Dear Ubuntu…

Dear Ubuntu,

I hope this letter finds you well. I want to start by saying that our time together has been one of creativity and entertainment, a time in which you gave me the tools to develop a new career, to run a small electronics business, make fun things, and to write several thousand articles for Hackaday and other publications, but for all that it’s sadly time for our ways to part. The magic that once brought us together has faded, and what remains is in danger of becoming a frustration.

In our early days as an item you gave me for the first time a Linux distro that was complete, fast, and easy to use without spending too much time at the CLI or editing config files to make things happen; you gave me a desktop that was smooth and uncluttered, and you freed me from all those little utilities that were required to make Windows usable. You replaced the other distros I’d been using, you dual-booted with my Windows machines, and pretty soon you supplanted the Microsoft operating system entirely.

We’ve been together for close to two decades now, and in that time we’ve looked each other in the eye across a variety of desktop and laptop computers. My trusty Dell Inspiron 640 ran you for over a decade through several RAM, HDD, and SSD upgrades, and provided Hackaday readers with the first few years of my writing. Even the Unity desktop couldn’t break our relationship, those Linux Mint people weren’t going to tear us asunder! You captured my text, edited my videos and images, created my PCBs and CAD projects, and did countless more computing tasks. Together we made a lot of people happy, and for that I will always be grateful.

But over the last few years, I’ve noticed that our relationship has slowly become one less of harmony and more of frustration. Like middle-aged spread, you became progressively more bloated, your moments of freezing became obvious and inconvenient, and the delays to open some indispensable pieces of software became too long to simply explain as the result of having other apps running in the background. Our once close relationship has become strained by endless waiting for Snap packaged applications to load, and by my USB peripherals mysteriously refusing to talk to applications they’ve been used with for years.

I understand that Snap is meant to release us from dependency hell and I know why you’ve put each one in its own little sandbox, but honestly, even ChromeOS running a Linux application in its virtual machine is faster than this, and it doesn’t require everything to come from one distribution hub, or mess with access to hardware. I need my machine’s performance back, I need using a peripheral to stop being a lottery. I need more, Ubuntu, I need a distro that understands me and works with me, not against me!

I’ve tried to work around my frustrations, tried to convince myself that maybe if I had a faster laptop we could be happy together, but I can’t help thinking about the older generation PC in my hackerspace running Arch that Just Works, and Just Works without having to wait several minutes for Prusa Slicer to load. I realise that I can’t go on living a lie, I need to move on and find a distro that gives me the performance and stability I crave.

I need you to know that I didn’t jump to this conclusion in an instant. I kept the faith, I kept hoping every fresh distribution update would fix your shortcomings, and I even defended you when confronted with the other, leaner, distros my friends use. But I sense we’ve passed the point of no return, and a relationship built on frustration is no way to live. Let’s remember the good times, writing an article lying in a hammock at BornHack, or cracking how to number-crunch millions of words of corpus text on a mundane laptop. We traveled a long way together, and for that I’m grateful.

The transition will be painless enough, I won’t even uninstall you. Instead I have a new SSD in the mail, and I’ll transfer you in your drive to your own caddy. We’ll still see each other from time to time, and maybe if you can Snap out of your midlife crisis one day we’ll get back together. Meanwhile, thanks for all the good things you allowed me to do over the years, and I hope your maintainers can help you through your current difficulties.

Yours,

Jenny List

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• Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/05/22/dear-ubuntu/