Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) • Hacker News Board

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#391

Post by joshuaellinger » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 2:02 PM UTC

Yesterday, I didn't know what Snaps were. I'm returning to Linux from years in Microsoft land. Used to use Solaris back in the 90s. I'm running big servers in a coloc environment (not desktop) but I want nice things like, oh Python 3, by default. Now, I know way more than I ever wanted to.

So far, there have been two real pain points: 1. Netplan is a mysterious friend who occasionally rearranges my furniture when I'm not looking. 2. Snap is a young kid who wants to make help me get groceries but borrow my car to drive to the store.

I'll leave netplan aside for a moment and focus on Snap.

I got 20.04 to fail badly under KVM using either the just released version or the nightly build because Snap fails. I can see exactly where it fails thanks to Python (cool). It's in an error handler for a UI view that's reading a property that doesn't exist and it hoses the install (ouch). It appears to be triggered because I was testing an odd network configuration.

Once something goes wrong, after that, every change just results in a one-line "apt-get fails" error message.

But consider the implications...

Canonical apparently doesn't have an automated testing system which checks how Snap behaves under failure conditions but they put it into the install process without protections around it. This feels pretty half baked....

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#392

Post by m463 » Sun, Apr 26, 2020, 4:48 AM UTC

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 haven't tried 20.04, but this is the "dconf dump /" setting in 18.04 that got emacs in the ballpark:

  [org/gnome/desktop/interface]
  text-scaling-factor=1.5

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#393

Post by Too » Sun, Apr 26, 2020, 5:06 AM UTC

sho_hn wrote: post #49

zeppelin101 wrote: post #11

"Fractional scaling does not work with the NVIDIA proprietary driver (bug 1870736, bug 1873403)." That's kind of a big deal for any desktop users with a high resolution display.

While I would agree it's certainly not insignificant, fractional means, say, 1.5.x. A nice high-resolution display will be 2x, which will generally result in a nicer experience (largely due to how software deals with it or not). Now many people do indeed have displays where a fractional multiplier works better, but as a buying rec - try to avoid them.

If you put your scale to 2x you might as well save your money and buy an old 1200p screen instead of 4K. Biggest benefit of a 4k screen is more screen real estate, smoother text is of course nice too but imo secondary. When comparing image quality you also have to take panel type into consideration, a very good 2k IPS screen can still be cheaper and have better image quality than a entry level 4K with TN panel.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#394

Post by r3ll » Sun, Apr 26, 2020, 3:34 PM UTC

cies wrote: post #284

suby wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, do you feel the same way about Flatpak?

Have not tried that. Maybe I should, but im on Debian-style distros for so long (and use 'm on servers and such) that I dont really want to learn the basics again. Also, from my RPM days I remember essential (pgk mgmt) tools changing way too often for my taste. Also I'm a KDE/Qt kinda person, and the RPM ecosystem was mostly GTK based.

You can install flatpaks on many distros, including Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Kubuntu, et cetera. I have some flatpaks on a Kubuntu laptop I maintain for a family member and installation was about as smooth as it is on my own fedora machine. I use cli exclusively though so ymmv if you prefer gui(Edit: Exclusively use CLI for sysadmin).