On the contrary, Systemd has brought a standard, a replacement for messy scripts and logs used before.
Ubuntu is not a best choice despite of the popularity, I'd recommend Manjaro (XFCE edition since it's simpler - so not a lot of things can be broken, not the Gnome/KDE version), or Debian stable if you need stable system. Gnome itself is shitty thing in my opinion, KDE is too complex, XFCE is nice.
> Ubuntu is not a best choice despite of the popularity, I'd recommend Manjaro (XFCE edition since it's simpler - so not a lot of things can be broken, not the Gnome/KDE version), or Debian stable if you need stable system.
Listen: I learned unix by installing MkLinux on a PowerMac G3 (the beige kind that came with MacOS, the single-tasking cooperative OS from the '80s) in 1997. I built my first PC in '99 or '00 and ran Debian on it until the old glibc transition broke so much that I switched to Gentoo, and much later to slack & arch.
I've done the distro-shuffle. There is no magical Happy distro where everything finally Works. Everything is constantly being rewritten, and some percentage of it is egregiously, embarrassingly broken at the user-facing level.
In some ways it's even worse now than it was in the early 2000s. So after nearly 20 years of "you shouldn't have used distro X you should use distro Y", I think I'll pass.
And despite this rant in 3 years I'll probably be dumb enough to think "well maybe this time things are finally working well", yet again.
I run ubuntu on a server at home. Every time I did a distro upgrade, it broke so much stuff (Nvidia drivers/mythtv/random other stuff) that I would have to fix, that I ended up not upgrading it from 12.04 until just a few weeks ago.
I decided to blow everything away and do a fresh install of 16.04. I wanted to have both Gnome and KDE on it, so I could have the choice of window managers. You're meant to be able to do that.
So I put a fresh ubuntu on it, and then the first thing I did was try to install kde. The kubuntu-desktop package install stopped halfway because of conflicts between Gnome and KDE packages, with just a cryptic error message about a background process having an error during package installation!
The failed install broke (both) GUI's and the apt package manager completely. KDE wouldn't launch at all and Gnome would come up with a blank screen and a mouse cursor and nothing else.
It took hours of googling to find the magic commands to actually remove the conflicting Gnome packages to get the KDE install to continue, and any GUI working. I have it working with just KDE now, but could never get it working with both.
A fresh install of the latest "long term support" version of the most popular distro, then I tried to install the second most popular window manager, and that didn't work. What a massive fail.
I actually love using Linux, and it's so refreshing to not be tied to corporate garbage on your PC, but unfortunately, Ubuntu/linux is 100% not ready for normal consumers. I really really hope it improves, but it always seems to be two steps forward, one step back. It's a bit sad.
On the contrary, Systemd has brought a standard, a replacement for messy scripts and logs used before.
Ubuntu is not a best choice despite of the popularity, I'd recommend Manjaro (XFCE edition since it's simpler - so not a lot of things can be broken, not the Gnome/KDE version), or Debian stable if you need stable system. Gnome itself is shitty thing in my opinion, KDE is too complex, XFCE is nice.