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Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

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Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#201

Post by bArray »

llarsson wrote: post #136
bArray wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just take Ubuntu Server and throw a light window manager on top. Ubuntu Server is pretty lightweight as is and there are still some very nice lightweight window managers out there. Something like WM2 is ultra low [1], but watch out if you're running a laptop as you won't get battery monitoring! [1] http://www.xwinman.org/

That web site is horribly out of date, and thus, their "activity rating" of projects is hilariously wrong. I was very happy to see that it claimed that my old pal fluxbox is highly active, but the last three news items on the fluxbox site are from 2015, 2008, and 2006, respectively. But I fully agree with your general sentiment that the best way to use Ubuntu is to go with the Server install and then adding only what…

> I was very happy to see that it claimed that my old pal

> fluxbox is highly active, but the last three news items on

> the fluxbox site are from 2015, 2008, and 2006,

> respectively.

Many of these projects are quite old, but still compile fine and are usable. WM2 for example still runs perfectly fine on top of X11.

> I've never had anything but a good and responsive system

> with that approach.

Fast and gives you an appreciation for what is needed for a functioning desktop.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#202

Post by rhinoceraptor »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #106
LeonM wrote: post #22

Looking through the features Gnome 3.36 - X11 fractional scaling. I got all excited, because this means that now finally Ubuntu will be usable on my Lenovo X1E with High-DPI display. But then further down below: Fractional scaling does not work with the NVIDIA proprietary driver (bug 1870736, bug 1873403). OK, nevermind, back to Windows with WSL...

I can recommend Kubuntu, KDE has better support for fractional scaling and is a very usable and distraction-free window manager. In general I'd try to stay away from NVIDIA drivers on Linux, unless you're doing GPU-intensive work the embedded graphics is often the better choice as it's less power-hungry as well and sufficient for most tasks.

KDE is also a lot less garish than it used to be. That was the one thing holding me back from using it.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#203

Post by jrockway »

encom wrote: post #130
bragh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope the HiDPI support is improved now. Right now, when I use fractional scaling on 19.10, none of the display settings get saved and so after a restart, I have to readjust all of the layout, orientation and scaling for displays. Pretty annoying for a dual-boot triple display system. edit: Nevermind, seems that it got even worse for my case: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1... https://bu…

Try using mixed DPI displays. My main display is 27 inch 4K display, and on the sides I have old 19 inch 1280x1024 displays, used for IRC, music player, process monitor, email etc. Stuff I glance at from time to time. _NOTHING_ supports this setup properly. Even Windows has bugs galore as soon as you mix high and low DPI displays. I don't believe anyone ever tests this scenario. I've learned to tolerate and work arou…

I use a 1440p display at 100% and a 4k display at 175% on Windows and it works fine. The only bug that I see is that if a window is spanned across two monitors, it picks the scaling based on which monitor contains more of the window. I'm not even sure that's a bug, it's just how it has to be done. (My first mixed DPI setup was actually on ChromeOS. That got around the issue by not letting a window span monitors. Actually a somewhat elegant workaround, since it didn't let you do that before HiDPI support ;)

Windows and the applications I use even handle the different refresh rates of my monitors pretty well. I have a 165Hz main monitor and a normal 60Hz monitor. Apps are aware of the framerate differences when I move them around.

It wasn't always good, but as time goes forward applications and Windows itself handles HiDPI better and better.

(FWIW, I haven't had any problems on Ubuntu... except that letting the monitors go into power saving mode resets the display scaling override. That was with 18.10, though. I use an Ubuntu VM under Hyper-V now... begrudgingly.)

Having said that, I am not a GUI power user by any means. On Linux, all I ever use are a browser, terminal, and Emacs. On Windows, I use CAD software and games (and a browser, terminal, and Emacs). It all works well enough for me.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#205

Post by mcjiggerlog »

pantalaimon wrote: post #69
LeonM wrote: post #22

Looking through the features Gnome 3.36 - X11 fractional scaling. I got all excited, because this means that now finally Ubuntu will be usable on my Lenovo X1E with High-DPI display. But then further down below: Fractional scaling does not work with the NVIDIA proprietary driver (bug 1870736, bug 1873403). OK, nevermind, back to Windows with WSL...

Does the Nvidia chip drive the display directly? I think you also have an Intel GPU that drives the display, the Nvidia GPU will only be used to offload rendering. I don't know how it is implemented, but from my understanding, as long as the Intel chiip does the scaling you should be fine.

If you only ever want to use the laptop's screen then you can indeed run the X1E on the intel gpu only. Unfortunately the display ports are hardwired to the discrete gpu so you need run the nvidia chip in that case.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#206

Post by usr1106 »

Zhyl wrote: post #47
doublesCs wrote: post #32

For a long time I've been using Lubuntu on my laptop. However, a couple of years ago they changed focus and From wikipedia: Lubuntu was originally touted as being "lighter, less resource hungry and more energy-efficient", but now aims to be "a functional yet modular distribution focused on getting out of the way and letting users use their computer" I stopped updating my OS since (I'm on 14). Does anyone care to sugg…

If you're just looking for a DE/WM that's light on resources, I can definitely recommend tiling window managers like i3 [1]. I'm not sure what other changes would be in your sightlines given that you were happy with Ubuntu, but I usually go to the Arch wiki in those times to see what fat I can trim off of my setup. [1] https://i3wm.org/

Support for i3. Just don't give up even if it feels a bit awkward to use it the first day(s).

There is also https://swaywm.org/ if someone thinks they should run wayland.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#207

Post by readwind »

TimWolla wrote: post #185
readwind wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

> huh how well does that work with individual downloaded *.deb packages? You can `apt` to install `.deb` files on the local file system using: apt install ./path_to_the.deb

And it will take care of all dependencies? What if the repo packages are version < 2.4 or something, I have ran into that a tons of times. Yeah rather the AUR than the ppas to be frankly these days. I love Ubuntu though, as a general idea. Let's just hope it works sometime. Bit disappointing the last few releases. If it ever truly wasn't. Just gave up after 14.04. Tried to like it but I failed.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#208

Post by stubish »

mcny wrote: post #94
turbinerneiter wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My understanding is snap and flatpak are not equivalent at all because snap is more permissive whereas flatpak is sandboxed. Specifically, it is not possible to do gpg signed commits from flatpak (e.g., jetbrains idea) without tweaks upstream. I agree with the overarching idea though: it gets worse before it gets better. See wayland and how we still can’t capture display in obs. I am a little torn on this. Should the…

Snaps are sandboxed. They can be granted extra privileges, such as access to $HOME, camera, bluetooth etc. Some of these interfaces such as $HOME can be gained automatically by any snap. Others need to be granted by Canonical (to automatically grant access on install), or manually granted by the user post install. There is also a 'classic' mode where the app is unsandboxed, which again needs to be granted by Canonical and in addition requires explicit acceptance by the user when being installed.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#209

Post by breakingcups »

readwind wrote: post #179
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rel…

I agree with almost everything you say, and, yes, people used IIS, windows, as webservers, only not-long ago, so, let's hope for progress. Totally agreed.

I don't see what that has to do with the post you replied to.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#210

Post by markrian »

globular-toast wrote: post #62

I wonder if we'll ever get /usr/bin/python back. Or is it going to be like browser user-agent strings where we call it "python3" forever and forget why we can't just call it python?

You can install the [python-is-python3][0] package on 20.04, which symlinks /usr/bin/python to python3.

[0]: https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/python-is-python3

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