Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish Released

wiki.ubuntu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 181 posts

Re: Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish Released

#151

Post by Shish2k »

marenkay wrote: post #40
hannasanarion wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the fact that Dropbox only supports unencrypted ext4 now? No, that is Dropbox's new intentional behavior, they have no plans to resume sync support for linux.

Couldn't you just fake it in a container pretending it was ext4? Apart from the real question: why Dropbox when you can rsync and others.

> why Dropbox when you can rsync

I've been thinking about this attitude a lot recently, and realising how much it's holding back open source -

- since everybody said "rsync is good enough", we stopped innovating file sync tools in the 90's; and it was only when dropbox came along that we realised what we were missing, and now open-source is playing catch-up and is still behind (I'm using syncthing myself, but I still recommend dropbox to non-technical friends & family as it's easier to set up)

- everybody said "IRC is good enough", and so chat protocol innovation stopped in the 80's (except for XMPP, which was a better protocol that never really took off because the implementations of that protocol were a mess); and now Slack & Discord have come along and eaten IRC's lunch, and again open-source is trying to clone those

- "Mobile chat apps are dumb, don't bother creating one of those; you can just set up IRC on your phone, with ZNC as a bouncer on your server"... now closed-source closed-protocol whatsapp has literally billions of users, and no open-source open-protocol chat app has even 1% of that

- VNC got made the standard remote-desktop tool, and has recieved only incremental improvements since the 90's. Last week I discovered Parsec, which is simpler, faster, lower latency, higher quality, and includes sound - which are all objectively useful traits for a remote desktop system. Why did the open source community never come up with a tool that's "similar to VNC except simpler, faster, lower latency, higher quality, and with sound"? There's no technical reason that we couldn't have created that in a free and open source way a decade ago - but we chose not to, because VNC was "good enough"

Alas, I have no idea what can actually be done about this situation; and I have a minor fear that I'd be crucified for even suggesting "let's stop incrementally polishing all our 80's software, and use 30 years of hindsight to create something better" (witness all the resistence to wayland / pulseaudio / etc), but I'm open to suggestions...

Re: Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish Released

#152

Post by HeadsUpHigh »

simion314 wrote: post #103
tapoxi wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Snap was here before flatpack, what should a company like Canonical do if they want to try something new? Use planted developers in GNOME or other projects to push projects as dependencies into all distributions? They shouldn't hardcode Snap to depend on snapcraft.io, its really that simple.

I understand that, maybe they will do it in future or someone will fork it to change the store url,,, but do we want each distro to create it's own snaps, we get back to duplicated efforts in packaging and review(snap team reviews apps that ask for elevated permissions)

Not every distro but different stores with different policies for including snaps. I personally am completely uninterested in using any of the security and usability disasters that are the new universal package types but that would definitely make sense.

Re: Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish Released

#153

Post by apatters »

apexalpha wrote: post #71

Despite recieving enormous amounts of backlash and criticism from the tech comunity every release Canonical is the one company making Linux desktops available for less technical people and I applaud them for doing so! Rocking the latest LTS here, and Ubuntu server on my homeserver. Wish them all the luck!

From the perspective of a desktop user they are phoning it in. Gnome is upgraded to the latest release and they made some theme tweaks. The desktop feature list is humiliatingly short.

It's not entirely Canonical's fault. No one ever figured out how to make money off of desktop, consumer Linux. Mark was at least honest about it, they tried, it didn't work, server is a better way to make money, they aren't investing anymore.

But there is no one out there now who is investing in desktop Linux in order to win. Meanwhile Apple and Microsoft still invest in the desktop, but it seems like nowadays they invest to lose as neither of their desktop operating systems are really getting better. We live in interesting times.

Re: Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish Released

#154

Post by dunpeal »

jki275 wrote: post #118
dunpeal wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I converted several of my non-technical friends to Ubuntu, including various other people I know. Many of them are running Ubuntu on a laptop that would cover half the cost of a macbook. Not everyone can afford Jobs' prices. Even if Apples were cheap, I consider Ubuntu a much better choice for an aspiring hacker / programmer.

What does a Linux machine do better than a Mac, if price were not a factor?

Your typical Linux stack is far more configurable and customizable than the Mac stack.

You typically have far more configuration levers, as well as deeper customization access. The stack is built entirely from open, accessible source, so you can ultimately customize every single part of it to your exact liking.

For example, KDE has an order of magnitude more levers than the OS X DE.

Re: Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish Released

#155

Post by jki275 »

dunpeal wrote: post #154
jki275 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does a Linux machine do better than a Mac, if price were not a factor?

Your typical Linux stack is far more configurable and customizable than the Mac stack. You typically have far more configuration levers, as well as deeper customization access. The stack is built entirely from open, accessible source, so you can ultimately customize every single part of it to your exact liking. For example, KDE has an order of magnitude more levers than the OS X DE.

You realize OSX is BSD, right? Just because they didn't build you a configuration button for everything doesn't mean it's not configurable.

Re: Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish Released

#156

Post by Shish2k »

marenkay wrote: post #98
marenkay wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you just fake it in a container pretending it was ext4? Apart from the real question: why Dropbox when you can rsync and others.

Considering the amount of harsh replies this got: I merely wanted to know if it is technically possible. Not if it is feasible, nice, makes sense. It was a question. Do not 4chan me.

If you wanted to know "can you use rsync?" (a technical yes/no question), perhaps you should have asked that, instead of asking "why use dropbox?" (a subjective preference question)?

To answer the question of "can you use rsync instead of dropbox?" - yes, it is "technically possible" to use rsync to transfer files between multiple devices.

I don't understand why you would ask this question though, because everything is "technically possible" if you ignore all the constraints that stop it from being possible...

Re: Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish Released

#157

Post by y4mi »

jki275 wrote: post #145
appleiigs wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The non-technical people in my life did not realize you don’t need Office to open Office documents. This important when they interact with accountants, lawyers and such. Once I show them Libre, they still want Office because Libre looks like it’s from Excel 2003 era and loses credibility in their eyes. Then I show them Google Docs and Sheets and it looks nice. Literally all they need is something that looks modern. B…

All of those applications are ok if you don't actually need to produce commercial documents. Libreoffice and Google Docs aren't good enough, and if you're doing anything other than basic data presentation with Excel it's not compatible with any of them.

Google sheets isn't the only option available though. You can even use Microsoft's own online implementation if you want compatibility to excel (without vba)

https://office.live.com/start/Excel.aspx

Re: Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish Released

#158

Post by simion314 »

HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #152
simion314 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that, maybe they will do it in future or someone will fork it to change the store url,,, but do we want each distro to create it's own snaps, we get back to duplicated efforts in packaging and review(snap team reviews apps that ask for elevated permissions)

Not every distro but different stores with different policies for including snaps. I personally am completely uninterested in using any of the security and usability disasters that are the new universal package types but that would definitely make sense.

Snaps could work great on servers, at work we have a CentOS server (via hosting is not our own), I am a developer not a sysadmin and I don't want to mess with the package manager and break something on this server(it is running a bunch of stuff)...anyway today I had to download and run a linux binary , it was a .tar.xz and it worked, would have been even better if I could be sure this binary was sandboxed.

On the desktop I use Kubuntu LTS, snaps will allow me to test or run software that is not in the repo or it is an older but sable version in the repo, IMO snaps provides extra options so if you do not need it you should not use it.

Re: Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish Released

#159

Post by jki275 »

y4mi wrote: post #157
jki275 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those applications are ok if you don't actually need to produce commercial documents. Libreoffice and Google Docs aren't good enough, and if you're doing anything other than basic data presentation with Excel it's not compatible with any of them.

Google sheets isn't the only option available though. You can even use Microsoft's own online implementation if you want compatibility to excel (without vba) https://office.live.com/start/Excel.aspx

Those are limited subsets of functionality, and vba isn't all that's not there.

Re: Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish Released

#160

Post by Shoue »

cuu508 wrote: post #105
rleigh wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 2018. We have had SVG icons for years on Linux, which scale beautifully. Bitmap icons shouldn't be used any longer.

On desktops/laptops, 1366x768 is still by far the most common resolution. SVG or not, but on a 13" - 15" 1366x768 screens icons need to be pixel-perfect or they will look crap.

If you have a 1366x768 screen why would you need DPI scaling? You shouldn't be affected by this issue at all if your resolution is below a certain threshold.
Post reply on HN