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Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

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Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#161

Post by readwind »

viraptor wrote: post #150
Jean-Philipe wrote: post #31

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…

The problem is, from a user perspective, when simple things as the included calculator is a snap package. I am biased and it's been a long time since I used Ubuntu or snap, but, you shouldn't need to be a hostage to sloppy snap-early-experiments, for the _calculator_, on an LTS release. This is long ago, and, let's hope these things have improved. And will improve. All progress is progress, let's hope for the best. Freedom is good, long live Ubuntu and snap. Right.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#162

Post by tannhaeuser »

turbinerneiter wrote: post #63
Jean-Philipe wrote: post #31

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.

I'm on Fedora where the equivalent is called Flathub/Flatpaks. There are definitely some rough edges still, but the possible upsides are amazing for me. It makes it way easier for a developer to release for different Linux-flavors. The applications get sandboxed and there is much less risk to mess up your system. Stuff like permission, similar to Android/iOS becomes possible. There for sure is problems to: it makes i…

> I'm on Fedora where the equivalent is called Flathub/Flatpaks. There are definitely some rough edges still, but the possible upsides are amazing for me.

Except Ubuntu and Fedora each use their own container format. The entire reason we're in this place is that RedHat went with .rpm and Debian/Ubuntu with .deb. There's no-one winning in this format war, and no-one is winning by putting yet another layer of abstraction either. Like with Docker, the problem that container app images are trying to solve (that of incompatible 3rd party shared libs) cannot be solved by containers, because the reason for shared libs to exist in the first place is so that eg. security vulnerabilites in old shared lib versions can be transparently fixed by having the OS install newer libs; but (as you say yourself) with containerized apps this is impossible. You might as well ship statically linked apps instead.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#163

Post by readwind »

jamieweb wrote: post #159
viraptor wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's f'd up. Some people say the default settings for sandboxing [in respects of basic snap defaults or setups] etc are basically disabled some places. Hope that works. Bet the skin looks great. Most snaps I used long ago looked like a un-made-up pig to be frankly. I don't hate on snap, I obviously love it, or either I'd not wasted the time. Let's hope it improves. All improvements are great, obviously.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#164

Post by BiteCode_dev »

thdrdt wrote: 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.…

I understand the hate for snap (and flatpak) and I personally use deb as much as I can, but they are the right move.

Yes, right now it's a subpar experience.

But you need to deploy it now to be able to improve on it and have it as the default in the future.

And I believe it's a better future, because:

- packaging a deb is difficult. I've done it, and it's a lot of complicated hard work you get to repeat for every release for anything that is not a simple program. Snap and flatpak are very easy to build and support accross releases. This will increase the number of software that will be provided to Linux. In fact, it already has.

- the permissions model we have on our phones is very hard to replicate on Linux, yet something like this proves more and more necessary. SELinux and Apparmor are too low level. Snap and flatpak make it easy to make sandboxed app and request permissions by abstracting those. What's more, they make it ovious for the user to know that the apps it uses are sandboxed and the permissions they use.

It will take a few years before we get a streamlined experience with snap and flatpak, and it will be at the cost of a bit of performance and disk space. For now they feel bloated, are not necessarily more secure, and are less well integrated.

But in the end, it will make the Linux ecosystem more user friendly.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#165

Post by jabl »

oefrha wrote: post #127
majewsky wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just compare 4k and 5k displays at 27’’ I have one of these, a Samsung U28E590D which I'm very happy with in every way. That thing cost me 220 € (purchased in Germany), so I don't see what's particularly expensive about 4K 27" displays at this point unless you have some very particular requirements about shortest possible reaction time or precise color calibration.

The point is 5k 27’’ displays are significantly more expensive than 4k 27’’ ones (which are very affordable). And unless you prefer very large everything, running a 4k 27’’ display at 2x (meaning 1920x1080) is not desirable. But 5k 27’’ displays can be relatively comfortably run at 2x.

I have a 4k 32", and IMHO 1x is too tiny, 2x too large, something like 125% or 150% is just right for me.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#166

Post by panpanna »

vesinisa wrote: post #37
globular-toast wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throw your nVidia card in the bin and be free. After many years with nVidia I removed the card and I've been happily using Intel hardware for a year now.

Desolder the NVIDIA card on a laptop?

Or just disable it in bios?

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#167

Post by viraptor »

Jonnax wrote: post #9
thdrdt wrote: 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.…

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?

> What are the benefits?

Common packaging layer between distros and independent packaging. You don't end up in a situation where the software is packaged for Ubuntu, but not RedHat for example.

> Are they effectively like bundling an application with all its dependencies?

Kind of. Some dependencies, yes. But there are many layers which apps can depend on, so for example I've got an app which depends on "GNOME Application Platform version 3.36" - that is shared between apps which need it.

> Is it a way of running "native" apps instead of in a docker container?

Pretty much. Docker is more convenient for server software. For GUI apps, flatpak/snap/appimage provide nicer interface and more targeted sandboxing. For example flatpak allows to limit which DBus interfaces are reachable - which is not doable in docker. It also allows things like "filesystems=xdg-download;home:ro;" which protects your home directory files from being overwritten.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#168

Post by baq »

theelous3 wrote: post #102
coinerone wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever tried to open an Excel Sheet from 2002, that one that is existencially important for the whole success of the company :), with makros as big as the Windows Codebase itself, in Libre Office? I can tell MS Office will not leave the field.

Sounds like something a human wouldn't have any use looking at anyway. Multi gb excel files? This is what programming is for.

Excel is a very nice purely functional programming environment with a fantastic debugger.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#169

Post by jamieweb »

thdrdt wrote: 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. It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal.

My main concern with Snap is security.

Using the default Ubuntu Apt repositories, I can `apt install` pretty much anything I want and it's almost guaranteed to not be malicious/dangerous, as only trusted/well-established developers can get their package into the Apt repos.

However, with Snap, everybody in the world can publish any old rubbish in the Snap Store, including packages that typosquat the names of others.

Snap's current 'protections' for this are mainly reactionary rather than preventative, which is far from satisfactory [1].

For me, the absolute key selling point of Linux over Windows/Mac is the secure-by-default and natively integrated package management. Pushing Snaps as the main package management method goes too close to the Windows way of just downloading random EXEs from the internet.

I personally would like to see Apt remain as the default system package manager for all common/well-known software, with Snap existing purely as a 'community' repository for software that is known to be untrusted/unknown.

[1] https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/is-there-any-protection-against...

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#170

Post by readwind »

usr1106 wrote: post #157
readwind wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

huh how well does that work with individual downloaded *.deb packages? You're probably right, but, the included repos are usually full of outdated versions, if you get a too-new deb, from some experimental site, in terms of Ubuntu freshness, and then no pkgs in the repo will have a new enough version. (In terms of dependencies for the local exteriorally-gotten base pkg.deb and it's deps,) I guess ppa's are a thing, but, yeah, good to be off this train, no disrespects to Ubuntu, if it picks up I will surely be glad, and even, chances are slim, ever use it again. We're all friends, let's say yes to progress, in general, in the right directions.
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