121–130 of 295 posts
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I’m a long time Ubuntu user and haven’t really shopped for other distros. Any recommendations besides Debian?
Fedora, Arch. You can basically look for any popular distro, they're all working very well if you're not entirely out of your depth wrt Linux
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?
Been using for a few years now and it has been the closest thing to "set up and forget" to me (I needed to install some codecs to play H.264/HEVC video). Painless upgrades, decent software catalog... It has been extremely reliable. Highly recommend it.
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…
The "registry" is not an issue anymore?
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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.
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…
> 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…
Yes, I was installing stuff into ~ the entire time.
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> Nowadays everything works out of box. Except for decent power management on laptops, and certain Bluetooth headsets.
PopOS has decent power management.
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- 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…
> Trivial app portability The "registry" is not an issue anymore?
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.
If you already have an Ubuntu box, you can also install the `xfce` package or do this:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xubuntu-dev/staging
sudo apt update
sudo apt install xubuntu-desktopEarlier quoted context omitted.
If you use btrfs, which Ubuntu defaults to, you can simply take a snapshot of your system before upgrading and roll it back if there's an issue. That said, I use Ubuntu on many machines and VMs, and I haven't had issues with upgrading them at all.
I don't think Ubuntu defaults to btrfs.
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.