this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2022
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

I agree that Fedora or a proper rolling release would be a better choice, but re: using Ubuntu at all as a desktop user, there's a few reasons. First of all, its install and setup process is absolutely painless. Fedora for example requires quite a bit of extra things out of the box. dnf isn't configured very well, additional repositories aren't enabled, it's missing a ton of codecs, it won't handle nvidia drivers automatically (though they've made that easier lately), etc. mostly as a result of its free software policy. Ubuntu has no qualms with delivering proprietary software and otherwise putting principles to the side if it makes the process smoother.

In addition to that huge one, the vast majority of answers you're going to find when looking things up will be catered toward Ubuntu, it's still common for projects to only provide .debs (though this has been made MUCH better since flatpak and appimage came around), or they might be familiar with it from work.

Depending on your preferred desktop environment they may have the best implementation of it. Ubuntu MATE is to MATE what Fedora is to GNOME, you're not going to find a MATE experience half as good anywhere else. I wouldn't be surprised if the same was true for lxqt or something.

I don't think Ubuntu is one of the better distros and am more likely to nudge people toward Fedora, Debian, or Arch, but there's definitely valid reasons to use Ubuntu.