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Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

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Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#291

Post by julianlam »

cies wrote: post #91
zyga wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still work in progress but snaps genuinely make packaging easier. There are rough edges, especially on the desktop, but those are all being worked on, in collaboration with flatpak actually. It will take a while but in the future it will not be any worse at runtime and it will be much, much easier to package and run apps across releases and OSes

Ubuntu had the calculator as a snap! What's the idea with that? It suddenly took 2 secs to load and uses load of memory... I dont care packaging got easier. I care for a smooth working system I can understand and instrument, and that does not hog resources.

Oh! Is _that_ why the calculator is nigh unusable now? Sheesh, this just shot snap's credibility right out the window. It's faster for me to boot up the node executable and do my calculations there.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#292

Post by linsomniac »

In the linked post they mention "ZFS Native Encryption", but (to save others the time I spent on it): Encrypted ZFS is not available in the installer. However, it will boot encrypted ZFS fine.

If you boot the live image and modify a source file, you can install to an encrypted ZFS. I've documented what I had to do here: https://linsomniac.gitlab.io/post/2020-04-09-ubuntu-2004-enc...

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#293

Post by brnt »

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.…

Does the snap store mean that much software was moved out of the apt repositories or is it also still available there as well?

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#294

Post by distances »

nanna wrote: post #267
distances wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for KDE+Ubuntu it's always advisable to also check the official KDE distro KDE Neon, based on Ubuntu LTS. I don't know of the timeline for 20.04 based version though.

What's the advantage of Neon over Kubuntu?

Up to date and optimally integrated KDE directly from the project.

Looks like 18.04 came for KDE Neon only in August 2018, so that's a bit slower process then I suppose.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#296

Post by davb »

usr1106 wrote: post #154
davb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually tried installing xubuntu-desktop first (and then plain old xfce) as I fancied switching back to them after a few years using Gnome. But you're definitely right that out-of-the-box, XFCE HiDPI support was lacking. Widgets (panels, icons, etc) and fonts all scaled fairly independently, and I gave us after manually resizing a few elements.

On Ubuntu 20.04 (with Gnome), it just worked (with the exception of Chromium/CEF/Blink based applications like Chrome and Teams, which needed the aforementioned command line argument to scale them). I actually had to undo most of the scaling changes that came across with my restored home folder. The one other thing I had to change was the Terminal font as the default was a little too small to use comfortably on my laptop screen - I opted for Liberation Mono Regular, 12pt (px?) with 1.10x height.

As a former long-time XFCE proponent, I recommend you give Ubuntu + Gnome a try. It's the best it's been since the Gnome 2 days, and is no-where near as power hungry as it has been in recent years. The most power-hungry application I'm running is Evolution, where the webkit process that renders HTML email frequently gets out of control and burns 40% CPU until I restart it (I'd use Thunderbird but the Lightning plugin https://github.com/ExchangeCalendar/exchangecalendar to handle Exchange calendar stopped working with recent versions of Thunderbird some months ago).

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#297

Post by enriquto »

timClicks wrote: post #125
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.…

Snaps are significantly safer for users and easier for publishers to produce. The styling issues and so forth occur because of a security-first mindset. [Disclaimer: work for Canonical, but not on the Snapcraft team]

> because of a security-first mindset.

I would believe you here if snap was not an auto-updating system. This is about the least security-first mindset that it can be; it has a single, gaping, point of failure, after which an attacker may get hold of millions of user's computers without action by their part.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#298

Post by arprocter »

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…

Definitely check out MX (their 19 image even fits onto a 2GB USB) - I have a crappy old netbook with only 2GB of RAM and it's surprisingly useable

Other options worth looking at - Peppermint is okay (although their focus on web apps is a little odd), or LTS Ubuntu MATE using the minimal install option

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#299

Post by Legogris »

Kudos wrote: post #110
Legogris wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of packages (specifically which slip my mind) that either were only available as snaps and not in the main apt repos, or had way older versions in the apt repos. At that point, there's no reason to not run debian instead.

I'd like to understand which packages, I've had no packages I need disappear. I'm skeptical that the packages are actually missing to favour snaps, and not simply renamed or replaced.

My guess is more attention and focus on snaps and increasing neglect maintaining the deb repo.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#300

Post by InternetOfStuff »

microtonal wrote: post #288
jamieweb wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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. Maybe not malicious, but packages in the universe repos only have 'community maintenance', meaning that they are not updated with security fixes in any systematic manner. Given that you need universe to have a somewhat useful sy…

> meaning that they are not updated with security fixes in any systematic manner.

Interestingly, that exact thing was always my worry about Snap (or Flatpack) as well.

Sure, big-name software such as Spotify will keep their Snap package well in order; they've got both the incentive and manpower to do so. (Incidentally, they could also use this manpower to build distro-specific packages).

But what about all the little open-source hobby projects? They'll be packaged with whatever library version happens to be latest at the time. And then, be updated whenever the hobbyist dev finds the time and inclination.

So on my system I might have a huge zoo of different versions of the same library, with various bugs or vulnerabilities.

If they all used the same system-wide library, at least they would all be fixed at the same time (when the library maintainers publish an updated .deb).

To me, Snap and the like feel like they're essentially the same as static linking, except more opaque.

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