Ubuntu’s popularity often makes it the default choice for new Linux users. But there are tons of other Linux operating systems that deserve your attention. As such, I’ve highlighted some Ubuntu alternatives so you can choose based on your needs and requirements—because conformity is boring.
“New to Linux? Where the most daunting thing about switching to it is how many choices you have in configuration? Well, good news! You have more choices than you think!”
From an engineering perspective, I prefer Debian distros. Apt is the greatest package manager ever built. For a production server, I’d choose Debian or maybe Ubuntu if I needed to pay someone for support.
But for a desktop, Ubuntu kinda sucks. These days, I think I’d recommend Fedora to Linux noobs.
And for my toys at home, I run Arch btw.
Apt is the greatest package manager ever built.
Urgh, no, it’s not. Everything about it is super crusty if you go beyond simply installing packages and adding others’ PPAs IMO.
- Packages often enable the services they install right away. Someone told me they got locked out over SSH because they installed a firewall package that locked everything down by default, and the service got started on install. I guess that’s technically more of an issue with the way things are packaged rather than the package manager itself, though.
- To temporarily install a package (so that it will get uninstalled with the next autoremove) you need to use aptitude to install the package, or run apt-mark auto after installing (which will also clear the manually installed flag if it was manually installed before), apt has no syntax for it.
- dpkg-scanpackages is eternally slow, I had to write a wrapper for it that runs it separately for every package and caches the result because I didn’t want to wait multiple minutes for it to rebuild the PPA package index
- The standard packaging tools (dh-make or debuild, I think I’ve looked at both) are insane, so much so that I gave up and wrote something that takes files similar to Arch PKGBUILDs which calls dpkg-deb at the very end.
I could probably list more but I haven’t had to touch apt in a while, thankfully. But it is probably the #1 reason I avoid anything Debian-based. #2 is probably their Frankenstein sysvinit/systemd setup.
I do have to say that apt remove vs purge is pretty cool though.
What do you like about it?
one of the first
there were dozens of others in the 11 years between the first and ubuntu
“Targeted at regular desktop users”
I really feel like you’re missing the idea of that sentence deliberately.
What Linux distribution came before Ubuntu that was specifically designed to be user friendly for a non-technical user?
What Linux distribution came before Ubuntu that was specifically designed to be user friendly for a non-technical user?
There were a bunch of distros advertising ease of use; several were even sold in physical boxes (which was the style at the time) and marketed to consumers at retail stores like BestBuy years before Ubuntu started.
Here are four pictures of the physical packaging for three of those pre-ubuntu desktop distros designed to be user friendly and marketed to the general public:
Ubuntu was better than what came before it in many ways, and it deserves credit for advancing desktop Linux adoption both then and now, but it was not “one of the first” by any stretch.
