I was hardcore Ubuntu devotee for many years and at one point just got tired of having to undo all of the terrible choices being made for users. Minimal install saved the time of having to undo before doing things the way I wanted.
It's this kind of messing around with package and desktop managers that finally sent me to other distros.
Yeah. It's hard to figure out who Canonical thinks its customers are now. I'm not a super-libre-pedant and am usually happy to run closed source driver blobs. But stock debian seems to be getting better with driver support and I probably should be more careful about the provenance of proprietary drivers. Seems like every week there's a reminder that I'm not Ubuntu's target market.
AFAICT, Canonical's customers are cloud vendors and people who buy cloud services. The Linux desktop is, in that sense, just a hearts and minds investment for people who run linux workstations to manage their much larger linux server fleet. From that perspective, the investments in charm and snap on the desktop feel a bit like a sales pitch for their new cloud features. Which.... would be more effective if they didn't also make the user experience for FF emphatically worse.
And originally, Ubuntu was a high visibility demo piece for Launchpad. If it can manage the full build cycle for Debian, it can certainly handle your niche app.
I'm guessing Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop customers are businesses that are using Ubuntu as a cheap Windows replacement. The IT departments who set up their OS probably just do the default install, so the minimal install option is just more code to maintain.
Even now snaps are pretty avoidable for almost everything but we'll see how that lasts.
Firefox is the only major thing where I've just abandoned the package manager, and it's probably a better experience this way than the .deb was in the first place.
I run Ubuntu LTS on many of my servers. Most of them are just VM hosts running KVM. If I had to do it again, I'd go with Debian. Ubuntu upgrades often do strange and surprising things. I remember doing a minor upgrade with 20.04 and losing the default route! Another minor upgrade renamed network interfaces. (20.04.1 I think?) The machine was completely inaccessible remotely.
Perhaps this was "my" fault because the machine had been updated several times, originally at 14.04 through various LTS releases, accumulating cruft.
Fedora has an existing look of being... too easy/friendly/noobish? It's not necessarily the trendy "at your own risk" distro others choose. However, I completely feel Fedora is going to be the strongest distros in the mix in the next decade. ostree, docker-image-based, read-only images are going to be The Thing (tm). I'm hoping they take CoreOS and continue it as a server-oriented minimal distro, and use it as a base layer for the desktop-oriented ones like Silverblue.
I wish I could articulate this better, but this is how 1 person is creating their own customized version of Fedora Silverblue - with Github workflows:
I can just rebase off of that image and try it out like a git remote branch.
Add in eventual plans for dm-verity and such, and Fedora's distros (kinoite, silverblue, (sigacea?)) are going to be leaders. Much more dependable and predictable.
The one thing I would want to know before switching from fedora to ubuntu - there's a ton of software support given ubuntu's prior popularity, so it always seems like the path of least resistance getting set up for basic things like a samba server or for a pytorch/CUDA development setup - how far along is this with Fedora? Similarly, there's a ton of user generated tutorials/technical and configuration answers online for ubuntu - I am hoping Fedora has this sort of material floating around?
Similarly, it seems the Fedora community exists by the good graces...of IBM - how much independence would it have in the future?
In my experience I’ve not had any issues finding resources and materials for most anything I want to do with Fedora.
That said I also migrated from Arch to Fedora when I needed to pick between Ubuntu and Fedora for work, so I was used to being a bit more hands on to begin with.
Universal Blue (https://universal-blue.org/) takes the OCI-based Silverblue and extends it even further, including bluefin (https://universal-blue.org/images/bluefin/) which aims to provide an Ubuntu-like desktop experience for those of us who've given up on Ubuntu/Canonical.
I switched to mint linux for a few VMs that used to be ubuntu. So far it's working well where ubuntu just kind of stopped working for reasons I don't really have time for. Ubuntu changed some stuff and it's not really viable for me anymore.
I really wouldn't call it a reskin of Ubuntu. It uses the Ubuntu repositories sure, but it also has many of its own packages and there is the LMDE version which bases on Debian instead of Ubuntu (in case they ever want to become independant of ubuntu). Mint has none of the crap Ubuntu comes with and won't inexplicitly install snaps.
Mint develops their own desktop environment cinnamon (based on gnome 2).
If a distro is a reskin one should be able to convert an install of the original distro to the reskinned version. Mint comes with heaps of its own software, for managing software installation, software upgrades, managing kernels, managing release upgrades and of course its own DE.
It's this kind of messing around with package and desktop managers that finally sent me to other distros.