This is from 5.10. Warty 4.10 was the first Linux distro I actually installed, after only using a Knoppix live CD previously. I miss those days. A lot has improved for Linux but it seemed like Ubuntu was onto something. Then in 2010s they lost their way.
Have told this story many times but it’s due to the nostalgia of an era that seems long gone.
One day after a lectureship at unit there was some hackathon with people demoing computers with Linux. I got to see the compiz cube thing and my jaw dropped. They gave my friends and me one of these pictured, an Ubuntu 5.10 CD (I still have it somewhere in pristine state) so thanks to Ubuntu is how I got into Linux.
I wholeheartedly agree with everything that OP has said. You could feel the ubuntu everywhere, from the logo, the color scheme, visual theme, wallpaper and icons (and the ‘simplicity’ and cleverness of Gnome 2) all the way up to how the help pages were phrased and of course their motto, “Linux for human beings”.
It felt cozy. It make me feel like my computer was indeed mine. At that point I didn’t even knew using a computer could be felt like that. It’s been 20 years, some 4 years after that I moved on to use Gentoo, but I still remember and miss that old Ubuntu feeling.
So that’s why I have bittersweet thoughts about Ubuntu: on one hand, as with many people, it was my gateway into Linux and thus it changed the way I use and interact with computers forever; on other hand, it was really sad to see what it has become.
what it has become?
“Hey who wants to test our new coreutils in prod? Nobody? Fuck y’all you’re doing it anyway”
Remember when you could fill out a form online and they would send you a disk. That was my first intro to Linux. I ordered each new version and wish I would have kept those disks.
I couldn’t have said it better.
I’m perfectly fine with running an Ubuntu server. I have used Ubuntu since time first reports of how shitty Vista was. It was a great place to escape from Window$. And still is a great place.
I stubbornly stuck with it until last year. I’d still recommend it to a new Linux user if they weren’t fans of Mint but I feel like Mint has more of that old Ubuntu spirit. Ubuntu is one of the greatest distros ever in my opinion, and I get that Canonical is a business and has to make money, but what if they had maintained that focus on Linux for human beings.
Debian since what, Bookworm? has been everything that Ubuntu advertised. That’s when they finally voted to include non-free drivers on the installation media. The one thing that made Ubuntu easier than Debian.
From what I’m reading only the header doesn’t hold up due to forced snap packages, something else I missed?
The snap store not being foss is such a slap in the face. The ads in the terminal (and a few other places) are particularly egregious as well.
I bailed when they did Mir and Upstart. You could literally see their ego affecting their technical decisions, leading up to “Not Invented Here” syndrome, like you see in particularly culty software companies in silicon valley.
Like one poster said, I was an early adopter (Warty) and felt the warm and cozy ‘Ubuntu’ everywhere in their system. It was visionary and beautiful in it’s simplicity and hopefulness. They sold out.
Snaps are the big one. I know Pro is free for the average users but imagine if they didn’t put security updates for the universe repos behind that sign up? I understand that they didn’t get those updates before Pro but imagine if they just gave those updates to all users. I still think it is one of the great all time distros. I just think their focus is more on enterprise than on the average user and I am nostalgic for those early days.
When the Banshee music player added support for buying Amazon Mp3s, when Ubuntu packaged it for their distro, they took the original authors affiliate code out and put in their own.
They were unbearable the second they started sending every search request to am*z*n in 2012. They enshitified their OS years before Microsoft.
Uhh
Which Microsoft products have you been using?I’ve been (mainly) using Linux since 1996, but I can still acknowledge that Windows 7 (which was still recent in 2012) was peak Windows. As far as I know, Microsoft didn’t put ads in their start menu until Windows 10, a decade after Canonical.
I had an 8.04 CD that started me on my journey. I remember the boot sound to this day and miss my GTK 2+Compiz+Emerald setup. You can sort of still get there today, but with little to no modern themes being made, it’s hard to justify.
That was peak Ubuntu for me. I actually do mostly like where Gnome ended up but it just felt so new and fresh at the time. Until 2002, I had only ever used Windows and old Macs. When I saw what FOSS could be and Ubuntu then made it really easy, my mind was blown.
I like Ubuntu well enough and I really liked Unity but I’m not installing something, then going in and removing core parts of of the system. If they could ship with things like snap being optional I’d probably use it again
Unlikely.
Speaking of core parts of the system, I tried upgrading to 26.04 and it uninstalled coreutils to install their rust-based non-GPL version. Broke my system (just a test system, thankfully) so damn hard.
Just for fun I put the effort into recovering the system, had to scp individual binaries (mv, ln, mkdir…) until apt install --fix-broken would finish.
Hopefully they’ve fixed that. Last I saw, their official documentation (a buried blog page) blamed dpkg.
Oh! Their sudo-rs also made it so that Ansible plays failed on it. It’s fair to say “this is not trying to be a complete feature match with sudo”. It’s not fair to push that through when people need those features.
Their response there was also “yeah I don’t care, make the Ansible team fix it on their end”.
To be fair, the Ansible feature is “open an ssh connection and watch for this exact string that indicates that it’s listening for a password”.
