331–340 of 370 posts
22.04 LTS is probably gonna be my last go-to linux distro release for workstations and all-around. Going back to fedora after this goes EOL since the "snappy" shit, pro advertisements, and other things haven't stopped. I'm not mad or even annoyed because it fully expected it, but still somewhat disappointed.
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Firefox ESR is available in a PPA that is maintained by Mozilla. Even though that's a third party, that's as close to an official package as it gets. I'm just hoping that it will remain available until this snap thing subsides, or until I make the switch to GNU Guix or something. Edit: It seems that the latest stable Firefox is available, too.[1] I thought it was only ESR and that Ubuntu's switch to snap was requeste…
AFAIK, that PPA is not maintained by Mozilla. Source: I work for Mozilla.
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I also use Ubuntu a lot, and while I'm disappointed about this Snap thing, I'm still not looking for alternatives. At least until 22.04 I could dodge snaps pretty easily, but now, since Firefox is now a snap package, things went worse, at least for me. I gave it a try and, while the experience was not as bad as I feared, I soon encountered problems with things like trying to use a smartcard reader for signing documen…
I run Debian on all my systems, and to be honest firefox is something I always maintain separately. /opt/firefox contains the latest binary download from the official site. The application is one that updates frequently enough that the gain is worthwhile.
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KDE would be superb if it weren't so buggy. KDE is aimed in the right direction, trying to do and be all the things a desktop environment should do and be. But unfortunately the implementation is frequently deficient. Even seemingly basic things frequently break, like re-applying mouse preferences when you unplug and replug your mouse: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435113 A couple more recent annoyances, of ma…
That might be the case, but is there an alternative with a similar feature set? The latest GNOME versions are even buggier, and when it does work, it feels like a toy project compared to KDE. It's baffling to me that it's been years since the v3 controversy, yet the project still doesn't feel as mature and polished as KDE Plasma. All v2 forks also feel like someone's hobby project to bring disparate tools together, r…
This is an interesting viewpoint. My ideal DE is one that is "invisible", so to speak, and I've found that GNOME comes closest to it. I want to launch whatever program I'm using and focus on it's window. KDE has too much chrome, too many elements, so many options. It feels too "busy" to me. Ditto its apps, e.g. comparing okular to evince. Too many buttons, too many UI elements (I know I can remove them, but I don't want to have to, and all the functionality they expose I can do on evince using keyboard shortcuts), and all I'm interested in is the document I'm reading.
To each their own, I guess, I just wanted to put forth the alternative viewpoint.
I'm not sure precisely why, but when I first saw ads in Apt(8) I decided I wouldn't be using Ubuntu for any more personal projects. On one hand they obviously need to keep the project alive. On the other hand, putting your own ads on top of something that fundamental to the system just felt ... weird/narsty? Reading state information... Done Calculating upgrade... Done Try Ubuntu Pro beta with a free personal subscri…
Jump to Debian. It has always worked towards users' interests, and probably will continue doing that because pretty much all developers are volunteers and are running a democratically driven development process. I never understood why Ubuntu is so popular because it's 99.99% Debian, and only gives you a handful of things on top of that: predictable release schedule (which is a two-edged sword if you think about it),…
This is objectively not true. Debian has not worked for users interests in several cases.
One such case I experienced years ago, and the reason I switched to Ubuntu, was while at university with a laptop. I had been using Debian on and off alongside Windows for a long time by that point but then a new version of Debian came out. It might have been Debian 7.
Previously Debian had shipped with the correct Intel drivers/firmware for this laptops (incredibly well supported and common at the time) WiFi chipset.
However in the (then latest) version they refused to ship the driver because "we don't support non-free software". I was left in the situation where I could no longer 1) properly finish setting up the laptop as there was no longer internet access, 2) unable to use the ethernet sockets in the buildings as they were locked down to specific MAC addresses.
It took several days for me to be able to get a USB drive, find another PC I could run the Windows -> ISO program from Microsoft, write it to the USB drive, and then finally reinstall Windows.
I don't care for how dogmatic and Stallman-like they approached this, and I don't care how people try to defend this, it's simply not the case they have always worked for users interests. By removing a previously shipped driver that fucks over a user even being able to use their machine, they are working to harm the users interests.
Ubuntu also doesn't wait a couple of years before shipping new versions of software.
This is why Ubuntu won. It just works. It loads """non-free""" drivers. I heard recently that Debian might finally ship with the type of drivers they used to. Too little too late.
Lot of people here with opinions about using Ubuntu as a desktop OS. Seemingly nobody here with opinions about Ubuntu as a server OS. Strange for a bunch of startup people who ship their SaaS backends on Linux servers.
I use Ubuntu Server on all my headless stuff. It's boring, in the best way possible. I install it and set it up, run `apt-get update && apt-get upgrade` occasionally (I should enable unattended upgrades but I haven't), and otherwise don't have to think about it at all until it's time to upgrade to another LTS 2 years later. Those LTS to LTS upgrades are kinda painful, but not unexpectedly so, considering you're catch…
The only reason I still use Ubuntu is that their font smoothing is superior to everyone else straight out of the box. I tried to recreate the steps on Fedora, but couldn't come close.
How was I, as inexperienced as I was at the time, supposed to know that a "cross platform" GUI framework was going to render a tab or a label (can't remember which) slightly wrong on Ubuntu compared to Windows? A very frustrating experience.
Keep in mind that "good" UX/UI wasn't even a requirement (or even taught) and mine was honestly one of the better looking programs that were made. Some looked as you can imagine a bunch of students made.
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Upstart predates systemd by four years. It solved real problems at the time and they kept it going until Debian transitioned to systemd. Unlike systemd, upstart supported sysvinit scripts, so it made sense to transition when Debian did. Bringing that up is maybe not the best example you could choose to bash them with.
I am not saying anything about decision to _start_ using upstart... All I am saying is that in the past, Ubuntu made the right decision multiple times and switched from Canonical-only software to a more common alternative once that alternative became widely used. And I think that it's a grand time to slowly wind down snaps and switch to flatpak. Linux ecosystem does not need more fragmentation, and given proprietary…
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> Maybe I should give Pop OS a try... I'm a big fan: it's like Ubuntu, but with much of Canonical's divisive changes reverted, and with a few other improvements. I switched from Ubuntu to Pop!_OS a few releases back when I got a System76 computer. (I also use it on my Lenovo laptop.)
I wish Pop OS would tackle KDE. It's a much better DE (particularly if you like to customize), but there are very few (if any) distributions which have an opinionated tuned experience out of the box.
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> Make non-free the default Didn't they just vote to do this?
No, the recent change [0] was to add non-free firmware to the official installer (instead of relegating it to a separate unofficial installer). GP, however, was talking about the apt repository: the non-free apt repository is disabled by default. This hasn't changed and is unlikely to ever change. The non-free apt repository be enabled via a trivial /etc/apt/sources.list edit. [0]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debia…