Both Flatpak and Snap are preinstalled but it defaults to debs/apt. Though through the command line they strongly recommend the pkcon command over apt itself.

Yep. I’m running Neon instead of Kubuntu for this reason. I didn’t want the hassle of dealing with snap, and I wanted the latest KDE stuff, so it’s perfect for me and I’m enjoying the experience. May not be for everyone, though.

So… it sounds like you’re struggling with Snap. In addition to others’ suggestion (try a different distro without Snap, perhaps one of those distros made by a different company such as Fedora (Red Hat), an OpenSUSE variety (SUSE), or even a corporate, less Snap-reliant Ubuntu-based distro like Pop_OS (System 76)), you could also try uninstalling Snap from Ubuntu or installing another binary option like Flatpak/Flathub and installing your software that way. Frankly, the amount of money these companies make working on Linux or Linux-based products has nothing to do with your struggles. Plus, the companies you mention do, in fact, make money working on the kernel itself because they contribute to the kernel as a project. Even Microsoft and Google do the same, though Microsoft does so for the sake of WSL and Google does for Chrome OS and Android. So plenty of people make money if the Linux kernel keeps having work done on it and keeps improving. I don’t see what the problem is with the kernel itself. The lack of polish, as you call it, in Linux-based OSes is not a fault at all of the kernel but in all the various other parts that go into the OS. And that level of polish can vary quite widely. As you note, Snap has been holding Ubuntu back quite a bit due to lack and reluctance of community adoption. Even just trying a different Ubuntu-based OS such as Pop_OS, Linux Mint or Neon may change your view.

Flathub is likely safer than most other places to get flatpaks from, certainly safer than just some random repo you find on some guy’s website somewhere, but no software source is guaranteed to be 100% safe.

People downplay the “fringe” aspect, but it istheo most common complaint I hear, that Mastodon/Lemmy are the “crazy left wing” versions of Twitter/Reddit. And while I’m not necessarily right-wing myself, as someone who’s not far-left, in any sort of political or social discussion, yeah I kinda see it. Non “fringe” people don’t want to be on a platform where anything not “fringe” gets flamed/downvoted to oblivion, even if it’s not technically a rule that the communities are “fringe” it can feel like an unwritten rule. Then if anyone tries making a not de facto “fringe” instance everyone else defederates from it, effectively killing it before it can get off the ground. Let’s be real, there are plenty of valid reasons to defederate from Threads, but a common one I do hear is because most Threads users aren’t “fringe” enough. That’s not going to attract a lot of people to Mastodon or Lemmy itself.

Generally I agree. Many of the largest and most popular distros are run by corporate entities: Canonical (Ubuntu and its various flavors), Red Hat (RHEL, Fedora), SUSE (SLE, OpenSUSE), and so on. Many more of the popular distros are community developed but are based on, or draw heavily from, corporate distros. Most of the more “beginner friendly” distros just so happen to be these corporate distros or ones based on them. It would be foolish to think Linux would be where it’s at today without the contributions of these companies and others such as Valve, who has almost singlehandedly made Linux gaming commercially viable. It’s still up to the community, however, to keep these companies honest when it comes to staying true to FOSS principles and compliance with the FOSS licenses they work under. That includes things like telemetry and a respect for privacy and security, allowing for freedom as to when an end user wishes to update their software, and retaining the open source nature of code and companies’ contributions to it. Corporations have the freedom to use and contribute to open source software, and they even have the freedom to make profit from it. But they have no more or less freedom than anyone else has to do so as well, and that’s where we have to keep an eye on them.

The only times I allow it myself are in this case (zero legal availability) and for unofficial/fan translations of games not available in your home region/language. Nobody would be getting your money anyway, no theft of compensation/profits there. If any games do become available, though, then we should support them. The more we put our money where our mouth is for a return to market for these games, the more incentive there is for companies to bring more of them back.

Threads is already 30x bigger than Lemmy and many times bigger than even Mastodon. Mass defederation won’t be making any sort of large media news outlets. We wouldn’t have any sort of significant numbers at that point.

Basically “embrace, extend, extinguish” in a nutshell.

Redundancy (multiple instances making communities on the same subject) is a thing that’ll happen. I’m already subbed to communities on several instances dedicated to the same subjects. That can have an advantage, though, in that communities on the same subject but different instances can provide different perspectives on the subject depending on the makeup of the community in each instance (membership, modding, etc). Don’t like the community in one instance? Unsub from that one and hop on over to another one. Having one account able to access multiple instances allows for that. It can also help if one community or instance goes down for whatever reason, there may be another community/instance open where you can keep interacting. So I don’t see the redundancy thing as necessarily a problem.