Ubuntu Is Straight Doo Doo

technical

Introduction

Got a new laptop for work—an ASUS TUF F15 with an RTX 4070. Naturally, I wiped Windows and threw Arch on it immediately. Biggest beef steak. Two days of random freezes, black screens, and Xorg issues thanks to NVIDIA's garbage drivers. I got tired of fixing it and decided to install the distro that's 'certified' for this laptop and 'just works': Pop!_OS 22.04. That was an even bigger beef steak.

“Developer-friendly” – My Actual Ass

I needed Hugo to preview my site. I ran sudo apt install hugo, then hugo server, and immediately got:

This does not appear to be a Hugo site.

Turns out the Ubuntu repo version is so ancient it doesn't even support Go modules. So I had to delete it, go to GitHub, download the latest binary, and dump it in /usr/local/bin.

And Hugo wasn't the only one. Same issue with:

  • Node.js (still on 18 while the rest of the planet is on 22)
  • Docker (old enough to collect Social Security)
  • Neovim (missing half the Lua API)
  • Rustup (lol good luck)
  • Even bat was an ancient version that didn’t support syntax highlighting for half the languages I use

You install something on Arch, and it's there. You try to install something on Ubuntu, and it's a completely miserable experience.

Package Management is a Joke

Here's the situation if you want to install software on Ubuntu in 2025:

  • apt: Everything is hopelessly outdated.
  • PPAs: Random repos you have to add that inevitably break your dependencies later.
  • Snap: Canonical's bloatware that takes ages to launch and completely shits up lsblk with loop devices.
  • Flatpak: Works fine until you realize it ignores your system GTK themes and fonts.
  • Random .deb files from the internet: Because the official repos don't have what you need.

Firefox as a snap by default is actually infuriating. It takes longer to launch the browser than it does to boot the laptop.

"Stability"

People defend Ubuntu by saying it's stable. It's stable because nothing ever updates. I tried installing a basic Python tool. pip install → needs Python 3.11. System Python → 3.10. apt install python3.11 → not in the repo. So you're forced to add another random PPA just to get a modern version of a programming language.

Bloat

I opened htop and saw about thirty snap processes eating my RAM because I dared to install Spotify, VS Code, and Bitwarden. Having that many background processes just to run three basic apps is ridiculous.

Verdict

I wiped Pop!_OS and I'm reinstalling Arch while writing this. Ironically, the NVIDIA drivers work better on Arch than they ever did on the distro that was "certified" for this laptop.

Back to one package manager, up-to-date software, and no snaps. Ubuntu might be fine for regular users, but for development, it's straight doo-doo.