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Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

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Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#211
post #22

Looking through the features Gnome 3.36 - X11 fractional scaling. I got all excited, because this means that now finally Ubuntu will be usable on my Lenovo X1E with High-DPI display. But then further down below: Fractional scaling does not work with the NVIDIA proprietary driver (bug 1870736, bug 1873403). OK, nevermind, back to Windows with WSL...

Can you do scaling with xrandr? I scale gnome to 2x and then have this line in my .xprofile: xrandr --output eDP-1 --scale 1.4x1.4

I disable it whenever playing video games on steam.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#212
post #2

Most reviews are very positive. Faster, better, Amazon removed, maybe the best Ubuntu release until now. The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal. Ubuntu is also researching if they can get Adobe on board. I doubt this would ever happen, but that would be huge. Most people stick on Windows and MacOS because Adobe software is not available on Linux.…

> It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal.

That's a good thing! I can't wait for Deb installers to stop mucking about dumping random files all over my system. I also can't wait for the whole ppa nightmare which is the only way to get cutting edge versions of software by giving the right to muck about with the system to random packages on the internet to end.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with almost everything you say, and, yes, people used IIS, windows, as webservers, only not-long ago, so, let's hope for progress. Totally agreed.

I don't see what that has to do with the post you replied to.

I'll enlighten you. About twenty years ago people used IIS for web-servers, encumbered in costly licenses, for everything, and progress goes on. That's the point man. Time goes on, and things gets better. Hope you see now. That was the point, anyways. I really hope it helps.

Progress goes on is just the general point. Nothing else intended. Should be clear enough.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal. Oh, I did not even notice that during 4+ weeks on the unreleased Xubuntu Focal because I never use anything else but the command line to install software. But the target audience Ubuntu is wider, so I think that is a very bad change. One might think they have learned from https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 , but obviously not. Well, formally they…

One can dpkg -i , but, how about dependencies? I always had a problem with that. Whenever the app-store didn't work, which usually pulled-in all deps, I just naively used dpkg -i pkg.deb, and chased all the deps manually, through google. I have done that at least. Thank god for arch. No politics/"religion(s/*)" intended.

Apt is the best way, but if you don't want to or can't use apt, then try gdebi, which does the dependency chasing for a .deb you give it.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#215
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can dpkg -i , but, how about dependencies? I always had a problem with that. Whenever the app-store didn't work, which usually pulled-in all deps, I just naively used dpkg -i pkg.deb, and chased all the deps manually, through google. I have done that at least. Thank god for arch. No politics/"religion(s/*)" intended.

Apt is the best way, but if you don't want to or can't use apt, then try gdebi, which does the dependency chasing for a .deb you give it.

Yeah I was probably just ignorant using dpkg, didn't know better. Thanks for the info.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#216
post #90
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just set font scaling to 1.3x or whatever it is you need and everything works great. I've been doing that for many years for 1440p in a laptop. Ubuntu actually regressed there since switching back to GNOME from Unity. In Unity font scaling was neatly exposed in the same slider as integer scaling and all apps used that setting. Now I have to set one thing for GNOME and another for Firefox to get the same effect. "Prop…

As someone who uses Ubuntu on multiple machines, does this and uses a high DPI laptop display AND an external display, this only sort of works and the outcome is much worse than what Windows or MacOS do out of the box. Honestly, I don't get how the Ubuntu ecosystem is so much worse at handling something so basic, when other OSes have had almost no issues with it for over a decade..

I use external screens just fine. I can't even think of a situation that's a big issue:

- 4K laptop screen and 1080p external, just use integer scaling

- 1440p laptop screen and 1080p external, use 1.3x font scaling and everything looks fine

I currently have a 1440p laptop, a 4K external, and a 1280x800 projector in my work-from-home setup. The external screen replaced a 1200p one before. I use sway that supports fractional scaling per screen in whatever setup I want. And yet I prefer to just set 1.3x font scaling for everything and not touch the scaling at all. Everything looks great.

Fractional scaling is a missing feature for some people and Linux desktops are definitely behind. But compared to font scaling I don't see how it's really much more than a little bump in functionality (some controls sized a little better) for a big drop in performance (calculating >2x the pixels in a lot of situations) and even some loss of sharpness.

It's probably a huge preference thing. I've seen people online waiting impatiently for fractional scaling because things were too small in their 1080p laptop screen otherwise. Even though 1080p on a laptop is sort of the definition of 1x.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#217
post #59
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 18.04 you can install via the Software Center

This almost never actually worked in my experience. It was more of an annoyance than not even pretending to work, because I'd take time trying to get things to install in the UI and they wouldn't work before I eventually needed to revert to CLI.

My experience mirrors yours. Could never get double-click on .deb to work, same symptoms, and Software Center was always buggy/frustrating. dpkg -i all the way, but that's definitely a ux hit for broader adoption of Ubuntu.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#218
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope the HiDPI support is improved now. Right now, when I use fractional scaling on 19.10, none of the display settings get saved and so after a restart, I have to readjust all of the layout, orientation and scaling for displays. Pretty annoying for a dual-boot triple display system. edit: Nevermind, seems that it got even worse for my case: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1... https://bu…

You might want to give KDE Plasma a shot: it handles scaling quite well. I find it much superior wrt Gnome, but that's a matter of preferences of course.

Not true when you are using Wayland and GTK-based apps like Thunderbird / Firefox / Chrome or Electron based apps.

That was the main reason that after more than a decade I turned to Gnome. HiDPI and fractional scaling just works since then. Highly recommended!

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#219

I've been running this since mid Feb at home. It's been rock solid. I've only had 1 issue (other than it never remembering default audio devices which I set manually to resolve) Snaps break all the time for me. I installed VS Code, after reboot I couldn't launch it, had to uninstall/reinstall. Fixed, reboot, broken. Installed it via terminal. 0 issues. Same with Slack, Chrome, and Skype, and anything else I tried wit…

That sounds like a huge "1 issue", then, if Snaps are supposed to be the way forward for installing packages in Ubuntu as other threads make it seem.

One thing that threw me off is Snaps are sandboxed. So I installed Slack, and I clicked on support ticket links and I had to sign in again. Cos when it loaded Firefox it loaded a separate instance of Firefox rather than re-using my existing open instance.

So I've resorted to removing all the snap apps and installing them from terminal and no longer have any issues.

I'm not sure who the target audience is for Snaps.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#220
post #92

Just tried upgrading on WSL and I got an endless loop of sleep: cannot read realtime clock: Invalid argument Ctrl+C and then I get $ sudo apt --fix-broken install ... Setting up libc6:amd64 (2.31-0ubuntu9) ... Checking for services that may need to be restarted... Checking init scripts... Nothing to restart. sleep: cannot read realtime clock: Invalid argument dpkg: error processing package libc6:amd64 (--configure):…

For the life of me I don't get how people always say upgrades are so easy on Ubuntu. They do? I just assume that I have to do a backup of my data, wipe the disk and install they new version. Ubuntu updates never worked for me.

I don't understand how for some people it "never works", while for me it's literally never once failed, all the way from 6.10 up until now, my latest desktop install lasting through 12 updates, plus motherboard and GPU change (between Intel and AMD CPU, and Nvidia and AMD proprietary driver and then AMD open source driver no less) and four different desktop environments (Unity, Gnome, Mate, and finally KDE).

The closest it's ever come to failing was literally yesterday when I realized that my desktop was still on 19.04 and they had closed the old repositories so the GUI upgrade utility failed. The CLI upgrade didn't skip a beat, though.

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