The Dislike to Ubuntu

Every time this is asked, I post the same comment. I used Kubuntu for years and liked it, but more recently they started doing things that annoyed me. The biggest was related to snaps and Firefox. Now, sandboxing a browser is probably a great idea, but I wanted to use the regular deb install, so I followed the directions to disable the snap install and used the deb. However, Ubuntu overrode that decision several times - I'd start browsing, then realize I was using a snap AGAIN. Happened a few times over a couple years. If it happened once, eh, maybe an error, but it happened 3 or 4 times. I came to the conclusion I wasn't in control of my system, Ubuntu was.
I switched to Debian and am happy with my choice.
- I had the same experience on my one gui Ubuntu machine. I also have several headless machines, and due to some shared libraries I always ended up with snapd installed even though none of the packages I was running were installed through snap. I always found it through the mount point pollution that snapd does.
- Why do you care if it’s a snap or a Deb? To me the biggest problem with snap is the pollution in /dev/loop*.
  
  Because I wanted it to integrate with 1password full client.

The thing with Ubuntu / Canonical isn't that it doesn't work, it is that they've bad policies and by using their stuff you're making yourself vulnerable to something akin to what happened with VMWare ESXi or with CentOS licensing - they may change their mind at some point and you'll be left with a pile of machines and little to no time to move to other solution.
For starters Ubuntu is the only serious and corporate-backed distribution to ever release a major version on the website and have the ISO installer broken for a few days.
Ubuntu’s kernel is also a dumpster fire of hacks waiting for someone upstream to implement things properly so they can backport them and ditch their own implementations. We've seen this multiple times, shiftfs vs VFS idmap shifting is a great example of the issue.
Canonical has contributing to open-source for a long time, but have you heard about what happened with LXD/LXC? LXC was made with significant investments, primarily from IBM and Canonical. LXD was later developed as an independent project under the Linux Containers umbrella, also funded by Canonical. Everything seemed to be progressing well until last year when Canonical announced that LXD would no longer remain an independent project. They removed it from the Linux Containers project and brought it under in-house development.
They effectively took control of the codebase, changed repositories, relicensed previous contributions under a more restrictive license. To complicate matters, they required all contributors to sign a contract with new limitations and impositions. This shift has caused concerns, but most importantly LXD became essentially a closed-off in-house project of Canonical.
Some people may be annoyed at Snaps as well but I won't get into that.
- Just wanted to add something for future reference of anyone reading your post: after Canonical did this, LXD was forked by Linux Containers into a new project named Incus.
  
  Yeah, Incus FTW!!

I don't like snaps (nor flatpaks for that matter, they're too big for my slow internet connection here in my Greek village). But I find it absolutely, 100%, crazy to install gimp and darktable via snaps, and not being able to print (the print option is just not there, because they're snaps and somehow they haven't implemented that for these apps). As an artist who sells prints, this makes the whole distro completely and utterly USELESS to me. Sure, they can be found as deb packages too, but they're older. And Firefox is also sandboxed. And when I installed Chromium from the command line as a deb, it OVERWROTE my wish, and installed Chromium as a snap too.
So, no ubuntu for me. The only advantage it has is that many third party apps (usually commercial ones) that release binary tarballs or appimages have tested with ubuntu and they usually work well (minus davinci resolve). I don't have a big trouble with appimages as they're generally smaller than the kde/gnome frameworks that flatpaks/snaps use, and they're one file-delete away from getting rid of them completely. They're just more straightforward.
- Yeah, this kind of things drove me batty on Ubuntu. So many things were delivered as Snaps when they just don't work that way. The funniest one to me was Filebot. It's a media file naming/organizing tool....that doesn't have disk access. Are you kidding me, Canonical?
  Flatpak is easier to work with, but has similar issues. Great for simple things, but I'm always worried that at some point I'm going to need some features that just won't work, and then it's going to be a hassle to migrate to a native installation. And it has no CLI support.
  And yeah, the bloat is wild. Deduplication on btrfs (or similar) helps but there's no getting past the bandwidth bloat.
  
  Yeah, i hear you. I once installed the new version of snap (and later flatpak) of the gnome ide, and it couldn't find the vala compiler, because it was outside the sandboxing. Totally useless.
  And yes, it's bloated. Nothing works with less 1.6 gb of ram. But then again, it's the same on fedora.
  
  You have to explicitly grant permission to the disk because the app is sandboxed.
- And when I installed Chromium from the command line as a deb, it OVERWROTE my wish, and installed Chromium as a snap too.
  This right here is my issue with Ubuntu. A huge part of Linux for me is that I am in control of my OS and machine. If I use apt to install a package, it's because I want the .deb version. I absolutely don't need my OS telling me "I know what you asked for, but I'm going to give you the snap version anyway".
  I could see snaps being preferred over .debs in the Software app, sure (though they shouldn't be the only option). But replacing apps in a command line tool is garbage.
  
  As far as the software app goes, I like how Mint handles it: it clearly marks what's a system install and what's a Flatpak, and if both are available it makes it easy to select which one you want. At no point does it try to hide or obfuscate it.
- That shit of installing what it wants how it wants is MicroShit behavior.
- hey. unrelated question, sorry. do any greeks still worship the olympians?
  
  No, they're all orthodox christians now
  
  Thanks for giving me a shot at a woke moment now
  That was racist. There is nothing wrong with worshiping Olympian gods. You are a right-wing-conservative-republican-christian-homophobic-misogonistic-white-supremacist-rapper-patriarch.
  Lol, I honestly don't know how woke people manage to find all this crap on any comments, and you just saw me try 🤣🤣🤣
- What sort of printers do you make your prints with? And do you print directly from GIMP or from something else? I've been trying to set up a FOSS printing workflow using Canon giclee printers, which has been mostly successful but I haven't yet figured out how to print custom sizes on roll paper, only standard sizes on sheet paper.
  
  I use sheet paper to be honest on an Epson printer. I do use Gimp to print, although most of my editing is happening on Photopea in the browser (gimp didn't cut it for me as an editor for my paintings, I needed adjustment layers and Secondary Colors). Then, I export a JPEG, and print from Gimp (because the browser doesn't have all the printing options that gimp has). I use the Debian-Testing rolling release.

I'm old and my gateway to Linux was Ubuntu 5.10 via a live CD they gave me at uni back in 2006.
I got to experience it when they used to take seriously their "Linux for human beings" motto.
Those were GNOME 2 and kernel 2.x times. Albeit the limitations of the technology (40GB HDD disk, 256 MB RAM, an Intel Xeon processor which I can't remember it's exact specs) it felt way snappier (no pun intended) than Windows. You could felt they cared about it in that brown visual theme, the icons, the sounds, the way the documentation was phrased - you could feel the Ubuntu in it.
I ended wiping my entire docs drive while trying to install it but got to learn lots of stuff and feel like my computer was actually mine.
Same as for many people my generation, I switched to Linux thanks to that Ubuntu. It's really sad what it has become and the poor, selfish decisions they have taken, but still it keeps holding a special place in the Linux memories.
- Absolutely. I hate Ubuntu now, but Karmic Koala was my gateway drug. I was scared of partitioning so wubi meant I could still try it out.
  Then Unity happened and I no longer cared for Ubuntu.
  
  Wao, I haven't heard of wubi for about 12 years. Is that still a thing?

Ubuntu is not terrible and if it works for you then fine. I would be surprised if Debian or Mint didn't also work for you just as well though.
- Debian can be annoying if you want to install a newish version of something from the package manager. It's why I can't use APT to keep Rust up to date and have to use Rustup instead, for an example.
  
  You can use distrobox with podman to get newer software. You also can use Flatpaks
  
  While I don't disagree with you, I think it's a bit funny that you're bringing up hardships using apt to update software in Debian when the biggest complaint about Ubuntu is having to use snap instead of apt.
  
  On Debian Testing or Unstable you don't have to worry about that as much. Right now, I have rustc 1.80.1 from the Testing repo, just one version behind.

I think Ubuntu made sense back in the day when Debian wasn't as user-friendly.
Now that Debian is, it looks like Ubuntu is trying really hard to just be as commercialized as possible.
I still don't understand the logic behind their paying for updates for certain programs when Debian doesn't require it.
- I think Ubuntu made sense back in the day when Debian wasn’t as user-friendly.
  This is a very good point.
  When Ubuntu launched, it was a big moment for linux. Before then, setting up a linux GUI was a lot of pain (remember setting modelines for individual monitors and the endless fiddling that took - and forget about multiple monitors). Ubuntu made GUI easy - it just worked out of the box for most people. It jumped Linux forwards as a desktop a huge way and adoption grew a lot. They also physically posted you a set of CDs or a DVD for free! And they did a bunch of stuff for educational usage, and getting computers across Africa.
  That was all pretty amazing at the time and all very positive.
  But then everyone else caught up with the usability and they turned into a corporate entity. Somewhere along the way they stopped listening to their users, or at least the users felt they had no voice, and a lot more linux distros appeared.

The distribution is fine, maybe even good.
The politicking and project management around the distro has annoyed a lot of people.

Ubuntu isn't terrible, there are just bad things on Ubuntu that aren't present in other distros.
- Yeah I don't hate Ubuntu, I used it as my daily driver for years, but it did get a bit frustrating how they seem to fixate on the new 'shiny' thing (Unity, Mir, the whole convergent desktop thing, now Snaps) and chase after it while other things are left to stagnate, then they seem to get it to where it's almost good, then drop it and go chasing off after something else.
  Also, I find that these days there are just better options for a 'just works' kind of distro (like Mint or Pop!OS) so I don't hate Ubuntu, I just have no particular need for it anymore.

Ubuntu does work and is a decent distro in many ways. The problems are around how canonical leverages things for its own financial benefit for the detriment of users and the Linux community.
A good example is Snap. It is forced on users - even Firefox is a snap on Ubuntu. This is not an efficient way fo end users to run their system or their most used software.
Instead of making the builds available as standard software, users have to use the Snap or go hunting elsewhere for builds. That's anti-user and is identical to how Microsoft behaves with windows. It doesn't do things to benefit users, it does things to benefit Microsoft.
It's arguable whether what snap does is actually worth the overhead - I can see that it is more secure in many ways. But then so it Flatpak, and that is more universally used for desktop software across Linux distros. Snap has some inherent benefits for server side use but then why force it on end users where it is not as good as Flatpak in many ways? Or Appimage?
So Ubuntu is fine in many ways, but why bother when you can go for alternatives and give the best of both worlds? Mint is an Ubuntu based distro without snap and other canonical elements. I used mint for ages, it's great and there is a reason it's so popular.
I've moved on to OpenSuSE now but the Ubuntu ecosystem is fine, it works well for many, and it's very well documented and supported which often works downstream in Mint and others. It's just Ubuntu itself thats a bit crappy due to the decisions made to suite canonical rather than what users want or would suit them best. In the end it all comes down to personal choice and what people are willing to accept from their distro.

For me, Mint offers everything good about Ubuntu without any of the bad.
That being said, I don't hate it, but I also don't recommend it ever to people. The pitfalls that can come up from Snaps, plus the default layout of Gnome, are reasons why a brand new Linux user might struggle with it unless they are already somewhat of a techie.
For ex-windows users like my parents who aren't tech savvy, I just install Mint, set up their shortcuts and desktop icons, and away they go, happy little penguins.
- I love how you spelled Penguin with a q, can we Call it Linuqs too?
  
  lol, fixed it now :P

Ubuntu was a successful attempt to make Debian user-friendly. If you don't remember Linux in 2003, it took a lot of time to configure.
Ubuntu came along and did everything automatically from first install. Some of the polish it had was things like smooth fonts, TrueType font support (remember old XFree86 Bitmap fonts?) a GUI installer, automatically detecting your monitor resolution, setting up sound automatically, and automatic downloading of firmware needed to make your hardware work. In just one reboot after install, you had a usable system that looked really nice, with smooth fonts.
In 2024, Debian already does all of this out of the box. The value add of Ubuntu is minimal. Ubuntu provides a theme, a splash screen when booting up, a custom font, and a modified version of the Dash to Dock extension that you can just download yourself from the Gnome extension site. That's it. One might argue that snaps make Ubuntu worse than Debian.
Just use Debian. If you want a somewhat more polished system (nice cursors, unique icons, easy to configure animations), there is Mint Debian edition.
It takes less time to just set up Debian to look and behave like Ubuntu (about 10 minutes) than it takes to continually fight against Ubuntu snaps.
Just use Debian.

The thing is. Snaps isn't the first controversy.
Canonical, with Ubuntu early on was helping drive things forward, but they reached a point where they started to do things their own way with disregard to the broader ecosystem.
Each time they did this, they cause fragmentation, struggled, and then deferred to the choice the rest of the ecosystem has. The problem with this is that they're not sharing their effort, they're just throwing it away.
They merely doubled down hard on snaps which is the latest controversy.
Snaps have their own advantages, but Canonical owns the store. Which becomes its own stalewort
- Unity is one example I cared about.
  
  Same, I was very sad wheb they gave up in Unity8. I do check in often on the project as I felt it provided a very good mobile experience.
- Since when is fragmentation a negative around here? Its part of what makes Foss great.
  
  It's also part of what makes FOSS niche.
  
  Personally I don't consider it a con unless rampant. However in many cases they've dumped the projects. It is effort that could have helped along another project.
  imo the negative side effect is the wasted effort and the abandonment.
  
  Packages for third party apps is the one place we don't want fragmentation.
  
  I think there are good kinds of fragmentation (choice and/or competition) and many bad kinds/causes of fragmentation (clinging to abandonware, reinventing the wheel, rejecting reasonable changes, "rewrite it in X-lang", demanding complete control, style/design choices that don't actually matter...)

In all reality it's fine. Snaps are annoying on occasion, and the Amazon search integration was rightly riffed on, but it'll work like anything else. Sometimes it's just funny to riff on Ubuntu, and sometimes people hate on it because Linux people are very .. er .. um .. opinionated. But if it works best for you then go for it.

There are just better noob-friendly distributions, like LinuxMint.
- I watched a video of a Linux noob trying it for the first time. They chose Mint, and a significant amount of problems arose from the fact that mint is still on an old kernel version, and there was little to no indication from the OS or from cursory googling that updating it would fix the issue or even that you should do that.
  
  Mint uses the same kernel version as Ubuntu, so that's not really a point in favor of Ubuntu in any case. Do you remember what video it was?
  
  If you open up the kernel manager you can switch to a newer release
  Also I think they now have a version with a newer kernel
  
  It literally says on the website where you download it, if you have new hardware to use the Edge Edition (though it's not there right now, likely because the current Mint version already has a new kernel)

The Term
The issue is that, no Ubuntu is not "the Windows" of Linux.
First of all this statement makes no sense. You could say "the Samsung of the Android world" as Samsung Android is a Distribution that looks nice and many people think it is nice to use (leaving out that it is the most spyware-riddled software on locked devices with horrible customer treatment)
Windows is just one OS. Android is an easy variant of Linux, and Ubuntu was one too.
Nowadays, uBlue Aurora/Bazzite would be my "best Desktop Linux", because they implement all the great, easy and modern stuff of Fedora Atomic Desktops, while also removing stupid opinionated things, and adding packages they legally simply cannot ship.
Updates & Upgrades
Ubuntu is not easy anymore. Distro upgrades are a mess and break. I had 12 laptops, all had the same 3 issues and updates took forever.
Ubuntu requires a sudo account for them to even work, a nonsudoer gets an update message but clicking it does nothing.
I.e. they dont use polkit, unlike Fedora for example.The paradigm of
Needing a user with sudo rights to use a system, otherwise an admin needs to login every week and do the GUI updates
Updates and upgrades being a privileged action that requires root permission
Is just bad. Android works without root since forever, and I would say it is the easiest Linux distro out there.
Style
They have their own strange icons, which look worse than GNOMEs. They have their own strange store instead of using and improving GNOME Software.
Their design sucks in comparison to Manjaro if you ask me. Most personal point of this list. Many other Distros just ship GNOME, do the packaging and leave the Branding to small changes, and the upstream DE.
Snaps
Snaps are not cross platform, while Flatpak exists and is cross platform.
Ubuntu doesnt even have uptodate flatpak and dependencies in their repos so the Flatpak project maintains like 6 PPAs just to run them on Ubuntu.
Snaps are not cross platform because they rely on AppArmor for sandboxing, and afaik custom AppArmor patches that are not in upstream.
This means Snaps on Fedora and others would run Snaps unsandboxed.
Technically they are fine. Pretty normal approach. But their repo hat big malware issues and they only allow a single one, which is a total nogo for any opensource project.
Snaps installed by other users with sudo cannot be opened by other users. You need to install them per-user, no other option possible.
Flatpak requires wheel/sudo too, I need to make a Fedora Change request to fix that, my previous one got rejected...
Variants & LTS
They only ship KDE on the LTS variant, which means by now it is very outdated. KDE is the most windows-like desktop, and also has the most features, by far. I tried GNOME and made a writeup on Fedora discuss.
Bloat
They bloat (at least) their (LTS) variants with tons of deb packages.
Safety & Snapshots
They dont integrate timeshift or other backup systems. Linux Mint and OpenSUSE are better here. Fedora Atomic Desktops too, while traditional Fedora not.

Honestly, IMO Mint is just Ubuntu without all the scetchy stuff. The only real major difference (besides the packaging debate) is the default graphical shell.
If you like gnome shell, I wonder if it's worth installing Mint and then gnome-shell...

Ubuntu was a big part of my path to full time Linux use. I adore everyone who has contributed to Ubuntu.
But also, Snaps are bullshit, and are why I replaced all my Ubuntu installs with Debian.
Canonical doesn't get to pretend to be surprised by the backlash for pushing an unnecessary closed proprietary platform on their freedom seeking users.
I still adore everyone at Canonical and in the Ubuntu community, for all they've done for the Linux community. Y'all still rock. Thanks!

Ubuntu started and stayed great for many years. Now I feel it's coasting on the name it rightly earned. It was my daily driver but I left after frustration with firefox snap and some networking malarkey I don't care to recall. There are just better maintained distros out there.

My perspective is simple, a win is a win. If someone makes the leap to Linux, that's a huge win, regardless of distro.

These things go in cycles. I remember when “Fedora Core” — they dropped the “Core” part of the name — was the cool new distro. I remember when Ubuntu was the cool new distro. Just ignore it and play around with distros until you find one you like.
In my opinion, new users should use a very popular distro so they have documentation and message boards. After a few years, you get your legs under you. At that point, start distro hopping using weird desktop environments. Then, someday, you get a lot of experience and use a very popular distro because software is a tool and you don’t care. (If something has buzz, I throw it in a VM and go “Huh, that’s interesting.”)
It’s sort of like how the target audience for Nike Air Monarchs is people buying their first pair of Nike Airs and dads who aren't trying to hear the word “colorway” and just want some shoes.
- I agree with you that using what other “normal” people are using has a lot of value and Ubuntu is still the most popular distro by far ( even I do not like it ).
  I think both Fedora and Mint are popular enough as well and a better base than Ubuntu. But that said, Ubuntu is fine.
  
  One of the things Fedora specifically has going for it is the generally newer kernel, which has been important for me in the past.

Moved from Gentoo to Ubuntu in 2008 as I needed to focus more on my job, moved back to Gentoo in 2022. Snaps were part of it, but really the lack of maintenance and vision around the apt repository was really the issue. More and more I was installing stray debs, or having to use flatpaks / AppImages for what what I wanted the system to manage for me.
Not that I've entirely stopped using flatpaks or AppImages, but the process of creating an ebuild is far simpler than trying to do anything with a deb. For a while I had hope about the ppa, however that became fewer and fewer. I do think that the battle to have a comprehensive software repository is a loosing one because of the way things are currently structured.

I dislike Ubuntu, because it literally never successfully upgraded from one release to the next.
It's also the buggiest distro I've experienced, and I've tried quite a few. I'm talking about bugs like:
do a fresh install
log into Gnome
first thing that pops up is an error message about a crashed service
or:
do a fresh install
open Software Center
it doesn't load, keeps spinning the cursor
Stuff like this disqualifies a distro for years in my opinion.

Ubuntu is so bad in supporting deb packages, that the default included UI package installer under Ubuntu 24.04 didn't support deb packages. See: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2497203
Yes it's that bad. This is the reason I don't promote Ubuntu anymore, they went too far. They crossed a line. Just use Linux Mint or something.

Canonical lives and dies by the BDFL model. It allowed them to do some great work early on in popularizing Linux with lots of polish. Canonical still does good work when forced to externally, like contributing upstream. The model falters when they have their own sandbox to play in, because the BDFL model means that any internal feedback like "actually this kind of sucks" just gets brushed aside. It doesn't help that the BDFL in this case is the CEO, founder, and funder of the company and paying everyone working there. People generally don't like to risk their job to say the emperor has no clothes and all that, it's easier to just shrug your shoulders and let the internet do that for you.
Here are good examples of when the internal feedback failed and the whole internet had to chime in and say that the hiring process did indeed suck:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31426558
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37059857
"markshuttle" in those threads is the owner/founder/CEO.

I used to like Ubuntu, but I got so sick for not being able to do things due to packages being out of date, and/or snaps getting in the way.
I ditched it for arch and I'm so much happier

- Why not just disable the Ubuntu pro ads in the mean time?

I only joke about Arch being the superior distro because, well, I use it and because it’s apparently a thing.
I actually don’t have any strong feelings about Ubuntu. It’s a distro. It works. I only use Arch because of the AUR (I’m lazy, okay?). I don’t have strong feelings about it either. Linux is configurable to basically exactly what you want. Once (or if) you get into customization you just pick the distro that allows you to get to what you want faster.
I do have strong feelings about Windows though.

In my opinion Ubuntu-bashing is unjustified and counterproductive.
Unjustified because Ubuntu is great! I say that having used it exclusively for years without a problem. That has to be worth something. Yes, there's the Snap issue, and occasional shenanigans from Canonical, but so far these problems are not existential. For context I've been on Linux for 2 decades (also Debian) but I am not a typical techie (history major). Ubuntu just works.
Counterproductive because Linux needs a flagship distro for beginners. Just the word Linux is daunting to most normies! We absolutely need a beginner distro with name recognition. Well, this may hurt to hear but Ubuntu is basically the only candidate. Name recognition does not come cheap. At this point it is decades of work and we should not be squandering it.
- Ubuntu really isn't the only candidate though... Mint may not have quite as much name recognition, but I don't think it's that far off, and it has pretty much all of the benefits of Ubuntu without the issues.
  Mint just works.
  And I absolutely think it's justified to call Canonical out for things like quietly redirecting apt to install snaps instead or throwing up scare messages to make people think they're insecure if they don't pay for a subscription or adding unnecessary packages to the minimal install image that're only useful for paid subscribers but call home regardless
  Canonical has been toxic and getting worse, not calling them out is basically telling them it's okay for them to treat the community the way they have.
  
  Mint
  I see Mint as the more reasonable option that keeps 98% of the advantages of Ubuntu, with less of the crazy. I was a xubuntu user a decade ago, but have been very happy with Mint xfce since I switched.
  
  Fair points. Admittedly I use a tiling window manager so I never see most of these problems.
  My basic concern is with fragmentation. IMO many techies just don't grasp how forbidding Linux is to normal people. Or the importance of reputation in people's choice to take the leap. It's all but priceless. Ubuntu-bashing has always struck me as a case of an elite group that prefers to split hairs rather than to take the win of getting extra users of FOSS. Idealism vs pragmatism, basically.
  Anyway, I'm repeating myself. If you think that normies have heard of Mint already and that it won't go away next year, then fine. The important thing is to get them to take the leap. They can always change distro later, the second time is much less forbidding.
  
  Mint isn’t accept able for the server use case and desktop Ubuntu allows you to run a virtually identical configuration to your server for development purposes. Server Ubuntu pays the bills and it’s important to make sure you don’t have any conflicts with your dependencies. If you’re using desktop Linux for aesthetic, personal, or ideological reasons, then you’ve got a lot of options to choose from. Ubuntu pro just adds developer support to universe instead of just main and adds kernel live patch. It’s free so people are really upset about wording instead of any practical problem.

Ubuntu used to work out of the box and with sensible defaults but that’s no longer the case.
Gave Ubuntu another try a month back and external monitor resolution wasn’t right at all.
Switched back to Pop OS.

Well, they deserve it. A while ago, Ubuntu was a unique distribution, the ease of use was unparalleled and its popularity followed. Nevertheless, several other distros came through, capitalizing Canonical's mistakes they catched up. Now Ubuntu is only quite relevant but the only features that make it currently unique are still controversial, i. e. snaps.
In any case, people found their space in other distributions and communities. Some others stayed with Ubuntu and they are still enjoying the popularity they achieved as a distribution for newcomers, and it does the job, really. It's not that I think they deserve hate, but the criticisms are mostly founded without denying they have the right to make those decisions all the way.

There was a time when Ubuntu was the distro for the masses. It was the one that "just worked." It was the one you could use for school. They distributed marketing material with a bunch of diverse young people holding hands.
Now Canonical's website is, by area, mostly corporate logos. They're B2B now, we have lost them, and it shows in their engineering.
If the system you're shopping for an OS for isn't installed in a room with halon extinguishers in the ceiling, you shouldn't even be thinking Canonical's name.

Ubuntu is a fine "nice to meet you" distro -- the criticisms I've gathered happen a few months in. Nvidia+Xorg updates dropping GUI to TUI, MDADM shitting the bed and dropping RAID, the awkward 6 month upgrades where you go from old weird issues in apps to new weird issues -- thou snap and flatpak improve this a lot over stock.
Canonical NIH, Canonical CLA agreement, history of charging forward only to abandon in house tech over and again after users get comfy.
Then there are inner politics and the occasional hankyness inside, or discourteousness like when they shit the bed dropping lib32 without talking to partnrrs like Valve on how this would effect their business after they made Ubuntu their target.
Criticisms typically are based in something. I had started using Ubuntu since 2004 IIRC and its been an interesting ride.
Oh also, PPA's, avoid those, they're not stock and don't be surprised if your OS doesn't boot with the less than stellar ones not staying in sync with the latest kernel updates.
YMMV and this is by no means advice on your personal fit.
Personally I am not fond of most casual user low barrier distros but I still recommend them. Manjaro, PopOS, LinuxMint, Endless, are all fine options depending on what kind of user.
I recently recommended one to a GameDev and considering SteamOS is Arch he decided on Manjaro over Debian.
YMMV, and its important to listen first to people to see what they want their machine to do.
One last criticism of Canonical and Ubuntu. Their HQ is UK based and I honestly wonder how the culture effects development. Germany, UK, California all have different "feels", its hard to be more specific.
Choice is good, always keep your data backed up and the @home on a different partition. The differences across distros are largely not a big deal like they used to be. People find solus in being captain of their Linux adventure and even Ubuntu will do just fine at the basics, just know if you hit a snag it may not be like that on every distro.

Third party package mechanism is fundamentally broken in Ubuntu (and in Debian).
Third party repos should never be allowed to use package names from the core repos. But they are, so they pretend they're core packages, but use different version names, and at upgrade time the updater doesn't know what to do with those version and how to solve dependencies.
That leaves you with a broken system where you can't upgrade and can't do anything entirely l eventually except a clean reinstall.
After this happened several times while using Ubuntu I resorted to leaving more and more time between major upgrades, running old versions on extended support or even unsupported.
Eventually I figured that if I'm gonna reinstall from scratch I might as well install a different distro.
I should note I still run Debian on my server, because that's a basic install with just core packages and everything else runs in Docker.
So if you delegate your package management to a completely different tool, like Flatpak, I guess you can continue to use Ubuntu. But it seems dumb to be required to resort to Flatpak to make Ubuntu usable.
- You know you can prevent that with proper apt pinning right?
  
  I'm not sure how that would help. First of all, it would still end up blocking proper updates. Secondly, it's hard to figure out what exactly you're supposed to pin.

Canonical historically makes bad decisions. Ubuntu any most points in time is simply great. Their LTS is fab. But they're hungry. And they screw with us over time. the latest Debian just erased most of the reason to go with Ubuntu adding nonfree, and they haven't screwed us over.

My workplace preinstalls Ubuntu, personally I'm using openSUSE. I don't even think that Ubuntu is particularly bad, I'm mainly frustrated with it, because it's just slightly worse than openSUSE (and other distros) in pretty much every way.
It's less stable, less up-to-date, less resilient to breakages. And it's got more quirky behaviour and more things that are broken out-of-the-box. And it doesn't even have a unique selling point. It's just extremely mid, and bad at it.

I think Ubuntu is very good, if you want quick and easy. It's incedibly painless.
However, it does forced auto updates by default. They are called unattended-upgrades and run in the background by default. You can pause or disable them though. Also snaps auto update silently, by default. That can also be paused, though.
What really sucks is, if you don't have a printer it continues to try and install cups, which can be a security concern. However, I successfully blocked it by creating an immutable file where it would put the snap, while it was uninstalled.

started playing with ubuntu around version 6, been using it for various things ever since
honestly never got in the way of me doing what i wanted

But it seems like there are other easy distros with lenient requirements that don't try to force Snaps and ads on their users.

Personally I'm not looking an OS that is "not so bad", the initial impression should be "this is great" :)
Ubuntu is kind of the “Windows” of the Linux world
That's also the thing, I switched to Linux because I hated using Windows, and I don't like how Microsoft operates. The last think I want is a distribution which tries to be Windows made by a company which tries to be Microsoft. It's of course an exaggeration, and Ubuntu doesn't do EEE and patent trolling as far as I know, but at least for me it feels like they're going in the wrong direction when they keep reinventing the wheel, forcing solutions that users don't want, and generally trying to create a "one size fits all" desktop. I'm not against it, Ubuntu is probably a good choice for some users, it just doesn't fit me. I used Xubuntu for many years, and I also tried both Gnome and Unity at different points, but currently I use Fedora KDE.

Its not like it is the only option. There are so many better systems these days it isn't even funny. Use Linux Mint, Fedora, Pop OS or maybe even Bazzite.
- The funny thing here is that there are many good distributions that are based on Ubuntu. I’m a Pop!_OS fanboy, many of my colleagues enjoy Mint. Yet, almost everyone I know in the Linux world despises Ubuntu.
  
  Because Ubuntu by itself is in the "not great" category. It takes other to make it usable

I have not used Ubuntu enough to say I have a bad experience with it. I know of Snap being effectively a proprietary store (a dumb feature) and Canonical has a bad reputation for being like the Microsoft of GNU+Linux.
Linux Mint offers the pros of Ubuntu but with the cons of like-Microsoft decision removed, why would I consider Ubuntu?

While the criticism may be valid, it doesn't make sense to someone new to Linux.
It's easy to switch to Ubuntu from Windows, and it's easier to switch from Ubuntu to another distro.
- Many of us are still very salty
- I think those people just need to be pushed to an Ubuntu based distro, instead of Ubuntu itself.
  Mint, Zorin, Pop, etc.

Just give him LMDE

I remember when Ubuntu was released, and I still have one of the first or second release Ubuntu shipit CDs.
Ubuntu was good at marketing and they were good at making things 'just work'.
It was often the recommended choice of starter-distro due to hardware compatibility.
I've installed and admin'ed Ubuntu on 20 PCs in a small office setting, and it provides a decent user experience.
I would not personally use Ubuntu.
My daily driver now is Trisquel GNU/Linux, which is Ubuntu with all non-free packages(and binary blobs) removed.
If you are at the stage where you know how to source hardware that works with FLOSS-drivers, try out a fully-free FSF approved distro.
https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.en.html
Clean, with zero corporate fluff.

I use arch btw

The biggest similarity with Windows is that it isn't a community run project. In my opinion they tried very hard to represent themselves as an open source community in the early days and downplay Canonical's role. There is nothing wrong with Ubuntu as a first introduction to Linux but if people are looking for a project to join and make contributions there are many better options.

While I appreciate the utility of snaps and flatpaks for providing sandboxed, cross-platform apps, I've often found them slower than traditional packages. Their tendency to take up more disk space also feels inefficient, especially when system resources are sometimes precious. For these reasons, I generally prefer using apps installed directly through the system's default package manager, which tend to offer better performance and use space more efficiently....

I just switched back to Linux a week ago (Ubuntu Studio 24.04) from windows. I used to use Linux 15 years ago and I tried a lot of distros at that time. Eventually I landed on Crunchbang which I loved dearly.
Since it's been awhile I wanted something fairly vanilla so Ubuntu Studio felt like a good start. I was planning on switching to something else (I hear we have Crunchbang++ now) after getting used to Linux again but I have kind of settled in to Ubuntu now. It feels a little sloppy but comfortable somehow.

I still run ubuntu on my main work desktop and will likely do so until I replace it with a new one as I cannot face rebuilding it at this point in time. I like its broad support, its ease of install and use, but its becoming increasingly annoying having to disable all the enforced decisions the maintainers make, such as snap, ubuntu pro ads and so on. My fear is at some point it will not be reversible

Ubuntu is fine. Drivers are annoying on all distros (nvidia updates for me mainly, I don't update hardware often).
I have daily driven various distros and tested a lot since the 90s and I pay close attention to time spent on customizing and fixes, and ubuntu just isn't worse than other distros. I make setup scripts and have custom dockerfiles for webtops.
I want to like nixos or whatever fork will prevail, but it's more work than people want to admit. I personally don't want to have to pay that much attention to my operating system. It's why i ditched gentoo almost 20 years ago. I don't want to lurk forums for fixes and tweaks. I also make sure hardware I buy doesn't have glaring compatibility issues.
If Ubuntu rubs you the wrong way but you are fine with most of it, just use debian.

I use Ubuntu, I’ve used Arch, Debian, Fedora, Pop and many others too. I use Ubuntu because all my hardware works out of the box. Snaps are inoffensive imo. I have just as many issues with abandoned debs or flatpaks and I usually just use whatever package is more maintained.
The most annoying thing about Ubuntu is how slow the packages are sometimes to make it to a release.

Professionally/commercially they're MILES ahead of Red hat, Oracle, or Suse.
Personally/free they do weird shit that usually doesn't seem make sense on its surface if you're not getting paid to learn it.
Take snaps for example: flatpak/app image/whatever makes more sense if you only care nothing beyond getting/running the software; but in a professional setting where you need third party info for something like an sbom or some sort of industry compliancy, snaps make it easy.

Ub(loa)tu tries to cater to everyone whilst ending up in pleasing no one -- it has too much unnecessary clutter.

Most crashy breaky mainstream distro there is and always has been.
It's barely tolerable.
But I did used to like the departure from blue themes like nearly everyone else.
- Its a poor craftsman who blames their tools.
  
  No, it would be more like a poor craftsman who doesn't recognize it when a tool is crappy. Ubuntu is always on the way to breaking, or is broken at the get go. I remember when they thought 4 was stable. It was not nearly compared to most anything else at the time.
  Even recently I had to install Ubuntu for a project because that is what the vendor supported. Several things were broken post install. Default Ubuntu stuff that should have just worked. Par for the course. If you get past that, of course the mishmash of Snap management for feature incomplete software can be very trying for a new user, when other distros make it easy.

The Term

Updates & Upgrades

Style

Snaps

Variants & LTS

Bloat

Safety & Snapshots