Hey guys! I’m getting into the open source world and for years, i am finally hoing to try Linux! However, i see a lot of complains about Ubuntu and i just dont know why. What are you guys complains about Ubuntu? My next PC will come with Ubuntu. Do you guys think i should use Mint instead? Need help.
The only real issue with Ubuntu is it uses Snap app store instead of Flathub app store.
Flathub has more apps, is faster, and has some minor security improvements. Linux Mint uses Flathub.
HOWEVER, you can add Flathub as additional source in Ubuntu app store app, and use Flathub exclusively.
In that case, no real difference between Ubuntu and Linux Mint other than UI.
Also Snap backend is a proprietary crap, unlike flatpak.
Another problem though is the best Flatpak store Bazaar’s Flatpak version is broken due to Ubuntu apparmor. There are workarounds but they don’t really seem to be doing much about it. There’s a deb version in the repos but it is currently very out of date as its a newer app with fairly active development
What are the minor security improvements?
Flathub sandboxes applications to prevent them from infecting the system if app gets hacked, and lets you control permissions for each app, like microphone, camera etc.
But they are still work in progress and easily circumvented, thus I called them only minor improvements.
Snap is arguably the better sandbox. The bigger issue with Snap is that only Canonical (the company that owns Ubuntu) has the code for the Snap store, so it’s a closed ecosystem and there are no alternative stores, so the minute they enshittify it’s garbage. Flathub is the most popular flatpak repo but the code for a flatpak repo is open source, there are alternative options and will be in the future.
Snap has a better sandbox, but only if you have an AppArmor distro. If your distro of choice uses SELinux or something else, then you’re out of luck.
Actually, just having AppArmor enabled isn’t enough. Snap’s strict confinement depends on specific out-of-tree AppArmor kernel patches that Canonical bakes into Ubuntu.
If your distro uses the stock Linux kernel, even with AppArmor active (like Debian, Arch, or openSUSE) snapd lacks the necessary kernel-level hooks and drops down to partial confinement. Because of this fallback, non-Ubuntu AppArmor distros don’t actually get the full Snap sandbox, they get a degraded version of it.