Could Ubuntu be a reasonably secure "just works" alternative to Fedora?

Welp, since the thread has died down, I guess I’ll summarize my conclusions here.

  • There isn’t much clarity on whether Ubuntu’s updates are roughly on par with Fedora. A user pointed out that LTS versions in particular are at some security risk because of the way they manage updates, which I already assumed based on the warning about frozen distributions on Privacy Guide’s Linux Overview. It seems like this might be an issue with every point release distribution, including Fedora, but is considerably worse with “ancient” distributions like Debian and presumably others like Ubuntu LTS, RHEL, etc. I haven’t seen anyone claim this is also a major issue with the latest Ubuntu releases (at least in comparison to Fedora) though I haven’t seen confirmation that this isn’t the case either… So I’ll just assume it’s fine. (Again, relative to Fedora.)

  • The other main issue people seem to have with Ubuntu is Snap. Jonah says that (as of July 2023) the information in this post is still accurate, which honestly makes me want to do my hardest to re-try Fedora for a third time. Since their official Discussion forum and unofficial subreddit weren’t of any help, I guess I’ll look to more generic Linux support resources and hopefully someone can be of some help. If that doesn’t work out (and I gotta say, I’m not optimistic), I’m only left with returning to Ubuntu.

  • As I’ve discussed at much greater length, it’s extremely common for Privacy Guides to make soft recommendations with disclaimers for software/products that have issues, but are still worth mentioning as possible alternatives to what people might commonly use. I still think it’s worth considering adding Ubuntu as a soft recommendation along with some warnings, considering it’s probably a decent step up from Windows. Including an Ubuntu guide (as @jonah suggested) would be an awesome idea. Perhaps removing Snap (or replacing it with Flatpak) could be a part of said guide since it seems that Snap is one of the largest barriers to recommending Ubuntu. It’d be a nice option for users who (like me) were unable to get Fedora working. Others in this thread (and elsewhere on the forum) seem to be supportive of adding a soft Ubuntu recommendation and/or creating an Ubuntu privacy/security hardening guide. I’d love to hear if anyone from the PG team has any thoughts on whether they would consider it.

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