Why did I switch from Fedora to Ubuntu after 2 years?
I have used Ubuntu from year 2006 and left in 2022 for Fedora. Now, it is time to go back.
After 16 years of using Ubuntu, I said enough and switched to Fedora. The major reason was Canonical’s approach to Ubuntu all these years.
I will remember all these controversial decisions and map them into a timeline based on online resources. I may be wrong about the timeline, or my source may be wrong about the years, but the topics are not. These actually happened, and I was a very active member of the Ubuntu community.
I Changed My Go-to Linux Distro for the First Time from Year 2006
Everything started in 2010 with Unity desktop. It was the first time Canonical stopped listening to the user base and began to decide themselves. I was not against Unity and was in a tiny group of people who liked it. Still, I was very much against putting an immature desktop environment into a mature Linux distribution. In 2010, Ubuntu was years ahead of other Linux distributions on desktop environments and servers. Although I like Debian more on the servers, I know from my environment that Ubuntu was the go-to Linux distro for the majority of people. In 2017, Ubuntu dropped support to Unity. The weird thing is that GNOME has begun to copy Unity and continued their life. Unity is still alive, and people think they are copying GNOME: https://unityd.org/ . It was vice versa.
Although the timeline was earlier, Ubuntu One was less controversial than Unity. In 2009, Canonical introduced Ubuntu One, which competes with both Dropbox and similar services and unifies the environment for cloud services. The community pushed back because it was proprietary and paid. I was in a small group of people in the community supporting the Ubuntu One idea. For me, it was great, and if there are enough settings to clear the ambiguity of proprietary service, the acceptance rate will increase. Well, Canonical didn’t do it properly and promoted it very wrong, like a mandatory service; without it, Ubuntu would not work. They killed the service around 2014. You know that we have Google One, Apple One, etc. services that are basically working similarly nowadays.
Ahhh, this is one of my favorites… Amazon search results… In Ubuntu 12.10 (2012 — Quantal Quetzal), Canonical introduced Amazon search results in the Unity Dash (the search interface in the Unity desktop environment). Amazon results were included and displayed when users searched their files or applications from the Dash, mixing local search with commercial content. I still remember like yesterday, people were extremely furious, and even Richard Stallman (founder of the Free Software Movement and creator of the GNU Project) called Ubuntu “spyware” because of this feature. People were so against it because they thought it was a privacy violation. Yes, you heard right, privacy violation… It is like a joke nowadays, but we were more mature about our data and privacy years ago. I hated this feature, and this time I was not in small group of people about my feeling. Canonical eventually made it optional and removed it in 2016 with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. This was the start of the ending for me about Ubuntu.
In 2013, Canonical decided to divide the Linux community and contributors again by announcing the Mir display server. It was a big discussion but not like Amazon search results because, this time, the average user couldn’t understand the difference between the ancient X11 display driver and Mir. It was the right decision because X11 is old and cannot fit modern environments without hacky tricks in source code, but it doesn’t mean that Canonical should introduce a separate display driver. There was Wayland, and most of the Linux distributions were adopting it. It was like a Unity desktop environment, and Canonical never got the lesson. In 2017, Canonical dropped the support of Unity and its surroundings, like the Mir display server for desktop environments, and adopted Wayland. They didn’t kill the Mir display server and have supported Kiosks and IoT devices: https://mir-server.io/ .
And the last drop for me… Snap packages… In 2016, Canonical decided to introduce a universal package format without a universal store: Snap Store, which Canonical controls. It was so weird to see Canonical as an open-source supporter and trying to be the controller on several occasions. We were all frustrated because of Canonical decisions and Snap packages’ performance: Slow starting times, crashing very frequently, and terrible memory management. It was made for the Ubuntu server, and it is advantageous when trying to do a live patch, but that’s it! Its architecture has never been thought for Desktop environment applications, but Canonical decided to push it. I have waited enough years if Canonical decides to take it back again as their previous decisions, but no… They’ve pushed more and more and took the base applications like Firefox and Thunderbird installed as a snap by default. There is Flatpak, which is another package format that does not have central management in the store. People, even today, expect Canonical to move towards Flatpak and drop Snap, but it will not happen. Some Ubuntu-based Linux distributions, like Linux Mint, do many tricks to drop Snap and have Flatpak instead.
After years of controversial Canonical decisions, I moved away from it and started using Pop!_OS in my private life and Fedora in my professional life. I have never been a fan of Fedora because it is a RedHat Enterprise Linux lab trial and gets updates so frequently. Fedora is great if you are a Linux developer or contributor because you always reach for up-to-date features, but that’s it. As a regular user, you will be bothered by 500GB of updates nearly every week. Yes, I understand Fedora’s release cycle, but it has always been too much for me.
The owner of Pop!_OS, System76, decided to build their desktop environment as Cosmic. The original Pop!_OS uses a customized version of GNOME, but they thought it was a good idea to have a desktop environment written in the Rust programming language. I like the idea and contribution to the Linux World, but I have seen this movie several times. I hope that it will not be in the Drama genre in the coming years, and I will be wrong about my thoughts. Until we get the Cosmic desktop, Pop!_OS is an ancient Linux distro because the updates are minimal, and System76 will release the up-to-date version with Cosmic.
Let’s summarize why I left Fedora:
The biggest problem for me is font rendering on both my Laptop and 4K monitor. It is so bad that you need to do some tweaks if you would like to have proper font rendering. It is also not directly related to the Desktop environment. I tried both KDE and GNOME. I think that Ubuntu has the best font rendering in the Linux World.
The second biggest problem for me is the release cycle. Fedora gets updates so frequently that whenever I open the laptop, I need to perform an update. Of course, I can live without doing the updates, but I don’t like to make them stay in the system tray and send me notifications. It is not a big problem if I am at home, but if I am traveling and using low-bandwidth Internet, oh… These updates are never simple or small.
The third biggest problem for me is the default desktop environment. I am also full of GNOME’s controversial design decisions and tried KDE, too. There were killer problems in KDE, like losing the system bar and not being able to log in completely. As a result, I always wanted to go with GNOME, where I needed to do hacks to have a proper desktop environment. Fedora uses vanilla GNOME, so I need to do many hacks, but Ubuntu uses a customized version of GNOME, so its desktop environment is better. I only need Tweaks for startup applications and clipboard history for Ubuntu. Also, Ubuntu’s color schema is way better than the vanilla GNOME for me.
This is not a big problem, but Fedora comes with fully open-source packages. You need to do many things to use it properly in everyday life, like installing additional drivers, codecs, etc. If you skip one of them or some of them have compatibility issues because of your previous installs, you may end up not opening videos, and you need to understand what’s happened. Ubuntu comes ready with minimal additional effort.
There are some small things, too, but they are not worth mentioning here because my aim is not to find the simplest thing. I do not want to bury Fedora. It is a great Linux distro, but it is most probably not for me.
Well, I am not using Firefox or any other application in Snap. There is a great article about Firefox at https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/04/how-to-install-firefox-deb-apt-ubuntu-22-04. For me, package manager is DEB and if it is not in DEB, I am not using it and not going to use it. If you are more adventurous than me, you can also follow this guide to have Flatpak in Ubuntu: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/how-to-install-flatpak-on-ubuntu or can use Linux Mint if you like: https://www.linuxmint.com/ .
I decided to accept Canonical as my son, who sometimes makes me crazy, but life is better with him. I try to help my son make better decisions because of my experiences, but he would like to try and fail. I learned that failing is a learning process for smart people and companies, and I still want to believe Canonical is one of them.