I know that Canonical / Ubuntu people are sometimes not well received due to promotion of Canonical tooling (some might remember upstart and Mir, or more recently snap and netplan). Thus for some positive vibes consider that I could hand out the Ubuntu Desktop image on a USB flash drive to a family member, and the family member could just replace Windows 10 without any assistance. It just worked. This was made possible by the will to keep a slightly dated ThinkPad in use, which it's not supported by Windows 11.

I've to admit that I never looked at Ubuntu Desktop before, but the user experience is on par with everything else I know. Thanks to all the folks at Canonical who made that possible! Luckily the times when you had to fiddle with modelines for XFree86, and sleepless nights about configuring lpd to get printing up and running are long gone. I believe now that Microsoft is doing Microsoft things with rolling Windows updates which force users to replace completely fine working hardware is the time to encourage more people to move to open operating systems, and Ubuntu Desktop seems to be a very suitable choice.

Things to Improve

Albeit I think the out of the box experience is great, there are a few niche topics where things could improve.

Default Access to Apt / Ubuntu Universe

Well snaps are promoted as the primary application source, but having some graphical interface like synaptic available by default to just install from Ubuntu Universe would be helpful. In this case we wanted to install keepass2 to access the users keepass file kept from the Windows setup. Having to tell someone "open the terminal and type sudo apt install" is something that requires support.

Snaps and Isolation Overrides

I'm fine with snaps having least privileges, but it would be nice if one could add overrides easily. Here the family member was playing with an Arduino Uno and there is one sample in the workbook that utilizes a Java application called Processing. It's available as a snap, but that one doesn't have access to the required serial port device file. I tried hard to make it work - full details in the snapcraft forum - but failed, and opted to use the --devmode to install it without isolation enforcement. As far as I understood snap that results in no more automatic updates for the application. If someone from the Ubuntu crowd with more snap debug experience has additional hints on how to narrow down which change is required, I would love to improve that and create a PR for the processing developers. Either reply in the forum or reach out via mail sven at stormbind dot net.