Ubuntu is the windows of the Linux world

I wonder if it’s just me or if other people who were around before Ubuntu feel the same way but the reason I hate Ubuntu is that it seemed to take over the Linux world.

A lot of the information about how to do something in Linux was drowned out by how to do it in Ubuntu. When searching for information you have to scroll down in the search results for something that sounds unrelated to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu material was often titled “how to do it in Linux” and you thought you had a good long tutorial until you read a few paragraphs in and realized it was for Ubuntu and wouldn’t work for you for whatever reason.

Even some software that says it’s available on Windows and Linux just means they have a Ubuntu package and if you’re really good there’s a chance you might be able to figure out how to use it on a non Ubuntu system.

It’s like when Ubuntu came out, people just assumed that Linux was Ubuntu. I’ve never used Ubuntu so a lot of the information I’ve came across regarding it has just been in the way of me finding useful information.

Ubuntu? Its a cany make up its mind what it is trying to be while always becoming a crashy mess. When it first came out I remember trying it and immediately broke it.

The last time I installed it recently it had issues out of the box.

So I love Debian but it prides itself on stability so packages tend to be older. I think this is good for a server but probably not great for a desktop. Ubuntu came along and was like we’ll be like Debian but newer packages. Everything was cool for a while but then they started doing shitty things. The first that I can think of was ads in the terminal. This was not great for an open source app. Then when you did apt install firefox it installed Firefox as a snap. WTF?!?!? (apt should install .deb files, not snaps). Because of this, lately I’ve decided to avoid Ubuntu.

I used Gentoo for a while and it was great but configuring and compiling everything took forever. I’m getting too old for that. Arch seems like a good alternative for people who want to mess with their system. So it’s become a way for people to claim they know what they are doing without having to recompile everything. (Note: I haven’t used Arch, this is just my perception)

Recently I got a new laptop and I had decided to put Linux on it and had to decide what distro. Arch was in consideration but I ended up going with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because it’s got the latest but I don’t really have to configure anything. If I had more time, I might go with something like Arch but I don’t really want to do that much fiddling right now.

My way of thinking and working is incompatible with most premade automatism, it utterly confuses me when a system is doing something on its own without me configuring it that way.

That’s why I have issues with many of the “easy” distributions like Ubuntu. Those want to be to helpful for my taste. Don’t take me wrong, I am not against automatism or helper tools/functions, not at all. I just want to have full knowledge and full control of them.

I used Gentoo for years and it was heaven for me, the possibility to turn every knob exactly like I wanted them to be was so great, but in the end was the time spend compiling everything not worth it.

That’s why I changed to Arch Linux. The bare bone nature of the base install and the high flexibility of pacman and the AUR are ideal for me. I love that Arch is not easy, that it doesn’t try to anticipate what I want to do. If something happens automatically it is because I configured the system do behave that way.

Because of all the programming socks adverts with Arch in the background.

Ok, I think I can provide some insight into this that I think it’s missed on other replies.

I switched to Arch back when Arch had an installer, yup, that’s right, Arch used to have an installer, then they removed it and you had to do most of the process manually (yes, I know pacstrap is technically an installer, but I’m talking about the original ncurses installer here).

After Arch removed its installer it began to attract more purists, and with that the meme was born, people online would be discussing stuff and someone would explain something simple and the other would reply with “I use arch BTW”, which meant you didn’t need to explain trivial stuff because the person had a good idea on how their system works.

Then Arch started to suffer from being too good of a distro, see those of us that were using it consistently saw posts with people complaining about issues on their distros that never affected us, so a sort of “it doesn’t happen on my distro” effect started to grow, putting that together with the excellent wiki that people were linking left and right (even for non Arch users) and lots of people became interested.

This new wave of users was relatively new to Linux, they thought that by following a tutorial and running a couple of command lines when installing arch they had become complete experts in Linux, and they saw the “I use Arch btw” replies and thought they meant “I know more than you because I use Arch”, so they started to repeat that. And it became common to see posts with people being L337 H4ck3r5 with no clue whatsoever using “I use Arch btw”.

That’s when the sort of cult mentality formed, you had experienced people who liked Arch because it was a good distro that didn’t break on its own with good documentation to help when you screw up, these people suffered a bit from this and told newbies that they should use Arch. Together with that you had the other group who thought because they installed Arch they were hackers telling people Arch was waaaay too hard, and that only true Linux experts should use it. From the outside this must have felt that we were hiding something, you had several people telling you to come to our side or they couldn’t help you, or pointing at documentation that looked specific for their distro, and others saying you weren’t cool enough for it probably felt like a cult recruiting.

At the end of the day Arch is a very cool distro, I’ve tried lots of them but prefer Arch because it’s a breeze to maintain in the long run. And the installation process is not something you want to throw at a person who just wants to install Linux to check it out, but it’s also not complicated at all. There are experts using Ubuntu or other “noob” distros because at the end of the day it’s all the same under the hood, using Arch will not make you better at Linux, it will just force you to learn basic concepts to finish the installation that if you had been using Linux for a while you probably already know them (e.g. fstab or locale).

As for Ubuntu, part of it stems from the same “I use Arch btw” guys dumping on Ubuntu for being “noob”, other part is because Canonical has a history of not adoption community stuff and instead try to develop their own thing, also they sent your search queries to Amazon at some point which obviously went very badly for their image in the community.

I don’t use either now. I have tried both. When I started with Ubuntu i was great; fast, light, all the good stuff. Then it started to get bloated and wouldn’t run on my old machine… So I moved to Arch and it saved me and I used it for years.

I use Arch because I don’t know how to use Debian based distros, I got lost when trying to use Linux Mint or PopOS.

Because it just works. I used to love Debian . It had issues with drivers and stuff. Arch just does it for me.

We’re not a cult. Come on out to our compound and we’ll show you!

I had moved from Slackware to Debian but by 2004 the long release cycles of Debian were making it very hard to use any Debian with current hardware or desktop environments. I was using Sid and dealing with the breakages. Ubuntu promised a reskinned Debian with 6 month release cycles synced to Gnome. Then they over delivered with a live cd and easy installation and it was a deserved phenomenon. I very enthusiastically installed Warty Warthog. Even bought some merch.

When Ubuntu launched it was promoted as a community distro, “humanity towards others” etc despite being privately funded. Naked people holding hands. Lots of very good community outreach etc.

The problem for Ubuntu was it wasn’t really a community distro at all. It was Canonical building on the hard work of Debian volunteers. Unlike Redhat, Canonical had a bad case of not invented here projects that never got adopted elsewhere like upstart, unity, mir, snaps and leaving their users with half-arsed experiments that then got dropped. Also Mint exists so you can have the Ubuntu usability enhancements of Debian run by a community like Debian. I guess there is a perception now that Ubuntu is a mid corpo-linux stuck between two great community deb-based systems so from the perspective of others in the Linux community a lot of us don’t get why people would use it.

Arch would be just another community distro but for a lot of people they got the formula right. Great documentation, reasonably painless rolling release, and very little deviation from upstream. Debian maintainers have a very nasty habit of adding lots of patches even to gold standard security projects from openbsd . They broke ssh key generation. Then they linked ssh with systemd libs making vulnerable to a state actor via the xz backdoor. Arch maintainers don’t do this bullshit.

Everything else is stereotypes. Always feeling like you have to justify using arch, which is a very nice stable, pure linux experience, just because it doesn’t have a super friendly installer. Or having to justify Ubuntu which just works for a lot of people despite it not really being all that popular with the rest of the linux community.

Slackware users, “Those Arch users are crazy.”

In my experience the Arch people are the sane ones and the NixOS people are the young cult evangelists nowadays. I use Arch btw

People praising Arch, people hating on Ubuntu, meanwhile me on Debian satisifed with the minimalism.