Brave itself is a great browser and their search engine is also quite good. Don’t care much for the behind the scenes stuff.

They technically do tell you, even in the graphical software store. And the speed difference between snaps and debs has been largely nullified by now.

you can install firefox, but even if you click ‘make firefox my default browser’, it won’t. It will open the settings, wait a second and then show you another button. Clicking that will do what you wanted - for web links. Pdf files? Html files? Searches from the start menu? Still all open edge.

On ubuntu it takes maybe a minute to remove the firefox snap, add the mozilla repo and install from there. Those dummie packages are more for convenience than anything nefarious. I agree that snaps have been made unavoidable if you’re not paying attention, but I disagree that it’s a bad thing. Ubuntu is migrating from .debs to snaps, so it makes sense that those become ever more prominant.

They do not prevent you from adding repos and installing from those. They don’t even try to make it slightly more difficult to do so than it was before. Microsoft force you to use edge. Cannot really disable it. Can’t remove it. Can’t simply switch away from it. See the difference?

But snaps do have shared dependencies to a degree. Also, do you use gentoo?

Agreed

I’m sure it’s not literally all of them, and it’s almost never preinstalled. But available in the repositories.

Ubuntu has zero telemetry if you flick the switch they show you right after installation. And steam is proprietary software, yet basically every distro ships it in their repos. Your points make no sense.

Is it that bad? I run gnome on two 4k monitors with 100% scaling and large text and it’s great

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Creating your own linux-based nas is a very fun project!

They don’t neccessarily need to, you can pretty much always just look at reviews. Now you can make a point about trusting reviewers, but all that is still better than trusting the manufacturer or microsoft.

You’re right though, there is trust involved, but only if you don’t verify things yourself.

It’s more about privacy. Windows might access your mic to get more data on you for advertising, wouldn’t be anything new.

The problem with those is that it’s often just a piece of plastic, so the microphone isn’t cut off from power. The webcam sees noching, but sound is unaffected.

Hardware switches physically cut power to the device in question and you can take it apart and verify. There is no trust involved.

Get a laptip with a real hardware switch for the cam and the mic. Best peace of mind knowing that they’re really off. Neither tape, nor the non-electrical built-in plastic sliders do that.

My Computers are all reasonably modern and decetly spec’d, resources should not be an issue. Ubuntu also ships with a lot more pre-installed packages than tumbleweed does, but I get your point.

Right, but my tumbleweed install gets 100+ package updates per week, whereas ubuntu gets like 20

Absolutely, but unless you’re on a rolling release, it still won’t be that long. For example, my homelab ubuntu server didn’t get updated for over a month, but when I finally did run updates it finished after no more than a minute. Depends a bit on hardware and network speed though.

Trigger warning! Updating my linux systems takes 15 seconds ;)