Ubuntu 21.10 • Hacker News Board

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#151

Post by jzer0cool » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 10:13 PM UTC

I had rotated a lot "pre-ubuntu" trying to discover a distribution that works a decade+ before. It was always trying to get the video card (at high res) and wifi dongle to work.

Ubuntu just worked out of the box and I was very happy with that. So. Cool. The magic was also the boot live install that also worked. It really was magical.

I am using Ubuntu on desktop and a mac via VM now which is also good performance (no need to dual boot), so I think tech in general has come a long way.

===

Thought someone might be able to help here with something on my mind: 1) smooth mousepad scroll? 2) able to utilize multiple "desktops" (ie: swipe to different desktop). the mac seems to captures the vm as a single application so I can't get multiple desktops other than within the guest vm on a single screen.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#152

Post by djbusby » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 10:13 PM UTC

n8cpdx wrote: post #148

reilly3000 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you want to use a multitouch trackpad fluently, Elementary is is the only game in town. It has macOS-level support which is pretty cool.

How do they get it? Can't those tools also work in Debian or Gentoo? What's the magic sauce? Kernel patches?

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#153

Post by IshKebab » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

beermonster wrote: post #84

JonathanBeuys wrote: post #59

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.

Check how many vulnerable packages they have against their stable release across all packages and how long until they’re fixed. It’s an eye opener.

I guess a few volunteers can't backport security fixes to all software in the world after all.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#154

Post by nonameiguess » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 10:16 PM UTC

poisonborz wrote: post #83

aborsy wrote: 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…

Some of this feels out of date. I've used a fair amount of what seems like obscure peripherals and they've all worked fine for at least a few years. That definitely was not the case in 2008 and desktop Linux was legitimately hell at times back then.

As far as relocatable installs, this is entirely a choice on the part of distro maintainers and a consequence of how the packages are built. They can be built in a way that allows you to put them elsewhere, but it would defeat the purpose of having a package manager. Which makes me wonder, does winget support relocatable installs? I'm sure you can at least understand why Linux distros have chosen to do packaging this way. The killer app for Linux is server installs. It might be perfectly fine to allow users to move around software they've installed after first installing it on a single-user home PC, but it destroys the possibility of automation. A package manager can't know where the software is if it's constantly moving, meaning it can't upgrade or remove it without significant user interaction, which can't possibly scale to data centers full of servers. Different needs for different markets, unfortunately, but to me, even at home, this is an advantage of Linux, because I have many devices.

I guess not being choose between hundreds of media viewers might matter if you're actually a professional media editor or creator, but very people are that. Granted, any professional use of a computer other than making software is going to benefit from Windows. Professional software just targets Windows. That's on the creators of those packages, not the system itself. Whether it's CAD, media editors, the Adobe suite, software teams that charge for use don't like Linux. But they don't like it because people aren't using it. It's a chicken and egg problem.

I'm not sure I actually agree with the ease of adding and moving Windows software, though. One of the big problems is it's often impossible to completely uninstall something. Applications quite frequently drop files all over the place that Windows Installer doesn't know about if it wasn't registered upon installation, and it's even worse if your "installation" doesn't use Windows installer at all and it just you copying an executable file somewhere. Did it leave data in %PROFILE%/LocalLow/AppData, %PROFILE%/Local/AppData, or %PROFILE%/Roaming/AppData, and what the heck is even the difference between those? Where is it putting logs? Where is it expecting config? Without any sort of filesystem hierarchy standard like Linux has, there is no way to know, and systems just gather cruft over the years to the point that common advice is periodically wipe your entire root filesystem and start from scratch.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#155

Post by IshKebab » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 10:17 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #110

Scarbutt wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah because when your software is at the scale of Chrome, "playing nice" with system libraries as you put it means your software is unreliable, difficult to debug and reason about. You want as few unbundled dependencies as possible.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#156

Post by xiaomai » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

app4soft wrote: post #118

Zardoz84 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use flatpack

Use AppImage + firejail (optionally, to fully sandbox AppImage)

I want to like AppImage, but it is just unreasonable that there is no built-in way to trivially install a .desktop file for a given AppImage I've downloaded.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#157

Post by Tsiklon » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #138

beermonster wrote: post #92

I think 20.04 LTS with its 10 years support separates it from the crowd. As soon as you’re updating every nine months there are many great alternatives however.

10 year support is great for servers and "set it up once" type setups - but soon enough the libraries provided begin to be out of date, and you end up hacking things in. It was a problem on CentOS before it died the death, anything remotely PHPish was always really unhappy.

The IUS Repo did much in the way of solving PHP Hell on RHEL(type) machines.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#158

Post by nsonha » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #32

rlpb wrote: 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…

> Sounds like you have a really hacked up system there Some people would call this 'a system that's actually being used to do something'. Don't blame users unless it's clear they are doing something egregious with the system. Installing a different Python version shouldn't break installers, but here we are. Ubuntu should have taken a page from CoreOS, NixOS and even Arch. CoreOS with their immutable system partitions…

Obviously you put the effort into the Arch one to set up everything with Nix, and didn't do that in Ubuntu. A fairer comparison would be "a system that's actually being used to do something" in just Arch to Ubuntu or Nix on both.

I'm not a heavy linux user but I know 3 guys who use Arch at work and one of them had an upgrade issue that caused them half a day to fix, this was circa 2016. I know plenty of people who use Ubuntu no issue. Not that such anecdote really means anything, just to demonstrate that they can be used to back whatever bias.

> Having a separate system partition by default

This is just one simple extra step when you install. And I don't know if arch has this by default?

> Even Windows allow you to snapshot and rollback changes

just use brfs? This is more of a linux thing has nothing to do with ubuntu

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#159

Post by xiaomai » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 10:21 PM UTC

vladev wrote: post #36

aborsy wrote: 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,…

The fontconfig patches are a big reason I stay with Ubuntu. Fonts look _so_ much better on Ubuntu than Arch/etc.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#160

Post by blacksmith_tb » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

deeblering4 wrote: post #7

capableweb wrote: post #3

Funny, I run Ubuntu on my laptop and tried just today to upgrade it (since I'm on 18.04 and have been for a while). But no matter how I try, `do-release-upgrade` won't do the upgrade, complaining about third party repositories (removed all of them as a result), mismatched python versions, and a load of other issues. When I fix one, another one appears. Tried for 5 hours today and eventually gave up. On the other hand…

In my experience it's best to simply not attempt in-place major distro version upgrades and approach them instead as a backup/reimage/restore (or using an alternate/new machine) This has been true for me across all distros, and honestly it's a main reason why I only run linux on servers anymore (easy to create a new VM for upgrades, harder to create a new laptop)

Hmm, I have a couple of laptops with Ubuntu on them, they aren't my primary personal (or work) machines, but I generally haven't had trouble upgrading them - I did one today, via do-release-upgrade -d and it worked fine (though the FF snap, while maybe ok in theory, meant that it had lost all my tabs / bookmarks / etc., uninstalling and installing via apt got me the deb version which did pull those all in from my profile).