Why I am leaving Ubuntu (at least for now) after 7 years

in #ubuntu8 years ago (edited)

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Today marks a particularly sad day for me in my technology journey. With little fanfare and not even a notice of family and friends, I wiped what had been my favorite operating system from the final hard drive on which I had it installed. It wasn't an easy decision to make. I've been a fan of Ubuntu from the very beginning. I've installed it, used it, made money off of it, recommended it, and, finally, abandoned it all in the course of a mere 10 years. I held on through some bumpy times and I've defended the distro to friends and customers when it was honestly pretty hard for even me to do so in light of what was happening at the time. Those of us who were loyal to Ubuntu have held on. We've held on through half-delivered promises, ill-planned start-stop attempts at capitalizing on new technologies, and even ridicule from our peers when 'more stable' distros like RHEL quietly dominated the industry. Yes, we held on and we held on tight.

But last week was a breaking point. For the last 7 years, Ubuntu users have tolerated the company carving its own path on the desktop. When everyone was centered on the KDE or GNOME desktops, Ubuntu broke free and created a new desktop called Unity. When everone else was using systemd as an initialization system, Ubuntu created and used their own Upstart system. Oh they had their reasons and they defended those reasons passionately and fiercely. But, in the end, Upstart ended up giving way to systemd and, as of last week, the project dropped its dream of universal convergence and announced the death of the Unity desktop and a re-adoption of GNOME in the upcoming 18.04 release. Just like that. After 7 years. After pushing Unity down our throats, it's dead. And we aren't supposed to react strongly to that?

Don't get me wrong: Ubuntu is a fantastic operating system; particularly on the server. It's stable, easy to use, and supports such a wide variety of hardware and virtualization solutions that it's easier to list what it doesn't work with than what it does. But it's become increasingly difficult to recommend Ubuntu to others - especially those who might be new to Linux - as, at least on the desktop, it seems to be a moving target. New users especially need stability in their technology. They don't want to be faced with having to constantly learn something new. They want to install their software and get into a groove. They want to know that they can develop 'muscle memory' that will last them for a very long time. That's one of the reasons Microsoft faced such harsh critisism when they released Windows 8 and it's exactly the kind of legitimate critisism Canonical is facing right now with the changes coming to Ubuntu. It's simply too many moving parts all sliding around on what feels like a bed of sand.

As a business owner and consultant that makes my living on Linux and building solutions around it, I am in much the same situation as new users are: I need a stable system that I can learn and stick with. I want that muscle memory. I don't want to go through a fit of change every few years as my operating system vendor refocuses to chase whatever the new hot thing is. Give me a good, solid, desktop and server and leave it alone. If you have to change it, make those changes as transparent as possible so I don't have to worry about them. Trick me into thinking that very little has changed even if a lot really did. I'm OK with that.

So, for now, I find myself leaving Ubuntu for greener, more stable pastures. I removed the operating system from my final computer earlier today and and installing a combination of OpenSUSE and Fedora on the desktop and CentOS on the server. I'll miss my old friend Ubuntu and it's going to take a bit of time to get used to the new way of doing things. But I have faith that the operating systems I've chosen will provide me the stability I need to continue to build my business and support my customers for the foreseeable future. I'll revisit Ubuntu from time to time, especially after the 18.04 release. I'll watch for an opportunity to come back to what has become one of my favorite distributions. But, until they decide what kind of company they want to be, I simply have to get off of the ride for a while.

What about you? Are you sticking with Ubuntu or moving somewhere else? What are your reasons either way?

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I still run Ubuntu on my laptop that didn't get reformatted since I graduated (like 6 years ago). I don't use it much, but it still runs pretty good. I think its Ubuntu 12. Not 100% sure. I've never liked Unity though and always used some underground desktop environments (currently using i3).

From my experience, the #1 argument for using Ubuntu is compatibility. It will compile any project from github without any change, it seems most developers use it to test their linux versions and build their makefiles around it.

On my desktop I've been using arch or arch-based distros though because I don't like canonical and their views on things. As you mentioned in your article, what's the point of making Unity? What's the point of making an alternative to systemd? The linux world is pretty small and we should stick together, instead of running around like headless chickens. Also they seem to be pretty capitalistic and it seems they don't really believe in open source, at least not in the GNU/Stallman way.

Also, the general idea is that Ubuntu is very 'noob friendly', however I never managed to convert any of my friends or work mates to linux with ubuntu, they'd always go back to microsoft windows shortly after. However I've had good results with manjaro, and just explaining them how to make use of pacman and yaourt seems to do the trick for most people.

Glad to see fellow linux users around, you are now followed.

You bring up some good points. One of the things I've always loved about Linux is that the underlying system doesn't usually matter. As long as things are POSIX compatible, they seem to run fine. But, at least for a while, it seemed that Canonical really wanted to break away from the Linux ecosystem. Do you remember when they didn't even want to call themselves 'Linux' anymore? They just wanted to be known as 'Ubuntu'. I know that's a small thing to some but it signaled something very had to me.

As for their stance on free software, I'm 'alright' with them being somewhat captialistic. In fact, I even support proprietary software on Linux in some cases, But that software should still be as universal as possible. It shouldn't run on Ubuntu. It should run on Linux. Why lock me into a distro? Isn't that as bad as Microsoft at that point?

Lastly, I have to agree with your n00b friendly statement. While Ubuntu is a popular distro, Manjaro and other Arch based distro's seem to sit much better with new users long term. I'm not really sure why that is nor can I really blame Ubuntu for that but I've always found it weird.

Thanks for the follow!

I have used linux distros many times in the past.. but I was mainly ms user. At some point I stick on Ubuntu on early versions but when gnome updated and unity came also my pc back then couldn't afford it :)
Also I have skipped ms up from win 7..
So now my gaming desktop is on win 7 and my laptop on opensuse tumbleweed (I was on leap until a few days before) on kde plasma :)
Hope soon my gaming pc to be able to be on linux too :)

Your hope for a Linux gaming laptop is pretty close. With Steam now on Linux, we're finally seeing top-tier games come to our platform. This is an exciting time to embrace Linux!