For work and "power usage", Fedora Workstation has the best "Ubuntu" experience outside of Ubuntu I'd say. You can also go for Fedora Silverblue to get some NixOS-like powers with your Fedora (I expect that to be folded into Workstation eventually).

Notable diferences that might influence your decision are:

- RPMs instead of DEBs;

- Flatpaks instead of Snaps;

- Podman and Buildah instead of Docker (although you can get Docker if you really need to use that);

- SELinux enabled by default (some people don't like this for non-server usage, but I dig it);

- firewalld comes enabled by default, which may be annoying and unexpected if you're trying to get some iptables rule to work (I personally always remove firewalld and install ufw for the things I need);

- Fedora 33 (due for release next month) will be switching to btrfs as the default filesystem, whose features are definitely welcome for home usage (but I'll wait a bit before upgrading and see if people run into any issues);

- I'd also highly recommend installing Pop!_OS's Pop Shell [0] to add great tiling support for GNOME, but that goes for anyone using GNOME really

[0] https://github.com/pop-os/shell

If you like gaming though, I never tried setting up Steam or a ProtonDB game on Fedora to be able to report on that (I think it would be complicated enough to make me wanna switch distros), but if you'll be doing this a lot, Pop!_OS (Ubuntu based, snaps disabled) has a great out-of-box experience with Steam, as does Manjaro (Arch based) which has an excellent hardware detection and driver auto-installer tool called mhwd, and makes setting up NVIDIA cards and other finicky hardware a breeze.

> - Flatpaks instead of Snaps;

snapd is packaged in Fedora, it's just not installed by default, nor does Fedora have any shim things to force installation of flatpaks or snaps.

> - Podman and Buildah instead of Docker (although you can get Docker if you really need to use that);

By request from upstream Docker, Inc, Fedora renamed the docker package to "moby-engine". It _does_ get installed if you do "dnf install docker" and provides the docker CLI command and docker daemon service.

> - Fedora 33 (due for release next month) will be switching to btrfs as the default filesystem, whose features are definitely welcome for home usage (but I'll wait a bit before upgrading and see if people run into any issues);

This won't impact upgrades. Fresh installs will get this change, systems upgrading will not (unless you want to reinstall to change to Btrfs).

> - I'd also highly recommend installing Pop!_OS's Pop Shell [0] to add great tiling support for GNOME, but that goes for anyone using GNOME really

pop-shell is available as a COPR for Fedora: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/carlwgeorge/gnome-sh...

> If you like gaming though, I never tried setting up Steam or a ProtonDB game on Fedora to be able to report on that (I think it would be complicated enough to make me wanna switch distros), but if you'll be doing this a lot, Pop!_OS (Ubuntu based, snaps disabled) has a great out-of-box experience with Steam, as does Manjaro (Arch based) which has an excellent hardware detection and driver auto-installer tool called mhwd, and makes setting up NVIDIA cards and other finicky hardware a breeze.

GNOME Software will let you easily install Steam and the NVIDIA driver with a few clicks in Fedora Workstation. It generally works pretty well.

Debian. It’s Ubuntu without the commercial parts and without snap.

Or jump ship for a BSD if your hardware is well supported or this is for servers.

Mint and Pop come to mind if you want to stay in the Ubuntu ecosystem without snaps.

Debian is even more stable and retains apt as a package manager, but you will have older packages for stability and have to customize it a little.

If you can venture out of the Ubuntu space, I have found Manjaro to be an excellent experience in the few months I used it earlier this year. It has very fresh packages since it is Arch-based, but also uses an LTS kernel and has some measures in place on its own repositories for stability's sake. I can't attest to the effectiveness of the latter since I've never had stability issues on Arch, but Manjaro is certainly wonderful out of the box and a very pleasant experience in my opinion.

Author of this post recommends Pop_OS!, but I personally like openSUSE. It’s easily configurable both using GUI and from CLI.

I really like Fedora honestly - I switched off of Ubuntu a few years ago after the Unity shakedown and have not regretted it one bit. Works perfectly and has very up to date pkgs available in core repos (unlike Ubuntu).

fedora+rpmfusion+flathub

silverblue effectively gives you the ability to have the benefits of a rolling distro and the benefits of a distro that does releases (stability focused).

Pop!_OS and Linux Mint would probably both suit your needs.

They both opt for flatpak instead of snap. Pop prefers apt over flatpak in the graphical app store, I don't use Mint so I don't know how it's done there.

> What's the best Ubuntu alternative out there?

Debian.

I tried.

For some reason I cannot run synaptic.

Removed debian that very second.

So I asked that question a couple months ago and the response that sounded most like a drop in replacement (and better in a lot of ways) was Pop!_OS.

I haven't had the time to try it out yet ... maybe a good weekend project. I've been using Ubuntu for over a decade now so it might take some time to switch over.

I've been slowly switching over all of my desktops and servers from Ubuntu to Debian.

The only annoying situation I've encountered is having to manually install a non-free network driver, but once that's done I haven't found a single thing I miss from Ubuntu.

I recently moved from Ubuntu 18.04 to Pop OS 20.05. So far everything works smoothly, and no snap.

I use macOS pretty much full time now, but my one linux box is still KDE Neon. It’s LTS Ubuntu-based but as far as i know doesn’t push snaps, and just maintains a clean KDE/Qt based environment (if that’s your fancy)

I've enjoyed Pop!_OS

If you dislike Snap but like Ubuntu, you can continue using Ubuntu. Just don't install any snaps! The system is perfectly usable without them - right out of the box. No customization required.

I am Firefox user so I don't miss Chromium. However, occasionally you hit sites that don't work with Firefox. It's rare, but if it is an airline check-in (less relevant these days) or the e-learning platform of my daughter's school (very relevant these days) you don't have any choice. With the market share of Firefox I fear this will become more common :(

And don't install Chromium, since it looks like it's installing the traditional way but, instead, will install the snap.

Is Chromium the only app that works this way or are there a set of applications where the .deb file results in a snap being installed? Right now, Chromium is the only one I've noticed.

I imagine they'll do that for more apps down the line...

The specific reason it's done for Chromium is that Chromium upstream is a rolling release. If you want security updates, you must also accept new features. Sometimes those new features need new versions of build dependencies. This does not fit the traditional distribution (eg. deb) model, since those build dependencies can't be bumped without impacting every other dependent package too.

What has ended up happening so far is that distributions bundle all these things into the deb and ship it and hope for the best. It's very painful from a packaging perspective, and effectively turns the deb into nothing better than a bundled app (like a Snap or Flatpak or AppImage) wrapped in a .deb anyway.

I can see this happening to Firefox in the end. For example Firefox upstream added a whole Rust toolchain dependency that wasn't packaged in supported distribution releases. I don't see it happening to anything else, since the rest of the distribution upstreams don't the thing that causes so much deb packaging pain for the browsers.

If snaps are yet another Canonical technology that they want to succeed despite their users' wishes, then forcing Snap versions of most common apps will come sooner or later, regardless of an app's original release or build model.