Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better • Hacker News Board

Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#281

Post by Jedd » Fri, May 11, 2018, 8:10 AM UTC

Dayshine wrote: post #74

Jedd wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you re-installing, or re-starting, a VM for this? If you're re-installing from scratch each time you're possibly doing that wrong. An installation from scratch, in any case, should only ask you hostname, domain name, maybe wifi details (probably not for a VM), partitioning preference, and package / function (set of packages) --- none of this stuff benefits from a flashy / GUI installer. > ... I just need a linux…

>Are you re-installing, or re-starting, a VM for this? Yes, of course I am, as an amateur in linux it would be reckless for me reuse an existing linux installation in a different context. The only way I can safely re-use is docker. >An installation from scratch, in any case, should only ask you hostname, domain name Domain name has already lost me, I'm not a website, why do I need a domain? :) In practice, you're usu…

> Yes, of course I am, as an amateur in linux it would be reckless for me reuse an existing linux installation in a different context. The only way I can safely re-use is docker.

If you're using Docker - or even know about it - you're not an amateur.

Since you're talking about your need to 'build a Linux VM for something' this also suggests you're significantly better than average on the GNU/Linux awareness scale.

But to your question -- if you're using a VM instance, make a base build, make it just right, and then snapshot it. When you need to spin up a new Linux VM for something, replicate the snapshot, do an apt-get update/upgrade (or equiv) and carry on. This is fairly common practice and saves having to remember your domain name, root password, home folders etc.

To your last point -- I rarely install Ubuntu, and can really only compare Debian vs various Microsoft installations processes for the past twenty years. GUI GNU/Linux installers were popularised by Ubuntu, and that's why that came up. You're right that totally vanilla CLI installers don't explain things well, but that's what we used to have on Windows 3.1 / 95 / 98 ... and people somehow managed to struggle on. Either average Microsoft users have become dumber (quite possible) or IT types continue to underestimate people's ability to read or work things out. Given almost everyone that installs an OS now has another device to hand to look up guides and answers, I'd suggest it's (installer complexity) even less of a distinction now.

Aside - Microsoft installers always had it much easier than most GNU/Linux installers simply because Microsoft installers (for a very, very long time) didn't give a flying if there was an existing operating system on the box. They'd just re-partition, re-format, install, and overwrite the MBR.

Pretty much every GNU/Linux installation process took great care to accommodate other OS's already in situ, and also documented the process and correct ordering required to be sociable with other OS's.

Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#282

Post by Jedd » Fri, May 11, 2018, 8:13 AM UTC

gnode wrote: post #68

Jedd wrote: post #22

Unity was never the main reason people chose to use Ubuntu -- it was always (well, from when I first heard about it until I lost interest (5 years ago)) the claim that Ubuntu is easier to install than Debian. I never understood the fixation about ease of installing , as that's something I either did once every few years on custom hardware, or had automated already using a CFM. For stuff I installed manually (laptops,…

For people who have little / no experience with Linux, an easy low-expertise required install makes all the difference.

This may be the case, but I expect it applies for a tiny percentage of (potential) users.

For a long time, anyone interested in dipping their toe into GNU/Linux would either use a live CD (Knoppix was huge) or they'd be encouraged by someone that would assist them.

At the risk of sounding dismissive, I'd suggest if someone couldn't summon the patience to follow a fairly straightforward keyboard/location/pick-a-host-name/yeah-use-my-whole-disk sequence of steps, then actually using a GNU/Linux operating system for more than a few days was probably not on the cards. I'm not suggesting it was ever an intentional gating process, but it probably did help to save some people from being even more frustrated.

Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#283

Post by Jedd » Fri, May 11, 2018, 8:21 AM UTC

choward wrote: post #242

Jedd wrote: post #22

Unity was never the main reason people chose to use Ubuntu -- it was always (well, from when I first heard about it until I lost interest (5 years ago)) the claim that Ubuntu is easier to install than Debian. I never understood the fixation about ease of installing , as that's something I either did once every few years on custom hardware, or had automated already using a CFM. For stuff I installed manually (laptops,…

> CFM What is that? Pretty hard to search for.

Whoops, a bit dated abbreviation. Sorry. I usually spell things out as I appreciate this can be annoying.

Configuration Management. The f was often shown as lowercase, as Cf is short for Configuration (don't look for a middle word :) No one knows why.

Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#284

Post by iso-8859-1 » Fri, May 11, 2018, 8:49 AM UTC

chillydawg wrote: post #192

jessaustin wrote: post #173

After updating to 18.04, local DNS no longer works on this machine. It worked before. It seems that the systemd "stub" resolver isn't failing over to the LAN DNS server specified by DHCP. resolve.conf is just a single reference to systemd-resolved. It seems systemd-resolved knows about the LAN DNS server: $ systemd-resolve --status | head -4 Global DNS Servers: 192.168.88.1 It's not using it though: $ nslookup laser…

It's one of many questionable design decisions in the systemd project, in my view. The other one that I really dislike is the entire logging system moving away from plain text files toward binary journals and complex commands to view them.

Really infuriating since it means I no longer can lookup A records on TLD's. Breaking an old DNS feature...

    $ nslookup dk.
    Server:		127.0.0.53
    SERVFAIL
    $ nslookup dk. 8.8.8.8
    Server:		8.8.8.8
    Non-authoritative answer:
    Name:	dk
    Address: 193.163.102.58

Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#285

Post by q3k » Fri, May 11, 2018, 10:00 AM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #278

q3k wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restore sanity by applying the following patch: https://code.hackerspace.pl/q3k/q3kverlay/tree/x11-libs/gtk+... (or just use this overlay if you run Gentoo)

Any tutorial on this ? And above all, how to automate it so that it's applied after updates ?

Depends on the distribution you use. Some (Debian, Ubuntu) make it extremely annoying to apply your own patches to packages, while others (Arch, Gentoo) make it very easy.

Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#286

Post by Sylos » Fri, May 11, 2018, 1:30 PM UTC

dnr wrote: post #265

kcdigital wrote: post #87

Anyone else use a tiling window manager like i3wm? https://i3wm.org/ Since I mostly work in the terminal, it improves my productivity quite a bit when I can navigate around and open apps without touching the mouse.

Yup. I'm probably one of three people still using ion3, which was last updated around 2009 (actually the "notion" fork that builds on modern linux). I've tried to switch but the muscle memory for my custom keybindings is too strong :(

You could probably set up another WM to have the same custom keybindings...

Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#287

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, May 11, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

djanogo wrote: post #76

fb03 wrote: post #23

I've been skipping all the Unity drama by staying on Xubuntu which is really snappy and stays out of your way. Also, Gnome on this laptop (Dell Inspiron 15 7000) gave me (and several others users, as per forum post https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2358975 and some bug reports I found on the internet) a freeze or stutter every 10 or so seconds. So instead of having to start debugging shit from a fresh Linux i…

I have been using XFCE for 5 or 6 years, the _best_ thing about it are it's developers, they don't keep updating it. XFCE avoids the plague which affects rest of the software industry (me included) - dedicate design, marketing, and development teams who constantly have to add something to justify their jobs and bonuses. Look at the number of app updates on mobile phones, every freaking week there is a update availabl…

Windowmaker perfects this ;-)

Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#288

Post by mcovey » Fri, May 11, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

matharmin wrote: post #212

jto1218 wrote: post #202

I don't know if this is on topic but I switched to Ubuntu 18.04 recently and ran into this fairly annoying bug [1]. Installing curl installs libcurl4, which then uninstalls any applications you have that have a dependency on libcurl3 (which turns out to be Slack, Virtualbox, and some others). They really need to figure out how to allow libcurl4 and libcurl3 to live side-by-side if that's possible. Responses from ubun…

For Slack you can use the snap package, which doesn't have that issue.

For some reason I can only run the snap with sudo, and thus any processes it spawns (clicking links or opening a file manager for example) run as root.

Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#289

Post by Sylos » Fri, May 11, 2018, 5:28 PM UTC

banishwashtub wrote: post #102

rullopat wrote: post #42

With KDE that got so much better in the last 2-3 years, Qt license that is not an issue anymore since a long time... why so many distros are still using GNOME (especially version 3)?

I try using KDE every couple of years and I can't even put my finger on why it grosses me out so much. The "K" start to every piece of software is obnoxious, I don't know if this is true today but I remember one of my first times using KDE and searching for "calculator" or something and being unable to find it because it was "kalculator". Terrible UX. I think what really gets me is I use Windows at work and KDE is to…

They are somewhat moving away from calling everything and the kitchensync something with K, but the calculator is still called KCalc.

Luckily, the search has gotten a lot better, so it will actually find KCalc when you type in "calculator".

You can also type "1+1" into the search bar and it will tell you the result right there.

And there's also an option to have the menu show applications with their generic names. So, for example "File Manager" instead of "Dolphin". Depending on the distro, this option may be default-on, too.

And now would be a good time to try it again, by the way. The last three years were spent with a major rewrite. Now it has most of the features that you'd expect from a KDE again, is stable and has been stable for long enough that most distros actually have a stable version in their repos (even Kubuntu is decent for once.)

Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#290

Post by derefr » Fri, May 11, 2018, 8:27 PM UTC

_phaq wrote: post #169

shabbyrobe wrote: post #77

> Ubuntu has done a bit of tweaking so that you can actually put launchers, folders, and files on your desktop, which should be welcome news for many Ubuntu users. How long that will last is an open question, though, since GNOME just completely removed the code that made it possible for Canonical to enable this feature. I was curious about this and went spelunking for more information. https://community.ubuntu.com/t/…

> It seems wilfully destructive to remove something that is depended on by so many without making sure there's a replacement in place first. Could cut straight to the GNOME logo after that sentence. This is sort of what they do, yeah. And they do have their niche with that, which is big enterprise-y, centrally administered systems. If the user doesn't need to administer things themselves, then not exposing ways of ad…

I think there are two different kinds of "power users" that people have been conflating without noticing.

• There are the kind that want more "power" exposed through the GUI, with administration happening through the same interface as regular usage. This culminates in things like Windows Server administration via snap-ins. This is traditionally what a "power user" refers to.

• There are the kind that want to treat their PC or mobile device as, effectively, single-node enterprise systems, with administration happening through alternative interfaces that were designed specifically for administration, usually of large clusters of systems. These are the folks who are at home with Windows Group Policy Objects; Linux config files; MDM profiles on mobile; etc. Basically, sysadmins who happen to be administering their home network. These also get called "power users", though maybe "hobbyists" (that hobby being https://reddit.com/r/homelab/ building) might be more apropos.

Most modern OSes seem to be moving away from supporting the first kind of "power user", seemingly because features that support that use-case are also "sharp edges" where less-knowledgeable users can hurt themselves.

But modern OSes are exposing ever-more configuration functionality to the second kind of "power user." Windows now lets you do more things through PowerShell commands than you ever could through the Control Panel. macOS has always left the more arcane functionality to the terminal, creating POSIX-ish tools like diskutil(8), defaults(8), scutil(8), lsregister(8), etc. And Linux, underneath, is still just glued together 99% via editable plaintext files (the newest iteration being systemd unit files.)

As "the second kind of power user", I like using GNOME just fine. (It's actually a little bit "more powerful" for me than macOS is, even, because I'm also the third kind of power user: a developer willing to tweak the GNOME source to get what I want. ;)