Live data from Hacker News

Ubuntu 26.04

lwn.net

261–270 of 270 posts

Re: Ubuntu 26.04

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why rewrite coreutils in rust? TOCTOU isn't exact some new concept. Neither are https://owasp.org/Top10/2025/ (most of which a good web framework will prevent or migrate), and switching to rust (which as far as I know) won't bring you a safer web framework like django or rails.

I don't know their motivations but mine would be: 1. Rust is a much more pleasant language to work with. 2. You can improve the tools, adding new features, fixing UX paper cuts etc. You're probably thinking "you can improve the GNU versions!" and in theory sure. But in practice these sorts of tools are controlled by naysayers who want everything to stay as it was in the 80s. The sorts of people that only accept patch…

Another maintainer and I follow issues and pull requests on a GitHub mirror. But email works fine for us and many other projects.

Regarding poor UX, it is difficult to dispute with that claim without a specific example. Note that a lot of the features we support are standardized by POSIX. Even if we dislike the behavior, it is better to comply with the standards so the programs don't behave differently than users expect. The sentence you quote isn't meant to put down users. These programs are often much more complex than meets the eye, and there are lots of common gotchas that people have run into (and will continue to do so) [1].

Of course we would love for these programs to be useful for everyone. However, feature requests are often incompatible with existing behavior, incompatible with other feature requests, or have existing functionality elsewhere. For those reasons we cannot accept every feature request.

[1] https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/coreutils-gotchas.html

Re: Ubuntu 26.04

#262
post #252
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu can have one GUI and Kubuntu can have another. Every distro can't be everything for every person.

Lets put KDE as the default for Ubuntu and have GNOME available on Gnubuntu instead. :)

If you run Ubuntu you are free to do what you want with it.

Re: Ubuntu 26.04

#263
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do we still put up with GNOME? Because maybe not all people have the same preferences as you?

Preferences don't form in a vacuum though. There's a perception that GNOME is the "good environment" which means its decisions get treated as more important than other DEs' when things change: and that's somewhat self-reinforcing. Distro: "The most used DE needs first class support, we should probably bend to it" → Distro: "We should probably make this DE the default since it's so widely used and supported" → User: "…

I'm not sure about this. In general I see more criticism of GNOME than praise, so if anything the perception would be that GNOME is not a good DE.

Re: Ubuntu 26.04

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why rewrite coreutils in rust? TOCTOU isn't exact some new concept. Neither are https://owasp.org/Top10/2025/ (most of which a good web framework will prevent or migrate), and switching to rust (which as far as I know) won't bring you a safer web framework like django or rails.

I don't know their motivations but mine would be: 1. Rust is a much more pleasant language to work with. 2. You can improve the tools, adding new features, fixing UX paper cuts etc. You're probably thinking "you can improve the GNU versions!" and in theory sure. But in practice these sorts of tools are controlled by naysayers who want everything to stay as it was in the 80s. The sorts of people that only accept patch…

Have you used busybox? The BSDs? I'm not sure adding more features to coreutils is a major help, and given rust-coreutils/uutils has:

1) more CVEs between two latest Ubuntu releases than coreutils has had over the last 30+ year

2) managed to break security updates

3) is neither fully compatible with POSIX nor coreutils

I'm not sure why I'd ever use it? Sadly, projects like uutils have made me suspicious of rust projects, so unless I know that the project is well maintained (for which there are numerous examples, ripgrep being the obvious example, but newsboat, the various tools from proxmox, servo/firefox, and the pgrx ecosystem are ones I use regularly), it's a negative marker against that project.

Re: Ubuntu 26.04

#265
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way, José. From where I sit I have 5 Thinkpads set up within reach, and I have a few more in other rooms. They are by far my preferred laptop. Most run Ubuntu as their default OS, most have the trackpad disabled because I usually use the trackpoint for everything, and on all of them I use middle-click to paste extensively.

I'm guessing you have touchpad corners enabled. Usually by default lower-right is 2nd mouse button and upper-right is 3rd mouse button (middle click). I only use the touchpad, but knowing where it is I can avoid it and almost never trigger it accidentally. It can also be disabled without affecting two-finger and three-finger tap, which I do use. (This applies to all laptops, not just Thinkpads)

> I'm guessing you have touchpad corners enabled.

Er, no. As I said:

Usually I leave the trackpad disabled. I don't like gestures and multi-finger taps much so I prefer to just turn it off.

Re: Ubuntu 26.04

#266
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing you have touchpad corners enabled. Usually by default lower-right is 2nd mouse button and upper-right is 3rd mouse button (middle click). I only use the touchpad, but knowing where it is I can avoid it and almost never trigger it accidentally. It can also be disabled without affecting two-finger and three-finger tap, which I do use. (This applies to all laptops, not just Thinkpads)

> I'm guessing you have touchpad corners enabled. Er, no. As I said: Usually I leave the trackpad disabled. I don't like gestures and multi-finger taps much so I prefer to just turn it off.

Ah, I meant to respond one comment above, to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47886430

Re: Ubuntu 26.04

#267
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm guessing you have touchpad corners enabled. Er, no. As I said: Usually I leave the trackpad disabled. I don't like gestures and multi-finger taps much so I prefer to just turn it off.

Ah, I meant to respond one comment above, to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47886430

OIC.

Re: Ubuntu 26.04

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we still put up with GNOME? I've spent the last 10 years off and on from Linux. Had I used something other than GNOME, I believe my experience would have been better. I've been on KDE for the last 3-4 years and things work so well I could never imagine going back to GNOME.

I find it hilarious how much religion is put into Gnome vs. KDE in this case. I did use both. I honestly have no strong favourite. After that many years of Linux desktop environment DE hopping I came to the conslusion that the DE should get out of your way and allow you to focus on your work. Both Gnome and KDE support that. Actually Gnome a tad better as it gives you less knobs to turn an waste your time. Accept the…

> I came to the conslusion that the DE should get out of your way and allow you to focus on your work.

This is the exact problem of GNOME; they routinely drop a lot of useful functionality, often irreversibly. So [for power users] GNOME absolutely gets in the way of the user.

Re: Ubuntu 26.04

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The X Window developers were mostly just making it up as they went along. Practically no one expects mouse buttons to work like that.

Unix workstations had mice with 3 buttons. The Mac had only one. Windows, Amiga, Atari had two. The Unix developers had choice that others didn't have. They came up with a use that existed forever. Now someone decided to remove the default for no apparent reason. It's like the Android product managers continuing to change the color, size and gesture to answer a phone call: every release, the first call is an exercise…

The number of graphical Unix workstation users during at the time of widespread adoption of Windows and Mac was utterly insignificant.

You cannot compare it to Android.

Re: Ubuntu 26.04

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true any more, and hasn't been for some years, you know. It was true but times change. Microsoft chose to kill off Windows 10, which it once promised would be the last desktop Windows ever. Its replacement is bigger, slower, stuffed with adverts and upselling attempts, and has an artificial demand for TPM 2. That's driven thousands of people to check out Linux, and if you don't know anything about Linux, t…

>That's driven thousands of people to check out Linux, and if you don't know anything about Linux, then Ubuntu is the number one best-known distro. Not really. Most normies seem to choose meme gaming distros based off Fedora like CachyOS or Bazzite. Many are waiting for official SteamOS release which is based on Arch.

CachyOS is based on Arch.
Post reply on HN