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Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

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Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#231
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the hate for snap (and flatpak) and I personally use deb as much as I can, but they are the right move. Yes, right now it's a subpar experience. But you need to deploy it now to be able to improve on it and have it as the default in the future. And I believe it's a better future, because: - packaging a deb is difficult. I've done it, and it's a lot of complicated hard work you get to repeat for every rel…

> packaging a deb is difficult. I've done it, and it's a lot of complicated hard work you get to repeat for every release for anything that is not a simple program Right, but the point of a high-quality distribution is that this complicated hard work only needs to be done once (per package, updated for upstream changes obviously) by your distribution's package maintainer. Then it scales for free. That's the beauty.

Deveroper/packager productivity matters a lot, as people will then bother to package more nice things and keep those packages up to date. It's bad for everyone if packaging is needlessly hard.

Also the sw engineering world is clearly moving away from packaging as "integate application into distro X version set of library versions by continuously expending a lot of integration engineering effort" and more towards things like docker images, snap/flatpak/appimage that sidestep the problem of host platform component dependencies as much as possible.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#232
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but didn't think anyone would have the balls to do it haha.

IIRC Arch did that years ago.

No, it was a few months ago, and it's still a work in progress: https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/python2/

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#233
post #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.

Setting up scaling via xrandr when you have multiple (different-sized) displays is probably doable but incredibly tricky.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#234
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.…

Some problems I had with Snaps:

* Installed VScode. The terminal in VScode was in a different environment from the system terminal, so used different Python environments. Took me a while to figure out why installing a package was not working. * Installed Slack. When I click a link in Slack it opens a new Firefox process that does not have access to my normal profile, saved logins, etc. and is not shown as a Firefox window in the sidebar.

In both cases I uninstalled the Slack version and installed the "real" version.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Snaps have mostly created problems for me I think this is the wrong way to look at it. You still have access to the same packages as before without snap. If you're using snap, that means you either explicitly chose it, or the package is not available in the repo. The choice here isn't between a package or a snap most of the time. It's between: not using the app, packaging it on your own, or using a snap which is no…

But certain packages are migrating to Snap-only, e.g. Chromium. I understand why they're doing this (primarily to save on build times), but the way they've gone about it (using a transitional Apt package that just installs the Snap) is messy and inconsistent. If I type `apt install` then I want an Apt package. Under no circumstances should this install a Snap.

That's because Chromium is hell to keep updated in a stable distribution release apt archive. Upstream adds new dependencies that aren't packaged in the distribution's stable releases, for example. It's not practical to do anything but a whole load of bundling (in debs) to solve the problem. This then isn't much different to a snap any more anyway, and packaging a snap takes a fraction of the effort.

Anyone is welcome to maintain chromium as an apt package for your distribution release of choice, and you're welcome to point apt to that repository instead. The reason it's not happening is that it's increasingly impractical to do while also maintaining Ubuntu's quality standard for debs.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#236

I wonder if we'll ever get /usr/bin/python back. Or is it going to be like browser user-agent strings where we call it "python3" forever and forget why we can't just call it python?

You can install the [python-is-python3][0] package on 20.04, which symlinks /usr/bin/python to python3. [0]: https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/python-is-python3

I saw that, but it's not the default setting. You can't just write a python script and expect it to work on Ubuntu without putting python3 in the shebang.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#237
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throw your nVidia card in the bin and be free. After many years with nVidia I removed the card and I've been happily using Intel hardware for a year now.

How's ML training on Intel integrated graphics? :)

Do you have to use the nvidia as your graphics adapter if you are only using it for ML training?

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#238

For a long time I've been using Lubuntu on my laptop. However, a couple of years ago they changed focus and From wikipedia: Lubuntu was originally touted as being "lighter, less resource hungry and more energy-efficient", but now aims to be "a functional yet modular distribution focused on getting out of the way and letting users use their computer" I stopped updating my OS since (I'm on 14). Does anyone care to sugg…

I've read all the responses to this thread, and I still think MX-Linux is the distro you're looking for: https://mxlinux.org/current-release-features/

You're going to be delighted.

Re: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

#240
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. I don't get why they're doing that. Snaps have mostly created problems for me, like they don't scale when other apps do, or the styling is off, or they don't show up properly in the software manager. The snap daemon on one of my laptops always blocks the shutdown by 30 seconds. Generally a rather confusing experience.

> The snap daemon on one of my laptops always blocks the shutdown by 30 seconds Oh THAT'S why that happens sometimes. I never bothered debugging it.

Same, I'd taken to just holding down the power button, mystery solved I guess.
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