this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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Fair points. Admittedly I use a tiling window manager so I never see most of these problems.
My basic concern is with fragmentation. IMO many techies just don't grasp how forbidding Linux is to normal people. Or the importance of reputation in people's choice to take the leap. It's all but priceless. Ubuntu-bashing has always struck me as a case of an elite group that prefers to split hairs rather than to take the win of getting extra users of FOSS. Idealism vs pragmatism, basically.
Anyway, I'm repeating myself. If you think that normies have heard of Mint already and that it won't go away next year, then fine. The important thing is to get them to take the leap. They can always change distro later, the second time is much less forbidding.
But why move people from Microsoft to another company that is implementing more and more user-hostile "features", when there are alternatives like Mint? If all the new Linux users are herded towards Canonical, it's just giving them even more power to extract profits in the future.
It's far easier to have them start with a community-led project on the same basis. Imagine Ubuntu being enshittified and forked - how should they decide which fork to use, and how can they know it will still exist in a couple of years?
Yes yes, these are good points. To be clear, IMO Debian is the ideal Ubuntu replacement. They have the pedigree, the credible claim to be the Universal OS. But have you seen Debian's website? No way. Hopefully that will change one day.
Debian is amazing, but you're right that they are far from noob-friendly. I recently switched to Fedora due to the fast availability of new packages (e.g. KDE Plasma 6.1 with fixed Nvidia drivers), and even the arguably easiest option - Ublue images - had some issues I wouldn't have been able to fix without deep Linux experience.
But there definitely has been a lot of progress over the last couple of years, and I'm sure that will continue. We just have to be mindful of not participating in creating the next Microsoft. Ubuntu is already seen as the default Linux distribution - the further it gets entrenched, the worse for all of us.
Believe it or not, I'm being gradually won over by the arguments deployed in this discussion! Incredible but true.
Being open minded in response to new information is an automatic upvote from me
Not sure why you'd think it would go away next year since it's been around for 18 years and adoption seems to be going up rather than down, and a lot of people have switched to recommending it for new converts rather than Ubuntu
I don't think that many normies have heard of Mint, but I don't think that many have heard of Ubuntu either.
Fragmentation is a concern but it's an unavoidable side effect of an open community with many people and opinions
Fair enough, and perhaps you're right. Personally I'm reassured when a for-profit company backstops an open-source project. So many amateur projects turn into abandonware, an OS has to do better than that. But yes, Canonical could get into trouble too.
Personally I see not Mint but Debian as the best claimant to Ubuntu's mantle. I just wish they would become a bit less amateurish. Maybe move towards the Wikimedia foundation model, get some serious resources, a better website and onboarding funnel, etc. Their ideological position is great, but if you want to change the world then at some point you need to behave at least somewhat like a private business.
Honestly, I feel the exact opposite when a for profit company does that, because inevitably they ask themselves the question "how can I squeeze every last dollar out of this possible?", which is never, ever, good for the product.
Capitalist hyperfocus on short term quarter-over-quarter gains is toxic and destroys pretty much everything it touches, if not entirely then at least in quality. While I appreciate the amount of development those companies bring to the table, the moment they're in control of the project they'll try to find ways to profit from it at the expense of the community, and it almost always results in a poorer product.
Debian vs Mint for server, I'd agree with you, but for desktop, Mint is trying to do something Debian never really set their sights on: making it easy to use, particularly for people switching from Windows. Hell, they even have a version directly based on Debian instead of Ubuntu just in case something happens to make it so they can't run downstream of Ubuntu with a reasonable amount of work.
I think a better model for FLOSS in general is community owned and operated foundations that get backing from companies that benefit from those projects, but which do not let those companies gain sole or majority control.
*Just to stress, everything here is just my opinions and I don't pretend to have all the answers, just observations of the world and the impact for profit companies have had on it... For that, I pretty much never trust a for profit company to act in good faith for the benefit of anyone outside of themselves. They may do so for a time, but eventually most of them will become too focused on profit to behave as good citizens.
Yes, hard to argue with this. Or indeed anything else you just said. I agree that for any project it's crucial that there be a wide variety of stakeholders.