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

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

#181

Post by chimeracoder »

setquk wrote: post #167
ninkendo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you try to make that point again but without the hyperbole and with some specifics? It's possible you're trying to engage in a real discussion here but it reads like you're just venting.

I believe it deserves as much respect as the systemd maintainers treat their users with. 1. Hosed system down. All systemctl commands fail with "Failed to get D-Bus connection: Operation not permitted". Only option was to reinstall it from scratch, like a Windows machine 2. Does something wrong. So many random weird bugs like "failed to start reboot.service" ffs. Answer is always "upgrade systemd" which is a problem…

> 3. Totalitarian maintainer. Pwnies award for lamest vendor response 2017 covers my complaints there.

It really doesn't. One of the pull requests they link to as the "lamest vendor response" literally has only three comments from Poettering, one which says "Looks great otherwise", one which says "excellent! thanks a ton for fixing this!", and one which answers a question about why a local variable is named MTU.

Seriously, this is the thread itself: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/6214

There's another linked thread where he admits that they misjudged a commit as irrelevant, but explains that they can't rewrite git history, which is unfortunate but hard to take serious issue with. And a third where he says that systemd will defer to validating input according to POSIX and other common cross-distribution requirements, instead of enforcing its own, stricter set of requirements that would actually break other systems.

It's not even hard to find places where Poettering has said something that makes him look less sympathetic than this stuff. But referring to these as the "lamest vendor response" really just makes it look like they're searching for anything to take issue with for Poettering himself, regardless of the topic at hand.

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

#182

Post by megaman22 »

andrepd wrote: post #104
IAmEveryone wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UI is simply terribly hard. And the open source “bazaar” model also happens to be at its worst in UI work. You kinda need a dictator with taste to get UIs right, and the Linux community has neither dictators nor taste.

A counterexample to that is the many other DEs done right: Xfce, Cinnamon, etc.

It's not like there isn't decades of prior art out there on what works well...

A decade ago I was quite happy with the Gnome2 desktop. Since then, I either go with Xubuntu and XFCE or Mint, which was Cinnamon last time I checked.

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

#184

Post by lessclue »

DCKing wrote: post #145

Man, the Linux crowd really sucks. Why am I even reading these comments? I'm of the opinion that the Linux desktop has never been better, and I really enjoy using modern Linux desktops a lot more than I used to. To all those developers that made it possible for us to use this stuff on our computers with no strings attached: thank you. Ubuntu 18.04 is a great collection of these achievements (like many other current L…

I’m of the same opinion. I thought Unity was alright and this new desktop is a great improvement.

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

#185

Post by severine »

themtutty wrote: post #159

Most of the reviewer's comments aren't about anything new in 18.04. It's like he didn't see any of the 17.* releases?

A lot of people are on previous LTS versions. Both 14.04 and 16.04 still have support: https://www.ubuntu.com/info/release-end-of-life

edit: grammar

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

#186

Post by sampo »

pizza234 wrote: post #34
willvarfar wrote: post #3

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.

XFCE is slowly dying, and I think the issues are a symptom of this. The file manager, for a very long time, had a reproducible issue (>20% of the time) where moving a file would cause a crash; based on the Ubuntu bug tracker, took an year and half to fix, and it was (appropriately) marked as critical. It's clearly lacks development resources (and I also personally question the development quality). I still use XUbunt…

The Gnome file manager (Nautilus) works just fine with the Xfce desktop as well. I use the Xubuntu desktop, but I use the Gnome apps instead of the Xfce apps.

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

#187

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Karunamon wrote: post #25

It seems like none of the dumb GNOME warts were plastered over. There's still the idiotic, screen-taking-over activities menu (because, yknow, it should take 3840x2160 pixels to show a fucking app launcher. Did nobody learn from Windows 8? The GNOME devs are officially more hard-headed than Microsoft - an achievement of some note) There's still the swipe-to-unlock desktop There's the default Apple scrolling behavior…

> There's still the idiotic, screen-taking-over activities menu (because, yknow, it should take 3840x2160 pixels to show a fucking app launcher. Did nobody learn from Windows 8?

Launchpad on the Mac takes over the full screen too and I never hear anyone gripe about that.

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

#189

Post by mst »

chimeracoder wrote: post #172
okket wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet with systemd it is even higher, 100:1 or 1000:1, but the few haters are extremely noisy.

> I bet with systemd it is even higher, 100:1 or 1000:1, but the few haters are extremely noisy. People who have positive things to say about systemd have learned long ago to stay away from most discussions about it on places like Hacker News, because they'll just get drive-by-downvoted. They're still around, and they still like (or at least appreciate) systemd; you just won't see them commenting much on those sorts…

There are a lot of valid reasons to praise systemd.

There are a lot of valid reasons to criticise systemd.

However, actually discussing those requires a level of nuance and consideration of the trade-offs involved, especially around forward progress versus reliability, that seems in this case to invariably get utterly derailed by screaming assholery from the far ends of the spectrum.

(signed, somebody who has more negative than positive things to say about systemd, but has also given up trying to engage about such things on here)

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

#190

Post by deltron3030 »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #92
setquk wrote: post #82

I'm not mincing my words here but Gnome 3 is just an unpolishable turd and needs to go away. It's just trying to be original and clever but has missed the mark so incredibly far that makes it the most frustrating thing possible to use on a daily basis. I have tried on and off for 2 years and it is just eye gouging pain to use. I crawl back to xubuntu and XFCE in the end every time as it does the service of getting ou…

UI is simply terribly hard. And the open source “bazaar” model also happens to be at its worst in UI work. You kinda need a dictator with taste to get UIs right, and the Linux community has neither dictators nor taste.

The main problem I see with Linux is the barrier for contributors. Somebody who works as UI designer or web / app developer wouldn't want to to go back to arcane ways of coding UIs, but would want to learn and build upon the skills he needs for his profession. This chasm between how the real world works, and how it works in the Linux ecosystem has to be closed first.

Something like React Native for Linux could help, or maybe a distro that is focused on full stack web/app development, and sets the standards for the rest of the Linux ecosystem in this regard.

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