Ubuntu came along and made it easy. A live bootable image to play with and see work, and an installer that just let you click through and let it do the dirty work without me having to know what I was doing. That went a long way, and IIRC was the first of its kind to take this approach.

I'd honestly still be using it today if not for snaps. I generally don't like tinkering and optimizing, much preferring to just get something working quickly and out of my way.

But I still appreciate KDE-based Linux environments for their more straightforward, consistent, no-nonsense GUI, which seems to be derived from classic (pre Windows 8) Windows. Another thing that KDE seems to have gotten right is realizing that what makes macOS and Windows useful isn't just the GUI itself but the set of apps that use it and interoperate seamlessly with each other.

Ubuntu seems to have more UI churn than I'd like (even though I prefer Mac-style menu bars, etc.) And Wayland (which KDE has also moved to for better or for worse) has never brought me happiness.

I understand the motivation for Snaps, but I only want them for app store type apps, not for everything.

Prior to Ubuntu, Linux was a tool for social misfits to get revenge on everyone else for getting stuffed in lockers in high school. Eric Raymond and his merry band of followers did way more than Microsoft to slow Linux adoption. Ubuntu put an end to that.

I would like to submit PRs to remove these ads, but of course they would never be accepted.

We've seen where the road of advertisements eventually leads (Windows 11), and it isn't good.

Adding extra garbage into CLI sessions is something that I greatly dislike because 1) it adds distracting noise and 2) it can break scripts. Some non-Canonical offenders include GNU parallel and Apple's cc and c++. I don't like how vim includes political messages either, even for causes that I might otherwise support, simply because it is distracting when I want to concentrate on getting work done. Tools should focus on the task at hand and avoid promotional messaging.

You kinda can't, and that's the point people are angry about. I never personally cared one way or the other about snaps. But it is not at all acceptable that Ubuntu will sometimes install a snap when I explicitly use apt to install it. That was the moment I decided I'm not gonna use Ubuntu any more: they started to override my decisions about what to install on my computer, and that isn't ok.

The last time I tried Ubuntu it would automatically install the snap version if I tried to `apt install` a package. Is this behavior easy to disable? Do they even ship apt packages of stuff they use snap for?

The Amazon search lens was also a mistake, but at least it was easy for "regular" users to disable it. About Mir: so long as everything works, regular users wouldn't even notice, which is fine. I don't like the fragmentation in the Linux landscape, but oh well.

If you've already got something going there's probably not enough reason to bother switching things up. If you're doing it as a new user... why not compare to Debian or another Debian-based rather than something radically different in type and focus as Arch?

I think that apart from MS Office apps (which don't have a good enough alternative, especially for Excel), most of the other apps that people use are already available on linux, either natively, through electron, or as a web app.

A beginner friendly distro like Ubuntu (especially the LTS version) can be ideal for a lot of people. Reducing the bloatware overhead that Windows brings, increasing performance and battery life, adding privacy, and reducing the likelihood of malware.