I think the bottom line is if they didn't like Mint they're not gonna like Ubuntu. Any criticism I can level at mint I can level even harder at Ubuntu. Before anyone can say anything for sure though it'd be important to know what they didn't like about Mint and what it is that's drawing them to Ubuntu.

As far as would I recommend Ubuntu? Honestly, no. I don't recommend it to anyone. Its not easier to use than Mint if you want an easy to use Linux distro. Its basically no better than Windows if you're issue with Windows was philosophical. From a technical standpoint I find it to be about the worst distro there is.

The list of distros I find myself recommending to people is as follows:

• Mint (for noobs)
• MX (for experienced users who don't wanna Futz with stuff)
• Antix (for constrained systems)
• Arch (for experienced users who do wanna Futz with stuff)
• Debian (for people who are on a futzing with stuff spectrum between MX and Arch, regardless of experience level)
• Artix (for sickos who love the Futz, live for the futz, and found Arch to not be futzy enough)

Snaps sucks, canonical sucks, Amazon integration sucks, KDE updates are years behind which also sucks, pushing snaps over deb sucks, pushing snap over flatpak sucks.

However, Ubuntu is a great distro. Incredibly stable, very well tested and polished. Installation is super easy and hardware support is very good, unless you got some very new hardware.

I recommend Ubuntu to a lot of people even though I'd never use it myself. Most people just want their computer to work.

Personal main-complaint about Snaps is that they ship Firefox by default with it and some things in it are just broken:

• "Save Image As..." in the right-click menu would just fail to open the file dialog and therefore do nothing.
• It doesn't use ~/Downloads/ for downloads, but rather some complex folder underneath ~/snap/. You can get to that folder from Firefox's download list, I believe, but navigating there via file manager is tricky.

Thankfully, Mozilla now offers a DEB repo: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w_install-firefox-deb-package-for-debian-based-distributions

As for Kubuntu, it's far from the greatest showing of KDE. They frequently have oddball KDE versions, e.g. not quite shipping the KDE LTS version in Ubuntu LTS, because releases didn't line up, but also just in general weird instabilities and crashes which don't happen on my openSUSE laptop (my workplace issues Ubuntu laptops).

Having said that, we gave some of our Linux newbie colleagues GNOME and they always seem to struggle more with it than the colleagues with KDE, because usability in GNOME is just whack.
Things like not being able to type a file path into the file manager (unless you know the magic shortcut Ctrl+L), or the file-open dialog highlighting the name field, but when you type into it, it starts searching files instead.
But also just the whole thing not behaving like Windows. I'll be the last to praise Windows' usability, but it is what many people know.

I just switched away from Kubuntu to Debian.

The snap thing was annoying, but not a major problem for me, except for one thing: I switched Firefox back to a debian package, following the directions online to do so, and every few months it seemed somehow I had been switched back to a snap version. I removed the snap and all of that, but every now and then I'd realize I was using Firefox in a snap. (It became obvious when I tried to unlock 1Password - the snap version relies on the plugin, but the non-snap version fires up the standalone 1Password program.)

In general, I'm not opposed to the concept of snaps, and a browser is probably something that should be in a sandbox. But, I preferred the standard Debian package installation, and somehow that kept getting overridden. And that is the kind of thing that I hate about Windows.

The install was smooth, or would have been if I hadn't had a slightly unusual setup with my drives. It works just like Kubuntu, by switching to KDE with X11 (I had a few minor issues with Wayland), but without Canonical. I don't need bleeding edge, I just want my system to work reliably.

My Linux background: Spent a lot of time with Slackware starting in the late 90s, both on server and desktop. Switched desktop and laptop to Kubuntu around 2010. Server got switched to Debian in 2017 or so.

While I found ubuntu's business practices (all the upsells, mostly) the most grating, really the thing that pushed me off of Ubuntu was packages being behind inexplicably and all the forking/modifying they did to gnome and just always being like 1-2 major versions behind, especially since gnomes been shipping tons of features the last few years and Ubuntu wouldn't get them for ages.

Outside of the snaps that Ubuntu seems to force you back into if you purposely try to turn it off, its not the worst to avoid otherwise. Or just deal with for a few apps.

If they want the ubuntu stack of tooling, suggest debian. If they feel intimidated by Debian, Ubuntu is fine. Debian is really solid out of the box for a primary devices nowadays. no need to wait for Ubuntu to bless packages since the Debian ppa's are usually much faster to update. But as long as they aren't doing really weird stuff, they can always move off of Ubuntu to Debian or any other debian descendant easily if they want a smooth transition since its the same package manager.

As long as the immutable distro paradigm isnt a turn off for them, Vanilla OS is also really neat, including cross-package manager installs. V1 is Ubuntu based, v2 will be Debian based (if it isnt already GA'd... I know thats soonish)

I've mostly switched to using Debian for dev containers and servers, and 99% of the time any ubuntu-specific guides are still perfectlh helpful. I moved to Arch for main devices.

(Side note: I abandoned manjaro for similar reasons as I abandoned Ubuntu: too much customization forced upon me, manjaro's package repo was always behind or even had some broken packages vs the arch repos, and some odd decisions by the maintainers about all sorts of things. EndeavourOS has been just way better as someone who likes to have a less-dictated setup that is closer to the distro base and faster to get package updates)

Edit: I guess my tl:dr is... If one thinks "Ubuntu", first ask "why not debian?", and then proceed to Ubuntu if there are some solid reasons to do so for the situation.

Do you know what they didn't like about Mint? If it's just the DE (which I imagine covers most of the look and feel for a beginner) then there are three different defaults to try.

if they run hardware that's not cutting edge, by all means, that's the best solution as a first distro.

ubuntu is important as a stepping stone. myself and everyone I know that's on Fedora et al started with Ubuntu. we learned what's what and how to go about doing things and after hitting the ceiling one too many times, we tried other stuff, found better havens and finally abandoned it forever.

so I'd caution against any action aimed at hurting it. leave it be and know that it's still the most user-friendly solution out there and the one that's most likely to "just work" for most people. it'll convert people over, whether from Windows or MacOS. once they've crossed over, they're more likely to wander further.

I used Ubuntu for 10 ish years before moving to Fedora. I switched because the Kde packages were seemingly years out of date with no idea of when the new versions would hit the Apt repos.

Seems like a lot of Ubuntu packages are old compared to Fedora since I’ve experienced way fewer bugs now adays.

Snaps were bad but I never was forced to use them, had it purged and disabled the whole time.

Ubuntu is a perfectly usable operating system, there is a LOT of elitism in the Linux community.

De gustibus non est disputandum

In matters of taste there is no dispute

If they are competent with computers, they can probably figure out Ubuntu and maintain it theirself.

I left Ubuntu for systems I manage because I'm not smart enough or willing to invest time learning snaps, and snaps kept breaking Firefox updates and generally made Firefox unusable. Since I've been around a while, I found it was just easier to migrate my fleet to Debian and set it to look like Ubuntu with the dock on the left. This has been fine since 2022.

If it's something you would be partially managing, and they didn't like Mint, have them try Pop!_OS.

If it's a super simple, low maintenance desktop, just go Fedora Silverblue and it will stay solid and up to date until the hardware dies.

Not recommending Ubuntu because of those 2 things, both of which can be turned off easily, seems a bit extreme. Like not recommending a Toyota because some of the inside trim attrack dust

As an intro into Linux, I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone even if I myself moved on from it

Ubuntu has its ups and downs when you're actually living with it, but they have a fantastic installer experience. I have had my fair share of bizarre dead ends with other distro installers, like Bazzite telling me "you need -860GB more space". Ubuntu puts you in a solid live-iso OS where the installer is just an app that you can drag to one side and run other tools before continuing. It tends to do sensible things if I go off the beaten path with a more advanced install.

Nowadays, I am happy with debootstrapping or btrfs send'ing an existing Debian install to set up a new system for myself. I still think that Ubuntu is reasonably likely to be a good experience for a newcomer.

I've switched to KDE neon, after being disappointed how far behind Ubuntu was, again, with KDE.

Snaps are teeth grinding slow crap that I always disable and remove first thing

SystemD still aucks, over a decade later, and always managed to add yet another thing to its bloated corpse causing yet more hours of work for me to do basic setups that shouldn't take more than 30 seconds... But it's everywhere and basically nearly impossible to avoid st this point. Such is life, I guess?

You'd be surprised how many people don't care about business practices. It's actually kind of alarming

I am in the same boat as you. I am still running Ubuntu (with snap removed, so I can't comment on its current performance overhead) on a few of my machines because I couldn't be bothered to do a reinstall with something less insane, but I'm not recommending Ubuntu to anyone anymore over the same concerns as you have.

If you want to recommend a system that runs decently out of the box and runs a lot of software, recommend Mint instead. Ubuntu used to be Debian with sane default settings that would run out of the box, nowadays Mint is Ubuntu with sane default settings that will run out of the box. Mint also doesn't subscribe to this snap madness and is continuing to maintain a few packages Ubuntu has migrated to snap as .deb package (for instance Firefox and Chromium).

I tried to install GrapheneOS from Chromium, but online installation doesn't work on snaps, I had to go hunting for apks because Ubuntu doesn't allow you to just choose which version of the program you want

That's the opposite of what I want from Linux. I installed NixOS on my new laptop

Biggest problem for me was, due to optimization issues ans since I used it on an old computer with hdd, how slow it was.

Has anything changed about snap?

It became less slow and I think they considered implementing human verification for new packages but idk if they did.

Have they made any changes in their management that may make sure there won't be another Amazon search thing?

Even if management changes are done, it's as easy to revert them. This one is purely a matter of trust.

Is it best to use the default desktop on Ubuntu? I would recommend Kubuntu to them, all else being equal, but don't know if maybe the default one is better integrated.

I think the default Ubuntu has the best integration in terms of theming and stuff but not having it is absolutely not a problem. I don't remember the flavours being less user friendly or anything.

Ubuntu is even more aggressive with snaps. However it's a ok package manager, I would not be very annoyed by it if I have to use

I mainly just want to know if it will eat all their RAM or something

Kinda the same as Flatpaks... Actually it's not a big issue, once spare ram is money thrown away...

It's fine.

Seriously I've run it for years. It's just fine. No greater or fewer issues than other distros. You can avoid snaps if you like, but I don't. I simply don't care and they usually work better than flatpaks for me (snaps can install a cli executable, flatpaks require silly ways of running from the CLI).

server: LTS , desktop: latest point release. keeps the video games happy

Its not bad, but I don't like it because it's ugly brown defaults and it's gnome.

Admittedly very superficial reasons. But I know that.

Kubuntu chose to not ship Plasma 6 because it didnt match their release point. While in general a good decision, stable releases are the flaw really.

So a semi-rolling Kubuntu yes, but LTS Kubuntu before Plasma 6? Wouldnt recommend.

Ubuntu is also still full in on Snaps. ~~Flatpak comes from a PPA~~ I think. Their store is snaps-first.

While this is not a bad concept, Flatpaks are better for many reasons. They also may be worse for some others, mainly because Snaps just use Apparmor for sandboxing, like the rest of the system, so you can make easy exceptions.

Ubuntu is a great distro. It's performant, ,its stable, its well configured it looks nice out of the box. For seasoned Linux users they can be more picky with which their distro but as an intro to Linux I always recommend mint and Ubuntu.