I've had it with Ubuntu

Dear Diary of Lamentations, I wiped the disk and installed Debian. It wasn’t a manifesto. It wasn’t a holy war. It was the end of patience.

Years of living with it

I used Ubuntu for many years. Real years. I knew where every config file lived. I complained about Unity, then GNOME, then whatever came next — and still came back. It worked. The community helped. apt was an honest friend.

Ubuntu was on home machines, at work, in VMs, on servers I should not have treated like desktops. I defended it. I recommended it. I was that guy who said “just install Ubuntu” with the calm of someone pointing you to a trusted restaurant.

Until Canonical started cooking a different recipe.

Erosion

It wasn’t a single day.

Unity forced on everyone, Mir abandoned, Upstart halfway through: the habit of reinventing the wheel and leaving the project on the roadside. Product decisions that smelled like “we know what’s best for you.” A company that grew by selling easy Linux to humans — and slowly started treating the user as territory, not as a partner.

I swallowed it. “It’s just a phase.” “You can turn it off.” “The next release will be better.”

It didn’t get better. It only changed the shape of the stone in the shoe.

The last straw: Docker via Snap

Then came Snaps.

In theory: isolation, automatic updates, a single package. In practice: a daemon with a life of its own, /snap taking space nobody asked for, apps that open while contemplating existence, and an apt install that, underneath, pushes you into another reality.

My limit had a name.

Docker is already a universe — sockets, groups, volumes, networks, permissions. Wrapping that in a Snap is asking confinement to fight the tool all day long. Volumes that don’t mount where they should. Paths that disappear behind the sandbox. Permission errors written by someone who clearly never brought up a real container. And, as a bonus, the chance of mixing Snap with .deb and leaving two daemons fighting over the same socket.

I removed it. Reinstalled the classic way. Read threads. Hacked around it. Pretended it was the future.

Until the day clarity arrived without poetry:

I’ve had it.

Not with Linux. With Ubuntu. With Canonical. With the project of turning a distribution I liked into a platform with too many opinions and too little respect for the classic Debian path — the same Debian Ubuntu was born from. The irony almost deserves applause.

Why Debian

Debian doesn’t sell me a dream. It delivers stability, a repository that does what it says, and the dignity of installing a package without discovering later that it came in a shell with a life of its own.

It isn’t perfect. Sometimes it’s boring. Sometimes it’s conservative. Sometimes the package you want is on a version GitHub already buried. All true. After years of swallowing “improvements” I never asked for, boring and predictable sounds like luxury.

I switched. Wiped. Installed. Configured what was needed. Went back to work.

It wasn’t an anti-Canonical religious conversion. It was getting tired of carrying weight that no longer served. If the distribution’s path doesn’t work, you change roads.

Ubuntu was home for a long time. Debian is the address now — with apt, patience, and zero Snap on the PATH.