Do you use Linux?

[R-T-B]

I've hardly ever compiled anything, except for 'automatic compilations' that happen when installing default packages.
I used to use Arch and therefore also the AUR and then I always lost a lot more time because of the AUR packages.

What I mean is that FreeBSD has more default packages than the popular Arch:

Arch Linux - Package Search

archlinux.org

13597 matching packages found

FreshPorts -- The Place For Ports - Most recent commits

Most recent commits

www.freshports.org

Port count 57482

My bad, I thought FreeBSD only had ports in source form similar to gentoo. Learn new things here everyday.

 

[SchumannFrequency]

My bad, I thought FreeBSD only had ports in source form similar to gentoo. Learn new things here everyday.

On Gentoo, you also don't have to compile much if you don't feel like doing that:

Gentoo Packages

Gentoo Packages Database

packages.gentoo.org

I suspect you'll also be able to use Flatpak, Snap, AppImage and Nix on Gentoo, so that's over 110 000 packages that you can install without having to compile anything.
Although I understand what you mean. Gentoo is indeed widely used by people who like to compile their own packages. This is not so ecological because compilation requires a lot of CPU time.

FreeBSD is actually relatively simple to use as a desktop system. Like Void Linux, it's something that is undervalued by many computer users, but is capable as an everyday desktop.
For Office software:

He doesn't list all the options, but some of the main ones. You also have eg Gnumeric which is better than MS Excel.
Of course you have plenty of choice in clients for email. You have Chromium, Epiphany, and Firefox, among a number of other browsers. You have plenty of audio and video player apps. You have many PDF viewers, Emacs, Vim, etc. You have GIMP, Inkscape, Krita and other software similar to Photoshop. For photographers you have RawTherapee and Darktable, digiKam and RawTherapee have some algorithms that give more detail than what the expensive Lightroom offers. For music producers you have Ardour, Audacity, LMMS, Qtraktor, and I've also made Ableton Live 9 work perfectly for what I need through Wine.

Gaming is where FreeBSD might be the least good at, but I've been using it for gaming for a while too and it's good enough for me.
You have 1237 native games. You can install these games with the package manager like any other package.
Then you have cloud gaming, which gives you access to a lot of games:

Best Cloud Gaming Services of 2025

Cloud gaming service is an online gaming platform and streaming service that enables players to access games stored on a remote server, instead of players

geekflare.com

You have https://www.freshports.org/games/linux-steam-utils/ which gives access to quite a few additional quality games.
You also have Suyimazu: https://codeberg.org/Alexander88207/Suyimazu
You can use VirtualBox or bhyve to virtualize windows in FreeBSD. You can probably play that way too.
Finally, you have quite a few emulators that you can use in FreeBSD that make many additional games available:

FreshPorts -- games/retroarch: Cross-platform entertainment system based on libretro API

RetroArch is the reference frontend for the libretro API. Popular examples of implementations for this API includes videogame system emulators and game engines, but also more generalized 3D programs. These programs are instantiated as dynamic libraries. We refer to these as "libretro cores".

www.freshports.org

FreshPorts -- emulators/dolphin-emu: Gamecube and Wii Emulator

Dolphin is an emulator for two recent Nintendo video game consoles: the GameCube and the Wii. It allows PC gamers to enjoy games for these two consoles in full HD (1080p) with several enhancements: compatibility with all PC controllers, turbo speed, networked multiplayer, and even more!

www.freshports.org

GitHub - derrod/legendary: Legendary - A free and open-source replacement for the Epic Games Launcher

Legendary - A free and open-source replacement for the Epic Games Launcher - derrod/legendary

github.com

FreshPorts -- emulators/rpcs3: PS3 emulator/debugger

RPCS3 is an open-source Sony PlayStation 3 emulator and debugger written in C++ for Windows and Linux. The project began development on May 23rd, 2011 and currently sports modern Vulkan, Direct3D 12 and OpenGL graphic APIs. The emulator is capable of booting and playing hundreds of commercial...

www.freshports.org

Etc.

In general, it's surprisingly easy to switch to FreeBSD as a daily driver. I have a Microsoft LifeCam HD-3000 and it no longer works in windows, but it does work in FreeBSD even though this is an MS product that supposedly, according to the sticker, would have windows10 support. There are also some other strange things where I see FreeBSD having better support than windows/Linux. Think for example of 32 bit systems, which most Linux systems no longer wish to support.

If you're a computer user with intermediate or advanced skills, FreeBSD is quite competent on the desktop, but less so on laptops. (due to less hardware support for laptops)

 

[redeye]

yes i use linux

lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:    Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS
Release:    22.04
Codename:    jammy

for interfacing (downloading)to my seedbox. i call that my main system
although if web surfing defines the main system, then my ipad 9.7 pro would be the main system.
on my watercooled PC i use Win 10. (gaming) and for aquacomputer stuff.

i prefer linux, if only because it is easy to see the speed of downloading (vnstat)... but Window for system specs. and i think (believe) linux it is more "secure" (probably a myth, but ubuntu is straight foreword for data movement)

 

[SchumannFrequency]

I think (believe) linux it is more "secure" (probably a myth, but ubuntu is straight foreword for data movement)

Windows Computers Were Targets of 83% of All Malware Attacks in Q1 2020

AV Test shows that Windows computers are the most vulnerable to malware attacks and are targeted more than any other operating system.

www.pcmag.com

Windows Computers Were Targets of 83% of All Malware Attacks in Q1 2020
Android only made up 2.75 percent in 2019 but has increased to 3.24 percent this year. All other systems, including iOS, macOS, and Linux, accounted for just 2.35 percent last year; that number has since dropped to 1.91 percent in the beginning of 2020.

There are rumors that Linux has been getting more and more malware lately.

This is a list of vulnerability statistics for FreeBSD and Linux. The generally lower amount of security issues on FreeBSD doesn't necessarily mean that FreeBSD is more secure than Linux, even though I do believe it is, but it can also be because there is a lot more eyes on Linux. However, the attack surface on most Linux distributions are considerably higher that on FreeBSD.

+---------+---------+-------+
| Year | FreeBSD | Linux |
+---------|---------|-------+
| 1999 | 18 | 19 |
| 2000 | 27 | 5 |
| 2001 | 36 | 22 |
| 2002 | 31 | 15 |
| 2003 | 14 | 19 |
| 2004 | 15 | 51 |
| 2005 | 17 | 133 |
| 2006 | 27 | 90 |
| 2007 | 9 | 62 |
| 2008 | 15 | 71 |
| 2009 | 11 | 102 |
| 2010 | 8 | 123 |
| 2011 | 10 | 83 |
| 2012 | 10 | 115 |
| 2013 | 13 | 189 |
| 2014 | 18 | 130 |
| 2015 | 6 | 86 |
| 2016 | 6 | 217 |
| 2017 | 23 | 454 |
| 2018 | 29 | 177 |
| 2019 | 18 | 170 |
| 2020 | 31 | 126 |
| 2021 | 25 | 158 |
| 2022 | 1 | 73 |
|---------|---------|-------|
| Total | 430 | 2780 |
+---------+---------+-------+

For further information about the specific vulnerabilities you can take a look at the CVE Details website for FreeBSD and Linux

 

[R-T-B]

On Gentoo, you also don't have to compile much if you don't feel like doing that:

I'm a gentoo admin man, nearly everything in gentoo packages/portage is distributed in source form...

I suspect you'll also be able to use Flatpak, Snap, AppImage and Nix on Gentoo, so that's over 110 000 packages that you can install without having to compile anything.

Yes but this is widely looked at as blasphemy... lol.

 

[SchumannFrequency]

I'm a gentoo admin man, nearly everything in gentoo packages/portage is distributed in source form...

I think work is underway to make more binary packages easier to access for Gentoo:

Experimental binary Gentoo package hosting (amd64)

IMPORTANT : This blog post is outdated! As direct result of this experiment, we now have official Gentoo binary packages available . See th...

dilfridge.blogspot.com

For KDE, most packages are available in binary form I believe.

 

[R-T-B]

I think work is underway to make more binary packages easier to access for Gentoo:

Experimental binary Gentoo package hosting (amd64)

IMPORTANT : This blog post is outdated! As direct result of this experiment, we now have official Gentoo binary packages available . See th...

dilfridge.blogspot.com

For KDE, most packages are available in binary form I believe.

You're probably correct, truth be told it's hard for me to drop the "gentoo admin" title anymore when all I haven't touched it for 2 years lol...

 

[shovenose]

I manage multiple web servers on which I do run Linux. But for desktop/laptop I have tried Linux over and over throughout the years and always end up frustrated and switching back to Windows.

 

[Space Lynx]

I just installed the latest Ubuntu that came out a few days ago, I think I will be leaving Linux Mint for a bit and enjoying this OS for awhile.

I imagine in summer 2023 or fall 2023, I will go back over to Linux Mint.

periodically I will boot up windows on a separate SSD. I am trying to move to Linux permanently though. so far its been a great transition.

 

[DrCR]

I suspect you'll also be able to use Flatpak, Snap, AppImage and Nix

Please keep the forum family-friendly and avoid such foul language.

I’ll have to check ou Void at some point. Recent Slackware release still shows love to 32bit.

I just installed the latest Ubuntu that came out a few days ago

Did that on a box just the other day.
PSA: Getting the Desktop version (Ubuntu 22.04.1 Desktop) to install to a software raid 1 is annoying but doable if you’re interested.

 

[Space Lynx]

Please keep the forum family-friendly and avoid such foul language.

I’ll have to check ou Void at some point. Recent Slackware release still shows love to 32bit.


Did that on a box just the other day.
PSA: Getting the Desktop version (Ubuntu 22.04.1 Desktop) to install to a software raid 1 is annoying but doable if you’re interested.

I don't mess around with raids, just casual gamer here, all I care about at this point is beating the fucking bots of third party sellers and getting RDNA3 at launch at MSRP. going to be a bloody fucking nightmare on launch day refreshing the web page I know it already. i'm done after this. its already past the point of stupid. but i don't want to "settle" on the gpu side of things for what may very well be my last build for 7+ years.

 

[SchumannFrequency]

I just installed the latest Ubuntu that came out a few days ago, I think I will be leaving Linux Mint for a bit and enjoying this OS for awhile.

I imagine in summer 2023 or fall 2023, I will go back over to Linux Mint.

Ubuntu has not been doing so well lately:

The systems I would recommend for beginners right now:
Nobara Project, Mint, EndeavourOS, MX Linux

For intermediate/advanced users:
Void Linux, NetBSD, Devuan, FreeBSD, Clear Linux

Those are the best Unix-like systems in my opinion.

 

[Shihab]

Ubuntu has not been doing so well lately:

Just the Snaps crap, but other than that it's still one of the widest supported distros out there. Just look at the hits for any linux-related queries on Google. Doubt anything comes close, except perhaps for the strong documentation Arch has.
The OOMD issue was fixed months ago.
Ubuntu has probably been "declining" since at least Unity days, in the same vain PC gaming has been dying since someone invented gamepads...

That said, I agree that snaps suck. One of the reasons that had my try ditching it for Fedora. I still hate Canonical for the deceptive Firefox deb packages in official repos. Doesn't seem like there is much hope it will go the Unity way anytime soon, sadly...

 

[Zareek]

Great thread, a large part of my job is administration of Linux servers. All CLI, RHEL and CentOS and mostly in AWS. I have Linux running on a lot of things at home. It's mostly tinkering, but some of it is home network. I have a little Ubuntu Server box as my Unifi Controller. It's not Linux, but a few other people have mentioned FreeBSD. I use that too, PfSense Firewall. A few R Pis I mess with, mostly for emulation. A few random PCs running CentOS and Mint. More recently, I put Zorin OS on an old laptop to check it out. I won't even attempt to count the number of embedded Linux and Android devices I have. I am also contemplating jumping to Linux as my primary desktop OS. There are too many things I dislike about Windows 11 and the direction Micro$oft is going.

 

[SchumannFrequency]

Just the Snaps crap, but other than that it's still one of the widest supported distros out there. Just look at the hits for any linux-related queries on Google. Doubt anything comes close, except perhaps for the strong documentation Arch has.
The OOMD issue was fixed months ago.
Ubuntu has probably been "declining" since at least Unity days, in the same vain PC gaming has been dying since someone invented gamepads...

That said, I agree that snaps suck. One of the reasons that had my try ditching it for Fedora. I still hate Canonical for the deceptive Firefox deb packages in official repos. Doesn't seem like there is much hope it will go the Unity way anytime soon, sadly...

It's not just Snaps. Ubuntu has been steadily declining in quality for the desktop since the year 2010. That's twelve years of decline now.
Their focus is IoT and they don't spend much time on their desktop anymore. Their own engineers usually use macOS or windows on the desktop, and it shows.

Ubuntu OOMD just isn't that good as a technology I guess: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Mint-17-No-OOMD
You're right they solved a big problem but other things keep popping up:

oomd fails during pid1 daemon-reexec · Issue #20330 · systemd/systemd

When I do 'systemctl daemon-reexec' in a Fedora rawhide VM, I get: Jul 28 11:52:54 rawhide-uefi systemd-oomd[685]: Failed to connect to /run/systemd/io.system.ManagedOOM: Connection refused Jul 28 ...

github.com

Why is my Firefox so unstable on Ubuntu LTS 22.04?

Four days ago I upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to 22.04 LTS. While this upgrade generally went very smoothly, a pop-up paused the process to tell me that henceforth Firefox would be pack...

askubuntu.com

The technology is just unstable right now, not ready at all to force it on people.

Fedora is as much supported as Ubuntu, it has packages that Ubuntu doesn't have. RPM is about as popular as DEB. SUSE and Red Hat are the two largest Linux companies and both use RPM..

I don't know but I just want to say it's about time Ubuntu is abandoned by desktop users. It has simply become one of the very worst Linux systems.

UBUNTU CONTINUES FALLING LIKE A ROCK AS A GAMING DISTRO

Ubuntu Continues Falling Like a Rock as a Gaming Distro

Ubuntu Continues Falling Like a Rock as a Gaming Distro

boilingsteam.com

Linux Mint Makes Improvements Around Flatpaks With Update Manager Integration

Linux Mint Makes Improvements Around Flatpaks With Update Manager Integration - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME

Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME - Phoronix Forums

Phoronix: Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME Canonical has announced via Mark Shuttleworth they are ending their development of the Unity 8

www.phoronix.com

Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Amazon Ads and Data Leaks

Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Amazon Ads and Data Leaks

See part 2 of Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Full Disk Encryption. Earlier this month the eagerly awaited free software operating system Ubuntu 12.10 was released, and it includes a slew of new features (YouTube link), some of which have infuriated users because of privacy concerns. Over the last...

www.eff.org

Are We Witnessing the Decline of Ubuntu?

Are We Witnessing the Decline of Ubuntu? | Datamation

History is written years after the events it describes. But when the history of free software finally is written, I am increasingly convinced that this

www.datamation.com

Ubuntu abandons Unity8/Mir/Phones… WHAT?

Ubuntu abandons Unity8/Mir/Phones... WHAT?

Wow!!! I just read this… Totally unexpected!!! I’ve been reading comments on phoronix for years that Canonical will just drop the whole project, but I always thought that the investment to this project is too much to just drop it. I was totally wrong… Any thoughts?? Phoronix Article Mark...

ubuntu-mate.community

What a mess is Ubuntu 22.04

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/ujn838

The fact is, a small company like Canonical doesn't have the resources to specialize in more than one thing, and that thing is IoT. As a desktop user you are going to be (usually) better on Mint, Fedora, Void, MX Linux, Devuan, EndeavourOS.

 

[Space Lynx]

It's not just Snaps. Ubuntu has been steadily declining in quality for the desktop since the year 2010. That's twelve years of decline now.
Their focus is IoT and they don't spend much time on their desktop anymore. Their own engineers usually use macOS or windows on the desktop, and it shows.

Ubuntu OOMD just isn't that good as a technology I guess: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Mint-17-No-OOMD
You're right they solved a big problem but other things keep popping up:

oomd fails during pid1 daemon-reexec · Issue #20330 · systemd/systemd

When I do 'systemctl daemon-reexec' in a Fedora rawhide VM, I get: Jul 28 11:52:54 rawhide-uefi systemd-oomd[685]: Failed to connect to /run/systemd/io.system.ManagedOOM: Connection refused Jul 28 ...

github.com

Why is my Firefox so unstable on Ubuntu LTS 22.04?

Four days ago I upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to 22.04 LTS. While this upgrade generally went very smoothly, a pop-up paused the process to tell me that henceforth Firefox would be pack...

askubuntu.com

The technology is just unstable right now, not ready at all to force it on people.

Fedora is as much supported as Ubuntu, it has packages that Ubuntu doesn't have. RPM is about as popular as DEB. SUSE and Red Hat are the two largest Linux companies and both use RPM..

I don't know but I just want to say it's about time Ubuntu is abandoned by desktop users. It has simply become one of the very worst Linux systems.

UBUNTU CONTINUES FALLING LIKE A ROCK AS A GAMING DISTRO

Ubuntu Continues Falling Like a Rock as a Gaming Distro

Ubuntu Continues Falling Like a Rock as a Gaming Distro

boilingsteam.com

Linux Mint Makes Improvements Around Flatpaks With Update Manager Integration

Linux Mint Makes Improvements Around Flatpaks With Update Manager Integration - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME

Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME - Phoronix Forums

Phoronix: Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME Canonical has announced via Mark Shuttleworth they are ending their development of the Unity 8

www.phoronix.com

Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Amazon Ads and Data Leaks

Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Amazon Ads and Data Leaks

See part 2 of Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Full Disk Encryption. Earlier this month the eagerly awaited free software operating system Ubuntu 12.10 was released, and it includes a slew of new features (YouTube link), some of which have infuriated users because of privacy concerns. Over the last...

www.eff.org

Are We Witnessing the Decline of Ubuntu?

Are We Witnessing the Decline of Ubuntu? | Datamation

History is written years after the events it describes. But when the history of free software finally is written, I am increasingly convinced that this

www.datamation.com

Ubuntu abandons Unity8/Mir/Phones… WHAT?

Ubuntu abandons Unity8/Mir/Phones... WHAT?

Wow!!! I just read this… Totally unexpected!!! I’ve been reading comments on phoronix for years that Canonical will just drop the whole project, but I always thought that the investment to this project is too much to just drop it. I was totally wrong… Any thoughts?? Phoronix Article Mark...

ubuntu-mate.community

What a mess is Ubuntu 22.04

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/ujn838

The fact is, a small company like Canonical doesn't have the resources to specialize in more than one thing, and that thing is IoT. As a desktop user you are going to be (usually) better on Mint, Fedora, Void, MX Linux, Devuan, EndeavourOS.

thank you for this. I had no idea.

well I guess I will stick with Linux Mint after all. bloody hell lol

 

[Shihab]

You're right they solved a big problem but other things keep popping up:

oomd fails during pid1 daemon-reexec · Issue #20330 · systemd/systemd

When I do 'systemctl daemon-reexec' in a Fedora rawhide VM, I get: Jul 28 11:52:54 rawhide-uefi systemd-oomd[685]: Failed to connect to /run/systemd/io.system.ManagedOOM: Connection refused Jul 28 ...

github.com

Why is my Firefox so unstable on Ubuntu LTS 22.04?

Four days ago I upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to 22.04 LTS. While this upgrade generally went very smoothly, a pop-up paused the process to tell me that henceforth Firefox would be pack...

askubuntu.com

The technology is just unstable right now, not ready at all to force it on people.

What a mess is Ubuntu 22.04
What a mess is Ubuntu 22.04 from linux

The first linked issue is marked closed and fixed already. Besides, it's not Ubuntu specific (the conditions specifically name Fedora).
Random posts on some forums or boards hardly constitute a mass issue. Name any distro and I can pull posts with the worst bugs and issues you can imagine in seconds.

UBUNTU CONTINUES FALLING LIKE A ROCK AS A GAMING DISTRO

Ubuntu Continues Falling Like a Rock as a Gaming Distro

Ubuntu Continues Falling Like a Rock as a Gaming Distro

boilingsteam.com

Ubuntu as a gaming platform is going steady and sometimes even going up, despite SteamOS pushing all competition against it. Check Steam's hardware survey, which is more relevant considering ProtonDB's stats are most likely a fraction of what Steam has, given that the former's users are subset of the latter.
That said, the figures are fickle. Ubuntu sometimes ranks lower and higher than Arch/Manjaro, but there is nothing that can be used to infer that it's "declining."

I'm inclined to believe the field has somewhat leveled in the past couple of years. Looking at random dates from Wayback machine's records, Linux overall market share did jump since 2019 (naturally). The bulk of the growth seems to have gone to Arch/Manjaro.

It goes without saying, of course, that we are comparing marketshare percentages here, not the actual size of the userbase.

Linux Mint Makes Improvements Around Flatpaks With Update Manager Integration

Linux Mint Makes Improvements Around Flatpaks With Update Manager Integration - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

Not sure what's the relevance here. A user can integrate flatpak with the software store on Ubuntu and update flatpak (and snap) packages from there. The software updater is a front end for .deb updater/upgrader by design. It's probably just a preference, but I'd argue it's better to keep the two separate. Prioritize updating system packages and important security patches to major components without potentially tempt the user to postpone them because the updater lists gigabytes of some low-priority programs' updates.

Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME

Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME - Phoronix Forums

Phoronix: Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME Canonical has announced via Mark Shuttleworth they are ending their development of the Unity 8

www.phoronix.com

Ancient history. And I honestly can't find why this can be used in anyway to infer that the distro is declining. Gnome itself has gone through drastic design (aesthetic and under-the-hood) changes, don't hear anyone calling its demise (gnome-haters popping every major release notwithstanding).
If anything, I'd say going back to Gnome counts for Canonical here.

Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Amazon Ads and Data Leaks

Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Amazon Ads and Data Leaks

See part 2 of Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Full Disk Encryption. Earlier this month the eagerly awaited free software operating system Ubuntu 12.10 was released, and it includes a slew of new features (YouTube link), some of which have infuriated users because of privacy concerns. Over the last...

www.eff.org

And it was practically killed even before Unity's head hit the chopping block.

Are We Witnessing the Decline of Ubuntu?

Are We Witnessing the Decline of Ubuntu? | Datamation

History is written years after the events it describes. But when the history of free software finally is written, I am increasingly convinced that this

www.datamation.com

Yet another page from the distant history, this one does prove my point from my previous post: This doomsaying has been going around for ages, yet here we.
But don't take my word for it, let's see how Google trends are faring:

Ubuntu abandons Unity8/Mir/Phones… WHAT?

Ubuntu abandons Unity8/Mir/Phones... WHAT?

Wow!!! I just read this… Totally unexpected!!! I’ve been reading comments on phoronix for years that Canonical will just drop the whole project, but I always thought that the investment to this project is too much to just drop it. I was totally wrong… Any thoughts?? Phoronix Article Mark...

ubuntu-mate.community

And Microsoft ditched Windows Phone, because that's what companies do when a project is clearly going no where: Cut your losses it and focus on what's working. You'd be hard pressed to name any company, successful or not, that hasn't dropped a project or two (or a googol). This has nothing to do with the state of another product that is still going strong half a decade after this decision.

The fact is, a small company like Canonical doesn't have the resources to specialize in more than one thing, and that thing is IoT. As a desktop user you are going to be (usually) better on Mint, Fedora, Void, MX Linux, Devuan, EndeavourOS.

That's conjecture, not facts, considering we neither can measure said resources nor tell if there is any allocation issues.

 

[SchumannFrequency]

The first linked issue is marked closed and fixed already. Besides, it's not Ubuntu specific (the conditions specifically name Fedora).
Random posts on some forums or boards hardly constitute a mass issue. Name any distro and I can pull posts with the worst bugs and issues you can imagine in seconds.

There are init systems that are faster and more secure and for which bugs are almost never reported.
Systemd is basically bloatware. There is no other init system that has as many lines of code. And complexity isn't good for security.

Ubuntu as a gaming platform is going steady and sometimes even going up, despite SteamOS pushing all competition against it. Check Steam's hardware survey, which is more relevant considering ProtonDB's stats are most likely a fraction of what Steam has, given that the former's users are subset of the latter.
That said, the figures are fickle. Ubuntu sometimes ranks lower and higher than Arch/Manjaro, but there is nothing that can be used to infer that it's "declining."

ProtonDB is a decent indicator. Anyway, you don't seem to believe it. Let's consult a second source:

User stats | GamingOnLinux

Statistics generated from the users of the GamingOnLinux website

www.gamingonlinux.com

Arch is used twice as much as Ubuntu currently, and Manjaro is also slightly more popular than the 'pure' Ubuntu.
Outside of Mint, there are no really popular derivatives of Ubuntu anymore for gaming.

Not sure what's the relevance here. A user can integrate flatpak with the software store on Ubuntu and update flatpak (and snap) packages from there. The software updater is a front end for .deb updater/upgrader by design. It's probably just a preference, but I'd argue it's better to keep the two separate. Prioritize updating system packages and important security patches to major components without potentially tempt the user to postpone them because the updater lists gigabytes of some low-priority programs' updates.

Mint does not follow Ubuntu with Snaps, and instead will help to better integrate Flatpak. Mint also does not follow Ubuntu with systemd OOMD. Those are two core technologies that are not competitive/acceptable according to a large distro such as Mint..

Ancient history. And I honestly can't find why this can be used in anyway to infer that the distro is declining. Gnome itself has gone through drastic design (aesthetic and under-the-hood) changes, don't hear anyone calling its demise (gnome-haters popping every major release notwithstanding).
If anything, I'd say going back to Gnome counts for Canonical here.

A large company that is very diversified can afford these kinds of mistakes. But these are three things they've invested in that they're just dropping completely. When did Fedora create these kinds of major failed projects? This also means that they have not put their limited resources to good use. In the end you can say that Ubuntu has done little more than make existing tech worse for the last ten years, and they don't even develop their own desktop anymore, which Mint does. You should also not forget that this is not a pleasant experience for users, that the desktop environment you are familiar with is suddenly no longer properly supported. When did Mint users experience this? What elements does Ubuntu still have from a relevant distro? Nothing at all.

And Microsoft ditched Windows Phone, because that's what companies do when a project is clearly going no where: Cut your losses it and focus on what's working. You'd be hard pressed to name any company, successful or not, that hasn't dropped a project or two (or a googol). This has nothing to do with the state of another product that is still going strong half a decade after this decision.

But Ubuntu is not a big company. If you have limited resources, you have to see that you don't invest them in completely useless things, or you will be immediately out of the market. What do you think would happen to Canonical if Mark Shuttleworth is gone?

Yet another page from the distant history, this one does prove my point from my previous post: This doomsaying has been going around for ages, yet here we.
But don't take my word for it, let's see how Google trends are faring:

Are these specific to the desktop, or about 'general use'? That Ubuntu is declining despite the strong growth that IoT has seen in the last 10 years says everything you need to know.

I tried to put Ubuntu on a computer I wanted to sell. I encountered a disaster.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/xnds8x

Ubuntu 22.04: Beautiful Outside, Ugly Inside!

Ubuntu 22.04: Beautiful Outside, Ugly Inside!

Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish looks gorgeous but there are some problems Let’s have a look at them in this Ubuntu 22.04 review.

averagelinuxuser.com

Overall, Ubuntu 22.04 brings many attractive improvements and the problems I mentioned are not devastating. But given that there are other Linux distros without these problems, I would not look at Ubuntu 22.04 as my daily driver.
If you are an Ubuntu user, I recommend waiting at least 3 months before you upgrade so most of the bugs get fixed.

why is ubuntu so bad and buggy.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/t33p01

I know enough distros where I've never even seen questions like this asked.
I follow the reddit of some distros on a daily basis and I've never, ever seen this kind of question.

My impression is that Ubuntu desktop users will be the Linux users who will see the most things crash on their desktop.
Unfortunately, there are no statistics for this.

 

[Shihab]

Systemd is basically bloatware. There is no other init system that has as many lines of code. And complexity isn't good for security.​

I can't comment on this specific topic, but I can point out that reservations about systemd are not Ubuntu's issue, at least not in this context. Practically every major Linux distro uses systemd at this point. Can't use it to smear only Ubuntu now, no?
​

There are init systems that are faster and more secure and for which bugs are almost never reported.​

A lesser used software with less eyeballs on it will definitely have less bugs, the base premise of Linus's law. Having little or no bugs reports is not necessarily a good thing, it could also mean a software is poorly audited/tested. Betting on uncertainty can go either way...
Again, not exactly defending Systemd here, but this is not argument against it.
​

ProtonDB is a decent indicator. Anyway, you don't seem to believe it. Let's consult a second source:

User stats | GamingOnLinux

Statistics generated from the users of the GamingOnLinux website

www.gamingonlinux.com

Arch is used twice as much as Ubuntu currently, and Manjaro is also slightly more popular than the 'pure' Ubuntu.
Outside of Mint, there are no really popular derivatives of Ubuntu anymore for gaming.​

Nice stats, but they still represent a fraction of the population Steam has access to. Your link states a population of about a 12k total, Steam's active, relevant population is probably in the million range. Ironically got this estimate from a different article on the same website you linked to.
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Mint does not follow Ubuntu with Snaps, and instead will help to better integrate Flatpak. Mint also does not follow Ubuntu with systemd OOMD. Those are two core technologies that are not competitive/acceptable according to a large distro such as Mint..​

And that's the choice of Mint's maintainers, which its user base may be supporting of. But that doesn't automatically make other distros with different choices bad.
Ad verecundiam hardly applies to Mint here. First because Ubuntu is "larger," older, and definitely better funded. Second, because there are other "large" distros that did choose to implement systemd-oomd (Fedora comes to mind).

Choosing flatpaks over snaps or vice-versa isn't a critical choice, no different than a distro choosing to go plasma over gnome. Probably even less, seeing how you can run both snaps and flatpaks and easily install on with the other.
​

A large company that is very diversified can afford these kinds of mistakes. But these are three things they've invested in that they're just dropping completely. When did Fedora create these kinds of major failed projects? This also means that they have not put their limited resources to good use. In the end you can say that Ubuntu has done little more than make existing tech worse for the last ten years, and they don't even develop their own desktop anymore, which Mint does. You should also not forget that this is not a pleasant experience for users, that the desktop environment you are familiar with is suddenly no longer properly supported. When did Mint users experience this? What elements does Ubuntu still have from a relevant distro? Nothing at all.​

Fedora is not a company though, it's a community-run project, same as Mint. Compare companies to companies.
Canonical maintains multiple versions of Ubuntu with different DEs, including one that is based on Unity.
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But Ubuntu is not a big company. If you have limited resources, you have to see that you don't invest them in completely useless things, or you will be immediately out of the market. What do you think would happen to Canonical if Mark Shuttleworth is gone?​

Strange question, tbh. Might as well ask what would happen to Linux at all if Torvalds is gone (probably less memes to use as reaction to Nvidia+Linux news, which would be devastating indeed).
Doing a quick research, Canonical has about 500 employees and >US$140 mill (> €120mil?) in revenues. That well fits the EU's criteria for "large enterprise."
As for investing in useless thing, that's a tricky part for a business (or any project owner or manager, really) to determine. Projects begin on some ambitious (and optimistic) premise, and, at least for the smartphone forays, that criteria was met. Who wouldn't want a slice of that pie? It wasn't just Canonical who tried jumping on the smartphone OS bandwagon, you have Moblin, Tizen, FirefoxOS, Meego, and others from various sized companies and initiatives that either were dropped entirely or repurposed for other applications.
When things later turned out not to be going anywhere, Canonical did what any other sane product owner would do, axe it. That's not a bad thing by any measure, only natural (and I'd argue healthy, else nothing would be developed at all).
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I know enough distros where I've never even seen questions like this asked.

That's where the trend ratings come into play. Perhaps you're seeing this because there are many more people using and are interested on Ubuntu than other distros?
Also, again, I invoke Linus's law...
And I can't resist not including this...

 

[SchumannFrequency]

Practically every major Linux distro uses systemd at this point. Can't use it to smear only Ubuntu now, no?​

There are plenty of popular Linux distros that don't use systemd:

MX Linux
PCLinuxOS
Slackware Linux
Alpine Linux
Devuan GNU+Linux
ArchBang
Funtoo
Nitrux
AntiX
GNU Guix System
Void Linux
Artix Linux
ChromeOS
Android

MX Linux has been at the number one position of DistroWatch for over a year.
If you compare this system to how Ubuntu is running now, most people will immediately understand why it is in this position.

Nice stats, but they still represent a fraction of the population Steam has access to. Your link states a population of about a 12k total, Steam's active, relevant population is probably in the million range. Ironically got this estimate from a different article on the same website you linked to.

I have a degree in statistics. The size of a sample is not going to be the only factor.
The sample simply has to be large enough and representative and meet some assumptions.

2736 people have replied to the question.
That is a fairly large number of users. It can be fairly representative for all Linux gamers.

 

[ShiBDiB]

Thread title should probably be "How do you use linux" instead of the current. Given it's in the linux section of the forum you're going to get skewed answers if you base it off the current title.

I run ubuntu on my home server. It's mainly a plex/torrent/sonarr/radarr box right now as I don't really have anything else to use it for.

 

[claes]

You’re probably right, guy just doesn’t understand that Ubuntu is by far the most popular Linux distribution in both consumer and enterprise markets and is searching Reddit for an agenda as to why the largest user base reports bugs more often than small user bases.

I mean, the focus of Ubuntu is IoT? Think you meant web servers but whatever. Let’s ask 2,000 random users rather than the tens of thousands of corporate websites, databases, and other servers that rely on Ubuntu LTS with no real issue.

 

[R-T-B]

popular

I think you are kind of abusing that term with your distro list, honestly.

 

[claes]

“Slackware, a popular Linux desktop environment for the casual user, great for gaming and known for it’s bug-free, transparent development”

sorry I’m in a mood

 

[Shihab]

I have a degree in statistics. The size of a sample is not going to be the only factor.
The sample simply has to be large enough and representative and meet some assumptions.

True, and perhaps the most important of those assumption is the sample being unbiased.
Now consider: A: A website for enthusiasts and users who are more technically oriented, and B: a service that practically every gamer subscribes to.
A relies on conscious participation and self reporting, while B is -partially- automated.
A samples forum users, B samples gamers directly, regardless of whether they even know what the hell a forum is.
So, which, from your experience as a trained statistician, would provide a, shall we say, "less" biased sample, assuming -for the sake of argument- ceteris paribus?

Suppose we can't even begin to quantify this bias, so we'll have to settle with what have. And what have is one result from a population that is more than 130 times the size of another, that paints a complete different picture. I don't believe we need to start swinging degrees around to at least agree that something isn't right here...