That does make sense. Thanks.

Interesting insight, thanks.

Honest question. In the era of collaborative document editing on browser-based platforms, who is using this software and what are they using it for? I work with documents for my job and it’s been literally decades since I used a local standalone word processor.

To distrohope! Way to inadvertently coin a useful word.

I just copy paste commands from Arch wiki and it just magically works without me knowing anything about it.

Join the club.

I am not a big fan of snap, and I would prefer a more logical and unified package management system

That’s exactly where Snap is going!

Seriously tho, Ubuntu is fine. The LTS versions are always extremely solid. Your objections sound more theoretical than practical and you also seem to be running quite advanced hardware and software. The least risky strategy would be stay where you are.

The options are surprisingly poor.

Personally, I rolled my own TUI script. It uses pdftk to explode and merge, and gs (Ghostscript) to optimize. To paste PNGs of my signature (absurd, but here we are) I use xournal, which looks a bit rough but gets the job done.

Exactly. OP should start by seeing what’s possible in Firefox.

OK, but that incident was well over a decade ago. I agree it was bad but to call it spyware or “malicious” is just spin. If you read the quotations from the time, it becomes clear they really thought users would love it. After all, it’s the sort of thing Windows exiles were probably expecting. So: bad judgement, mainly. They could have just put the feature behind an opt-in modal and avoided the whole furore.

They’re a private company trying to tune their business model in a delicate area under the watchful eye of privacy hawks like yourself. For the price of an occasional lapse like this, we get a rock-solid OS with literal salaried employees to maintain it and keep it secure. To me it seems like a decent trade-off.

Yes yes I know that. But the consumer desktop product is a loss leader. There is no demand for payment and yet It obviously cost them something to make.

Seems you might be a more sophisticated user than the ones targeted by Ubuntu. That is: Windows normies who find the whole concept of Linux deeply foreboding, but bravely take the leap anyway. As usual, most people in this discussion are neglecting this crucial fact.

Ubuntu is trying to make things easy and secure. I don’t much like Snaps either, but the security paradigm is better than APT, and they are nothing if not easy.

their “selling” point

Here’s one place to begin. They’re not selling it, it’s literally free. Speaking for myself but I just cannot bring myself to criticize a free product which is not a monopoly. And this clearly isn’t a monopoly. It just feels entitled.

Amazon ads

The tiny flaw in the above logic. Reminiscent of similar scandalettes involving Mozilla. But these sponsorship deals have always been easy to disable, even before they get dropped like a hot potato because of the backlash. I always come back to the same thought: how much are we actually paying for this product that is apparently valuable because we’re using it and concerned about its flaws? We’re paying nothing.

Or tell me with a serious face how the snap thing makes the life easier of someone wanting to install a deb.

The typical Ubuntu user will not know what a deb is, and should not be expected to. That’s the point. It’s meant to be easy. Whatever else they are, Snaps are definitely easy.

Your point is a bit off-topic but I for one agree with you.

Interesting. Possibly useful to some. I have also discovered that the simplest, most privacy-friendly way to update location is just to do it manually when you change location.

I have a simple script that does this by querying OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim server with the city name. It feeds the resulting coordinates thru a Python library that deduces the timezone, and sets the system time to this.

Good to know.

Useful. I hate shorts and portrait-format video in general.

NB for those who don’t know: a server is not needed to make Youtube RSS feeds, they exist natively: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCxxxxxxxxxx. You just have to find the channel_id buried in the page source, which admittedly is a bit of a PITA. But no native way to exclude shorts, though.

And so what? Why are you so bothered by it? I’m a Linux user of 20 years and I couldn’t give a fig that someone is running a forum called LinuxSucks which, unsurprisingly, contains little “positivity or praise” for Linux.

So: you posted a serious contribution in an unserious community, and got treated unseriously. It’s not very newsworthy.

As for that community’s existence, why is that even up for discussion? As a Linux user I’m happy for people to say what they like about Linux. If the jokes are funny, all the better.

I use Ubuntu btw and it doesn’t suck. Well, not that much.

This is the best answer. Most of the others jump straight in at the deep end. The entirely predictable outcome of asking this question to a bunch of earnest geeks.

Model and price is unimportant. But if metal’s too expensive and they can’t do a fake chrome finish that doesn’t wear off in 5 minutes then then they should just stick to white or black.