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Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

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Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#151
post #2

Most reviews are very positive. Faster, better, Amazon removed, maybe the best Ubuntu release until now. The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal. Ubuntu is also researching if they can get Adobe on board. I doubt this would ever happen, but that would be huge. Most people stick on Windows and MacOS because Adobe software is not available on Linux.…

> The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. I don't get why they're doing that. Snaps have mostly created problems for me, like they don't scale when other apps do, or the styling is off, or they don't show up properly in the software manager. The snap daemon on one of my laptops always blocks the shutdown by 30 seconds. Generally a rather confusing experience.

Yeah, snaps are pretty much a disaster if you don't have a simple home directory, put some directories on different volumes with a symbolic link (because they are so large and you don't have room), or use /tmp as a temporary directory to save files into and chrome becomes useless (and fails quietly without explaining why) - I must admit if they haven't fixed this stuff I'm likely jumping ship

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#153

I use Ubuntu via WSL2 when WFH (i.e. always, at the moment). I've ran into lots of issues trying to use snaps (e.g. for ccls) in WSL, because of the lack of systemd as PID 1. Does anyone know a robust way to get snapd running properly in WSL2? I would prefer to use whatever package there is than compiling everything that isn't packaged as .deb myself. In the case of ccls it's particularly annoying because I had to in…

There are guides for this at https://discourse.ubuntu.com/c/wsl2 That's the place where you can find any working solutions for WSL2 and Ubuntu.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#154
post #35
post #2

Most reviews are very positive. Faster, better, Amazon removed, maybe the best Ubuntu release until now. The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal. Ubuntu is also researching if they can get Adobe on board. I doubt this would ever happen, but that would be huge. Most people stick on Windows and MacOS because Adobe software is not available on Linux.…

So far, I'm very impressed with 20.04 on my personal laptop (a Thinkpad L390). HiDPI works better out-of-the-box (I didn't actually need to enable scaling manually, but did have to add a Chrome and Teams .desktop file with --force-device-scale-factor=1.2). Power management is much better out-of-the-box too (I've gone from 2-3h battery to 4-8h depending on workload, rivalling what I see under Windows). But you're righ…

oh, I am suprised you praise HiDPI support. I could not make emacs work resonably. It does not react on the widely documented Xft and GDK_DPI_SCALE settings as in other distros.

I am on Xubuntu though if that makes a difference. And I have not tried for a couple of weeks. There have been many package updates since I tried last.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just switch to LibreOffice. The dependency on .docx/.xlsx is an overblown propaganda. I personally had a business in 2007..2011 that replaced windows for Linux. All that time I heard that same old song again: "But but MS Office is so essential!". Turned out, not so much, on over 5000 PCs in several dozen companies. Update: business eventually failed, for one simple reason - Ubuntu Linux is too freaking stable. The id…

Ignoring format issues, LibreOffice just feels extremly slugish for me. I get little freezes all the time, the UI is laggy and startup time is pretty bad too. I came to dislike it so much that i prefer to edit things in Google Docs over LibreOffice .

I personally didn't experience any problems with LibreOffice performance, but things happen probably. Maybe you'll feel better about it since that sluggishness you experience is compensated by the fact that you can run LibreOffice on a proper OS, not slowed down by necessary antivirus software and the likes

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#156
post #10
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not used Snap, Flatpack, Appimage and all the other types of app packaging tools before. What are the benefits? Are they effectively like bundling an application with all its dependencies? Is it a way of running "native" apps instead of in a docker container? What should I and shouldn't be using it for?

They claim that it does sandboxing, which to my knowledge was never actually activated in any meaningful way. I have used flatpaks on fedora which was nice, and I also built some which was quite painless. I hate that I can't launch them from the terminal like usual though.

You're right regarding the sandboxing. Snaps use 'plugs' to add sandbox exceptions that can be configured by the package author and enabled at install time, e.g. to allow access to your home area or the network.

Even if the sandboxing may technically prevent the package escalating to root or whatever, this is a fairly moot point on a personal computer as everything valuable is probably in your home area.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal. Oh, I did not even notice that during 4+ weeks on the unreleased Xubuntu Focal because I never use anything else but the command line to install software. But the target audience Ubuntu is wider, so I think that is a very bad change. One might think they have learned from https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 , but obviously not. Well, formally they…

One can dpkg -i , but, how about dependencies? I always had a problem with that. Whenever the app-store didn't work, which usually pulled-in all deps, I just naively used dpkg -i pkg.deb, and chased all the deps manually, through google. I have done that at least. Thank god for arch. No politics/"religion(s/*)" intended.

apt is your friend. Or apt-get if you prefer old school. Or aptitude if you are willing to learn something pretty powerful.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#158
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using Lubuntu 18.04 as a desktop OS without any problem whatsoever, works like a charm.

Since I know nothing about your machine, that response doesn't really tell me anything. My laptop has 2 cores and 5GB ram. But bigger picture my point was: Lubuntu's focus has changed, so it's not for me any more.

18.04 is the last release that comes with LXDE, wikipedia even lists the requirements

System requirements for Lubuntu 18.04 LTS included a minimum of 1 GB of RAM, although 2 GB was recommended for better performance, plus a Pentium 4, Pentium M, or AMD K8 CPU or newer.[139] The RAM requirements increased from Lubuntu 17.10.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. I don't get why they're doing that. Snaps have mostly created problems for me, like they don't scale when other apps do, or the styling is off, or they don't show up properly in the software manager. The snap daemon on one of my laptops always blocks the shutdown by 30 seconds. Generally a rather confusing experience.

> Snaps have mostly created problems for me I think this is the wrong way to look at it. You still have access to the same packages as before without snap. If you're using snap, that means you either explicitly chose it, or the package is not available in the repo. The choice here isn't between a package or a snap most of the time. It's between: not using the app, packaging it on your own, or using a snap which is no…

But certain packages are migrating to Snap-only, e.g. Chromium.

I understand why they're doing this (primarily to save on build times), but the way they've gone about it (using a transitional Apt package that just installs the Snap) is messy and inconsistent.

If I type `apt install` then I want an Apt package. Under no circumstances should this install a Snap.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#160
post #75
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. The graphical "gnome software" software installer was replaced in the default install by a snap-only fork named "Snap Store" with no support for Flatpak (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/snap-store/+bug/1871944 ). Were there some technical reasons for this move or was it a business decision to kneecap the other package format?

IIRC GNOME removed support for snaps from gnome-software so this was the only way forward.

According to git, gnome-software snap support still seems to be actively developed: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/commits/mast...
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