I think running a long term support distro is silly for non critical devices.
I personally use Debian Testing, maybe take this chance to try it? I've never had a stability issue across the 4 different devices I use.
Ask HN: Is it a good time to switch to Ubuntu 18.04 desktop?
41–50 of 70 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is it a good time to switch to Ubuntu 18.04 desktop?
#42I would avoid Ubuntu. They take carry a LOT of patches that are not upstreamed (for whatever reason) and they have a long history of ignoring community trends and being extremely divisive for no good reason.
Have any recommendations?
I do. Manjaro (arch-based rolling release distro). The installer is second to none except maybe suse, the hardware detection is also second to none, having worked for me with all kinds of combinations of cpu/vid card. It has one more thing that is super awesome as well, which is the easiest kernel management system I've ever messed with. I also really think that rolling release is the optimum current release model, another reason I like it. It has access to the aur (arch user repository).
I highly recommend the xfce4 version, (most user issues on the forums are kde based and not manjaros fault) even though I am fully over on awesome now. I also don't like lightdm that much so I like replacing that too. In general, that's the arch principle (KISS, remove the cruft, use what you want, replace things and customize them)
Source: someone who distro hops all the time, maintains all kinds of systems, and who has been using manjaro as a daily for ~1 yr.
Re: Ask HN: Is it a good time to switch to Ubuntu 18.04 desktop?
#43I would suggest Fedora if your going to use gnome it has far better consistency in my opinion. Ubuntu have switched to installing default apps like system monitor and some others using snap. There's some inconsistencies if you use other GTK themes besides the default.
Re: Ask HN: Is it a good time to switch to Ubuntu 18.04 desktop?
#44I've been using 16.04 since release and loved it. It was my first Linux daily driver after dumping Windows due to dislike of the way MS has handled Windows 10. I just bought a new drive, so took the opportunity to install 18.04 to see how it goes. I'm using a Latitude E7450 with a 1920x1080 touchscreen. I'm not a developer, I'm primarily a network engineer, so I spent a lot of time in terminal windows configuring rou…
Wow. Some of the bug reports here sound pretty obvious. I wonder if your touch screen is the reason why so many issues are occuring... That or Wayland/Ubuntu isn't right at all.
> Some of the bug reports here sound pretty obvious
That describes the state of ubuntu these days. More often than not when you get an issue you can find a bug report for it to and the bug report was opened 3 versions ago, never addressed and closed automatically by a bot. It seems they've been busy chasing squirrels and ignored the desktop.
My pet peeve with all recent versions (so xorg and wayland) has been user switching not working, but at least 18.04 is the first version that doesn't boot to an unusable resolution.
Re: Ask HN: Is it a good time to switch to Ubuntu 18.04 desktop?
#45I bought a Dell Inspiron laptop in early 2017. After upgrading from 17.10 to 18.04, the ACPI became all messed up. Manually running "pm-suspend" (suspend to RAM) puts the machine into an unusable state. Of course the problem isn't when this happens manually but when it happens automatically, and the problems are the same. Running "pm-hibernate" fails as well.
I'm sure if I spent more time looking at it I could fix it, or at least work around it. I won't go into all the details of what I've looked at so far in this post. But how many hours do I want to devote to this?
There are also other unpleasant things like this in 18.04, like - https://askubuntu.com/a/1028857 . Starting in 18.04, right clicking on a touchpad is turned off by default, in order to be more "Mac-like" (if Ubuntu wants to be more Mac-like, they should get power management working, not shifting me from three Unix mouse buttons to two and now to one).
I should also add I have been burned in the past by upgrading to Ubuntu on the week the new release comes out ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1674838 ), so now I usually wait about six weeks for the major bugs to get squashed before upgrading to the new release (in the past, when I had more time, I would do the opposite - I would put Ubuntu beta into a KVM virtual instance, or even a partition on my machine, ferret out bugs, and report them, maybe send patches etc.)
Re: Ask HN: Is it a good time to switch to Ubuntu 18.04 desktop?
#46Upgraded my laptop two weeks ago. Smooth sailing so far.
Re: Ask HN: Is it a good time to switch to Ubuntu 18.04 desktop?
#47I'm still a unity fan for various personal reasons, so my machine still runs 16.04 for now. But my wife's newest laptop got a fresh 18.04 install and I can report that amd proprietary drivers seem to be a lot easier to install without devastating hiccups in 18.04.
Re: Ask HN: Is it a good time to switch to Ubuntu 18.04 desktop?
#48I think running a long term support distro is silly for non critical devices. I personally use Debian Testing, maybe take this chance to try it? I've never had a stability issue across the 4 different devices I use.
How is it silly? I've used Debian Stable and Ubuntu LTS on desktops for many years. I've always had the latest versions of all the apps I use thanks to backports, repos managed by upstream developers (e.g., PPAs) and occasionally installing software from source. (Disclosure: I don't use GNOME, KDE or any other DE, which can be problematic to keep updated.)
Also, many upstream developers who provide packages for Debian and Ubuntu (e.g., PostgreSQL[1][2] and Spotify[3]) only test their software on Debian Stable and Ubuntu LTS.
Lastly, Debian Testing has the worst security update speed and should not be preferred if security is a concern.[4]
[1] https://www.postgresql.org/download/linux/debian/
[2] https://www.postgresql.org/download/linux/ubuntu/
Re: Ask HN: Is it a good time to switch to Ubuntu 18.04 desktop?
#49If you are considering a switch, do give Fedora a shot. I moved after a decade of Ubuntu. All the technologies that won out (systemd, gnome, Wayland,etc) were created at Fedora. So the level of integration is unparalleled. Ubuntu still seems to be fighting it's choices.
You should inform the developers of i3, KDE Plasma, etc. that they can retire now that GNOME has "won out".
Re: Ask HN: Is it a good time to switch to Ubuntu 18.04 desktop?
#50I would avoid Ubuntu. They take carry a LOT of patches that are not upstreamed (for whatever reason) and they have a long history of ignoring community trends and being extremely divisive for no good reason.
> hey take carry a LOT of patches that are not upstreamed (for whatever reason)
I have spent some time looking at bug tracking for Ubuntu with regards to PDF files.
IMHO, FLOSS support of PDF's on Linux has never been that good, although it has gotten better over time (although it is still problematic). For example this file - https://web.archive.org/web/20100215043153/http://www.ratp.i... - loads fine on most platforms, but in Linux FLOSS (evince with poppler) it might take over 30 seconds to render. Because it had an O(n^2) algorithm running over part of the PDF, something other software on other platforms seems to avoid (even the closed source Adobe reader for Linux).
So I spent a lot of time looking at it. But it takes a little bit of domain knowledge to deal with it. Most people load up evince and have a problem reading a PDF and report it to Ubuntu evince bug channel. But the problem with PDF rendering is often up the library dependency chain - with poppler the PDF renderer. So sometimes I curate tickets and move the ticket from the evince queue to the poppler queue when I see there is a problem.
But poppler often depends on cairo, and sometimes (not often) the rendering problem is in cairo, not poppler. So it goes even higher up the library dependency chain, kicked from evince up to poppler up to cairo.
But sometimes it can't be dealt with locally at Ubuntu, so you log into freedesktop.org and report the problem to them there (or chime in to an existing ticket about another manifestation of a problem). Then you link the Ubuntu cairo queue ticket to the upstream fd.o cairo one.
So some domain knowledge is needed - I informally curate the Ubuntu evince queue, and kick a ticket up to poppler, then with a closer look kick it further up to cairo, then I kick that ticket up to the official cairo queue at fd.o and link the ticket (actually sometimes the chain is evince -> poppler -> cairo -> pixman, as some seeming cairo issues are actually pixman issues).
One reason I've done some curation of this is, as I demonstrated with the pdf above, Linux FLOSS pdf support is not so hot, despite the heroic efforts of Albert Astals Cid of poppler and his cohorts. So I jumped in and did some curation of Ubuntu tickets, and fd.o tickets, and even tickets of other Linux distros. I even attempted to write patches for this complex C++ program, but I lacked the time to get a handle on the code base.
In summary, it takes some domain knowledge to upstream things properly for any distro.