I liked Ubuntu. For a very long time, it was the sensible default option. Around 2016, I used the Ubuntu GNOME flavor, and after they ditched the Unity desktop environment, GNOME became the default option. I was really happy with it, both for work and personal computing needs. Estonian ID card software was also officially supported on Ubuntu, which made Ubuntu a good choice for family members. But then something changed. Upgrades suck Like many Ubuntu users, I stuck to the long-term support releases and upgraded every two years to the next major version. There was just one tiny little issue: every upgrade broke something. Usually it was a relatively minor issue, with some icons, fonts or themes being a bit funny. Sometimes things went completely wrong. The worst upgrade was the one I did on my mothers’ laptop. During the upgrade process from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04, everything blew up spectacularly. The UI froze, the machine was completely unresponsive. After a 30-minute wait and a forced restart later, the installation was absolutely fucked. In frustration, I ended up installing Windows so that I don’t have to support Ubuntu. Another family member, another upgrade. This is one that they did themselves on Lubuntu 18.04, and they upgraded to the latest version. The result: Firefox shortcuts stopped working, the status bar contained duplicate icons, and random errors popped up after logging in. After making sure that ID card software works on Fedora 40, I installed that instead. All they need is a working browser, and that’s too difficult for Ubuntu to handle. Snaps ruined Ubuntu Snaps. I hate them. They sound great in theory, but the poor implementation and heavy-handed push by Canonical has been a mess. Snaps auto-update by default. Great for security1, but horrible for users who want to control what their personal computer is doing. Snaps get forced upon users as more and more system components are forcibly switched from Debian-based packages to Snaps, which breaks compatibility, functionality and introduces a lot of new issues. You can upgrade your Ubuntu installation and then discover that your browser is now contained within a Snap, the desktop shortcut for it doesn’t work and your government ID card does not work for logging in to your bank any longer. Snaps also destroy productivity. A colleague was struggling to get any work done because the desktop environment on their Ubuntu installation was flashing certain UI elements, being unresponsive and blocking them from doing any work. Apparently the whole GNOME desktop environment is a Snap now, and that lead to issues. The fix was super easy, barely an inconvenience: roll back to the previous version of the GNOME snap restart still broken update to the latest version again restart still broken restart again it is fixed now What was the issue? Absolutely no clue, but a days’ worth of developers’ productivity was completely wasted. Some of these issues have probably been fixed by now, but if I executed migration projects at my day job with a similar track record, I would be fired.2 Snaps done right: Flatpak Snaps can be implemented in a way that doesn’t suck for end users. It’s called a Flatpak. They work reasonably well, you can update them whenever you want and they are optional. Your Firefox installation won’t suddenly turn into a Flatpak overnight. On the Steam Deck, Flatpaks are the main distribution method for user-installed apps and I don’t mind it at all. The only issue is the software selection, not every app is available as a Flatpak just yet. Consider Fedora Fedora works fine. It’s not perfect, but I like it. At this point I’ve used it for longer than Ubuntu and unless IBM ruins it for all of us, I think it will be a perfectly cromulent distro go get work done on. Hopefully it’s not too late for Canonical to reconsider their approach to building a Linux distro. the xz backdoor demonstrated that getting the latest versions of all software can also be problematic from the security angle. ↩︎ technical failures themselves are not the issue, but not responding to users’ feedback and not testing things certainly is, especially if you keep repeatedly making the same mistake. ↩︎

Electric power in the US is provided by the electrical grid, a huge network of power plants, transmission lines, and transformers that moves electric power from where it's generated to where it's consumed.

I know it's a bit of cliché, but count me in the group of white men who 2021's Inside really connected with me in a huge way. Anyway, now All Eyes on Me is going to be stuck in my head for the next month.

The Pragmatic Engineer's YouTube channel crossed 100K subscribers. Celebrating with a giveaway of 100 books and newsletter subs: 10x signed physical books (The Software Engineer’s Guidebook [in English or German - your choice!], Building Mobile Apps at Scale; winners get both; shipping is on me) 90x