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Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

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Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#61

Post by kijin »

Recoil42 wrote: post #52
hristov wrote: post #50

This repeated notion of a truly converged OS is really annoying and it is very disappointing to see Ubuntu continue to pursue it despite the loud complaints of most of their users. Lets point out the obvious: the user interaction of a small handheld device is very different than that of a computer with a full size monitor and mouse. Thus any os's on those two devices have to have different UI features. That's it. Of…

>Lets point out the obvious: the user interaction of a small handheld device is very different than that of a computer with a full size monitor and mouse. And what happens in-between? What happens in the case of tablets? Notebooks with a touchscreen? Future devices like large format displays with full UI, and future paradigms like gesture control?

You just make another couple of custom UIs for "in-between" cases.

Notebooks with a touchscreen can be treated either as tablets with a bunch of integrated USB/Bluetooth peripherals, if you want to use them like MS Surface, or alternatively, a regular notebook with an oversized multitouch-enabled trackpad that happens to be the display. So there's no need for a new UI paradigm there.

Super-large or gesture-controlled devices will probably need their own UI paradigms when they become mainstream.

None of this is meant to imply that every device will need its own, incompatible, radically different UI. Competent designers should be able to come up with a "line-up" of 3-4 UIs that "gracefully degrade" into one another, e.g. a menu bar appears if the device has a mouse, and non-maximized apps are allowed if the screen is larger than X inches. And of course, lots of options for power users, e.g. I want non-maxed apps in my 7-inch device even though the default only triggers them in 10-inch devices, and I want Alt+Tab to switch between windows rather than apps.

Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#62

Post by kinleyd »

Recoil42 wrote: post #52
hristov wrote: post #50

This repeated notion of a truly converged OS is really annoying and it is very disappointing to see Ubuntu continue to pursue it despite the loud complaints of most of their users. Lets point out the obvious: the user interaction of a small handheld device is very different than that of a computer with a full size monitor and mouse. Thus any os's on those two devices have to have different UI features. That's it. Of…

>Lets point out the obvious: the user interaction of a small handheld device is very different than that of a computer with a full size monitor and mouse. And what happens in-between? What happens in the case of tablets? Notebooks with a touchscreen? Future devices like large format displays with full UI, and future paradigms like gesture control?

At this stage the key differentiation point is touch (ie. your finger as the pointer) v. the pointer (mice/keyboard, etc.) The UI for these two categories is naturally different, and convergence would be possible only when the UI can handle both. Even in the case of notebooks with touchscreens, the UI has to handle both requirements well, that of the finger and of the mouse/keypad. I personally feel Ubuntu is neglecting the latter. In time, that may well be the right choice. At present, it's definitely only part of the story.

Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#63

Post by deepdog »

adwf wrote: post #45
jff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with Arch has frequently been: 1. Run pacman -Syu 2. Pacman failed. 3. Go to Arch website 4. Learn that I shouldn't have run pacman just then, and now I have to follow these steps to un-break my system The most notable instance was when Arch decided that /usr/lib should be a symlink to /lib. Yeah, barely recovered from that... it was also a reinforcement of my position that basic utilities should be sta…

Yeah I got caught by forcing the /usr/lib update too. Went away for a month, came back and did a full upgrade, failed. Checked the website, the news had dropped of the front page, forced update, broke it horribly. Despite the problems, I still find rolling release vastly preferable. If Ubuntu can bring some of the commercial support quality to a rolling release, they'd alleviate a lot of the difficulties that I have…

> forcing the /usr/lib update

That's the number one thing to remember with pacman, _never_ force an update. That is how 90% [citation needed] of problems arise.

Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#64

Post by YokoZar »

pyre wrote: post #60
YokoZar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decision hasn't been made yet. Canonical's CTO may have decided he likes it, but the Ubuntu project hasn't yet given it a pass. If you've got workflow-critical programs you don't want updating, use the LTS release. That's what it's for.

I think the real issue is when infrastructure things move. How would the move to PulseAudio have worked in a rolling release? Would someone with a new install end up with PulseAudio, but someone with an existing install, would just never have it installed unless they knew what it was and started poking around for it? The same for the transition to using evdev for (e.g.) mouse-handling in X.org rather than defining th…

It's not even clear that the rolling release will be intended for non-enthusiasts at this point, however as a matter of policy you can be pretty sure that any update applied to the rolling release will need to be tested against users as old as the last LTS.

That means the same sort of transition of config files and libraries that occur on release upgrade would just happen during a normal package install, which is pretty much how it works anyway (a release upgrade isn't much more than a giant group of packages being upgraded together -- all this logic is stored in the packages themselves).

Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#65

Post by zanny »

gtaylor wrote: post #31
yogo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's so much on the bleeding edge in Arch as most people think and packages are usually upgraded in such a way so that dependencies don't cause problems in other packages (at least from my experience). The key has always been to always do a system upgrade and not upgrade individual packages, i.e. always run pacman -Syu or pacman -Syu . In four years I've never seen anything break (knock on wood) aside f…

Arch has been overall very good for me, but there have been breakages (and I experienced a whole lot more with Gentoo, though that was a while ago). Arch's systemd migration in particular was somewhat painful and the documentation wasn't great for the process (it has improved somewhat since). I seriously doubt that Ubuntu would expect their users to do what I had to do to apply that update (since Arch and Ubuntu serv…

> I expect the whole update process will be more hands-free and possibly a little more smooth.

I've been using my current Arch install as my main desktop since the great systemd switch late last year, and I just have it do an apper autoupdate on Sundays. I don't even do pacman -Syu, I just check the logs after an update before a restart to make sure it went smoothly.

It kind of won me over, that and yaourt at least. I have Ubuntu on my grandparents machine and sshing into it and using apt starts to feel last century after getting used to pacman.

Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#66

Post by zanny »

csense wrote: post #44
zalew wrote: post #3

considering the tipping point of me leaving buntu was being tired of the upbreak release process, I second this idea. they are basically adopting the debian scheme, only the stable releases will be more frequent.

I thought Ubuntu's original reason for existing was because Debian releases don't happen often enough?

It existed because testing wasn't stable enough and stable wasn't fast enough. The 2 year LTS releases are basically just the slow stable thing carried over, but having 2 layers of rolling release (like Arch) where you have a base repo and a testing repo lets them having the rolling release without all the continuous integration problems if it hits enough testing users first.

Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#67

Post by fulafel »

gizmo686 wrote: post #56
moxie wrote: post #54

What's interesting is that they are in part re-creating the original problem they were trying to solve. The complaints about Debian were that they only cut a release like every two years. The Debian response was that people who wanted more timely updates could run the "testing" branch, which was a "rolling" release. Ubuntu promised to solve the slow release cycles and the instability of a rolling branch by cutting st…

A difference is that Debians testing branch was a testing branch, and as such did not have the same effort and priority put in to keeping it stable. Even as a rolling release, I would expect Ubuntu's main reopositories to be more stable than debian tesdting.

labels and your expectations aside, testing usually is pretty stable and non-lts Ubuntu releases are sometimes not.at least with testing you can hope for fixes in less than six months - Ubuntu generally doesn't fix bugs until the next release in non-lts releases.

Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#68

Post by bad_user »

loudmax wrote: post #38

I suppose derivative distros like Xubuntu and Edubuntu will need to follow suit. I've had pretty bad experiences with non-LTS versions of Xubuntu. The last time I had a go on it on my laptop, things broke unpredictably, a little at a time. When I say unpredictably, I mean totally by surprise, not even after performing an update. First, Pulse audio stopped working. Spent a few days trying to fix it, then gave up and r…

One thing to keep in mind is that you're going to have far fewer problems with compatible hardware.

On my older laptop things were breaking on each upgrade. Most problems I had were with the Geforce graphics card included, but wireless stopped working at some point in combination with the router that I have at home (kept working with other routers just fine, so I guess it was a protocol issue). Anyway, it required constant tinkering.

So first of all, on that laptop I gave up on Nvidia's proprietary drivers and went with Nouveau, which for my needs works well. 90% of all problems I ever had were linked to these proprietary Nvidia drivers. Don't know how well Nouveau works with newer Geforce cards, but you should give it a try.

I also have a new Thinkpad with Intel HD 4000 graphics and the Wifi chip is also from Intel. I rejected other models with Geforce cards on purpose. With the latest Ubuntu everything worked flawlessly out of the box on this laptop, graphics, wifi, sound, everything.

People expect Linux distros to run well on any hardware they throw at it and many times it does, but if you're buying a new laptop / PC, do some research first and prefer models for which all drivers are available as open-source, or if you don't want that hassle, search for models certified for Linux. Thinkpads are good (if you get it with Intel HD at least), Dell also sells a couple of models that are Ubuntu-certified, like that new developer-targeted laptop, there's also System76 and I'm sure you can find others.

Re: Ubuntu Rolling Release Proposal

#69

Post by lorenzfx »

Nux wrote: post #30

This could work, rolling-release + LTS. Archlinux seems to be doing quite well under the rolling-release auspice, so why not. Of course, never in my experience has rolling-release ever worked in anything close to production environments - it's what killed FreeBSD in the data centre, however, if you're a techie with some time on your hands it could be cool.

totally dead https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/software
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