I use ProtonMail for all official communication related to It's FOSS. Around 2020, I took their Visionary plan and switched from Google Workspace for the @itsfoss.com emails.

The bundled offer of email, VPN, calendar, drive and password manager is a good ecosystem in its own. I am happy with their offering and continuous feature additions and improvements. Well, for the most part,

One thing that I am still missing after all these years is the canned response feature.

The lack of saved replies

If you have ever used Gmail, you probably would have heard of the 'canned response' feature.

The idea is simple and it solves a major problem for people who get emails that often need similar replies. A canned response lets you save template responses. It lets you insert the template response in the email. Here, you can quickly modify it and hit the send button.

Without this feature, I have the usual responses saved in my knowledge base. I have to open that, go to the appropriate response section, copy it and then paste it in Proton Mail, modify the message if needed and then hit the send button.

This could have been fine if it was a once-a-day activity. But if I have to do it multiple times a day, I surely lose time in it. This is especially frustrating because I am aware of the existence of the canned response feature.

It's like being forced to use the mouse when you know the same thing can be quickly done through keyboard shortcuts easily and quickly.

I give you an example. I receive multiple press releases and software coverage requests a day. Often, the reply is similar, with only a little modification needed. Imagine if I could compose the repetitive reply in 2-3 clicks:

I think this feature is more than ten years old and is available for free to all Gmail users. I don't see a reason why ProtonMail cannot offer it.

There are a few more things that can help us ProtonMail users save some time

In Gmail, if you are replying to an email and type Hi its predictive text feature already suggests the responder's name. It does save a few keystrokes.

Now that is Google but I am sure ProtonMail can work on providing a similar feature without intrusing our privacy.

How come? Well, Proton does provide a deep search option where messages are downloaded to the system and then you can search through email content. By default, you can only search through the email subject and sender. This way, the Proton server doesn't see your messages and yet you can do a full search.

Perhaps something on that line to make our lives more convenient? I don't know how technically challenging it could be, that's why it's just a suggestion.

Another convenient feature would be to make their AI integration more useful. ProtonMail has integrated its (private) Lumo AI but I don't find it helpful.

Perhaps it can be utilized to provide predective text? If not that, at least it can be used to compose replies to emails?

For now, it provides a few options: Write for me, proofread, shorten, expand and a couple of options on changing the tone of the message.

The Write for me feature needs full prompts on what to write. If it could read the reply, locally in the browser, and suggest a response, that would be good. Basically, a "compose a reply" option here.

I know, not everyone is a fan of AI and many find it repulsive but if Proton has to become a real private alternative to Google Workspace, it has to offer the cutting edge tools and features. And AI is the hottest buzzword that can raise a shoe company's stocks 800% in a single day.

Come on, good people at Proton. Give us lazy users the boon of template response 😄

Ubuntu 26.04, the much anticipated LTS upgrade to 25.10 and 24.04, is here. This release promises to be one of the more daring and potentially revolutionary releases in quite some time, delivering on many much-awaited features, and laying the foundation for the next generation of Ubuntu and its derivatives. Still, this release is bound to be one of the most controversial, in that it's got quite a lot of good, but to some, a little bit of "bad". To be fair, how you see it is largely a matter of perspective.

In this article, we'll look at 5 of the reasons you should consider upgrading to Ubuntu 26.04, and 3 reasons you might want to sit this one out, or even consider if it's time to set sail for other shores.

Reasons to upgrade

LTS releases are popular among many users, from the casual everyday user, to hardcore developers and creators. Even some gamers feel at home on these releases, and the reasons for all categories of user are typically the same: stability, reliability, and the promise that future updates will bring the best tested elements of the future back to the refuge of the past.

That said, LTS releases also often bring a balanced blend to this island of stability by introducing a well-tested, but relatively fresh tech stack. So what's new in Ubuntu 26.04? Let's have a look.

1. Linux kernel 7.0

One of the highlights of Ubuntu 26.04 is that it ships with Linux kernel 7.0, which brings a much newer hardware and driver stack than version 6.8 in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. While kernel version numbers aren't typically especially significant, newer kernels still matter because they bring improved compatibility with newer hardware and give Ubuntu a stronger foundation for the years ahead. No doubt, Linux kernel 7.0 does exactly this in some critical areas.

For instance, this release improves support for newer Intel and NVIDIA systems, with full support for Intel's Core Ultra Xe2 integrated graphics and Arc Battlemage GPUs, plus NVIDIA Dynamic Boost enabled by default on supported laptops. NVIDIA users have even more reason to rejoice, in that Ubuntu 26.04 improves suspend and resume behaviour with the proprietary NVIDIA driver. AMD and ARM users aren't left out either, thanks to broadened compatibility for ARM64 desktop systems that boot via UEFI, and initial support for Snapdragon X Elite devices in the new generic ARM64 Desktop ISO.

Also in this LTS are a few practical platform-level improvements around reliability and responsiveness. Crash dumps are now enabled by default on both desktop and server installations, making it easier to diagnose serious failures, while the old linux-lowlatency package has been retired in favour of tuning low-latency behaviour on the generic kernel at boot time.

2. GNOME 50: HDR & VRR improvements, robust parental controls, smoother NVIDIA experience, and more

Ubuntu 26.04 comes hot on the heels of GNOME 50, bringing a wave of important refinements that should be noticeable in everyday use.

First up, GNOME 50 builds on the HDR groundwork introduced in GNOME 48 with further colour-management improvements and, at long last, HDR screen sharing support. That should be welcome news for creators, because accurate colour handling matters in professional photography, video, and design work. It also helps modern games to look as intended on supported hardware. Additionally, GNOME 50 improves both Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) and fractional scaling, with bug fixes, stability work, and various user-experience improvements. Some of these features were once treated as experimental across various distributions, but GNOME 50 now enables them by default, making for a smoother out of the box experience.

Rounding out the display improvements, NVIDIA users also have reason to be optimistic. GNOME 50 includes workarounds for NVIDIA driver quirks aimed at reducing stutter and frame-timing issues, which should make window animations and general desktop fluidity feel smoother on affected systems. GNOME 50 also adds a low-latency cursor path while VRR is active, helping the pointer stay responsive even when an application is running below the monitor’s maximum refresh rate.

Accessibility and parental controls

GNOME 50 brings some important accessibility improvements. Orca, the GNOME screen reader, now has a significantly improved preferences window, global settings, automatic language switching for web content and app UI, better Braille support, and Mouse Review support in Wayland sessions. Also new is a new Reduced Motion option in Accessibility settings, which tones down interface animations to reduce discomfort and distraction.

That should come as a real relief for users with vestibular issues or motion sensitivity. For now, the biggest wins will be in GNOME and libadwaita-based apps, while broader support across other toolkits and desktops will take a little more time to mature.

Parents moving to Ubuntu 26.04 will also benefit from much stronger parental controls. GNOME 50 now allows parents and guardians to monitor screen time, set limits for child accounts, define bedtime schedules, and automatically lock the screen once those limits are reached. Time can also be extended when needed. On top of that, GNOME has laid the backend foundations for web filtering, though the user-facing components needed for this part are still to come in a future update.

3. Better gaming potential with NTSYNC

This one is sure to be exciting for the growing number of users choosing to switch to Ubuntu (among other distros), as their home for gaming. NTSYNC is a Linux kernel driver that emulates key Windows NT synchronization primitives directly in the Linux kernel. Wine and Proton can use it to provide a faster, more accurate implementation of these operations in a way that Windows applications expect.

So why does this matter so much for gaming? The answer is simple: modern games often rely heavily on multithreading, which means they constantly need to coordinate tasks and wait on synchronization objects efficiently. Handling these operations entirely in user space can add overhead and make it harder to match Windows behaviour precisely.

By providing a kernel-level interface for these synchronization primitives, NTSYNC improves performance potential and helps deliver behaviour that is closer to what many Windows games and applications expect under Wine and Proton. In some cases, performance has even been shown to be better on Linux than when running the same game natively on Windows.

4. Security Center and better Snap privacy controls

Users upgrading from Ubuntu 24.04 will find the new Security Center and its experimental permissions prompting system for Snap apps. First introduced in 24.10, the Security Center is a critical part of the 26.04 LTS. Traditionally, Snap permissions have been handled mostly through interfaces, which define broad access to system resources.

With the new prompting system, Ubuntu gains a more granular permissions layer by using AppArmor to mediate access at the system-call level, even for applications that were not specifically written to support this behaviour. In its current form, the feature focuses on Home directory, camera, and microphone permissions, giving users more direct control over which locations and features Snap applications can access, and for how long.

It's worth noting that Canonical still describes this feature as experimental, and says the Security Center will expand over time with additional prompting options and other desktop security controls. Ubuntu does have a history of backporting key desktop features over the life of an LTS release, so 26.04 may well benefit from further refinements in this area over its lifetime.

5. Dual-booting with Windows is finally less painful

In recent years, thanks to the ever increasing convolution of Windows, dual-booting Ubuntu alongside Windows has become a far more fragile and awkward affair than it really should be, especially on modern machines protected by BitLocker. Ubuntu 26.04 helps smooth this out, carrying forward recent installer improvements that help Ubuntu get along more comfortably with BitLocker-based Windows systems.

Most importantly, Ubuntu can now be installed alongside existing BitLocker partitions when enough unallocated space is available, or when a large enough partition can be resized safely. The new installer also makes encrypted Ubuntu installs and other advanced options available in dual-boot scenarios — a significant quality-of-life improvement for users who still need to run Windows on the same machine.

Reasons not to upgrade

As mentioned earlier, there are some real reasons you may want to sit this release out, and some users may find these reason to consider sticking with an older release for a little while longer, or even changing distros altogether.

1. Sudo replaced with sudo-rs

sudo-rs is a Rust implementation of the su and sudo commands. This is definitely one of the more controversial changes, technically introduced in 25.10, that will land for LTS-only users upgrading to 26.04. It's pretty easy to understand the logic here: these are critical security components, and Rust is generally considered a safer language for security-sensitive software. Still, replacing something as deeply trusted as sudo understandably makes some people uneasy.

To be fair, this caution isn't unreasonable. Even though most common use cases should work without issue, sudo-rs isn't yet a 100% compatible replacement. Sure, for everyday desktop users, the differences are likely to be invisible. For system administrators and power users however, there's a risk of some older scripts or applications encountering problems. It's a smaller risk, but still a genuine concern, and may be reason enough to wait until the situation settles.

Read about the difference between classic sudo and rust-based sudo.

2. No more X11 session for Ubuntu’s default GNOME desktop

GNOME on Ubuntu is now effectively Wayland-only (as of 25.10), meaning the classic “Ubuntu on Xorg” session is no longer available at login. Users upgrading from 24.04 will need to be aware of this if looking to remain on Xorg. Granted, in practice, this will only affect users who specifically use GNOME on X11 and/or still depend on Xorg features and or hardware quirks that Wayland doesn't handle yet (or at all). Most others likely won't even notice the change and can just keep using Ubuntu as normal.

Alternative desktop environments aren't affected, though. If you install something like XFCE, LXQt, or OpenWM, GDM can still show those sessions at the login screen. This may change in future releases, but at least 26.04 is marked safe for X11 users who aren't yet ready to move on. Just, not for GNOME.

3. Too many changes under-the-hood in one go

Simply put, Ubuntu 26.04 brings a lot of low-level change at once, especially for LTS users, and this alone may be enough reason for some folks to hold off for a while. For instance, this release switches to Dracut as the default initramfs system, removes apt-key, drops support for cgroup v1, and is marked as the last Ubuntu release with support for System V service scripts in systemd.

While many desktop users won't notice the difference, some on older systems, custom setups, or long-lived admin habits, may be at greater risk of something unexpectedly breaking. For cautious users, this may be one of those releases that is better adopted after at least one or more point releases.

Will you be upgrading or sitting this one out?

Ubuntu 26.04 is surely one of the more interesting LTS releases in quite some time. It brings some genuinely exciting improvements, especially for newer hardware, gaming, and some modernization on a few rough edges. At the same time, it does ask advanced users to accept a fair bit of change under the hood, and of course, not everyone will be comfortable making the leap right away.

For some, Ubuntu 26.04 will be an easy yes. For others, it may be the kind of release best approached with caution, and perhaps a good backup plan. Either way, one thing is clear: this LTS is sure to give us a whole lot to talk about.

In Los Angeles this March, a jury did something US courts have long refused to do: it treated the feed itself as the harm. It felt like vindication, victory even, to those of us who are critical of big tech's outsized influence on every aspect of our lives. But there is need for cautious optimism, caution even, instead of celebration.

Jurors found Meta and Google negligent for the way Instagram and YouTube are designed; not for any particular piece of content (the 20‑year‑old plaintiff, identified as Kaley/KGM), happened to see on them. They awarded her $6 million in compensatory and punitive damages and explicitly described these platforms as deliberately addictive “machines” that harmed her mental health.

This is more than a sympathetic jury and a moving story. It is the first time a US jury has effectively treated major social platforms as defective consumer products whose design – infinite scroll, notifications, algorithmic recommendations – can be a “substantial factor” in harming young users. In doing so, the case skirted the traditional shield of Section 230 by focusing not on user‑generated content, but on product design and failure to warn.

For critics of big tech, and I am one of them, that sounds like justice delayed finally arriving. I was happy.

Briefly.

But if we are not careful, the legal and policy response to this big tobacco moment will harden the already rapidly enshitified internet we already have: centralized, identity‑hungry, and surveillance driven. These are precisely the conditions that made these products so powerful in the first place.

From Bad Content to Bad Machines

For nearly three decades, legal debates about platforms have orbited around content: who is responsible for extremist propaganda, self‑harm photos, misinformation. Section 230 in the US enshrined the idea that platforms are not publishers of third‑party speech. Even when courts and regulators pushed, they pushed on content moderation, not on the underlying machine.

The Kaley verdict is a reorientation of this conversation. Jurors heard company documents and expert testimony describing Instagram and YouTube as addiction machines” designed to maximize engagement, time‑on‑site and data extraction from children who were never supposed to be there in the first place.

They found negligence not only in failing to keep under‑13s off the platforms, but in failing to warn about the risks of the core design itself.

This shift from “we hosted bad content” to “we built a dangerous machine” matters. It opens the door to product‑liability style reasoning that could travel, in principle, to other design patterns: streaks, loot-boxes, recommendation systems, dark patterns in on-boarding. It also resonates with developments outside the US, where the EU’s Digital Services Act is already scrutinizing addictive design at the level of interface and recommender algorithms. Earlier this year, the European Commission issued preliminary findings that TikTok’s reliance on infinite scroll and weak “screen time breaks” breaches its duty to mitigate addictive design risks under the DSA, and told the company to change “the basic design of its service”.

But if the machine is on trial, the question becomes: what kind of machine do we build next?

“Addiction” as Legal Story and Medical Dispute

In both law and media, the Kaley verdict has been framed as proof that social media is simply addictive and toxic to teens. The courtroom narrative is clean: a straight line can be drawn: a vulnerable child to the manipulative machine.

The scientific picture is messier.

On one side, the 2026 World Happiness Report carries a chapter by Jonathan Haidt and Zachary Rausch arguing that there is now “overwhelming evidence” that social media is harming adolescents at a scale large enough to shift population‑level mental health, drawing on seven lines of evidence ranging from cross‑sectional studies to natural experiments. The authors argue that ordinary use – often five or more hours a day – functions as a product safety failure, especially for girls.

We further argue that when these lines of evidence are considered alongside the timing, scope, and cross-national trends in adolescent well-being and mental health, they can help answer a second question: was the rapid adoption of always-available social media by adolescents in the early 2010s a substantial contributor to the population-level increases in mental illness that emerged by the mid 2010s in many Western nations? We call this the “historical trends question”. We draw on our findings about the vast scale of harm uncovered while answering the product safety question to argue that the answer to the historical trends question is “yes”.

On the other, another chapter in the same report, by Helliwell and colleagues, emphasizes that the relationship between youth well-being and internet use is more nuanced: some types of online activity (communication, learning, content creation) correlate with higher life satisfaction, while heavy social media and gaming correlate with lower well-being, particularly at extreme usage levels and in English‑speaking countries. They caution that youth well-being trends cannot be reduced to a single cause.

In other words: there is strong evidence of risk and harm, but causality, dose, and mechanism are still contested.

Safety as a Pretext for More Surveillance

Politicians around the world have not waited for the science to settle. They have moved quickly to do something about youth and social media – and the measures they are choosing tell us a lot about the political economy of the internet they are entrenching.

In Australia, world‑first social media age restrictions now require major platforms – Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Threads, Reddit, Kick, Twitch – to take “reasonable steps” to prevent under‑16s from having accounts, backed by fines of up to A$49.5 million for non‑compliance.

In practice, they are expected to deploy multiple age assurance technologies: ID checks, facial or voice analysis, behavioral age inference.

Children and parents themselves are not fined; the pressure is entirely on platforms to ramp up identity and behavioral surveillance in order to demonstrate diligence.

In the US, California’s Digital Age Assurance Act pushes the same logic down into the operating system itself. From January 2027, OS vendors are required to collect an age or age bracket at account setup and expose it via an API so that app stores and online services can query a system‑level age signal.

The law is written broadly enough that free and open‑source operating systems – Debian, Fedora, BSDs, Pop!_OS – are, on paper, on the hook alongside Apple and Microsoft.

System76’s CEO, writing about this wave of laws in Colorado and California, warns that the effect is to turn OS vendors into identity brokers and gatekeepers, and to “encourage children to lie” about their age for fear of being confined to a “nerfed internet”

Layer these developments on top of each other and a pattern emerges: won't somebody please think of the children?

We've heard this moral argument before: with video games, heavy metal, rap. What happens next is history rhyming:

• pushing age‑verification and age‑bracketing ever deeper into the stack – from app sign-up forms, to OS APIs, to network‑level checks;
• incentivising large platforms and OS vendors to collect, infer, and share more information about who we are and how old we are;
• creating compliance burdens that small, de-centralized, or non‑profit projects can barely navigate, effectively nudging regulators and industry towards a small club of compliant, centralized providers.

Safety becomes the moral language through which a more identity‑locked, surveilled, and centralized internet is made to feel inevitable.

Regulators Discover “Addictive Design” – But For Whom?

The EU’s preliminary findings on TikTok’s addictive design under the DSA are a good example of this ambivalence. On one level, it is encouraging to see regulators finally target infinite scroll, frictionless autoplay, and weak screen time nudges as systemic risks requiring product changes, not simply more content moderation. The Commission is, at least in principle, saying: design patterns that exploit compulsive behavior and harm children can be unlawful. This is a good start. Unfortunately that's where the good news ends.

Notice who is legible to this kind of regulation. The DSA presumes large, centralized platforms with access to vast behavioral data, capable of implementing complex risk‑assessment and age‑assurance regimes. The Australian and Californian laws do the same.

A federated social network run by a school, a youth center, or a community collective cannot cheaply plug into this machinery. A small FOSS OS project has neither the lawyers nor the telemetry to play at this table.

The risk is that addiction design becomes another compliance rubric that only the biggest players can afford to satisfy, while everyone else is either chilled out of existence or forced to rely on the same proprietary identity infrastructure.

The Missing Imagination: Community‑Run, Free and Open Alternatives

The saddest thing about this moment is how narrow the mainstream imagination of alternatives remains. The policy menu is filled with bans, curfews, and ID checks for the same extractive platforms. There is little serious talk of changing the infrastructure.

Yet we know from both history and present practice that other models are possible. Schools and libraries have run moderated online communities for decades. Federated platforms like Mastodon and Matrix, for all their flaws, show that it is possible to have social networks that are not controlled by a single profit‑maximizing entity. Community‑run game servers, forums, and fan communities have long been youth‑driven spaces with their own norms of care and accountability. My first years on the internet, circa 2001-2003, was spent in such forums. Social media trampled such online communities during their first decade.

A genuinely emancipatory response to the Kaley verdict would start from a different question: given that these products have now been recognized, in court, as dangerous by design, how do we:

• treat them like other dangerous consumer products – with warnings, design constraints, and liability – without making bio-metric and behavioral surveillance the price of entry to the digital world;
• redirect public money, regulation, and cultural attention towards building non‑exploitative, commons‑based digital spaces for young people;
• lower the barriers for schools, municipalities, youth groups, and co‑ops to run their own FOSS‑based platforms, with public funding and legal safe harbors, rather than locking them into corporate clouds that must, by their nature, maximize engagement.

This is where free and open source software is not just a licensing detail but a political stance. An internet where young people’s social lives unfold on community‑run, auditable, forkable software – hosted by institutions that have a duty of care, not a duty to shareholders – is not a Utopian fantasy. It is not merely a design choice.

It is a political choice.

Builders, Regulators, and the Rest of Us

For those who build technology, the Kaley verdict is a warning shot: engagement is no longer a neutral metric. If a design pattern is optimized to keep a 10‑year‑old scrolling past bedtime, courts may increasingly treat that as a defect, not an achievement. Engineers, designers, and product managers now have to think like people who might one day be cross‑examined about why they shipped this infinite scroll, this notification scheme, this recommender.

For regulators, the temptation will be to double down on what already feels familiar: more age gates, more identity checks, more compliance dashboards for big platforms and OS vendors. It is politically safer to demand better seat-belts from the existing car companies than to fund buses, bike lanes, or public trains. But if all we do is wrap the same addictive machines in ever tighter rings of surveillance and control, we will have saved some children from some harms at the price of deepening structural dependence on the very firms whose incentives created the crisis.

The LA jury has told us, in the blunt language of damages and negligence, that the machine is the problem. The real task now is to ensure that the fix is not simply a more paternalistic, more identity‑hungry version of the same machine, but an opening for something else: community‑run, free and open infrastructures where young people can be online without being harvested.

That is a harder story to tell in a courtroom. But it is the story the rest of us – parents, educators, coders, writers, legislators – will have to write.

These days, it’s become fashionable to make fun of Ubuntu.

Whether it’s jokes about Snap packages or criticism of Canonical’s decisions, mocking Ubuntu often feels like the default attitude in parts of the Linux community.

To be fair, Canonical has made decisions over the years that have not always been well received, and some of the criticisms of Ubuntu and the direction it’s taken have their own merit. Yet, the derisive way Ubuntu is often talked about online isn’t particularly fair and, frankly, misses the point.

Ubuntu didn’t become the “face of Linux” by accident, nor did it gain its popularity and mass appeal (both on the desktop and servers) without real, solid reasons behind it. For many, it is in fact these same reasons that cause them to feel so passionately about the shift in direction since the early days.

Ubuntu’s speciality: Linux for Human Beings

Ubuntu was once widely seen as the easiest Linux distro for beginners and a solid choice for both casual and “power” users alike. Many Linux enthusiasts (myself included) recommended it without hesitation because it was straightforward and opinionated in a way that just felt sensible for regular people. From the time you popped in a live CD, you got a sane, uncomplicated experience that felt like a breath of fresh air compared to Windows, and it made you feel like Linux could actually feel like home. All you had to do was install it, update it when necessary, and get on with your life.

The slogan “Linux for human beings” was more than a branding choice. Ubuntu embodied this motto in a very real way by reducing friction for everyday people and never being afraid to match form to function. It hasn’t always lived up to that purpose in ways that everyone agreed with, but the underlying mission has never truly changed, if we’re being fair.

Even with the shift towards a more developer-focused ecosystem, it has remained just as easy to download, install, learn the ropes (if you’re new) and get on with your life. Drivers are still a breeze to set up for most hardware. The default themes are still designed with a polished aesthetic taste in mind, and yes, installing apps easily and swiftly is still a major feature. Whether you’re deep in DevOps or a casual desktop user who wants a stable system that doesn’t demand constant babysitting, Ubuntu remains one of the most practical choices in the Linux world. In other words, the memes and tropes are loud and often funny, but reality still begs to differ because Ubuntu still delivers.

So why all the hate? What happened to our once beloved flagship among Linux distros?

From darling to punching bag (and why that happened)

In order to understand why Ubuntu has been falling from its place of overwhelming popularity among Linux users, it’s important to remember that Ubuntu was not just a community effort, as is the case with many other distros. Ubuntu is both a community effort and a product of Canonical, and it’s actually the latter first. While the community has some say in what happens through feedback, bug reports, feature requests, and other standard open-source infrastructure, Canonical ultimately makes the call for what defines Ubuntu as a whole.

Like any company, Canonical makes decisions based on factors that aren’t always known or agreed with by the broader public. While many of these decisions have ultimately worked out well, just about as many have also proven not to work out in the long run. This fluctuation between success and well, failure, is a natural part of the product lifecycle for any long-running product.

Ubuntu is no exception to this rule.

However, from the perspective of the community, many of these decisions started steering Ubuntu in directions that many users found puzzling and, at times, concerning. The backlash didn’t come suddenly, nor did it stem from a single decision. It came from a notable pattern: Ubuntu choosing its own path, even when the broader Linux community preferred a different direction. While this isn’t inherently “bad”, it’s unfortunately created friction within the community. To be fair, some of these decisions, such as introducing Amazon affiliate links during the Unity era, or the decision to keep the Snap Store closed on the backend, haven’t followed the expected ethos of the Linux/open-source world.

Furthermore, with the Linux desktop constantly fighting the challenges of “fragmentation”, the decisions to use snaps over Flatpaks for a containerised solution, AppArmor over SELinux, etc, have brought on accusations of ‘NIH’ (Not Invented Here) syndrome. Unfortunately, while Canonical has reversed course on some of its more controversial choices and attempted to show goodwill and engage more collaboratively, the reputation and distrust are unfortunately hard to shake. Yet, in spite of these difficulties, Ubuntu itself has largely settled into a steady state, even becoming, in the eyes of some, “boringly stable”.

But whether or not this accusation is fair, it’s a sign that Ubuntu is largely doing its job. A boring desktop is often a reliable desktop, and for most people, especially people trying to work, play, study, or just have a functional computer, reliability beats novelty any day.

Taking a path less travelled, and yet…

Ubuntu is often criticised for “driving in its own lane”, but that independence is also why it has remained so relevant and popular. Many of the distros that have taken its crown in the ranks of popularity and ease of use are still Ubuntu derivatives. Even if they look different on the surface, or choose not to include technologies that have become synonymous with Ubuntu, they’re still Ubuntu at heart (like snaps).

This isn’t a mistake. Ubuntu is a solid base for the likes of Mint, Zorin, AnduinOS, and others because it’s stable, widely supported, and consistent, even while Canonical is willing to take the heat for making strong platform decisions.

Like any other distro, Ubuntu is a reflection of choices and decisions, whether those are made by the community, upstream maintainers, or the entity curating and tying everything together. It represents the collective work of everyone who contributes, packages, and builds. As such, it’s not just “another Canonical product”, even if the influence of a product mindset is evident. That combination of open-source philosophy and community culture, alongside the stability and direction of a commercially stewarded platform, is what makes Ubuntu unique.

Ubuntu’s mission is simple: ship something cohesive, make it consistent, and keep it well supported over time. Sure, it’s not always going to please everyone, especially those of us who would prefer a more decentralised decision-making process or more community consensus. But if we’re being honest, it’s also why we so often assume Ubuntu when we’re writing tutorials and install instructions.

That’s no accident, either. Ubuntu may not be perfect (no distro is), but it makes enough of the right choices to remain a dependable foundation, not only for users, but for an entire ecosystem built on top of it.

More than a desktop OS

Ubuntu and its ecosystem are often easy to reduce to the realm of “beginner distro,” but that view is outdated, and I’d even argue it’s never really been true. Granted, I personally started using Ubuntu because I wanted to see what the hype was about where the likes of Compiz, Beryl, and other flashy effects were concerned. Yet, I never even got to try any of the whiz-bang features until I was a few years into my Linux experience, due to hardware limitations. So what kept me here? It was recognising that Ubuntu is so much more than a desktop.

Ubuntu is a serious platform across the server space, cloud platforms, and embedded environments and infotainment, and even lives on in the mobile space due to the efforts of UBPorts. Personally, I’ve never run a VPS on any other distro, not because I couldn’t, but because I haven’t found any reason to choose another. Ubuntu just works, and when your mission is to keep servers reliably online and updated for yourself and clients, that’s exactly what you need it to do.

Ironically, many of the same reasons Ubuntu gets flack on the desktop are the reasons it’s preferred in development and server spaces today. For instance, using a snap to install and configure a web service like Nextcloud is far simpler than even using a more well-known solution like Docker. Some snaps don’t even require any further configuration beyond setting up basic admin credentials and settings through web-based UI.

Ubuntu’s LTS cadence is a lifeline for server stability. Once you’ve successfully deployed a complex server environment, it’s often preferable to keep it “as is” for as long as humanly possible, while still getting the necessary security upgrades and minimal feature changes that you need to keep it up to date. With a Ubuntu LTS, that kind of stability isn’t even a challenge to solve, because there again, it just works. You get the flexibility and familiarity of a Debian-based system, with the freshness and stability that Ubuntu brings to the table.

Another important point is that a lot of production environments, containers, tutorials, and automation examples are written with Ubuntu (or Ubuntu-like) systems in mind. By matching what’s common in the field, you spend less time fighting your environment and more time understanding and using the tools you need to get actual work done.

Giving Snaps a fair shake

While “just getting work done” is one of Ubuntu’s hallmarks, that’s not typically what people think of when they think of snaps, and let’s be honest: snaps are a big part of why Ubuntu gets mocked. This criticism isn’t completely imaginary either. While the tech has come a long way, snaps still have some real-world challenges. But, the same can be said for just about any containerised packaging system. For the sake of fairness, let’s just get some of the remaining issues out of the way.

Theming inconsistencies still persist, especially if you are using an app built with a toolkit that your desktop isn’t built on. Snaps still take significantly more storage space than “native” packages, because they often depend on other “foundational” snaps. Also, there’s no open or decentralised software store, so we have to trust Canonical’s stewardship. These are real trade-offs, and it’s only fair to acknowledge them.

Usually, the discourse stops right here, as if “Snaps exist” is the same thing as “Ubuntu is unusable.” If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen someone say “First thing I do is remove snap from the system”, I could end world hunger overnight. Yet, realistically, most people don’t choose an OS to make a statement about packaging decisions. They just want to be able to install what they need, do it quickly, keep it updated, and avoid breaking things in the process. Whether some in the community like them or not, snaps deliver on this promise.

By providing a consistent delivery mechanism for newer app releases, a simple rollback method and a clean way to clear app settings and data once an app is removed, snaps reduce dependency stress across different Ubuntu releases. For most types of software they simplify maintenance for developers and users alike. Plus, many of the issues that led to snaps being so heavily disparaged, such as slow startup times and terrible desktop integration, have been massively improved since their introduction, and continue to be improved with time.

Besides, even if you absolutely detest snap as a technology, Ubuntu is still flexible enough that you can make your own choices about where you get your apps and what package distribution formats you prefer. Case in point: most of the apps I use on my Ubuntu system today are Flatpaks and native applications, not because I don’t use snaps (I actually use quite a few), but just because that’s how most of the latest versions of the apps I need are currently packaged.

Why you can safely ignore the noise

Many of the arguments against Ubuntu these days are essentially identity- or philosophy- based, not practical positions. For most people, a better question is simply: what do you need your computer to do?

Ubuntu is still a strong choice if you’re new to Linux and want something straightforward, different from Windows and macOS, but familiar enough to not be a complete shock to the system. If you’re a developer seeking the friendly environment of a Linux-based workflow, choosing Ubuntu means you’ll have a system that matches the majority of guides and tutorials you’ll encounter online. The same is true if you work in DevOps or system administration.

The point is, whether you’re a casual desktop user or a seasoned denizen of SSH terminals, Ubuntu still meets the mark, offering stability, broad app availability, and the ability to Google a problem and find answers quickly.

Why it’s never going to be for everyone

It goes without saying, but Ubuntu can’t be everyone’s cup of tea either, and even some long-time users might find it no longer fits their needs. For instance, if you prefer ultra-minimal systems that let you build everything your own way, or even if you just want to avoid Canonical’s decisions on principle, Ubuntu won’t fit the bill, and that’s perfectly okay.

With the move to deliver more core components as snaps, it’s also understandable that some of us might be forced to choose other distros to avoid this fundamental change in direction.

What really matters here is that none of this is a matter of a moral judgement, though I’m sure some folks would argue otherwise (and hey, I respect it, even if I disagree). At the end of the day, it’s all about freedom and finding the matching tools to get the job done, whatever that means for you.

Final thoughts

Long story short, Ubuntu often gets the most backlash because it’s one of the most visible and durable targets. It’s a distro many of us have long outgrown, but it’s also the distro where we “cut our teeth” on everything Linux has to offer. It’s no surprise then, that it’s the distro many people now love to dunk on and poke fun at.

Love it or hate it though, Ubuntu remains. It’s still quietly doing what many people actually need, still serving its age-old role as many folk’s first foray into Linux, still pushing innovation and momentum across spaces where we need it most, and still helping the collective to gain market share. The work Ubuntu does behind the scenes may not always be exciting, but no doubt, it’s quite invaluable. It doesn’t have to be perfect, and sure, it would be nice to see it reclaim its former glory, even just for a bit of nostalgia.

But Ubuntu has earned its place among the Linux giants, and continues to prove itself every day. So maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t deserve our hate.

A new year has started, and who knows what kind of innovations and improvements it holds for for Ubuntu, which remains the world’s most used desktop Linux operating system. We get two new releases of Ubuntu each year, one in April and one in October. Plus, new point releases of the latest long-term support release rolling up bug fixes, app updates, and back-porting newer Linux kernels and GPU drivers. So 2025 should be another golden year for Ubuntu, those of us using it, and the Linux and open-source community as a whole. Changes to Ubuntu in 2024 span a wide […]

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