[HN Gopher] Ubuntu 21.10
___________________________________________________________________
Ubuntu 21.10
Author : zathan
Score : 194 points
Date : 2021-10-14 19:31 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ubuntu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ubuntu.com)
| capableweb wrote:
| Funny, I run Ubuntu on my laptop and tried just today to upgrade
| it (since I'm on 18.04 and have been for a while). But no matter
| how I try, `do-release-upgrade` won't do the upgrade, complaining
| about third party repositories (removed all of them as a result),
| mismatched python versions, and a load of other issues. When I
| fix one, another one appears. Tried for 5 hours today and
| eventually gave up.
|
| On the other hand, my desktop machines run Arch and NixOS and I
| have never had any issues upgrading. Well, actually a few issues
| with NixOS upgrades, but it's so easy to rollback that I barely
| spend any time on it, and when I later try to upgrade again,
| everything just works.
|
| I wonder why Ubuntu/Canonical can never get their upgrade game to
| work properly. I've had similar issues with Ubuntu upgrades since
| I started using Ubuntu (8.X) and seems it'll never be fixed.
| Maybe I'll just start using either Arch or NixOS on my laptop
| too.
| outworlder wrote:
| I'll echo the NixOS experience. Upgrades are not even stressful
| since you can 'rollback' nearly everything.
| rlpb wrote:
| > I wonder why Ubuntu/Canonical can never get their upgrade
| game to work properly.
|
| Ubuntu developer here. Sounds like you have a really hacked up
| system there, and that it's your existing system that has
| issues. Under these circumstances, I don't think it's
| reasonable to expect an upgrade to be able to work smoothly.
| Scripts that handle upgrade paths necessarily need to make
| assumptions that what they are upgrading from is what the
| distribution put there. If you hack it up, then those scripts
| aren't going to work.
|
| Your Arch system, being rolling release based, I assume isn't
| as hacked up with newer versions of things because you get them
| straight from your distribution? The equivalent on Ubuntu would
| be to run the six-monthly releases, which I assume you choose
| not to do. If you do that and then you hack up your system,
| then I don't think it's fair to compare to an Arch system where
| you (presumably) don't do that.
|
| If you want to run an Ubuntu LTS system then I suggest that you
| do your hacking inside containers (whether system containers
| like lxd, or app containers like Docker). Then you won't need
| to hack up your system itself, and then upgrades will generally
| work fine.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Sounds like you have a really hacked up system there
|
| Some people would call this 'a system that's actually being
| used to do something'.
|
| Don't blame users unless it's clear they are doing something
| egregious with the system. Installing a different Python
| version shouldn't break installers, but here we are.
|
| Ubuntu should have taken a page from CoreOS, NixOS and even
| Arch. CoreOS with their immutable system partitions (and two
| of them so it can revert to a good one if the current can't
| boot). NixOS with the immutable packages (and the split
| between user and system packages). And even Arch with its
| release model.
|
| Sometimes you have to 'hack your system' to add a new apt
| source to try to get your GPU working with OpenCL, or you
| have to modify some config file on /etc to get something else
| working. Or whatever the use-case might be. Should that break
| upgrades then? Ubuntu really doesn't provide any guidance or
| utilities to help with this.
|
| At least figure out a way to install a _known sane_ system
| configuration, even if it breaks the user 's customization.
| Having a separate system partition by default would actually
| help a little.
|
| Even Windows allow you to snapshot and rollback changes.
| Something that Ubuntu users have to - guess what - "hack the
| system" to get.
| rlpb wrote:
| > Ubuntu should have taken a page from CoreOS, NixOS and
| even Arch. CoreOS with their immutable system partitions
| (and two of them so it can revert to a good one if the
| current can't boot). NixOS with the immutable packages (and
| the split between user and system packages). And even Arch
| with its release model.
|
| Actually Ubuntu Core is an edition of Ubuntu that has
| exactly these properties. It runs read-only, with packages
| that can be added and removed cleanly.
|
| This does involve moving away from apt/deb, which is
| fundamentally incapable of this. I don't know of any plans
| to do this for the main Ubuntu distro itself, but consider
| the resistance if this were on the roadmap.
| nsonha wrote:
| Obviously you put the effort into the Arch one to set up
| everything with Nix, and didn't do that in Ubuntu. A fairer
| comparison would be "a system that's actually being used to
| do something" in just Arch to Ubuntu or Nix on both.
|
| I'm not a heavy linux user but I know 3 guys who use Arch
| at work and one of them had an upgrade issue that caused
| them half a day to fix, this was circa 2016. I know plenty
| of people who use Ubuntu no issue. Not that such anecdote
| really means anything, just to demonstrate that they can be
| used to back whatever bias.
|
| > Having a separate system partition by default
|
| This is just one simple extra step when you install. And I
| don't know if arch has this by default?
|
| > Even Windows allow you to snapshot and rollback changes
|
| just use brfs? This is more of a linux thing has nothing to
| do with ubuntu
| megous wrote:
| > And I don't know if arch has this by default?
|
| What do you mean by default? :) Arch doesn't have an
| automated installer that does partitioning for you. You
| extract some files to whatever partitioning setup you've
| dreamed up for yourself, setup a bootloader and reboot.
| nsonha wrote:
| You are the one who asked for default.
|
| Ubuntu has that but I don't think most people use it
| either. I don't see any harm as an option for beginners.
| Not that it actually happened but my parents should be
| able to set up ubuntu because they don't need to
| partitition.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| See, this is why Linux distributions piss me off. You have an
| upgrade path that breaks, and when it does the response is
| "oh, you used your Linux distribution in a way we said you
| could in our docs? why would you think the upgrade would work
| after that?!"
|
| Distros just don't care about the user experience. They care
| about making it look fancy, or shifting around designs, or
| introducing brand new components that break old
| functionality. But they don't care if people actually have
| problems using it.
|
| Every bug is the user's fault, and every reinvention-of-the-
| wheel (that actually works worse than the previous wheel) is
| a praiseworthy accomplishment. Regressions are nonexistent,
| hardware compatibility/stability is a guessing game, solving
| common problems is left to the user to Google, all the
| interfaces and apps are inconsistent, there are no
| interactive guides to design changes, and just getting some
| basic hardware like a Bluetooth adapter to work is a multi-
| day adventure. (And I'm a 20+ year Linux veteran.)
|
| I still use Linux because I know that my hardware will
| _mostly_ work, and that once I get past a month of fixing
| bugs on a new install, I can basically make it do what I
| want. But it 's so frustrating to use compared to Windows.
| The only reason I don't use Windows instead is performance
| and troubleshooting is worse there (for the most part) and
| security is scarier. But I want to throw both Linux and
| Windows in the trash. And I won't buy a Mac because the price
| and incompatibility is absurd.
| rlpb wrote:
| > "oh, you used your Linux distribution in a way we said
| you could in our docs?"
|
| Huh? Adding third party repositories has never been a
| supported path. You're welcome to use them since you own
| your system, but the future stability of your system is
| then down to the ability of the third party to not break
| it. Usually third party apt packagers don't consider future
| release upgrades.
| josephg wrote:
| What do you expect users to do in this case, when apt has
| old or missing software? Are users expected to limit
| themselves to the software in the main repositories?
| Windows and macos don't have this constraint. Installing
| applications from the internet never breaks windows
| update or macos. (Sometimes macos updates break homebrew
| or kernel extensions, but that's kind of easier to deal
| with.)
| rlpb wrote:
| Users can only realistically do what their third party
| software providers tell them to do.
|
| The third party software providers, however, owe it to
| their users to provide reliable and responsible
| mechanisms for users to consume their stuff. Providing a
| third party apt repository that breaks the user doing a
| future release upgrade is not it.
|
| Now we have snaps, AppImage, Flatpak. These mechanisms
| can be used by third party software providers to provide
| safe and reliable (for the system) software. Any of them
| are better than providing third party apt repositories.
|
| > Windows and macos don't have this constraint.
| Installing applications from the internet never breaks
| windows update or macos.
|
| That's because it isn't the norm for third party software
| to hack up the OS in order to install themselves, rather
| than use the mechanisms provided. It used to be -
| remember DLL hell? They got away from that, and our
| ecosystem needs to do the same.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| I've had dist-upgrade work 1 out of ~7 times I tried it. My
| count may be off, but that one time I had to help it along.
|
| Yes, I was installing stuff into ~ the entire time.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Just as another data point, to be honest, I've had nothing
| but similar issues with Ubuntu. It always found new, weird,
| sometimes downright bizarre ways to break, often in ways I
| never could figure out how to fix. Mind you, that was back
| when I didn't even do anything unusual and didn't know how to
| really dig into the nuts and bolts of linux... I just
| installed fairly normal apps from the repository with no
| custom configuration. ...That was all pre-snap.
|
| Ironically, I tried again post-snap thinking that would make
| things harder to break. The first app I tried to install
| failed in some bizarre way. I fixed it eventually, but it
| left a pretty sour taste in my mouth. I've had upgrades pre
| 20.0x that basically nuked my whole server. I just can't in
| good faith recommend ubuntu to beginners anymore. Mind you,
| that's for desktop... The 20.04 server is actually pretty
| nice for a headless linux box, though usually I just run it
| in a container from a debian system via lxc.
|
| Conversely, I've _never_ broken my Arch or debian systems
| beyond repair despite really hacking the ever-loving shit out
| of them. I think I had one package I had to fix the version
| on and no other significant issues.
| ostenning wrote:
| Agreed. Ubuntu aways broke more than my Arch system.
| capableweb wrote:
| I wouldn't expect nothing less than being blamed by Ubuntu
| developers for a hacked up system, even though I barely
| described anything.
|
| Thanks for giving me another reason to leave the Ubuntu
| ecosystem behind me. The condescending tone that your message
| has seems to be relatively popular in the Ubuntu/Canonical
| community as well, at least compared to NixOS.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| On my my recent Ubuntu attempt about 2 years ago, a major
| usability problem was diagnosed as "Not using an LTS
| release".
| rlpb wrote:
| You described third party repositories and mismatching
| Python versions. That _is_ a hacked up system, by
| definition.
| [deleted]
| generalizations wrote:
| Seems uncommon that those things would prevent upgrades.
| It sounds more like Ubuntu is beginning to suffer from an
| excess of complexity.
| rlpb wrote:
| I think part of the problem is that third party apt
| repositories have become normalised as if they're a
| reasonable way to "add on" to your existing system.
|
| In reality they're a hack on a packaging system that was
| never designed for third party plugability in this way.
| They very often break future upgrades. Third party apt
| repositories fundamentally cannot express all the
| necessary metadata to allow for upgrades to work in the
| general case. They don't even namespace properly; apt
| cannot even tell the difference between a third party
| installed package and one that came from the
| distribution. And third party packagers typically don't
| even consider future upgrades.
|
| This is why Ubuntu is working on snaps: they are a
| mechanism that allows for third party plugability in a
| way that does not break the system.
|
| If we want upgrades not to break, the system dpkg/apt
| installation needs to be left alone and not be interfered
| with by third parties.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| So, what should I do if you don't decide to include
| critical release of a package that was out there for 6
| months? https://github.com/swaywm/sway/releases
| rlpb wrote:
| Here's some further information on sway specifically.
| Looks like it couldn't be updated because depending
| packages weren't ready for the switch: https://bugs.launc
| hpad.net/ubuntu/+source/phoc/+bug/1938404
| rlpb wrote:
| Sorry that wasn't included. Please understand that it's
| not about "you" and "me" though. Anyone can contribute to
| Ubuntu, and "any responsibility can be carried by any
| contributor who demonstrates the required capacity and
| competence" (https://ubuntu.com/community/code-of-
| conduct). So please join us and help to make this happen
| next time.
|
| Of course there are processes and policies to help us
| ensure quality and that other user expectations (eg.
| stability, integration) are met as best as we can. These
| take time and effort to negotiate. But we'd be happy to
| help to explain what's needed to be contributed to make
| progress in Ubuntu itself for any specific circumstance.
| Find us in #ubuntu-devel on Libera Chat, or
| https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-
| discu...
| the__alchemist wrote:
| This is at the core of why I've found Ubuntu (More
| broadly Linux?) to be frustrating to use. Installing
| programs or functionality beyond what it ships with leads
| to the system ending in a "hacked up", as you put it,
| state. Then reliability tanks.
| josephg wrote:
| I don't know much about python, but for nodejs dev work I
| have about half a dozen versions of nodejs installed.
| It's super handy having all those versions installed so I
| can test that a certain native nodejs package I develop
| builds and works properly. And to rule out nodejs itself
| when reproducing bugs. I use nvm (or fvm) or something to
| manage all that because the system package managers
| updated too slowly.
|
| What are you saying here? That having multiple versions
| of python installed can put your whole OS into some sort
| of unrecoverable corrupted state, and that's expected and
| ok? That's a non starter for me.
| capableweb wrote:
| Yes, because Ubuntu doesn't ship everything you need,
| third-party repositories are needed for my day-to-day
| job. None of the packages I get from that are overwriting
| existing software from official repositories, but still
| Ubuntu recommends turning those off, not sure how that
| should break an upgrade. On the other hand, my Arch
| installation runs with tons of custom software, with
| repositories and more added to it, but still somehow can
| handle upgrades 100 times better than Ubuntu.
|
| Regarding the python, the error message was something
| like "python is gonna be python 3 after the upgrade, and
| we can't handle that so you should uninstall python
| before upgrading", or something similar.
|
| I'm just using what Canonical/Ubuntu are providing me
| when it comes to Python, but still somehow it's up to me
| to remove/install stuff manually when it comes to
| upgrading.
| V-2 wrote:
| Isn't the freedom of "hacking" your system one of the main
| reasons for using Linux to begin with?
| shock wrote:
| You're free to "hack" it as much as you wish, but when
| you break it(if you don't know what you're doing) you get
| to keep all the pieces. And the blame.
| rlpb wrote:
| I'm not sure it's a main reason, but it is indeed a key
| property of having full control over your own system that
| you are welcome to do this. But this level of control
| also comes with a curse: if you break your system, then
| you get to keep the pieces. I find it quite upsetting to
| be blamed instead.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| You are misassessing how people use Desktop/Laptop
| computers. Ie you're assuming people will install Ubuntu,
| and leave it in its default state, or only use package
| managers.
| rlpb wrote:
| I understand how people use their computers. I merely
| object to those people then blaming the distro for not
| writing software that can magically work around how they
| hacked it up.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| I'm sure you don't mean it, but this reads very much like
| victim blaming and responsibility reduction. Most likely the
| assumption of what the distribution should do is different
| for the user and provider, which is going to lead to a lot of
| talking past each other and not many issues being fixed.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| To be fair, some moving parts outside of canonical's work are
| necessary yet break often.
|
| Prominent example: Nvidia drivers. Oh how often have I wiped
| a system because the precise combination of
| driver/CUDA/nvcuvid/nvenc and nvidia-docker broke through
| some freak update.
|
| These are the things that often prevent smooth upgrades.
| bombcar wrote:
| Even when a "version jumping" upgrade is allowed, I usually do
| them in order, unless I'm going from LTS to LTS.
| koolba wrote:
| Bold is the man that jumps across multiple major versions of
| any software.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| I've upgraded from 18.04 in the past, but via intermediary LTS
| releases (i.e. 20.04). Going all in one step is not possible
| IMO.
|
| Also note that Ubuntu LTS releases only do upgrades after the
| first point release of a new version. You won't be upgraded to
| 21.10 until it hits 21.10.1.
|
| [edit] Apparently the holdout until point release .1 only
| applies to LTS versions:
|
| > Upgrades from one LTS to the next LTS release are only
| available after the first point release. For example, Ubuntu
| 18.04 LTS will only upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS after the
| 20.04.1 point release. [https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/upgrade-
| introduction]
| alcidesfonseca wrote:
| I've learned that ubuntu upgrades only if you update to the
| next version as soon as it is released. I have a 14.04 server
| that I cannot upgrade anymore and it sucks.
|
| Also, NVidia and Cuda drivers mess the upgrade path as well.
| And ubuntu is the most supported distro.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Yes, Nvidia is special (in a bad way).
|
| They seem especially hell-bent on pushing new versions of
| CUDA on everyone way before any usable software supports it
| (i.e. try getting a usable tensorflow or mxnet when your
| machine auto-upgraded to 11.4.x one day after its release).
| my123 wrote:
| You can have multiple CUDA versions installed at once,
| it's not exclusive.
| rlpb wrote:
| > I've learned that ubuntu upgrades only if you update to
| the next version as soon as it is released. I have a 14.04
| server that I cannot upgrade anymore and it sucks.
|
| Actually you can upgrade from old releases. You do need to
| move from LTS to LTS, rather than jumping. So you can
| upgrade 14.04 to 16.04, then to 18.04, and then to 20.04.
|
| See https://askubuntu.com/questions/91815/how-to-install-
| softwar... for details.
| prmph wrote:
| And this is why the year of the Linux desktop will forever be
| in the future. From the cryptic (to a normal user) error
| messages, the broken repositories, the (often) primitive UI/UX,
| I really don't see Linux becoming more mainstream popular
| anytime soon.
| flas9sd wrote:
| have a backup and skip the do-release-upgrade script, edit
| /etc/apt/sources.list directly for newer repos, outcomment
| anything 3rdparty (in sources.list.d/ too) and
| update+upgrade+dist-upgrade your system into the future, did it
| this way for years.. it's almost a rolling rhino
| deeblering4 wrote:
| In my experience it's best to simply not attempt in-place major
| distro version upgrades and approach them instead as a
| backup/reimage/restore (or using an alternate/new machine)
|
| This has been true for me across all distros, and honestly it's
| a main reason why I only run linux on servers anymore (easy to
| create a new VM for upgrades, harder to create a new laptop)
| qorrect wrote:
| I have been using linux and Ubuntu for years, and not once
| has a full upgrade gone off without a hitch. I did upgrade to
| 21.10 , and of course it blew away my display drivers.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Hmm, I have a couple of laptops with Ubuntu on them, they
| aren't my primary personal (or work) machines, but I
| generally haven't had trouble upgrading them - I did one
| today, via do-release-upgrade -d and it worked fine (though
| the FF snap, while maybe ok in theory, meant that it had lost
| all my tabs / bookmarks / etc., uninstalling and installing
| via apt got me the deb version which did pull those all in
| from my profile).
| regularfry wrote:
| In my patchy and incomplete experience this is true for
| Ubuntu but untrue for Debian. As long as I've followed the
| upgrade instructions I don't think I've ever had a Debian
| stable version bump fail. Whereas Ubuntu... yeah, backup and
| restore, because you're going to do it anyway.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| If you use btrfs, which Ubuntu defaults to, you can simply
| take a snapshot of your system before upgrading and roll it
| back if there's an issue.
|
| That said, I use Ubuntu on many machines and VMs, and I
| haven't had issues with upgrading them at all.
| Hasnep wrote:
| I don't think Ubuntu defaults to btrfs.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I just looked and you're right.
| mmcdermott wrote:
| Interesting. I ran the upgrade over lunch on my laptop and it
| finished pretty quickly (and I say this as I've been
| considering moving to Arch anyway).
|
| The only complaint I ran into is that I didn't catch the "new
| release available" message on the upgrade dialog the first time
| and had to go check again.
| whitepoplar wrote:
| Does this release allow ZFS-on-root via the server installer?
| (previous releases allowed ZFS-on-root, but only via the desktop
| installer)
| aborsy wrote:
| Over a decade of Ubuntu use, could not be happier!
|
| I remember in 2000s, I had to edit /etc/ text files to set up
| internet etc. Nowadays everything works out of box. All sorts of
| peripherals and hardware is recognized automatically. High
| quality free open source software is available for most stuff I
| need. The freedom to choose software and customize Linux, if
| required, is amazing!
|
| Am I missing anything ignoring closed source Windows and MacOS?
| beebmam wrote:
| For my work PC, I use Ubuntu, period. Too many third party apps
| just don't work very well outside of the Ubuntu ecosystem, apps
| which I need in order to function in my workplace.
|
| I'd probably use something like Arch or rolling my own for work
| if these apps weren't necessary!
| vlod wrote:
| fyi: There are distros which are fundamentally Ubuntu, like
| PopOS.
|
| I'm curious if the apps you're talking about are not
| mainstream.
| vladev wrote:
| You'll be surprised, but it's RedHat that made most of that
| happen. A lot of the important Linux projects are developed
| mostly by them - Gnome, Wayland, NetworkManager, Pipewire,
| flatpak, etc.
|
| Ubuntu, on the other hand, seem to like to do many things their
| way. Like aggressive patching. I recall fontconfig being
| heavily patched from upstream. Then we have Mir (now almost
| abandoned), Unity (abandoned), snap (flatpak, done differently,
| not yet abandoned :).
| xiaomai wrote:
| The fontconfig patches are a big reason I stay with Ubuntu.
| Fonts look _so_ much better on Ubuntu than Arch/etc.
| eecc wrote:
| Well:
|
| * NetworkManager is a dumpster fire.
|
| * Wayland is 10 years in the making and it's still barely out
| of alpha and still missing crucial features such as
| fractional and consistent scaling.
|
| * Pipewire is a welcome attempt to mitigate another source of
| grief, Pulse Audio.
|
| * Gnome? Lets not get started...
|
| Please. RedHat has been a boon to the Linux community but
| it's lack of - how can I put it tactfully - design taste? has
| stranded the platform into a decades-long quicksand of
| endless circular reinvention.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Well, Xorg is also missing fractional and consistent
| scaling - because there are many bugs with it
| flas9sd wrote:
| agreed, Redhat developers are behind many foundational
| packages (longterm thinking?), but I credit Ubuntu with
| bringing many users into Linux. They continue this with the
| WSL stuff.. while I see how distribution non-cooperation is
| difficult, at least the users of Redhat and Ubuntu-derived
| distributions have vastly more in common than what they
| differ by.
| nullspace wrote:
| I get annoyed when I see posts like this with revisionist
| history.
|
| I can't comment on everything but:
|
| > Unity (abandoned)
|
| You probably don't recall how bad Gnome 3 was initially, and
| how much better Unity was over Gnome 2. Sure it also had its
| issues in the beginning, but it took a really long time for
| Gnome 3 to catch up.
|
| > snap (flatpak, done differently, not yet abandoned :).
|
| I am pretty sure flatpak didn't exist when snap was
| announced. Or it was around the same time.
|
| Given the above two, I'd place very little credence on the
| rest of your points. I agree with the Mir situation to some
| extent, but look at how long wayland has taken to ship.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| You are absolutely correct that Gnome 3.0 was bad. Even
| more importantly there isn't anything whatsoever inherently
| with going your own way. Doing so is ultimately how we end
| up with a useful marketplace of tools to pick from.
|
| If you stop worrying about the victimless crime of
| fragmentation neither gnome sucking or the specific
| sequence of development matters.
|
| For what its worth I think they date from around the same
| time.
|
| https://launchpad.net/snapcraft/+milestones September 2015
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpak September 2015
|
| The larger issue would seem to be that canonical has a
| habit of betting on losers it ultimately abandons. Snap
| looks like the next roadkill to me. Far from being
| universal it will probably never see substantial use
| outside Ubuntu.
|
| It suggests perhaps that they should exercise better
| judgement.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _You probably don 't recall how bad Gnome 3 was
| initially_
|
| I do, and I have never seen its face again since then and
| the huge upsetting of ruining what worked well, and to
| create something perverse. And unless it was fixed very
| recently, it still is, because I just tried `gnome-font-
| viewer` and there are fades in the interface that cannot
| seem to be disabled. Unjustifiable. Not just the desktop
| manager: the paradigm. Dis-functional effects imposed to
| the user for no reason. And in a context which replaced
| functions with minimalism.
|
| I am still wondering what caused that stroke of lunacy - at
| the time, I thought it must had been literally a stroke.
| speedybird wrote:
| > _I am still wondering what caused that stroke of lunacy
| - at the time_
|
| Power users have privilege and need to be hobbled; their
| complaints ignored. The needs of users with the least
| privilege, the computer illiterate, should be
| prioritized.
|
| Or something like that.
| midasuni wrote:
| I moved from Debian teating to Ubuntu on the desktop in 206 as
| I felt the repos were more uptodate. The last couple of Ubuntu
| releases have announced me significantly though, netplan and
| subiquity especially
| imron wrote:
| > Nowadays everything works out of box.
|
| Except for decent power management on laptops, and certain
| Bluetooth headsets.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| PopOS has decent power management.
| tssva wrote:
| PopOS does slightly better than most distros out of the box
| on my Thinkpad. Installing tlp greatly improves battery
| life across all distros I have tried and basically
| eliminates the advantage PopOS has. Unfortunately compared
| to this level of improvement I still get about a 30%
| improvement in battery life using Windows without any
| tweaking at all.
| underscore_ku wrote:
| nope
| poisonborz wrote:
| - About 90% of the (GUI) software ever developed? I'm happy to
| hear that there are quality Linux alternatives nowadays, but
| there's just many order of magnitudes more choice on Windows
| (and far less, but still more on Mac). For a lot of categories,
| this might change in the next decade (Electron and other cross-
| platform frameworks, tech like Proton) but for things like
| media editing or even image viewers, or until there is some
| tech to seamlessly emulate, this won't be a fight.
|
| - Trivial app portability - I absolutely love the concept of
| portable Windows software. Have a single folder with
| configuration and binaries, that can run for sure anywhere
| (give or take a .Net/VisualC install) - and you can achieve
| this for 90%+ of all available apps. With a some sync tool it's
| simple to have the same (as in reproducible/copiable) work
| environment on many machines (in the context of ad-hoc gui user
| applications). I know this concept isn't really transferable to
| Linux (separated locations per app, "just build from source")
| and there are attempts (Snap) but due to the fractured scene
| and #1 it's not that practical for end-users.
|
| - Hardware compatibility - cool that you didn't have device
| issues, but this could be because you just don't use non-
| mainstream hardware. Even when I did, a lot of special
| functionality was bound to (Mac/Win) drivers. Sure, not
| Ubuntu's fault, but still.
|
| I think Ubuntu/Linux success stories are infinitely subjective
| - what you need as an end-user, how much time or patience you
| have, or how much you value privacy/lack of telemetry/security.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Some of this feels out of date. I've used a fair amount of
| what seems like obscure peripherals and they've all worked
| fine for at least a few years. That definitely was _not_ the
| case in 2008 and desktop Linux was legitimately hell at times
| back then.
|
| As far as relocatable installs, this is entirely a choice on
| the part of distro maintainers and a consequence of how the
| packages are built. They can be built in a way that allows
| you to put them elsewhere, but it would defeat the purpose of
| having a package manager. Which makes me wonder, does winget
| support relocatable installs? I'm sure you can at least
| understand why Linux distros have chosen to do packaging this
| way. The killer app for Linux is server installs. It might be
| perfectly fine to allow users to move around software they've
| installed after first installing it on a single-user home PC,
| but it destroys the possibility of automation. A package
| manager can't know where the software is if it's constantly
| moving, meaning it can't upgrade or remove it without
| significant user interaction, which can't possibly scale to
| data centers full of servers. Different needs for different
| markets, unfortunately, but to me, even at home, this is an
| advantage of Linux, because I have many devices.
|
| I guess not being choose between hundreds of media viewers
| might matter if you're actually a professional media editor
| or creator, but very people are that. Granted, any
| professional use of a computer other than making software is
| going to benefit from Windows. Professional software just
| targets Windows. That's on the creators of those packages,
| not the system itself. Whether it's CAD, media editors, the
| Adobe suite, software teams that charge for use don't like
| Linux. But they don't like it because people aren't using it.
| It's a chicken and egg problem.
|
| I'm not sure I actually agree with the ease of adding and
| moving Windows software, though. One of the big problems is
| it's often impossible to completely uninstall something.
| Applications quite frequently drop files all over the place
| that Windows Installer doesn't know about if it wasn't
| registered upon installation, and it's even worse if your
| "installation" doesn't use Windows installer at all and it
| just you copying an executable file somewhere. Did it leave
| data in %PROFILE%/LocalLow/AppData, %PROFILE%/Local/AppData,
| or %PROFILE%/Roaming/AppData, and what the heck is even the
| difference between those? Where is it putting logs? Where is
| it expecting config? Without any sort of filesystem hierarchy
| standard like Linux has, there is no way to know, and systems
| just gather cruft over the years to the point that common
| advice is periodically wipe your entire root filesystem and
| start from scratch.
| silisili wrote:
| Re 2: It's actually gotten a lot better. There exists
| Flatpak, AppImage, Snapd, and of course Docker on the
| 'container' front.
|
| A growing number of apps, probably due to Go, are just as you
| described - a binary you can run anywhere.
|
| I will say, I've been solely a Linux user for almost 20 years
| now, and still prefer the Windows structure as you described.
| I like the idea of applications in their own folder, with the
| binaries and configs and everything just there. In Linux, of
| course they are divided - confs go here, binaries go here,
| libraries here. The problem is that -here- isn't well
| defined. Directions for one distro don't necessarily
| translate directly to another wrt to locations.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _Trivial app portability_
|
| The "registry" is not an issue anymore?
| poisonborz wrote:
| A negligible percentage of apps use the registry to store
| configuration, and even if, when missing, it's not an
| issue. If absolutely needed, conf can be easily
| exported/imported on a per app basis. What's far more
| common is to store stuff in AppData, but that can be synced
| as well (with a whitelist).
| astrea wrote:
| video games :(
| midasuni wrote:
| I wish I had time to play, but transport fever, civ 6 and KSP
| all seem to work just fine every few months when I get a few
| hours.
| techrat wrote:
| Proton.
|
| Play on Linux.
|
| Lutris.
| beefjerkins wrote:
| Yeah, gaming on Linux has seriously come a long way thanks
| to the efforts of Valve and the wider community. My main
| issue with gaming on linux is cloud saves; while it
| generally will work with Steam, other platforms like GoG
| have no such capacity, and it's a real drag compared to
| Windows.
| mmcdermott wrote:
| Open source game development remains light, but Wine works
| better now than at any time in the past.
|
| I installed a game that had a Linux release that blew up on
| ALSA libraries. The ultimate fix was to install the Windows
| version over Wine.
| gigglesupstairs wrote:
| Does Steam work in Wine?
| sjustinas wrote:
| The Steam client works natively on Linux. It ships its
| own version of Wine, called Proton and many games work
| well. They are doing lots of work to get the remaining
| games working in preparation for the launch of Steam
| Deck.
|
| https://www.protondb.com/
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Is it still 32bit?
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Steam Proton is the way to do it now.
| techrat wrote:
| From my experience:
|
| Linux > Steam > Proton > Windows Game
|
| works better than
|
| Linux > Wine > Steam > Windows Game
|
| There's really no reason to be running Steam in Wine when
| Steam runs natively within Linux and Proton does the work
| for you for each individual game.
| mercurialmaven wrote:
| In my experience, Ubuntu, or Linux in general, works great on
| desktops but very poorly on laptops due to lack of hardware and
| driver support. Not a hardware engineer myself, I think this is
| because desktop hardware is more standardized while laptop
| hardware is more proprietary, advanced, and custom-made to
| different makes and models. My previous job was the first job I
| had wear a company-supported Linux laptop was even an option. I
| absolutely loved it, but fully admit it was incredibly
| difficult to set up and maintain. Most devs continued to use
| Macbooks.
|
| One specific Linux issue I ran into repeatedly is that Chrome
| and Chromium by default refuse to trust Linux graphics drivers
| and instead do software rendering. It turns out, software
| rendering makes your browser really slow and makes it burn tons
| of battery when not plugged in. I eventually figured out how to
| enable most acceleration for Chrome. However, there were
| several electron apps like Zoom that didn't expose any option
| to enable hardware acceleration. The zoom desktop app was
| completely unusable for me on Linux. Instead, I used the
| browser app exclusively.
|
| Slack was similarly unusable without hardware acceleration but
| to its credit exposed an option to enable it.
| techrat wrote:
| > One specific Linux issue I ran into repeatedly is that
| Chrome and Chromium by default refuse to trust Linux graphics
| drivers and instead do software rendering.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/u1sKBiu.png
| mercurialmaven wrote:
| I don't remember the details, but I remember it wasn't
| nearly as simple as toggling a switch. I remember it
| involving a mixture of:
|
| * Setting custom startup flags to chrome
|
| * accessing a hidden dev-specific page and turning on
| acceleration features that were deemed unsupported or
| experimental.
|
| This page looks related though I don't remember if these
| exact instructions worked for me or not:
| https://www.linuxuprising.com/2021/01/how-to-enable-
| hardware.... I had to do a bunch of research before I
| arrived at a working solution.
|
| After I enabled these features, my desktop started
| encountering a problem where I would have to kill and
| restart the display manager once, and thereafter the
| display manager would occasionally hang and I'd have to
| restart it.
|
| It was manageable with a few days research and technical
| skill, but it's not the kind of thing you would expect most
| people to put up with.
|
| Another thing to note, Chrome's software renderer didn't
| seem to play well with my skylake? integrated graphics. Not
| only was it slow, but buggy with screen tearing and other
| visual artifacts. So I had to get acceleration working so
| my browser would both render properly and be reasonably
| responsive and performant.
| techrat wrote:
| Anecdotal but no less amusing: I upgraded my desktop and used
| the extra parts to rebuild my Windows 10 system, the nearly
| cutting edge hardware on the newly rebuilt main desktop all
| worked when I reinstalled xUbuntu 20.04 on the new SSD.
|
| The hand me down parts, while not ancient, were still old
| enough that I had expected Windows 10 to be able to support it
| when I installed it on the SSD for that machine. Wifi and
| Webcam both did not work after Windows finished installing and
| detecting hardware/updating.
|
| Windows 10 later decided to reboot my system, unprompted, when
| I still had a project file open in Premiere.
|
| How far Linux has come is honestly refreshing. How long Windows
| has continued to have absolute dealbreaker issues is
| astounding.
| beefjerkins wrote:
| Out of interest, have you tried other distributions? Perhaps
| Debian based like Linux Mint / Pop OS, or others like Manjaro?
|
| What keeps you using Ubuntu after all these years?
| techrat wrote:
| Mint and Pop are still Ubuntu based, not to ignore the Debian
| underpinnings of Ubuntu.
|
| I've stuck with xUbuntu because it seems to be the most sane
| of the bunch when it comes to defaults and preinstalled
| software. Once installed, it does a good job of staying out
| of my way UI wise.
| PetahNZ wrote:
| For me, because Ubuntu just works for everything I need it
| to. So I have not found the need to try a different distro.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| I've personally tried some of those. Ubuntu simply works. I
| hate most of their defaults, most add bugs, Ubuntu is what
| most cloud providers use if you're a dev, every software
| provider targets Ubuntu if they target Linux, and so on.
|
| You can install Ubuntu and it'll work. Easy. No other distro
| I've tried (Fedora, Suse, Manjaro, Mint, Mageia) is as easy.
| underscore_ku wrote:
| Mint and Pop are Ubuntu based
| underscore_ku wrote:
| my favorite distro
| mindwok wrote:
| Ubuntu isn't perfect, but as someone who has used Linux as a
| daily desktop driver for the last 3 years or so, I think it's the
| best we've got (including downstream derivatives like Pop and
| Mint). Its release cadence seems to be in the sweet spot between
| 'bleeding edge and may break things' like Fedora and Arch, and
| 'too slow for a developers desktop' like Debian. I think for the
| Linux desktop role, it still manages to edge out the other
| distros.
| airstrike wrote:
| I loved Ubuntu around 2007-2009 or so. Nowdays it feels like
| there are plenty of alternative distros that "just work" without
| so many of the idiosyncratic stuff canonical keeps dumping into
| what used to be "debian for the masses"
|
| _> As Linux evangelist Mark Pilgrim once quipped, Ubuntu "is an
| ancient African word meaning 'can't install Debian'"._
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/16/debian_lenny_review/
| Octabrain wrote:
| I've seen that quote so many times used in forums and I find it
| annoyingly condescending. Actually I think that kind of
| attitudes are one of the worst things in the linux community in
| general. Anyways, I used to stupidly joke back saying that
| "Debian is a code word that means: no relevant contribution to
| the linux ecosystem for the last 15 years".
| reilly3000 wrote:
| I'm a long time Ubuntu user and haven't really shopped for
| other distros. Any recommendations besides Debian?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I like Fedora.
| y4mi wrote:
| Fedora, Arch. You can basically look for any popular distro,
| they're all working very well if you're not entirely out of
| your depth wrt Linux
| shams93 wrote:
| Yeah I switched to Fedora recently, with pipewire setup by
| default its really easy to get great audio performance out
| of the box, I used to have to build custom kernels for
| jackd.
| zamalek wrote:
| Agreed. I've done a lot of Ubuntu and Arch. Arch is
| fantastic. I recently have been trying out Fedora and I
| have been enjoying it a lot.
| petre wrote:
| openSuSE Leap is nice if you don't have anything against
| rpms. Upgrades just work and the distribution has an 18 month
| support window. The packages are pretty polished too. We're
| currently using that and Debian and also Ubuntu 18 on the
| developer workstations, which we'll switch to Debian 11.
| skinkestek wrote:
| KDE Neon. Based on Ubuntu but with a UI built by and for
| actual users, not a UI built by experts for grandmothers.
| dudus wrote:
| Manjaro seems pretty popular now. It's based in Arch with
| rolling releases and everything but gives a good experience
| out of the box while Arch is a full time job to maintain
| e-v wrote:
| > Arch is a full time job to maintain
|
| I've never understood that sentiment. Are there things I
| don't know about I should be doing?
|
| I installed Arch probably four years ago on my laptop, and
| have never had to do anything but install updates and read
| the announcements on archlinux.org since.
|
| I do understand the appeal of Manjaro - I did use it
| briefly when it first came out - but I don't see how
| maintaining Arch Linux would appear as being particularly
| complicated. I literally don't do anything with it I
| wouldn't do with any other OS.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| PopOS. Ubuntu with better power management and a tilling WM.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| If you want to use a multitouch trackpad fluently, Elementary
| is is the only game in town. It has macOS-level support which
| is pretty cool.
| djbusby wrote:
| How do they get it? Can't those tools also work in Debian
| or Gentoo? What's the magic sauce? Kernel patches?
| josephg wrote:
| I've been really happy with Mint. It's based on Ubuntu
| internally, but it feels light and fast.
| tclst wrote:
| If you like (or are okay with) GNOME, I'd recommend giving
| Fedora a try.
|
| Been using for a few years now and it has been the closest
| thing to "set up and forget" to me (I needed to install some
| codecs to play H.264/HEVC video). Painless upgrades, decent
| software catalog... It has been extremely reliable. Highly
| recommend it.
| int_19h wrote:
| Mint is arguably better at being what Ubuntu was originally
| intended to be. And is still based on Ubuntu, so all your mad
| apt-get skills still apply, the packages are readily
| available etc.
| kd913 wrote:
| Ubuntu is a commercial distro. They have their own infra,
| they have their own security team, they have large amounts
| of reliable funding and contracts.
|
| Mint is worked by a few people, had several large security
| flaws including not distributing security updates timely.
| They had issues in the past with their ISO being hacked.
|
| I can empathize with the whole mint, small time dev-base
| stuff. It just doesn't make sense to me compared with just
| going straight ubuntu + cinnamon.
| Chyzwar wrote:
| If anything, Cannonical is aligning with mainstream in recent
| years: upstart -> systemd, unity -> gnome, mir -> wayland
|
| New things that are Canonical specific are netplan and snap. I
| think snap is solving software packaging in Linux. If anything,
| I wish that snap brand stores were more affordable.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| It would seem that snap brand stores are essentially hosted
| private repos something one could do for Ubuntu for as little
| as $5 a month. Why not just use those?
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| Use flatpack
| app4soft wrote:
| Use AppImage + firejail (optionally, to fully sandbox
| AppImage)
| xiaomai wrote:
| I want to like AppImage, but it is just unreasonable that
| there is no built-in way to trivially install a .desktop
| file for a given AppImage I've downloaded.
| handrous wrote:
| I've tried AppImage, Flatpack, and Snap, and AppImage is
| the only one that approaches tolerable.
| nsonha wrote:
| what's wrong with snap? is it that it needs a deamon?
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Still dumping snapd into their server distro for some reason
| though.
| rakoo wrote:
| As someone who left Ubuntu at Hardy Heron (8.04), what are the
| problems with Ubuntu these days ? I know they tried to do
| desktop differently but failed to convince other distros and
| projects to change paradigms but it seems to me they are back
| to more common infrastructure now.
| notatoad wrote:
| Assuming I don't really give a crap about what mechanism is
| used to update Firefox, and just want a browser that works,
| what am I missing out on by sticking with Ubuntu?
|
| It's always been my OS of choice because I don't really care
| about my OS. Is there another distro that is similarly easy for
| me to get up and running With current versions of Firefox,
| chrome, vscode, and docker, and on whatever random hardware I
| happen to have available?
| JonathanBeuys wrote:
| Debian has a strange approach to security these days.
|
| There are over 100 unpatched vurnurabilities in their version
| of Chromium for example:
|
| https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/release/s...
|
| Because of this, I don't see debian as an option for the
| Desktop anymore.
|
| I _hope_ they still fix the server software in their repos.
| hjek wrote:
| Looks like all the CVEs are fixed in Debian Sid at least.
|
| Edit: Not _all,_ apparently. The whole bottom of that
| Chromium CVE list is still unfixed in Bookworm /Sid.
| beermonster wrote:
| Which makes a good case for rolling release distros. Not
| that Sid is released but things tend to get fixed upstream
| quickly and there's less lag than both testing and stable.
|
| The flip side is stuff breaks more regularly of course.
| beermonster wrote:
| Check how many vulnerable packages they have against their
| stable release across all packages and how long until they're
| fixed. It's an eye opener.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I guess a few volunteers can't backport security fixes to
| _all software in the world_ after all.
| beermonster wrote:
| Indeed they can't. So don't depend on that.
| NGRhodes wrote:
| How many of those vulnerabilities have patches available ?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| From what I can tell, the problem with these packages is
| that the security fixes need to be backported into earlier
| versions of packages because upstream fixed them in major
| version releases.
|
| Chromium 90 does not contain all security fixes found in
| Chromium 93 so there are tons of CVEs open on Debian
| systems still rocking Chromium 90.
|
| Most packages have fixes available but Debian doesn't have
| the manpower to backport every single security fix for
| every single package. This is a result of the way their
| project is structured: they guarantee that no major
| software updates happen within Debian releases, helping you
| get a completely stable system, but that comes at the cost
| of an incredible amount of work for the Debian maintainers.
|
| Debian chooses to modify or repackage upstream versions for
| compatibility or branding purposes (to the ire of many open
| source developers, like notably that guy that made
| XScreenSaver. I'd link to his rant about it, but his
| website shows some angry rant when HN is in the referer
| header...) That means that maintainers still need to do
| manual work even when upstream has already provided them
| with a fix for the latest version supported in Debian.
|
| This is why I prefer to run packages from repositories
| maintained by the developers themselves rather than relying
| on Debian's maintainers. The risk of needing to update
| config or check for breaking changes is much higher, but
| the security risk and patch cycle length is much lower.
| Even for browsers that release actively-abused 0day patches
| it can take up to a day or longer for some distributions to
| update their packages.
| Scarbutt wrote:
| Is this a 'chromium is not a priority because google' ?
|
| Or maybe lack of resources and the maintainer needs help.
| bluGill wrote:
| Probably google. Chromium has made the decision to bundle
| all their dependencies instead of play nice with system
| libraries. Which means you either need to re-roll all of
| chromium when something is found, or you need to undo
| google's efforts. I don't blame distributions for refusing
| to give chromium poor support - it is intentionally not
| playing nice.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah because when your software is at the scale of
| Chrome, "playing nice" with system libraries as you put
| it means your software is unreliable, difficult to debug
| and reason about. You want as few unbundled dependencies
| as possible.
| matja wrote:
| Is that the case for all distros? For Arch I see only
| libEGL/libGLESv2 are bundled, every other library is an
| external dependancy:
| https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/chromium/
| TekMol wrote:
| The one thing that I don't like about Ubuntu is that you don't
| have a taskbar.
|
| It is such a productivity boost to see a list of all windows and
| their titles.
|
| And it let's me organize my work much better when I can organize
| this list by changing the order of the buttons.
|
| Is anybody here using Ubuntu with a taskbar?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I recommend you try LXDE or Xfce with Ubuntu or any other
| distro. They are the closest I've used to "just clone Windows
| 95 with a few enhancements and leave it alone", which I like.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| No premade flavor for it, but icewm is great at this.
| pjungwir wrote:
| An easy way to get xfce is with the Xubuntu distribution.
| I've run that since 14.04, or maybe longer. I get all the
| benefits of Ubuntu with a lot less UI churn.
|
| If you already have an Ubuntu box, you can also install the
| `xfce` package or do this: sudo add-apt-
| repository ppa:xubuntu-dev/staging sudo apt update
| sudo apt install xubuntu-desktop
| mikeywazowski wrote:
| I agree, and can't understand how people manage without
| something like this.
|
| I'm pretty sure the `dash to panel` Gnome extension does what
| you want: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-
| panel/
|
| From memory, it can be configured to show the window titles
| instead of just the icons, like the screenshot at the bottom of
| this page:
| https://linuxhint.com/create_two_panel_layout_gnome_shell_us...
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Horizontal bar, with icon and title, for the windows open in
| the current desktop; vertical bar, with bigger icon, for the
| windows from all desktops.
| ProAm wrote:
| What do you mean? Mine has a taskbar from default install.
| Which window manager are you using?
| TekMol wrote:
| What do you mean by "What do you mean?"?
|
| I don't know which window manager. I just use Ubuntus
| defaults. It looks like this:
|
| https://ubuntu.com/wp-
| content/uploads/a728/2020-04-23-13.05....
| outworlder wrote:
| That is a launcher + taskbar. Open an app, it will show
| that the app is open. Open a new app, it will show there.
| Similar to the OSX dock.
| TekMol wrote:
| Yes. I have been using it for a few weeks now and it
| sucks.
|
| Because it does not show the titles of all open windows.
|
| And I cannot organize the entries as I wish.
| airstrike wrote:
| It's great for tablets, though
|
| /s
| ProAm wrote:
| Switch window managers and you'll be able to do that.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| Desktop Environments is what they meant (GNOME, Unity,
| other variants).
|
| If your desktop look like similarly to the image you
| posted, the soft black vertical bar on the far left side of
| the screen is the taskbar. I think you are using Unity as
| your DE which is default DE for Ubuntu.
|
| You can change to different DE if Unity is not your liking.
| There is a couple variants you can use, you can find them
| in the package manager and install it from there.
| TekMol wrote:
| I thought the vertical left bar is a "dock".
|
| It does not display the titles of the open windows and
| does not let me arrange the entries. That are the two
| problems I described.
|
| It feels like this is meant to be used on a mobile device
| rather than on a desktop. On a desktop it makes me way
| less productive compared to a normal taskbar.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| It is the same thing, all OS taskbar does not always
| behave similarly. That is Unity DE unfortunately, they
| are trying to "Fisher-Price" everything in there.
|
| If you want a better taskbar/dock, try different DE and
| see how you like it.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Unity is no longer the default DE, Ubuntu uses Gnome3.
| Unity has not been the default since before 18.04.
| ProAm wrote:
| As others have mentioned it looks like like you are using
| the default Window Manager. You can install others that
| will provide a more familiar taskbar for you (that is a
| taskbar on the left of your screenshot). I've like LXDE and
| XFCE in the past, Im currently using KDE + Plasma, its only
| been a couple weeks so Im still learning it but might
| switch to another. Long story short you can definitely find
| a taskbar that will meet your needs for Ubuntu.
| veeblevee wrote:
| I love Ubuntu but maybe not snaps so much.
| epage wrote:
| Had been with Ubuntu for so long but some problems with snaps
| finally drove me away from it. For now, I'm using Mint due to
| familiarity without snaps but flirted with "user friendly" Arch
| derivatives (had problems with both) and NixOS (got tired of
| specializing in a programming language just to use my OS and
| ran into some problems I couldn't find a solution to.)
| Chyzwar wrote:
| I had no issues with snaps. If anything, I wish more
| userspace software is provided via snap packages.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| The problem with snap is not the software selection, but
| how obnoxious it is on the system.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| It's great to see continued work on Nvidia GPU virtualization. A
| few years ago it was a monsterous challenge.
| amelius wrote:
| I love Ubuntu. But I wish their package manager supported "undo".
| outworlder wrote:
| You could use the Nix package manager with Ubuntu. Not ideal,
| but maybe it helps your use-case.
|
| https://ariya.io/2020/05/nix-package-manager-on-ubuntu-or-de...
| vasergen wrote:
| My setup for last 3 years is Ubuntu with i3wm (gaps) and NIX as a
| package manager. I keep Ubuntu as it is, just upgrade OS packages
| from time to time. All custom setup goes to nix package manager.
| This way I have more flexibility there and up to date tools that
| I use. I have all dependencies in a repo, so can quickly spin-up
| the same desktop environment in another computer if needed, as an
| example I do it between my personal and work laptop. This is
| preatty handy and I don't feel any difference switching between
| computers.
| schaefer wrote:
| Any chance your repo is public? Care to share a URL? I'm just
| getting curious about Nix, and would love to see this specific
| use case in the wild.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Then why not just go full nixos?
| zmk5 wrote:
| Updated a bit ago and it is a fantastic release so far. Yaru is
| very mature by now and the speed improvements for animations in
| Gnome 40 are very evident.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| After using Ubuntu for a couple years, I switched to Arch and
| never even think about going back. Ubuntu is great for people new
| to Linux, but it is like buying a new PC. Some people know very
| little about computers, so they just get an HP or Dell. Then once
| you start learning about graphics cards, SSDs, cooling,
| processors, etc... You either build your own or buy one with the
| components you actually want. That is why I use Arch.
| seiferteric wrote:
| What is so great about Arch? Is it just gentoo for the younger
| generation? I used to use gentoo and build all my own stuff,
| but I just don't care about that anymore and want it to just
| work. That's why I use Ubuntu after using Linux for 20 years :)
| mateuszf wrote:
| It's a DIY KISS distro, but with a lot less building packages
| from source like on Gentoo. And with systemd as default which
| to me is a benefit.
| saghm wrote:
| Arch has a lot of the flexibility of Gentoo (no default
| desktop/window manager/network software/etc., very small
| minimal install) but binary packages (with pacman, a package
| manager that many prefer to apt/yum), as well as the optional
| but very enticing AUR, which is essentially a first-party
| hosting of third-party packages (kind of like a one-stop shop
| for PPAs, if you're used to those). Arguably, the only strong
| opinion Arch holds is defaulting to systemd; you _can_
| replace it, but it's a lot of work and a lot of the package
| in the main repo won't work as-is if you do.
| marcodiego wrote:
| "the most productive environment for cloud-native developers and
| AI/ML innovators across the desktop, devices and cloud."
|
| Whoever wrote this phrase checked all the boxes in the buzzword
| list.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Some discussion here[1] already.
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28864458
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| A lot of negativity in this thread.
|
| I've been using Ubuntu for about 10 years and is my favorite
| distro after trying a few others. I went through the whole distro
| hoping thing and using Arch to set up everything just the way I
| wanted phase, and while very fun & educational, it isn't good for
| getting things done.
|
| Ubuntu just works and let's me be productive with things I care
| about.
|
| Thank you Ubuntu team!
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Same, getting close to 20 years of use here and I keep coming
| back to it.
|
| Big thanks to the team and community. I'll see if I can read a
| Full Circle again soon. :-)
| beermonster wrote:
| I think 20.04 LTS with its 10 years support separates it from the
| crowd. As soon as you're updating every nine months there are
| many great alternatives however.
| bombcar wrote:
| 10 year support is great for servers and "set it up once" type
| setups - but soon enough the libraries provided begin to be out
| of date, and you end up hacking things in.
|
| It was a problem on CentOS before it died the death, anything
| remotely PHPish was always really unhappy.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| The IUS Repo did much in the way of solving PHP Hell on
| RHEL(type) machines.
| jzer0cool wrote:
| I had rotated a lot "pre-ubuntu" trying to discover a
| distribution that works a decade+ before. It was always trying to
| get the video card (at high res) and wifi dongle to work.
|
| Ubuntu just worked out of the box and I was very happy with that.
| So. Cool. The magic was also the boot live install that also
| worked. It really was magical.
|
| I am using Ubuntu on desktop and a mac via VM now which is also
| good performance (no need to dual boot), so I think tech in
| general has come a long way.
|
| ===
|
| Thought someone might be able to help here with something on my
| mind: 1) smooth mousepad scroll? 2) able to utilize multiple
| "desktops" (ie: swipe to different desktop). the mac seems to
| captures the vm as a single application so I can't get multiple
| desktops other than within the guest vm on a single screen.
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