I was a bit late in realizing that Ubuntu has been going downhill for a while.

Why?

Here are a couple of things I have noticed about Canonical/Ubuntu:

  • Forced paid updates even for active life OS versions

  • Series of bad decisions (Mir, Unity, Upstart, Snaps) causing pain all around

  • Inflicting slow and buggy snap applications on their users. Not listening to feedback from users - Firefox Snap is really slow to launch, especially on older computers.

  • They lost the container security game to Chainguard

  • Often poor quality of security updates - A userspace patch causing kernel crashes! Ubuntu's security updates were also responsible for the $5M outage at Datadog it seems.

  • Ubuntu is bloated (try running it on Raspberry Pi Zero 2W) compared to Alpine Linux (as of 2025)

Alternatives

I haven't distro-hopped in more than a decade, but I feel forced to now. After using MX Linux - Xfce for a few weeks, I may try Debian Sid.

I found this 'I'm done with Ubuntu' article quite an interesting read as well.