A friend of mine who switch to #linux back in march 2025 and started with #fedora as distribution on my recommendation, asked my opinion on #ubuntu
I was perfectly honest that I in general like the distro, it just insist on things I don't like. Like none vanilla #gnome #snaps and so on.
He said he was thinking about giving it a spin due to a lot of the resources online was available for only Ubuntu.
I, honestly, encourage him to go for it. I don't want to be a distro gatekeeper.
That was two weeks ago.
In the last two days I have gotten more questions about Ubuntu, than I got about fedora in 11 months! He had a problem with VLC... turns out it was installed as a snap and did not have the right permissions. He had problems with gnome plugins clashing with canonicals default once. He had a weird issue that he and I are still trying to debug with #libreoffice crashing if and only if he starts Calc before Write and this one baffels me and.

the list goes on with a lot of applications, that behaves weirdly. From what I can tell so far. All applications (except libreoffice) he is having problems with are snaps! Either there is /home/<USER> they cannot access or its issues with them not having a dependency and so on.
Can someone please tell me if this is normal, I am not that experienced with snaps. He is running 25.10

He is thinking about switching back to Fedora because of all of these issues.

Honestly, I would like to help him fix the issues. But I am just not well enough versed in snaps.
Fun fact, we tried just for fun to install some of the apps as flatpaks as well... they don't have the same issues.
@looopTools how about trying to stick with the .deb packages coming from Ubuntu?
Or perhaps try Mint, OpenSUSE, Manjaro or some other thing. Can be tried in a VM, no reinstall needed.
Oooooor, and that's my favorite, go with Debian and make the desktop part yourselves 😁
@ojs The problem happens when you use the App Store that defaults to snap
@looopTools @ojs gotta love that they on the one hand didn't want their users to use flatpaks because of their own snaps, but on the other hand don't seem to care enough about their desktop to make the damned things work properly
@rasmus91 @ojs Well I am actually quite surprised it is this bad. I hope my friend is just having a very abnormal experience.