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

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241–250 of 391 posts

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

#241
post #45
post #8

Ubuntu is dead for me since the release where they were sending the data you typed in the internal search across the internet. And Shuttleworth claimed it's not a big deal. Since then, I'm a happy Linux Mint user. And since we are talking about Linux distros: I tried a bunch of times to live with a distro that has no start bar at the bottom. Even after a few weeks my productivity does not recover. It's a mistery to m…

> the data you typed in the internal search Your problem is that you viewed it as an internal search, when it was designed and advertised as a global search. If you want to argue that the global search should have been an internal search, that's fine. If you imply that the search was an internal search, though, then that's misleading FUD.

"it was designed and advertised as a global search"

No it was not. There were Lenses that were advertised as non-local searches, yes, but the main Lens was (to my recollection) not one of them.

What actually happened was that Canonical took the main search bar (which had traditionally been designed to search for local files and programs) and stuck Amazon search results in it. Then, when users (like myself) recommended the reasonable approach of "just stick the Amazon stuff in a dedicated Shopping Lens and leave the main Lens for local searches like it was before", Shuttleworth and friends doubled down.

Before that point, I was a happy Ubuntu user who - though I liked Gnome2 a lot - was at least willing to use Unity. After that point, I stopped using Ubuntu entirely and started my quest to find a new distro (Mint → Debian → Fedora → Gentoo → Arch → Slackware → Debian again → openSUSE → Slackware).

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

#242
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 tend to be pretty critical of Linux because I do genuinely believe there's a lot of stuff in Linux that's really bad. Would I ever give it up and switch to Windows/Mac? No, never in a million years. Compared to modern Windows 10, Gnome's UX is masterful. Linux has actually come pretty far - set up is still annoying, and some problems are still unnecessarily difficult to solve, but for the most part once you get eve…

I was using Gnome on Fedora for a while but I switched to Windows 10 a few months ago and can't say I've had any problems with the UX.

Window snapping works. Minimizing windows works. You can do that thing where it shows a small version of everything you have open on both (win+tab on Win10, don't remember the Gnome shortcut).

Recommending Linux to someone over Windows seems insane to me unless that person is literally just using a web browser for everything or they are a developer. An operating system is useless unless it runs the programs you want to run and Linux is still missing so much. Microsoft Office would be a good start.

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

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 1. What's wrong with the maximise button? It wasn't broken, it didn't need fixing. 2. What if you want the window at the top of the screen without being maximised?

> 2. What if you want the window at the top of the screen without being maximised? I'm using Unity in Ubuntu 16.04, and there a window only gets maximized if you drag it very close to the top edge of the screen. If you drag it to the bottom of the top bar or anywhere in the bottom half of the top bar, it moves to the bottom edge of the top bar without maximizing.

I got so much used to Unity. 17.04 felt more alien to me than when I first tried Win8 Metro. I'm getting old...

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

#244
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 owe my career in part to the fact that I just bit the bullet, dumped windows, and switched to Ubuntu as my main OS about 7 years ago. In the war on general purpose computing they're still fighting the good fight.

I, for one, am happy that a war is being fought on general purpose computing because it seems to be the only way to make everything "just work" to an acceptable degree.

The iPad is the least general and most locked down computer I've ever used but I love it because it just works. I've never had a problem with it.

I was a diehard Linux guy for five or six years but now I run Windows 10 on all my computers and spend most of my time in the iPad anyways.

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

#245
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately in the music production world, Windows or OSX are the only options if you want to customize your hardware (sequencers, synthesizers, etc) or import patches/presets. I think this is largely because no major DAW has Linux support.

So thank you, Bitwig Studio https://www.bitwig.com/

Bitwig Studio is great for the Linux audio world but the real problem is plug-in compatibility on Linux.

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

#246
post #229

Ubuntu 18.04 is the first release to include my app, PikoPixel (pixel-art editor), in its repository (universe): https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/gnustep/pikopixel.app I had to tweak PP's packaging to get it to appear in the Ubuntu Software app, so I can provide a bit of info about this part of the article: My assumption for now is that the Ubuntu Software application only shows updates for packages that were insta…

If only we lived in a world where developers could just distribute their application binaries to the end user without having to rely on a storefront.

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

#247
post #203

Upgrading from 16.04, the experience is quite awkward. CLI wise, I love Ubuntu and 18.04 is just a refined version of a very functional desktop/server distribution. GUI wise though, it seems to have changed many defaults, a lot of which will require extensions or obscure gsettings/dconf commands. But mulitple monitor really felt like a mess compared to unity. Workspace switches only the laptop screen, no grid layout,…

For those reasons, I like Xfce and LXDE on Xubuntu and Lubuntu, respectively. I use those for workstations, they've got the same CLI features as Ubuntu, and I don't need or want a bunch of GUI chrome in my dev environments.

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

#248

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.

Maybe this is different nowadays, but my initial experiences with Cinnamon a few years back (right when I first switched to Mint in light of Ubuntu's Amazon Lens debacle) were very strongly negative. It was ugly, unstable, slow, difficult to customize, and in general just as shitty as GNOME 3 was at the time.

MATE, on the other hand, was/is fantastic. GNOME 2 already was just about perfect for me, and though I was willing to give Unity a try, I was disappointed that it was so different from GNOME. MATE filled that void in my heart like no other DE could.

Xfce is also excellent, and is what I'm using at work right now (though I'm looking into switching back to a tiling WM, since I feel like I'm more productive with it).

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

#249
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Seri…

Just to have some context, the very same Pwnie "lamest vendor response" award was given to the OpenBSD project in 2007.

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

#250

Two pages to monitor if you want to jump on 18.04 as soon as possible: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2018-April... http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969 (No affiliation beyond being a user for about 4 years.)

If you want to jump/upgrade, simply add

deb [arch=amd64,i386] http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic main restricted universe multiverse

deb [arch=amd64,i386] http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic-updates main restricted universe multiverse

deb [arch=amd64,i386] http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic-security main restricted universe multiverse

deb [arch=amd64,i386] http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-security main restricted universe multiverse

to /etc/apt/sources.list

hit apt update && apt full-upgrade

If things look okay (it should upgrade a bunch of packages, add quite a lot new, and remove only a handful), hit enter.

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