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Ubuntu 21.10

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101–110 of 295 posts

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#101
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder why Ubuntu/Canonical can never get their upgrade game to work properly. Ubuntu developer here. Sounds like you have a really hacked up system there, and that it's your existing system that has issues. Under these circumstances, I don't think it's reasonable to expect an upgrade to be able to work smoothly. Scripts that handle upgrade paths necessarily need to make assumptions that what they are upgrading f…

See, this is why Linux distributions piss me off. You have an upgrade path that breaks, and when it does the response is "oh, you used your Linux distribution in a way we said you could in our docs? why would you think the upgrade would work after that?!" Distros just don't care about the user experience. They care about making it look fancy, or shifting around designs, or introducing brand new components that break…

> "oh, you used your Linux distribution in a way we said you could in our docs?"

Huh? Adding third party repositories has never been a supported path. You're welcome to use them since you own your system, but the future stability of your system is then down to the ability of the third party to not break it. Usually third party apt packagers don't consider future release upgrades.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#102
post #17

The one thing that I don't like about Ubuntu is that you don't have a taskbar. It is such a productivity boost to see a list of all windows and their titles. And it let's me organize my work much better when I can organize this list by changing the order of the buttons. Is anybody here using Ubuntu with a taskbar?

I recommend you try LXDE or Xfce with Ubuntu or any other distro. They are the closest I've used to "just clone Windows 95 with a few enhancements and leave it alone", which I like.

No premade flavor for it, but icewm is great at this.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#103
post #12

Over a decade of Ubuntu use, could not be happier! I remember in 2000s, I had to edit /etc/ text files to set up internet etc. Nowadays everything works out of box. All sorts of peripherals and hardware is recognized automatically. High quality free open source software is available for most stuff I need. The freedom to choose software and customize Linux, if required, is amazing! Am I missing anything ignoring close…

- About 90% of the (GUI) software ever developed? I'm happy to hear that there are quality Linux alternatives nowadays, but there's just many order of magnitudes more choice on Windows (and far less, but still more on Mac). For a lot of categories, this might change in the next decade (Electron and other cross-platform frameworks, tech like Proton) but for things like media editing or even image viewers, or until the…

Re 2: It's actually gotten a lot better. There exists Flatpak, AppImage, Snapd, and of course Docker on the 'container' front.

A growing number of apps, probably due to Go, are just as you described - a binary you can run anywhere.

I will say, I've been solely a Linux user for almost 20 years now, and still prefer the Windows structure as you described. I like the idea of applications in their own folder, with the binaries and configs and everything just there. In Linux, of course they are divided - confs go here, binaries go here, libraries here. The problem is that -here- isn't well defined. Directions for one distro don't necessarily translate directly to another wrt to locations.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#104
post #17

The one thing that I don't like about Ubuntu is that you don't have a taskbar. It is such a productivity boost to see a list of all windows and their titles. And it let's me organize my work much better when I can organize this list by changing the order of the buttons. Is anybody here using Ubuntu with a taskbar?

I agree, and can't understand how people manage without something like this.

I'm pretty sure the `dash to panel` Gnome extension does what you want: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/

From memory, it can be configured to show the window titles instead of just the icons, like the screenshot at the bottom of this page: https://linuxhint.com/create_two_panel_layout_gnome_shell_us...

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#105
post #72

I loved Ubuntu around 2007-2009 or so. Nowdays it feels like there are plenty of alternative distros that "just work" without so many of the idiosyncratic stuff canonical keeps dumping into what used to be "debian for the masses" > As Linux evangelist Mark Pilgrim once quipped, Ubuntu "is an ancient African word meaning 'can't install Debian'". https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/16/debian_lenny_review/

If anything, Cannonical is aligning with mainstream in recent years: upstart -> systemd, unity -> gnome, mir -> wayland New things that are Canonical specific are netplan and snap. I think snap is solving software packaging in Linux. If anything, I wish that snap brand stores were more affordable.

Use flatpack

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#106

I loved Ubuntu around 2007-2009 or so. Nowdays it feels like there are plenty of alternative distros that "just work" without so many of the idiosyncratic stuff canonical keeps dumping into what used to be "debian for the masses" > As Linux evangelist Mark Pilgrim once quipped, Ubuntu "is an ancient African word meaning 'can't install Debian'". https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/16/debian_lenny_review/

I’m a long time Ubuntu user and haven’t really shopped for other distros. Any recommendations besides Debian?

I like Fedora.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#107
Ubuntu isn't perfect, but as someone who has used Linux as a daily desktop driver for the last 3 years or so, I think it's the best we've got (including downstream derivatives like Pop and Mint). Its release cadence seems to be in the sweet spot between 'bleeding edge and may break things' like Fedora and Arch, and 'too slow for a developers desktop' like Debian. I think for the Linux desktop role, it still manages to edge out the other distros.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#108
post #36
post #12

Over a decade of Ubuntu use, could not be happier! I remember in 2000s, I had to edit /etc/ text files to set up internet etc. Nowadays everything works out of box. All sorts of peripherals and hardware is recognized automatically. High quality free open source software is available for most stuff I need. The freedom to choose software and customize Linux, if required, is amazing! Am I missing anything ignoring close…

You'll be surprised, but it's RedHat that made most of that happen. A lot of the important Linux projects are developed mostly by them - Gnome, Wayland, NetworkManager, Pipewire, flatpak, etc. Ubuntu, on the other hand, seem to like to do many things their way. Like aggressive patching. I recall fontconfig being heavily patched from upstream. Then we have Mir (now almost abandoned), Unity (abandoned), snap (flatpak,…

Well:

* NetworkManager is a dumpster fire.

* Wayland is 10 years in the making and it's still barely out of alpha and still missing crucial features such as fractional and consistent scaling.

* Pipewire is a welcome attempt to mitigate another source of grief, Pulse Audio.

* Gnome? Lets not get started...

Please. RedHat has been a boon to the Linux community but it's lack of - how can I put it tactfully - design taste? has stranded the platform into a decades-long quicksand of endless circular reinvention.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#109
post #36
post #12

Over a decade of Ubuntu use, could not be happier! I remember in 2000s, I had to edit /etc/ text files to set up internet etc. Nowadays everything works out of box. All sorts of peripherals and hardware is recognized automatically. High quality free open source software is available for most stuff I need. The freedom to choose software and customize Linux, if required, is amazing! Am I missing anything ignoring close…

You'll be surprised, but it's RedHat that made most of that happen. A lot of the important Linux projects are developed mostly by them - Gnome, Wayland, NetworkManager, Pipewire, flatpak, etc. Ubuntu, on the other hand, seem to like to do many things their way. Like aggressive patching. I recall fontconfig being heavily patched from upstream. Then we have Mir (now almost abandoned), Unity (abandoned), snap (flatpak,…

agreed, Redhat developers are behind many foundational packages (longterm thinking?), but I credit Ubuntu with bringing many users into Linux. They continue this with the WSL stuff.. while I see how distribution non-cooperation is difficult, at least the users of Redhat and Ubuntu-derived distributions have vastly more in common than what they differ by.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian has a strange approach to security these days. There are over 100 unpatched vurnurabilities in their version of Chromium for example: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/release/s... Because of this, I don't see debian as an option for the Desktop anymore. I hope they still fix the server software in their repos.

Is this a 'chromium is not a priority because google' ? Or maybe lack of resources and the maintainer needs help.

Probably google. Chromium has made the decision to bundle all their dependencies instead of play nice with system libraries. Which means you either need to re-roll all of chromium when something is found, or you need to undo google's efforts. I don't blame distributions for refusing to give chromium poor support - it is intentionally not playing nice.
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