that's not something I ever thought I'd be able to say a few decades back) are not Windows or Apples or whatevs. You do you and not them!
If Ubuntu fails to scratch your itch then move on. Debian is the upstream for Ubuntu so you'll probably be fine with that instead. There is loads of documentation for Debian via the wiki etc and of course most Ubuntu docs will apply as well.
That's precisely I changed to MX Linux. I won't use ubuntu for a long time I guess.
Disappoint is a sober word here. I am actually pissed at the casual arrogance of Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical.
I'm actually baffled that this would come as a surprise to people. Canonical has been like this for a long time and you'd have to have blinders on to not see it. They are hell-bent on doing things their way and ignoring the wider Linux community and even their users. That is, of course, their prerogative and to some degree I even welcome their attempts at differentiating their distro from others. As a user though you should be aware of their history and the apparent direction they're heading.
I just wish they'd stop stalling and went all-in on snaps already, since that's pretty obviously where they're headed.
I don’t get the anger. Just install your software as snaps. What’s the problem?
Just go Debian.
Ubuntu used to bring a bit of spit and polish at a time when most Linux distros lacked that. Nowadays it brings nothing worthwhile to the table anymore, it's just brand recognition, but what it does bring is aggravation for experienced users.
I had this realization a few years ago when I found myself fighting against 20.04 and I asked myself: what exactly is Ubuntu doing for me that plain Debian can't? The answer was nothing really, so I moved all my Ubuntu VMs over to Debian Bullseye and never looked back.
Definitely time to just use debian, mint MX, or pop os even. I did a lot of hopping though and I've settled on Nobara KDE. Mint was great but the Bluetooth was finicky for some reason, and debian is mostly just ubuntu with some gui stuff removed. PopOS is basically just debian until COSMIC but still good too.
