Today is Ubuntu's 20th Anniversary

Seems like everyone loves to hate Ubuntu lately. From the Amazon search icon years ago, to Snaps, Mir, "pro" updates (which I don't get the backlash about..).

But man, I started using this distro 18 years ago? And I still use it today. I can tell you, it's gotten more usable, more stable, and easier to install, without (imo) sacrificing any of what we love about Linux systems. If you hate snaps you can just remove them.

It's an OS I can easily recommend to beginners who want to dip their toes in the Linux world. They can install it without any help.

And I get that so much is a testament to the software Ubuntu uses getting better. But it brings it all together in such a great way.

I used Arch Linux for a few years. But I didn't really like having to check message boards for any breaking changes before updating lest my system become unusable... As a busy professional and dad, I don't see myself switching off of Ubuntu anytime soon.

I'm overall very positive on Ubuntu, but snaps was a big misstep in my opinion. When snaps were rolled out, lots of features were no longer working in apps packaged as snaps, or it was at least confusing to users (like file picker suddenly defaulting to some isolated path). For an operating system that always had a big focus on good user experience, this was really mismanaged and prematurely rolled out. And then they decided to force that bad UX on people by pointing apt packages to snaps suddenly, taking away the users choice to not use snap.

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.