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A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

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71–80 of 391 posts

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#71

Why doesn't Ubuntu (and many other distributions) change to a rolling release model. Having switched to Arch, though admittedly the installation process is much more elaborate than of Ubuntu, once you customise it to one's preference, it is much more convenient to keep upgrading individual packages as they are evolving.

> Arch, though admittedly the installation process is much more elaborate than of Ubuntu

If you want easier-to-install-Arch and a bit more cautious/safer rolling release cycles, take a look at Manjaro.

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#72

The technical audience who actually use Linux desktops want more customization not less, and the crowd that Ubuntu seems to be chasing doesn't seem to actually exist? Hmm this doesn't make me want to leave xubuntu any time soon, although I too have noticed the recent xfce issues mentioned in the article.

Yesterday, I finished converting a bike shop to Ubuntu Linux only. They are ridiculously happy because: - device drivers actually work - they don't have to worry anymore about viruses - they can use old machines without trouble So yeah, zero customization - but a way better experience than Windows. So, your crowd not only exists, but got me a new bicycle!

lol

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#73
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNOME is what you get when you build a team for political reasons instead of hiring good developers and designers. To make it good you'd have to exchange the whole team first. It's LXDE for me from here on out.

I'm very unfamiliar with gnome as an organization. What are the political reasons you're referencing?

>The GNOME Foundation has run into cash flow problems [...] got into this situation through its Outreach Program for Women [...] "The Outreach Program for Women (OPW) helps women (cis and trans) and genderqueer get involved in free and open source software."

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTY2Mjc

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes the window. FOR GODS SAKE WHY. I use this all the time when working with several monitors. Just press Alt, click somewhere onto a window, move this window to a different monitor, smash window to the top of the screen. Bam, instant monitor-switching of full-screen windows. (And yes, usually I use keyboard shortcuts for this but when the hand is already on the mous…

I love those features so much. Dragging the window near a side of the screen make it fills half of it too.

I learned that Windows has another nice variation on this: When you vertically resize (not drag!) a window to the top, it vertically maximizes the window. On Linux I configure a double click on the top bar to do this. I like to vertically maximize my terminals.

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#75
post #31

When the display goes to sleep due to lack of input or whatever, you have to drag upwards with your mouse to unlock the screen. Like some common dirty frickin' smart phone. Yes! Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes the window. FOR GODS SAKE WHY. Double yes!

> Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes the window. FOR GODS SAKE WHY.

This also works in Xfce and I love it.

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#76
post #11
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a member of the technical audience who actually uses Linux (Ubuntu), I want almost no customization. I want sane and tested defaults, not a bunch of knobs to adjust things. I mourn the loss of the Unity Desktop which was virtually perfect OOTB. It had a great management of the screen space, especially on laptops, it was pretty, and it worked. I wouldn't even change the desktop background.

The problem with sane defaults is that everyone seems to have their own idea what the default should be.

That's not true. People want an "intuitive" UI, meaning familiar. While there are some outliers, most people find Windows and OS X UI conventions familiar. Sticking to these conventions as "sane defaults" pleases most users.

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#78
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just press enter to get to the password prompt without using the mouse.

or just start typing your password

Interestingly pressing the Up arrow, as might be expected after seeing the upwards-pointing chevrons on the lock screen, doesn't work.

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#79
post #44

Why doesn't Ubuntu (and many other distributions) change to a rolling release model. Having switched to Arch, though admittedly the installation process is much more elaborate than of Ubuntu, once you customise it to one's preference, it is much more convenient to keep upgrading individual packages as they are evolving.

Last time I tried Arch (about a decade ago), I gave a command to update packages. In the update, my NVIDIA card was moved to be supported by "nvidia-legacy" rather than "nvidia"... Of course, I didn't have legacy drivers installed, so the driver failed pretty badly (it was assigned to NVIDIA in my xorg conf). X wouldn't load, and because several aspects of X changed in the update, I had to spend a few hours figuring…

Couldn't they do a "freeze" with backports just for the LTS? My experience with non LTS versions were always awful so I don't see why a rolling release model would be that much worse.

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#80
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very unfamiliar with gnome as an organization. What are the political reasons you're referencing?

>The GNOME Foundation has run into cash flow problems [...] got into this situation through its Outreach Program for Women [...] "The Outreach Program for Women (OPW) helps women (cis and trans) and genderqueer get involved in free and open source software." https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTY2Mjc

Really, GNOME's problem is the low quality of their software and poor responsiveness to user feedback and needs, not inane social initiatives. So long as Red Hat is one of their primary sponsors, it's not going anywhere.
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