Saying "just use an alternative" seems overly dismissive of the complications that entails.
IIUC, the only options for that are (a) abandon Ubuntu, or (b) actively circumvent Ubuntu's software distribution infrastructure, reminiscent of dealing with Windows 10 forced updates.
IMHO this somewhat erodes Ubuntu's value proposition.
> Now I know it's not going to be Ubuntu or anything else derived from Canonical.
Why avoid Ubuntu derivates like Mint or Pop!_OS, though?
They're doing the heavy lifting of fighting Canonical on this issue. Maybe using one of those distros instead of vanilla Ubuntu actually strengthens the pressure that Canonical feels on this topic.
Why not EndeavourOS? It's based on Arch Linux, with minimal numbers of external packages; quite unlike Manjaro actually. You can just treat it as a standard Arch install, and even use the ISO to boot with wi-fi drivers and all and install Arch plainly, without the non-wifi and other regrets. EndeavourOS is pretty great; I personally use it as a live-ISO (XFCE environment) and just install Arch from within the live EndeavourOS booted iso. Just throwing it out there.
Hadn't heard the name but glad I did. I was going to look for a live CD distro with good NTFS read support for the old drive recovery. This sounds good.
Saying "just use an alternative" seems overly dismissive of the complications that entails.
IIUC, the only options for that are (a) abandon Ubuntu, or (b) actively circumvent Ubuntu's software distribution infrastructure, reminiscent of dealing with Windows 10 forced updates.
IMHO this somewhat erodes Ubuntu's value proposition.