 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 864, 4 May 2020 |
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Welcome to this year's 18th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Last week we covered the release of Canonical's Ubuntu distribution and its many official community editions. This week we spend time exploring this new release which offers long-term support and will form the basis for dozens of other distributions and community spins. We begin with a look at Canonical's flagship offering, Ubuntu 20.04 running the GNOME desktop. Then we also share a first impressions look at Xubuntu, a community spin running the Xfce desktop. Read on to learn how these two distributions left their reviewers with quite different perspectives. Have you tried the new Ubuntu 20.04 release? We would like to hear your thoughts on it, positive or negative, in our Opinion Poll. In our News section we discuss Debian successfully building most packages with an alternative compiler and the eFoundation partnering with Fairphone to bring /e/ OS to a new device. We also share some details on the upcoming release of Linux Mint 20 which is expected to arrive in June. Plus we are pleased to share the releases of the past week and list the torrents we are seeding. We wish you all a fantastic week and happy reading!
Content:
- Review: Ubuntu 20.04
- News: Linux Mint developers prepare for version 20, Debian testing package builds with Clang, eFoundation partnering with Fairphone
- Review: Xubuntu 20.04
- Released last week: Fedora 32, CentOS 7.8.2003, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2
- Torrent corner: AUSTRUMI, CentOS, Fedora, Linuxfx, Live Raizo, Parrot, Pop!_OS, Simplicity, Ufficio Zero, Voyager Live
- Upcoming releases: Tails 4.6, UBports 16.04 OTA-12, openSUSE 15.2
- Opinion poll: First impressions of Ubuntu 20.04
- New distributions: Br OS
- Reader comments
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (21MB) and MP3 (16MB) formats.
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Ubuntu, along with its many community flavours, is one of the world's mostly widely used Linux distributions. Ubuntu ships four official editions (Desktop, Server, Cloud, and a minimal Core). There are additional community editions which provide alternative desktop and configuration options. Just over a week ago, Canonical launched Ubuntu 20.04 which offers five years of support for official editions and three years of support for community editions.
The new Ubuntu release includes version 5.4 of the Linux kernel and support for WireGuard. The Desktop edition ships with GNOME 3.36 as the default desktop and includes experimental support for installing the operating system on the ZFS advanced filesystem. The release announcement mentions that, along with ZFS, Ubuntu will offer “state saving” of the filesystem using a tool called Zsys. From the context, it sounds as though “state saving” here means taking filesystem snapshots as we are also told ZFS integrates with the GRUB boot loader in order to allow users to rollback system changes. (This is a similar feature to the boot environments provided by openSUSE and FreeBSD.) This version of Ubuntu ships with Python 3.8, though Python 2.7 (while unsupported upstream) is available in the distribution's repositories.
The Desktop edition of Ubuntu is a 2.5GB download. Booting from the supplied media will, if we do not interfere, load a graphical environment where we can choose to try a live desktop environment or immediately launch Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer. At the start of the boot process we can press a key to bring up a menu where we can preemptively choose to run the live desktop or load the installer directly. (Practically this does not make a difference and just means we are making our choice to try or install the distribution from a text-based boot menu rather than a graphical welcome screen.) While the operating system is loading it performs an integrity check on the local media to make sure the operating system was not corrupted during the download. We can optionally skip the media check by pressing Ctrl-C.
Ubuntu 20.04 -- The application launcher screen
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Taking the live desktop option loads a customized GNOME desktop that has been adjusted to look like Canonical's now-discontinued Unity 7 desktop. A panel with quick launch buttons is displayed down the left side of the screen. An application menu can be opened through a button in the lower-left corner. A system tray sits in the top-right and the GNOME Activities menu sits in the upper-left. Icons on the desktop open the system installer and file manager.
Installing
Ubuntu's graphical installer is called Ubiquity and it has not changed much in the past decade. The installer asks us to choose our preferred language from a list, offers to show us the distribution's release notes, and gets us to confirm our keyboard's layout. The following screen gives us a few important options. One is to install Ubuntu Desktop with a wide range of applications (this is called the Normal option) or install just the GNOME desktop, a few utilities and a web browser. This is referred to as the Minimal option. We can also opt to download package upgrades and third-party items such as media codecs and non-free drivers while the distribution is installing.
The following screen asks if we want to manually partition our hard drive or have Ubiquity set up filesystems for us. The automated option has two sub-options: setting up Ubuntu on a LVM volume or on ZFS. The ZFS option is marked as experimental and, following promising experiments I conducted when Ubuntu 19.10 was launched last year, I decided to try the ZFS option. We then select our time zone from a map of the world and make up a username and password for ourselves. The installer sets up the operating system and then offers to reboot the computer (or, if we were running the live desktop, Ubiquity can simply close and return us to the GNOME environment).
Here I ran into my first problem with Ubuntu 20.04: I was unable to shut down the distribution from the live desktop. The system would begin the poweroff process and then list an endless stream of errors saying the system could not unmount the live media. This happened whether I was running the live desktop from a DVD or USB thumb drive. When I ran the installer directly (without launching the live desktop) the distribution shut down cleanly after finishing the install process.
Early impressions
The first thing I noticed about my freshly installed copy of Ubuntu was that it took a long time to boot. Ubuntu always took over three minutes to get from the boot loader screen to the graphical login screen, if it managed to finish booting at all. (I will come back to this problem later.) Once we get to the graphical login screen we can sign into one of two session options: Ubuntu and Ubuntu on Wayland. Both sessions open the GNOME desktop with the former running on the X.Org display server.
The first time we sign into GNOME a window opens and asks if we would like to connect to any on-line accounts. Google, Microsoft, Nextcloud, and Ubuntu accounts are supported. We are then offered a chance to enable Livepatch, a tool which patches the kernel, side-stepping the need to reboot the computer when the kernel is updated. The Livepatch service requires an Ubuntu on-line account.
The first-run window then asks if we would like to send system information to Canonical and then offers to enable location services. The final screen asks if we would like to open the software centre. I will talk about the software centre later.
Something I noticed early on while using the GNOME desktop is window buttons are still kept on the right side of windows. I thought this was interesting as Canonical spent several years encouraging people to use window buttons on the left when they were developing Unity. The GNOME layout is set up to look a lot like Unity, but buttons have been kept to the right.
Pressing the application menu button opens a full screen of launchers. We can browse through applications one page at a time with the icons arranged in alphabetical order. There aren't any category filters, but we can type searches to locate items by name
Shortly after signing into the desktop a window appeared and told me there were two software updates available. These updates were 94kB in size and were downloaded quickly. The update manager was straight forward, showed a simplified list of what updates were available, and worked well for me.
Hardware
I began my Ubuntu trial by running the distribution in a VirtualBox environment. I found the GNOME environment integrated and resized properly in the virtual machine. However, the GNOME desktop was far too slow to respond and draw itself to be practical. Opening a new menu could take over five seconds and opening new applications tended to take longer than usual.
Ubuntu 20.04 -- The GNOME settings panel
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When running Ubuntu on a physical workstation the desktop worked more quickly. GNOME was still a little slower than the average open source desktop to respond, but it was usable. Audio worked out of the box and my display was set to its maximum resolution. I ran into a problem with networking. When connected to a wireless network my connection would drop around once every minute or two. This would be accompanied by a warning message on the desktop saying the network had been disconnected. However, a few seconds later, the network would reconnect. When switching to another distribution on the same hardware, this regular disconnection did not happen. This made it impractical to try to use wireless networking while running Ubuntu.
When running on ZFS, Ubuntu used about 1.4GB of RAM when signed into the GNOME desktop. ZFS seemed to be taking up a few hundred megabytes of memory, suggesting the rest of Ubuntu and GNOME were consuming about 1GB of RAM, about twice the amount most other mainstream distributions I have tested recently use. The distribution consumed about 2.5GB of disk space for a fresh install and set up a small swap partition alongside my ZFS volume when I used Ubiquity's guided partitioning option.
Early I mentioned having trouble getting Ubuntu to boot. The first time I installed Ubuntu and booted, the distribution started up and I was able to login, install updates, and explore the system a bit. Then I rebooted and the system locked up, unable to get to a login screen. I was unable to get the distribution to start via usual means and so I decided to reinstall. The first time I booted Ubuntu from my fresh install, I signed into my account, and then immediately restarted the computer without making any system changes. The system once again failed to boot. And failed to boot again, and again. I finally found I could get Ubuntu to boot by launching recovery mode from the GRUB menu and immediately picking Resume to continue the boot process. This was the only way I could get the distribution to load, after the initial boot.
Included software
Ubuntu's Normal install ships with a fairly standard collection of open source applications. We are treated to Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, the Rhythmbox audio player, the GNOME Files file manager, a document viewer and appointment calendar. The Transmission bittorrent software is included along with the Totem video player. When we install Ubuntu with third-party packages enabled Totem can play video and audio files.
Ubuntu 20.04 -- Reading the GNOME Help documentation and running Firefox
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The GNOME Help documentation is provided and has a useful spot on the desktop panel. In the background Ubuntu 20.04 uses the systemd init software and runs on version 5.4 of the Linux kernel.
Software manager
When we want to get additional applications most users will probably turn to the software centre. Ubuntu's software centre has three tabs, one of finding new applications, one for showing installed programs, and one for checking for updates. The first tab begins by simply showing us a list of "editor's picks" or favourite programs. There are no software categories we can browse. We can perform searches for software, locating items by name. Most of my searches were unsuccessful and I found the reason was the software centre only displayed Snap packages (portable packages in Canonical's repository) and not the tens of thousands of Deb packages in Ubuntu's repositories. To locate Deb packages I had to either install an alternative software centre or use the APT command line tool. This seems like a strange move for Canonical to make, especially given how few Snap packages there are and the very mixed reception Ubuntu users have had to Snap in general.
Ubuntu 20.04 -- The software centre
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The software centre did not detect system updates, these needed to be installed through the separate update manager I mentioned above.
While Snap support is installed and enabled by default, the alternative portable package format, Flatpak, is not. Flatpak can be installed from the Ubuntu Deb repositories from the command line.
Ubuntu 20.04 -- Installing a Snap package
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ZFS and boot environments
Two of the key features I was hoping to test during this trial were ZFS and booting into snapshots. The installer set up ZFS successfully, as it did last year during my trial with Xubuntu 19.10. The documentation reports that a tool called Zsys will help manage ZFS snapshots. I looked up the Zsys daemon (zsysd) and its manual page says that it automates the creation of filesystem snapshots, though it does not give any details. I could not find any information on whether snapshots are triggered by specific events or done periodically. I did notice that almost as soon as I logged into Ubuntu the first time, a ZFS snapshot was created. Though future actions did not seem to cause new snapshots to be made. Earlier in the year Arstechnica reported Zsys takes snapshots prior to package management actions, though with some restrictions.
Something that further frustrated me was the release announcement for Ubuntu 20.04 reports that users can select a snapshot to load at boot time. However, I did not find a way to do this. Older snapshots were not listed in the boot menu or under the Advanced section of the GRUB menu.
While the new Ubuntu ZFS tools do not seem to work, or not in ways I would expect, we can use the standard ZFS command line tools, zfs and zpool, to manage ZFS volumes and filesystems.
Troubleshooting
I ran into several issues with Ubuntu 20.04, especially in key areas such as booting, desktop performance and network stability. As a result I did more double-checking and troubleshooting than usual this week. For example, I double-checked my install media checksum, tried installing from different removable media (in case of corruption), and made sure the live media always passed its self-check before installing.
I also tried running other distributions on the computer this week to make sure they did not encounter performance or networking issues. Ubuntu was the only one which had problems working with my hardware.
At one point I was concerned ZFS might be introducing problems as it is an experimental feature. However, when I tried installing Ubuntu again, this time on an ext4 partition, the operating system failed to boot at all. Even the first time trying to start the system Ubuntu was unable to get to a login screen, even when going through recovery mode.
Conclusions
Going into this trial I was intrigued by some of the features Ubuntu was offering. Apart from ZFS storage for the main filesystem and bootable snapshots, there was also mention of performance improvements to GNOME, Wayland has been polished lately, and I was curious to see how Snaps were being integrated into the distribution.
The practical experience however was a disaster on almost every front. The Ubuntu installer was easy to navigate, but after that, things quickly went downhill. The distribution could only boot once when running on ZFS and failed to run at all when installed on an ext4 partition. The distribution's desktop performance was a little sluggish on physical hardware (with open source drivers) and painfully slow in the virtual machine.
The promised ZFS snapshots did happen (sometimes) though less consistently than the way openSUSE handles Btrfs snapshots and I could not find a way to boot into existing snapshots. The documentation feels light on this front.
Perhaps the oddest decision Canonical has made with this release is to make the software centre work only with Snap packages. Snap packages are large, have trouble integrating with the rest of the desktop, and there are far fewer of them than traditional Deb packages. This makes Snap a poor alternative to traditional packages in most scenarios, yet Ubuntu treats them as the primary package option and seems to require command line work to access traditional packages.
These issues, along with the slow boot times and spotty wireless network access, gave me a very poor impression of Ubuntu 20.04. This was especially disappointing since just six months ago I had a positive experience with Xubuntu 19.10, which was also running on ZFS. My experience this week was frustrating - slow, buggy, and multiple components felt incomplete. This is, in my subjective opinion, a poor showing and a surprisingly unpolished one considering Canonical plans to support this release for the next five years.
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Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications:
- Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU
- Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive
- Memory: 6GB of RAM
- Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card, Ralink RT5390R PCIe Wireless card
- Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card
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Visitor supplied rating
Ubuntu has a visitor supplied average rating of: 7.6/10 from 322 review(s).
Have you used Ubuntu? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Linux Mint developers prepare for version 20, Debian testing package builds with Clang, eFoundation partnering with Fairphone
The Linux Mint project is working toward a new release, Linux Mint 20, which will be available in three desktop editions: Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce. The new version will introduce changes and improvements previously seen in the distribution's Debian Edition. The distribution will also be showing off a new tool for sharing files over the local network called Warpinator. "Warpinator now encrypts communication on the network and includes all the features we planned for it this release cycle. It received a new icon and the only thing missing now are translations. If you want to give it a try, there are packages for Mint 19.3 and LMDE 4." Further details on upcoming features can be found in the project's newsletter.
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The Debian project strives to provide a universal operating system, one that can run on multiple hardware architectures, with multiple kernels, and possibly even being built with multiple compilers. Work has been going into building Debian packages with Clang, which offers some alternative ways to check for coding errors and regressions. "Even if most of the software are still using GCC as compiler, we can see that Clang has a positive effect on code quality. With many different kinds of errors and warnings found clang over the years, we noticed a steady decline of the number of errors. For example, the number of incorrect C/C++ main declarations has been decreasing.". A blog post highlights the work and improvements going into Debian packages to make them build with alternative compilers like Clang and a web page has been set up which tracks the status of packages which fail to build with compilers other than the GNU Compiler Collection.
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Earlier this year we shared a first look at /e/ OS, a mobile, open source operating system which removes Google services from Android and replaces them with open source alternatives. The eFoundation has announced a new partnership with Fairphone, an organization which sells upgradable and ethically sourced smart phones. It is now possible to install /e/ OS on the Fairphone 3 and European customers can purchase the Fairphone with /e/ OS pre-installed. Details on the Fairphone 3 and install instructions can be found in the eFoundation's documentation.
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These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Review (by Jeff Siegel) |
Xubuntu 20.04
Xubuntu has always been the quiet middle child in the Ubuntu family, the one that was always overlooked in favour of its older siblings, the glitzy Kubuntu and the rock star Ubuntu - and even for the younger ones, like the oh so retro Ubuntu MATE. All Xubuntu has ever done is offer a solid, dependable, mostly error-free, long-term release every two years. Given a world of Linux distro hoppers, Plasma desktop, and extras like the GNOME and MX Linux tweak tools, and the Zorin browser chooser, who needs something like Xubuntu?
A lot of us. We value the distro's dependability and continuity, its lack of controversy, and that it just works, almost and always, straight out of the box. In this, Xubuntu 20.04, Focal Fossa, continues the distro's tradition. The flashiest things about it are a new theme, Greybird-dark, and its purple desktop wallpaper, featuring a constellation of a fossa's head. Otherwise, don't expect many obvious changes.
But who cares? It's still snappy and quick, it's easy to use, easy to tweak (even without one of those new-falutin' tools), and the Xfce desktop remains as robust as ever. Yes, some of the annoyances remain in 20.04, like the fake weather in the panel's weather applet, and that Synaptic still doesn't come pre-installed. But so what if the quiet middle child is quiet? There are worse things.
Xubuntu 20.04 -- Running the Ubiquity system installer
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The basics
Xubuntu 20.04, Focal Fossa, is a long-term support (LTS) release, supported for three years until April 2023. It features the Linux kernel 5.4 and Xfce desktop 4.14. Minimum system requirements are 512MB of memory and 7.5GB of disk space; recommended specifications are 1GB and 20GB. The higher memory is almost certainly necessary these days, given modern resource-intensive web browsers, while 7.5GB will handle only the most rudimentary of installations; my basic testing installation took up almost 9GB of disk space. The 64-bit download ISO is 1.7GB. I tested Focal Fossa in VirtualBox and on my Asus UX-31A laptop, with a 128GB SSD and 4GB of memory.
Focal Fossa installed easily and worked as expected in VirtualBox, save for two things. First, I couldn't resize the guest's screen, no matter how big I made the VirtualBox screen. Second, the software center went missing. It wasn't listed in the Whisker menu and I couldn't activate it using the command line.
Xubuntu 20.04 -- Adjusting the Whisker menu
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Unfortunately, the laptop installation didn't go as smoothly as it should have. The Ubiquity installer was as quick as always, just eight minutes, and I was able to tweak the desktop and test several apps without any hanging or delays. It was a treat to be able to install updates and the extra non-free software without the installer crashing, something that has been known to occur off and on over the years. I'm not quite sure why the Ubuntu logo, and not the rat, was on the installer icon, but that's nitpicking.
What's not is what happened when Ubiquity finished and I removed the installation media and hit Enter as instructed on the bottom of the screen (apparently, something added after 18.04). The machine booted into a GRUB command line. I had to reboot (using Ctrl-Alt-Del) to start the distribution. Yes, trying to figure out what to do with the thumb drive when rebooting after installation is always a bit metaphysical - yank it out and hope for the best, hit F2 and change the boot order, or turn the machine off and turn it on again without the thumb drive - but this approach is worse than all three of those. And it's decidedly un-Xubuntu - introducing confusion into something straightforward.
On the desktop
But that was about the last of the aggravations. Xubuntu 20.04, if not quite up to the standards of the epic 16.04, Xenial Xerus, looks to be a solid improvement over 18.04 and its litany of on-release bugs.
Xubuntu 20.04 -- Customizing notifications
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The software, as always, is tried and true - the current versions of the Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail client, the LibreOffice office suite, GIMP, the underrated and unappreciated Parole media player, and the Atril PDF and Ristretto image viewers. Network Manager remains seamless, and connects as soon as it detects the network once it's set up - no dropping signal, no slowing or flagging. Especially impressive was the Whisker menu upgrade to 2.4.3, which now offers three options for displaying the menu - as icons, as a list, and in a tree menu.
Xubuntu 20.04 -- Browsing the filesystem
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In addition, Gigolo, the distro's remote file system app, has been upgraded to 0.5.1, and the difference is immediate. Save for connecting to Windows shares (which is apparently a Samba issue), it's no more complicated than determining the IP address of the machine you want to access, and clicking through the connect screen. I used Gigolo to access a video on my desktop, dropped it into Parole on the laptop, and it played without a hitch. In fact, Parole worked so well that I may forgo VLC when I upgrade my desktop to 20.04 and stick with Parole.
Is this an exciting collection of bleeding edge, "it's what they would run on Arch Linux" software? No, but you could use Focal Fossa with this assortment, not change a thing, and be productive from the minute the distro was up and running.
Xubuntu 20.04 -- The Ristretto image viewer
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Two other apps are worth noting - the new Document Scanner, which is the legendary Simple Scan under a new name, and the Software Center. The former retains Simple Scan's ease of use with a redesigned interface that's more intuitive. And it recognized my Canon PIXMA flatbed without any trouble. The latter? Well, there's a reason I grab Synaptic first thing on a new Xubuntu installation, because as much improved as Software Center seems to be. Software Centre can still be slow, unwieldy, and cumbersome, and especially if you're doing lots of installing and uninstalling at the same time.
So what's the catch?
There really isn't one, as long as you know what to expect. Again, one of Xubuntu's strengths is that its flaws aren't fatal:
- 20.04 is snappy and quick, but it uses system resources to do it: Run a YouTube video on Firefox, and I'm using 25% of the CPU and 27% percent of memory. Surf and search on Firefox, and those numbers are 32% and 25%, respectively. Even when the machine was idling, it was 2% and 16%. That's hardly as light as Puppy Linux, and ways from Xubuntu's history as a distro for older hardware.
- There's still no Livepatch, the Canonical kernel upgrade service. It's not crucial, obviously, but it would make Xubuntu users feel like we were part of the Canonical family.
Xubuntu 20.04 -- Trying to enable live kernel patching
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- Power consumption could be better. Yes, my laptop is almost eight years old, but it would be nice to get more than a couple of hours of battery life when I'm all I'm doing is writing a story, handling e-mail, and the like.
- The Xfce panel's applets can be confusing - trying to parse the notification area plugin, the indicator plugin, and the notification plugin to decide what needs to be handled. And I know the weather applet is an Xfce issue, but it has been going on for more than two LTS releases.
So what about tweaking?
The Settings Manager offers the basics, but it's hardly cutting edge. If you want more, you need to do it by hand. You can add a bottom panel to use as a dock or install Plank from in the repository. The Kupfer launcher, also in the repositories, fits the various Xubuntu themes and doesn't slow things down. Adding wallpapers, themes, and icons that aren't pre-installed (and only a handful are) requires a little command-line-fu, but nothing too serious. The Papirus icon set works surprisingly well.
Xubuntu 20.04 -- The settings panel
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Finally, for those of us who like a little nostalgia, the Eyes panel applet is still available, ready to stare at you as move the mouse across the screen.
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Hardware used for this review
My physical test equipment for this review was am Asus UX31A laptop with the following specifications:
- Processor: Intel Core i5-3317U, 1.7GHz
- Storage: 128GB SSD
- Memory: 4GB of RAM
- Networking: Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6235 802.11 a/b/g/n wireless
- Display: Integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000
When he is not testing out new versions of Linux distributions, Jeff Siegel can be found writing about all things related to wine at Wine Curmudgeon.
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| Released Last Week |
CentOS 7.8.2003
Johnny Hughes has announced the release of CentOS 7.8.2003, the latest update to the legacy series of the project's community distribution recompiled from the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux: "We are pleased to announce the general availability of CentOS Linux 7 (2003) for the x86_64 architecture. Effective immediately, this is the current release for CentOS Linux 7 and is tagged as 2003, derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.8 source code. As always, read through the release notes - these notes contain important information about the release and details about some of the content inside the release from the CentOS QA team. These notes are updated constantly to include issues and incorporate feedback from the users. Updates released since the upstream release are all posted, across all architectures. We strongly recommend every user apply all updates, including the content released today, on your existing CentOS Linux 7 machine by just running 'yum update'." See the release announcement, release notes and upstream release notes for further information.
Fedora 32
Matthew Miller has announced the release of Fedora 32. The projects latest release upgrades development tools and compilers, removes most of the legacy Python 2 packages, and ships with the GNOME 3.36 desktop. The distribution now includes the EarlyOOM memory monitor which can remove processes which are consuming too much RAM. "No matter what variant of Fedora you use, you're getting the latest the open source world has to offer. Following our “First” foundation, we've updated key programming language and system library packages, including GCC 10, Ruby 2.7, and Python 3.8. Of course, with Python 2 past end-of-life, we've removed most Python 2 packages from Fedora. A legacy python27 package is provided for developers and users who still need it. In Fedora Workstation, we've enabled the EarlyOOM service by default to improve the user experience in low-memory situations." Further details can be found in the distribution's release announcement.
Fedora 32 -- Running the GNOME Shell desktop
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2
Red Hat has announced the release of the second update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.x series, an enterprise-class Linux distribution with comprehensive support options. This version provides, besides many other improvements, an in-place upgrade tool for the users of RHEL 7.x series: "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 now generally available. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 is the latest version delivered according to the twice yearly release cadence. Highlights: enhanced user experience; streamlines subscription registration by making it a step in the installation process; simplifies monitoring with Red Hat Insights by enabling activation during installation; improved lifecycle management; simplifies upgrades from RHEL 7.8 to RHEL 8.2 with in-place upgrade tooling; reduces the time and risk of inplace upgrades with identification and remediation guidance to resolve potential problems; enhanced monitoring and performance; improves isolation and resource governance for container runtime processes with cgroup v2...." Read the release announcement and the detailed release notes for further information.
Voyager Live 20.04
Voyager Live is an Xubuntu-based distribution and live DVD showcasing the Xfce desktop environment. The project's latest release is Voyager Live 20.04 which includes version 4.14 of the Xfce desktop, Linux 5.4, and offers three years of security updates. "Good morning all. I introduce you Voyager 20.04 LTS with long-term support for 3 years, until April 2023 . A variant based on (X)Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) with the Xfce desktop in version 4.14 and version 5.4 of the Linux kernel. The advantage of Xfce is to offer a light, fast, modern, fluid and efficient system. With integrated for the first time, PC Tablet options and a minimum version for Xfce out of the box Voyager. Voyager comes in two desktop versions, with Xfce by default and GNOME Shell for a version called GE . Also, you can choose according to your wishes and machine capacities. The general idea of Voyager, is to introduce scripts grouped in a box and various panel profiles which optimize the system, with a choice of necessary software. The whole redesigned in a variety of color themes and wallpaper for better ergonomics." The release announcement offers additional details.
Parrot 4.9
Lorenzo Faletra has announced the release of Parrot 4.9, the latest stable version of the project's distribution set based on Debian's "Testing" branch. It comes in "Home" and "Security" editions both of which are available with either KDE Plasma or MATE desktops. "Parrot 4.9 is now available for download and it ships some important updates we are particularly proud of. Some new features introduced in Parrot 4.8 has also introduced some weird bugs that required some extra time to be spotted and fixed. We originally wanted to release Parrot 4.8.1 to address them, but then a huge amount of updates from Debian, like the removal of many Python 2 libraries and tools and the introduction of a new Linux kernel version made the 4.9 release a more appealing idea. We have also introduced a new, more friendly installer and a new look and feel to the login screen to make the system more appealing to newcomers and more comfortable for those users already aboard." Read the rest of the release notes for further details.
Pop!_OS 20.04
Pop!_OS is an Ubuntu-based, desktop distribution developed by System76. The company has published a new version, 20.04, of Pop!_OS which introduces improved keyboard navigation, enables Flatpak support with the Flathub repository enabled, and the ability to assign applications to run on a specific graphics card. "Previously on Pop!_OS: Laptops with Intel and NVIDIA graphics have the power to Jekyll and Hyde between integrated graphics and the dGPU. Now on Pop!_OS, In addition to switching between Intel and NVIDIA graphics, you can choose Hybrid Graphics from the system menu. In Hybrid Graphics mode, your laptop runs on the battery-saving Intel GPU and only uses the NVIDIA GPU for applications you designate. To do this, simply right-click on the app icon and select 'Launch using Dedicated Graphics Card'. Application developers and maintainers can configure their applications to use the dedicated GPU by default by setting the following flag in their .desktop file: X-KDE-RunOnDiscreteGpu=true" Further information can be found in the company's release announcement.
Pop!_OS 20.04 -- Running the GNOME desktop
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GhostBSD 20.04
The GhostBSD project creates a desktop-oriented, FreeBSD-based operating system. The project has published a new version, GhostBSD 20.04, which fixes a number of installation and ZFS-related issues at setup time. "I am happy to announce the availability of GhostBSD 20.04, but first thanks to all people that gave feedback and reported issues. We fixed a couple of problems that were found in 20.03. This release comes with kernel and OS updates and numerous software applications updates and many improvements like replacing gnome-mount and hald with FreeBSD devd and Vermaden automount which make auto mounting and unmounting of external device way more stable and supports more filesystems. What has changed and got fixed since 20.03: Fixed ZFS forced 4k option on ZFS full disk installation. Added 4k to default when creating ZFS partition with the installer partition editor. Fixed pool cleanup when deleting ZFS partition with the installer partition editor. Replaced gnome-mount and hald with FreeBSD devd and Vermaden automount. Fixed update manager weird loop. Fixed duplicate software repository config." Additional details can be found in the project's release announcement.
Simplicity Linux 20.4
David Purse has announced the release of Simplicity Linux 20.4, a new stable version of the project's Devuan-based distribution set with a choice of Cinnamon or LXDE desktop environments: "We are pleased to announce the release of Simplicity Linux 20.4. This time there are four editions, all based on the excellent Buster Dog. First we have 'Mini', which uses LXDE and Openbox and runs the 5.6.4 XanMod kernel. As usual with Mini, there isn’t a lot of software pre-installed; instead it uses web-based apps which run as a Chrome instance. We have preinstalled Google Docs, Taiga.io Project Management software, Spotify, Mega, Gmail and Facebook Messenger. For those looking for something with locally based applications, we have 'Desktop' which also uses the 5.6.4 XanMod kernel. Unlike Mini, it uses Cinnamon as its desktop. It comes preinstalled with Pidgin, LibreOffice, GIMP, Chrome, Thunderbird, Audacity, Spotify and MPV. The 'Gaming' edition uses the Debian Backports 5.4.0 kernel for stability, and it comes with Brave Browser, OBS, Discord, Blacknut Cloud Gaming, Vortex Cloud Gaming, Wine, Steam and Spotify as full local applications." Here is the complete release announcement.
Simplicity Linux 20.4 -- Browsing the application menu
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elementary OS 5.1.4
Cassidy James Blaede has announced the release of elementary OS 5.1.4, the latest update from the project that develops a beginner-friendly Linux distribution with a custom desktop called Pantheon, based on Ubuntu. This version updates (and renames) the parental control application and revamps the application menu: "Informed by our work last year at the Metered Data and Parental Controls hackfest, we've started overhauling Parental Controls. While we're focusing on the digital wellbeing aspects, we decided to rename it to the more straightforward 'Screen Time & Limits'. But it's more than just a rename; Screen Time & Limits is now available for your own account in addition to other non-administrator accounts on the device—so you can set your own rules around screen time, Internet access and app usage. As a result of reworking the feature, Screen Time & Limits is also much more reliable than before. If you previously had issues with Parental Controls, give Screen Time & Limits a try from System Settings and let us know what you think." See the detailed release announcement for more information and screenshots.
Endless OS 3.8.0
Andre Magalhaes has announced the release of Endless OS 3.8.0, a major new update of the project's Debian-based, family-oriented distribution that integrates more than 100 apps for working, studying or playing games. This release updates the GNOME desktop to version 3.36: "Endless OS 3.8.0. In this release the desktop and most of its components were updated to the versions from GNOME 3.36, bringing new features, performance improvements and bug fixes. On new installations, parental controls can now be enabled when you first start the computer, at the same time as creating the main user account. Once configured, there is now a dedicated Parental Controls application to make it easier to find and adjust the parental controls settings. We are now producing ready-to-go images that can be imported directly into any virtual machine software that supports OVF files (for example, VirtualBox or VMWare Player) and 64-bit virtual machines." Read the rest of the release announcement for more information and screenshots.
KaOS 2020.05
KaOS is an independent, rolling release distribution which focuses on providing one desktop environment (KDE Plasma) for one architecture (x86_64). The project's latest snapshot is KaOS 2020.05 which includes a number of toolchain updates. "KaOS is very proud to announce the availability of the May release of a new stable ISO. This release is unlike the February version, not about many new features, but rather about updates and rebuilds. Most of the base of this distribution has been rebuild on a new GCC 9.3.0, Glibc 2.31 & Binutils 2.34 based Toolchain. Other rebuilds were needed for ICU 66.1, Boost 1.72.0, Krb5 1.18, Glib2 2.64.2 based stack, Guile 2.2.6, Mesa 20.0.6, NetworkManager 1.22.10, Perl 5.30.2, Linux 5.6.8 and Qt 5.14.2. The new features from the last, major, release were numerous, so repeated here one more time. It starts with the installer, there it is now possible to select whether or not to install an office suite (current choice is limited to LibreOffice, future might see the addition of Calligra as option). You can also opt to do a minimal install." Further details can be found in the distribution's release announcement.
* * * * *
Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
The table below provides a list of torrents DistroWatch is currently seeding. If you do not have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.
Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found in our Torrent Archive. We also maintain a Torrents RSS feed for people who wish to have open source torrents delivered to them. To share your own open source torrents of Linux and BSD projects, please visit our Upload Torrents page.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 1,952
- Total data uploaded: 31.6TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
First impressions of Ubuntu 20.04
This week we shared two different reviews on Ubuntu and one of its community editions, Xubuntu. The authors had quite different experiences with these distributions despite the two editions using the same kernel, most of the same userland packages, and some of the same desktop applications. We would like to hear what your experiences have been with Ubuntu 20.04 and its many editions. Let us know what you think of 20.04 in the comments.
You can see the results of our previous poll on running computer with 32-bit CPUs in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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First impressions of Ubuntu 20.04
| I like it: | 321 (22%) |
| I dislike it: | 357 (25%) |
| I am using it and am neutral: | 129 (9%) |
| I have not used it yet: | 646 (44%) |
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| Website News (by Jesse Smith) |
Distributions added to waiting list
- Br OS. Br OS is a Kubuntu-based distribution for Brazilian users.
* * * * *
DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 11 May 2020. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Article Search page. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews/submissions, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, donations, comments)
- Bruce Patterson (podcast)
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Design Xubuntu (by Guido on 2020-05-04 01:03:53 GMT from Philippines)
I haven't tried it, but when I compare the default design of Xubuntu during the last years, it is getting worse with each version. I have seldom seen such an ugly desktop design. The colors are really not fitting together. Okay, you could change this detail. What do you think?
2 • Ubuntu (by mcellius on 2020-05-04 01:41:44 GMT from United States)
Wow, Jesse, what an unfortunate experience you had with Ubuntu 20.04! Nothing but problems, problems, problems!
I have installed Ubuntu 20.04 on two different computers: a Dell desktop, and a System76 laptop, and on both I enountered none - not one - of the problems you describe. Both have been stable and reliable, working very much as I hoped, and as an LTS release should work.
No slow boots, no installation problems, no network problems, no ZFS problems, etc.
However, I noticed one of the things you wrote, and perhaps that is the cause of your problems:
I decided to run the beta version of Ubuntu 20.04 earlier, wanting to know if I was going to like it or not. One of the issues I ran into, a couple weeks before the final release, was that there appeared to be some confusion about what was going on with Ubuntu Software (what you call the "software centre"). At one point it changed to include only Snap packages, and for awhile there were even two versions, but whatever was being done at Canonical was sorted out and what shipped in the actual Release was one package that did include both Snap packages as well as others in the various repositories. (I tested it out because of the earlier problems I had noticed.)
So I wonder, since you mentioned finding that the "software center" worked only with Snap packages: were you actually running one of the betas of Ubuntu rather than the finished and released version that everyone gets if they go to download it now? You also mentioned that the "software centre" showed no softwae categories, but the version released with Ubuntu 2004 does show software categories. A beta version, of course, is not to be used for "production" work, as it is expected to have problems that have not yet been fixed or corrected. It probably shouldn't be used for reviewing a product release, either.
3 • Ubuntu review (by Jesse on 2020-05-04 01:46:07 GMT from Canada)
@2: I never (unless explicitly stated in the article) review beta releases. I always wait for the final release and review it. The only exceptions to this rule have been with projects that are in on-going and persistent beta status like Haiku.
The version of Ubuntu reviewed this week was the final release of 20.04, not a beta.
4 • New LTS Release (by Bob on 2020-05-04 01:51:09 GMT from United States)
I usually wait until the first major upgrade, ie 20.04.1, before trying a new LTS.
5 • Ubuntu MATE 20.04 (by Tim on 2020-05-04 02:11:54 GMT from United States)
I can't comment on any of the bugs Jesse saw because I've got the Ubuntu MATE spin running and not the flagship but I've had zero issues. I had not planned on using this release because I was pretty happy with my mix of Mint 19.3 and Debian 10 but I threw it on one computer and it had so few annoyances I switched two others.
6 • Ubuntu - maybe a few years from now (by Andy Prough on 2020-05-04 02:42:33 GMT from United States)
I was actually thinking about trying out this version, since it is a long-term release and there was so much buzz prior to its release. Glad I waited. Maybe I'll think about it again in another 3 years. Probably by then Canonical will have thankfully given up on their bloated snaps like they gave up on mir and upstart and ubuntu-phone/convergence and ubuntu-one file hosting and the unity desktop and on and on.
7 • Xubuntu is the better Ubuntu (by Torsten on 2020-05-04 03:06:30 GMT from Germany)
Well, I have less problems with Xubuntu than with Ubuntu. In my view, Xubuntu really is the better Ubuntu, even when the design & layout could be better.
But I also don't like all the "Snap" store & stuffs. I think that I will switch to Debian or to MX Linux this weekend.
8 • Ubuntu 20.04 (by Ti-Paul on 2020-05-04 03:13:47 GMT from Canada)
I would love continue using Ubuntu 20.04, it runs smoothly on my laptop with this latest Gnome version BUT too much of a headache for trying to get suspend and hibernation working... And this is vital for me...
Seems like kernel 5.x don't help since i'm on Linux Mint 18.3 with kernel 4.15.x and it works well... but if i install kernel 5.x in Mint, no more suspend/hibernate! :(
9 • Ubuntu 20.04 (by Bob on 2020-05-04 03:39:13 GMT from United States)
Ubuntu was the first distro I ever tried and I have tried every major release for the last 8 years. I always want to like it, but I don't. It is always just too buggy. This time after a flawless install I rebooted and couldn't login. My password didn't do anything. I reinstalled and set it to auto-login, rebooted and got the same result. I tried it on a desktop and two laptops, same results. On the other hand Kubuntu works great on anything I put it on. No problems at all.
10 • Switching to a different distro. (by R. Cain on 2020-05-04 04:00:12 GMT from United States)
@ #7--
"... I think that I will switch to Debian or to MX Linux this weekend."
Make *absolutely* certain that if you do switch, you don't use any release later than the latest version of what was declared to be the absolute-best distribution of 2019: MX Linux MX-18 Continuum. And you should give VERY serious consideration to MX-Linux's stablemate: antiX.
From a serious reviewer of Linux distributions--
"...MX-18 Continuum delivered more than the other Xfce distros I tested, and it's better than MX-19, too..."
"... MX-19 was a nice product, with good connectivity and speed.... But then, things came undone - I noticed problems I didn't have before.... I was unreservedly happy with MX-18, but I didn't feel the same connection with the newest version...it always helps when you get a smooth, clean experience. Bugs sure don't help...its [MX-19's] worst enemy is - its earlier self [i.e., MX-18 Continuum].
11 • Ubuntu's Snaps (by Claus on 2020-05-04 04:27:24 GMT from Switzerland)
Canonical's Snap-Mania made me switch to Fedora KDE. Thanks again Canonical.
12 • Ubuntu 20.04 (by eco2geek on 2020-05-04 04:56:32 GMT from United States)
I have Ubuntu 18.04 LTS installed, which means that Ubuntu won't recommend an online upgrade to 20.04 LTS until its first point release (i.e. 20.04.1), scheduled for July 23. From what I read, they do this in order to make sure the upgrade and the distro are stable, as you'd want from an LTS. Point being, maybe Jesse can revisit Ubuntu 20.04.1 in July and see if he has a better experience.
On the other hand, if most Linux nerds had the same experience with 20.04 that Jesse did, there would be lots of yelling on the blogs that I'm not seeing.
Anyway, one good thing about Ubuntu 20.04 is its theme, Yaru, which looks very good. Cosmetically speaking, I think it looks great.
P.S. Your link to the latest elementary OS is labelled "elementaryos-5.1-stable.20200204.iso" (which is an older version) but goes to the real release, which is "elementaryos-5.1-stable.20200501.iso".
13 • Ubuntu on my machine... (by randomly generated entity on 2020-05-04 05:14:30 GMT from United States)
I had to stop and think about it...How did Ubuntu 20.04 end up on my PC?
So, no, turns out I didn't do a fresh install; I simply upgraded my 19.10 to 20.04, and in fact did that shortly after the beta was announced. I think I've done this process a few times now, at least since 18.04, and I've had zero issues. A bit surprising considering the fact that I got rid of all the Ubuntu customization and went vanilla Gnome (with some extensions) long ago. Aside from having to wait for dash-to-dock to catch up to 3.36, everything's been swell.
The only issue I have is that Gnome Software (not the snap - more on that soon) no longer lets you install/browse shell extensions. As for snaps, the mere idea of which I detest, along with flatpak, it's real easy to purge that crap - a little google-fu and you're good.
I was slightly surprised that I didn't have to remove a single snap package from my system when I double-checked just now that I had completely gotten rid of snaps. Gnome Software is a .deb, and if you turn off recommends it won't pull in snap crap, at least for now. Maybe I never had any snaps on this install. My tinkering (vanilla gnome, snapd removal) prior to upgrades may have prevented my system from becoming snap-encrusted.
Anyway, I'm not shocked that Jesse had all those issues in his testing, nor am I shocked that my experience has been smooth as silk with only minor annoyances. My aging Intel Core i7 K 875 @ 2.93GHz, Nvidia GT240 PC seems to get along insanely well with just about any distro, the Ubuntus being no exception. Guess I'm just lucky...
PS - FWIW, and one reason I was momentarily uncertain as to how Ubuntu 20.04 appeared on my machine is that I did recently do a fresh install of UbuntuDDE 20.04 (Deepin community beta respin), which also went fine for the most part. I was mainly disappointed that the older version of DDE (not what's on the recent Deepin 20 beta) was installed, with all the paper-cuts that brings, mainly the AM/PM clock thing. Seems to have issues keeping the "window effect" (transparency) setting with the Nvidia driver installed also.
But at least the proprietary driver can be installed, which is basically impossible with Deepin (the distro) itself, at leat the beta, for now. Looks promising, but I hope they opt for the newer DDE desktop at some point.
14 • Ubuntu 20.04 vs. Xubuntu (by spankmon on 2020-05-04 05:37:06 GMT from United States)
I have not tried the new Ubuntu but am surprised by Jesse's disappointment. I have been using Xubuntu 20.04 daily, since its release and am very pleased by its performance on my hardware. Pleased enough that I might abandon Mint in favor of Xubuntu, and I've been using Mint in excess of ten years.
15 • Ubuntu 20.04 and derivatives (by Wedge009 on 2020-05-04 05:38:45 GMT from Australia)
I've managed fine with Kubuntu for several years and have also been using it full-time on my primary machine since January this year. I know the upgrade option is generally only being made available from 20.04.1 onwards but I forced the upgrade from 19.10 to 20.04 (on a non-primary machine first, of course), and didn't encounter any issues (that I've noticed yet, anyway).
It sounds like the difficulties with a fresh Ubuntu 20.04 installation may be with choices specific to that environment. It also sounds like Snap is being pushed as the primary package management option there.
16 • Ubuntu 20.04 (by MDC on 2020-05-04 05:57:22 GMT from Belgium)
This version is the best version since 14.04. Until now I encountered no problems. Even snaps run well (like it or not, there's software only available as snap, like cherrytree that debian has thrown out of his repos). I run it on a 4 year old pentium and it is fast and responsive.
The new xubuntu is a bit of a disappointment however: ugly theming and colours, glitches and freezes on hardware that ran the previous version rather well (5 year old laptop with celeron processor). I'm asking myself if some problems are in fact problems with the series 5 kernel, and not with the distro per sé. Snaps are not bloat, but give you the ability to use the newest software in a LTS environment and are more secure, because containerized. They are a bigger than normal packages, but modern hard drives are big enough, aren't they?
17 • Ubuntu 20.04 (by GeekyMentat on 2020-05-04 06:33:34 GMT from Germany)
I upgraded to Ubuntu last week, and I noticed how many apps are SNAPs now.
I tried to add Flatpak support in the Ubuntu Software center, but you cannot as the Software Center is a snap. You need to uninstall the SNAP and reinstall it from DEB.
I migrated my work laptop to Linux Mint and my personal laptop to elementaryOS, to run them both for a bit and decide my new next distro of choice.
I really hope Canonical would stop this snap-mania and just use Flatpak for desktop apps and Docker for server software.
18 • Xubuntu (by Anis on 2020-05-04 06:39:06 GMT from Germany)
First of all I'd like to say Hello Linux and DW fans. Lately I've been looking for a good Distro to be my daily driver and after testing more than 10 distro I have come to the conculsion that Xubuntu is probably one of the best linux distros out there for me :) I really like that the Distro is stable, fast and everything just works out of the box. The Distro is is small, doesnt use much ram or cpu and everything you need is installed, however there are a few things that I wish that the Xubuntu team would add/change in the distro, I'd like to see something like in similar to the ubuntu mate theme settings so that a there are 3-4 themes /setting that can be changed with one mouseclick. I'd also like to see a nice default theme....*cough* matcha theme *cough* the current one just feels so outdated. And then there is Snaps, its kind of like Unity.....you either love it or hate it....
Conculsion: Its a very good distro but like with an old house it just needs a new paint job and and a few small tweak to make it feel modern again.
Have a nice day guys,
Anis
19 • About those buttons... (by eco2geek on 2020-05-04 06:51:45 GMT from United States)
From the review:
> Something I noticed early on while using the GNOME desktop is window buttons are still
> kept on the right side of windows.
That's the default in Gnome shell. Canonical didn't change it for whatever reason, but you, the end user, can move them to the left if you like. Easiest way is to download and install the "Gnome Tweaks" utility (which is highly recommended as it allows you to change several settings that the "Settings" utility doesn't).
20 • Ubuntu 20.04 (by Justin R. on 2020-05-04 06:54:17 GMT from United States)
Jesse hit the nail on the head for me when he summed it up with "slow, buggy, and multiple components felt incomplete". I tried it and felt the same way. I went back to Linux Mint with Cinnamon and couldn't be happier.
21 • Too much love for Snap? (by Ennio on 2020-05-04 06:55:51 GMT from Netherlands)
According to this post ( https://jatan.blog/2020/05/02/ubuntu-snap-obsession-has-snapped-me-off-of-it/ ) the prioritization of of Snap packages over Flatpack and even .deb ones to a point resembling coercion. One paragraph as (egregious) example :
" Slow and forced Chromium snap
On the latest Ubuntu, if you try to download the .deb version of Chromium using either the Software Store or command line, it acts as an alias to installing the snap version! Essentially, Chromium snap is shoved down your throat even if you explicitly asked for the .deb version. This is not cool Ubuntu – just because Chromium may be easier to maintain as a snap app doesn’t justify this forced behavior.
Besides, a typical user doesn’t care how the app is managed in the backend, all they care about is how it works – snap apps are slow. I hate that Chromium’s snap takes more than 10 seconds to load on cold boot on a freaking SSD, whereas .deb and Flatpak apps load in 1-2 seconds. Snaps are simply not fast enough to be default anything yet. "
22 • Ubuntu releases (by Here on 2020-05-04 06:58:30 GMT from Spain)
I have had problems with Ubuntu too. Tried 20.04 and "Software Center" does not have Search option, it only has various sections for choosing from, but no "Network" section. Where do I find Gftp? Then I tried:
sudo apt update - went well
sudo apt install gftp - package not found;
sudo apt-get install gftp - package not found;
........ synaptic - package not found;
........ - package not found;
........ not found
Excuse me, but it is supposed to give the user the freedom to chose what to use - deb, snap, flat...
So I quit Ubuntu.
Then I tried Lubuntu 20.04 - the first Lubuntu version with default LXQT. Surprisingly it felt much faster and beautyful than usual. I've always preferred the LXDE version but now LXQT feels quite pleasant.
Then tried PopOS! and I liked it. Do not know if I am going to use it regularly but it feels good.
Finally I am a KDE guy, not Gnome, but recently I tend to use JWM, IceWM, Qtile, so I thought the more keyboard oriented Gnome with Ubuntu 20.04 would be a good try, but nop.
23 • Kubuntu 20.04 (by Anis on 2020-05-04 07:03:50 GMT from Germany)
A lots of comments about Ubuntu and Xubuntu but not a lot of people are talking about Kubuntu. I tried Kubuntu out and I do have to say that Kubuntu is in my opinion the big STAR in the Ubuntu family.
You get a normal taskbar, normal menu, and a awesome file manager. Kde has made changing themes very simple and can be done easily within a couple of minutes. For me Kubuntu works very good out of the box, of course the Distro may not be as lightweight as Xubuntu but its almost there. My Kubuntu install uses about 550 Mb Ram ** WAIT WHAT !!?? ** which is almost like my Xubuntu install however, the CPU is used more often than in Xubuntu. I really like that Kubuntu offers the minimal install option, some people, like me, really like this option and use it. However my absolute favorite thing about Kubuntu/ Kde is that you can set your wallpapers to change everyday using Bing or Flicker wallpapers, its something that i definitely use.
Once again, Have a nice day guys,
Anis
24 • Did you enable the software repositories? (by eco2geek on 2020-05-04 07:42:34 GMT from United States)
@22 - It doesn't sound like you ran the "Software and Updates" utility to make sure all four software repositories ("Main", "Restricted", "Universe", and "Multiverse") were enabled. If they're not, you're not going to be able to download/install software like Synaptic.
(Alternatively, you can alter /etc/apt/sources.list yourself, but using "Software and Updates" is much easier.)
25 • Kubuntu 20.04 (by Gio on 2020-05-04 07:52:57 GMT from Italy)
I put this distro on two different low powered machines and apart usual problems with an ASUS Transformer (their webcam is still not working for instance, but these are ASUS problems not Kubuntu's), the system is running very fine.
I did notice anything wrong and Plasma 5.18 LTS is really a good fellow for this Kubuntu LTS too.
I am waiting for a full review from Distrwatch for this kind of Ubuntu 20.4 that, in my opinion, seems a step higher than the others from the Ubuntu family.
26 • @ Jesse Ubuntu (by OstroL on 2020-05-04 08:04:50 GMT from Poland)
Have you noticed that the Ubuntu devs, or the dev maintaining the Ubuntu Dock couldn't get the Folder icon correct to match the other default Yaru icons? It is the only icon with a "squircle" around it. (The images in the review.) The same wrong icon appears also in the AppGrid. The Folder icon is purple, but the icon on the Ubuntu Dock is blurred.
A simple matter, but not enough imagination to correct it. Or, not enough wanting to do so. I have a feeling that there's not enough developers.
27 • Ubuntu still effs us up (by Anthony on 2020-05-04 09:29:04 GMT from Austria)
Just learned that Ubuntu can't even use motd (message of the day) without phoning home. And they are sending some info home as well. Oh, and it is opt-*out* of course.
https://twitter.com/lelff/status/1210619413885575168?s=21
Checked my Linux Mint 19, it luckily lacks this "feature".
28 • Re: Ubuntu Releases (by Here on 2020-05-04 10:24:42 GMT from Spain)
@24 You are right. By default:
Ubuntu Software - No Network Category, no gftp, no wireshark , no synaptic, no ....
Software Updater - 106,8MB of updates
Software & Updates - Main and Restricted enabled, Universe an Multiverse disabled.
Enabling Universe and Multiverse gave me the software needed.
Weird defaults though. There isUbuntu Software which by default does not have any option to change the repos. And this one is on the sidebar as a favorite.
Then we have Software updates.
And finally there is Software and Updates where we can change the repos.
Intuitive?
Not to mention where they buried the netinstall mini iso.
29 • Ubuntu/Xubuntu 20.04 (by SaucyJack on 2020-05-04 10:48:46 GMT from United States)
I normally use Xubuntu, because for me it usually requires the least work after installation. Yet, with each new release, I find there's about a 60-40 chance I'll have to spend a couple afternoons fixing stuff that should have worked on installation.
Most of the problems THIS time were caused by decisions made by Canonical rather than regressions, which is usually the case. One example: my first update hung on installation of the snap-store, which I then removed. There are other examples.
For an organization as big as Canonical, their Q&A seems seriously lacking. Really guys, if I want to spend my time working on Ubuntu development, I'LL give YOU a call.
30 • Ubuntu 20.04 (by Ghost Sixtyseven on 2020-05-04 10:49:45 GMT from United Kingdom)
I too saw none of the problems the reviewer had with Ubuntu 20.04. It's been a long time since I've tried any of the 'buntus on-the-metal for any reasonable duration, but for this new LTS I decided to give it another try and I will admit that I was impressed with it.
I'm not a fan of Systemd, but I've come to accept it as something that will be sticking around, I never used to like Gnome Shell at all, but having used it over a long period on Debian I have become more used to its unique way of running the desktop and I don't mind it at all now. Yes, it uses more resources than most other desktop environments, but it wasn't at all slow on my old Toshiba Satellite C-50 laptop, and there was no sluggishness in any of the programs that I like to run on a daily basis for music and video production and graphics.
Now, I'm not a fan of Snaps or containered apps in general - I don't think they're ready just yet, but I found that the horror stories of excessive drive-space use were to say the least exaggerated. Yes they do use more space than traditionally installed applications, but not to any extent that should cause panic or anger. The speed opening the snap apps was longer than traditionally installed apps too, often the first run of a snap app was prohibitively long, though subsequent runs (during the same boot) were much quicker. However, after a system reboot I did notice the first-run tardiness returned and this was a showstopper for me. The theming of some snap apps under Gnome was also 'not quite there' yet, though I belive that this can be remedied by the installation of further system libraries.
In any case, a fresh install, this time installing Synaptic from the repos via terminal, and thence my favourite apps via Synaptic gave me a very good experience indeed. Ubuntu 20.04 was solid, quick, and (I think) beautiful in appearance.
Would I wipe my daily-use Debian Buster install for Ubuntu 20.04? No, I'm too comfortable and happy with what I already have, but if that were not the case and I was looking for a replacement, Ubuntu 20.04 would certanly be very favourable option.
31 • Ubuntu 20.04 (by Barna on 2020-05-04 11:00:55 GMT from France)
A long time Ubuntu user (first version I installed was 05.10), I installed 20.04 on 3 different laptops: a low-end Acer Swift1 ultrabook, my 4 year old HP 840G2 and my professional Dell.
First I tried XUbuntu beta on the Acer, and as it ran fine, so I installed (official final) Ubutu final on all three computers (using ext4).
I didn't have any serious issues on any of these computers. No problems at installation. Ubuntu starts quickly, never had bootloops. Suspend works. The system is stable. Even the NVIDIA drivers on the Dell run fine.
Regarding the interface, I replaced the ubuntu dock with a gnome panel and arc menu in the extensions. Much more usable. Otherwise like a lot the new Yaru theme.
My only issue was with the Software center which didn't load correctly the applications. Replacing it with gnome-software solved the issue. Anyway, I'm still using Synaptic and apt where possible. And by the way, the software selection is up to date. The Software center contains proprietary software too (Zoom, Skype, Discord, Teamviewer are the must haves this spring), so no more hunting for linux installers on their homepage.
I'm really pleased with this Ubuntu release, and really surprised by the bad experience Jesse was having with this release.
32 • repos and snaps and Xubuntu (by Jeff on 2020-05-04 11:03:05 GMT from United States)
@16 try MX Linux, cherrytree is in their repos as a deb, along with many other good apps, for a small team they do very well keeping up with applications their users want (and keeping them updated).
Years ago Xubuntu was my distro of choice, but it gets heavier and heavier while I become more minimalist. Lately even Lubuntu has abandoned older computers too.
33 • Ubuntu 20.04 (by Angel on 2020-05-04 11:03:23 GMT from United States)
Removed all snaps and I'm writing this in Chromium installed with a .deb from a PPA , just because I'm ornery and retired, with time to fart around. Not that I have anything against snaps except they are too fat and I don't need them.
I had been running the dailies for a few months and it's been well-behaved. Deleted it to install Kubuntu for my preferred DE. Now I put Ubuntu back on a VM to check the final release. It runs crisply enough, none of the lag reported by the reviewer. I allow 2.5GB on an i5 PC. VBoxVGA on the display, with no acceleration.
The most bothersome thing at live boot was the checking file integrity bit. In some cases it would slow to a crawl and you can hit "Control+C" until you have callouses, and it still keeps merrily spitting out checksums. Installing Kubuntu I had to reboot several times. Fedora does it better, offering you a choice at boot. More civilized that way.
The store does keep pushing you onto snaps. I clicked on quite a few before I found something that wasn't. No matter, I install synaptic first thing. All in all, it works well, except it's not my desktop of choice. For anyone wanting Chromium bad enough without the snaps, here's a link: https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+archive/ubuntu/chromium-dev
Read the fine print, and iif you break it, it's your problem. Frankly, I'd rather just install Chrome, or move to a Debian base or something like Manjaro.
34 • Ubuntu Releases (by Rick on 2020-05-04 11:40:35 GMT from United States)
Tried Ubuntu MATE 20.04. Still the same as all other Ubuntu releases. Bloated and buggy. They haven't had a really good release since 10.10. Stopped using Ubuntu after the nightmarish Unity came along. Have been using Mint since then but it also fell off the cliff after 17.3. My conclusion? Linux's glory days are over!
35 • Ubuntu (by César on 2020-05-04 11:41:56 GMT from Chile)
Hi!
I use Ubuntu 18.04 in my workstation for development (PHP, HTML, MariaSQL and image edit) and works well (never hangs or sluggish), but the worst is the gnome high RAM use (very very high), drinking memory like a old V8 drinking fuel. And the other, is really necessary install Synaptic and Aptitude, because is the only way to manage packages in this distro.
Saludos desde Santiago de Chile.
36 • Xubuntu Core (by Anis on 2020-05-04 11:51:36 GMT from Germany)
For those of you looking for a slimmed down version of Xubuntu (818 Mb iso) here is an awesome website : https://unit193.net/xubuntu/core/
Its as basic as it gets, no games, no office, no browser, no snaps, no nothing LoL.....
- Anis
37 • Ubuntu Studio (by Ram on 2020-05-04 12:15:20 GMT from India)
I'm using a dailybuild (alfa) version of Ubuntu Studio focal. It's working fine, so I have not upgraded yet.
FYI, Ubuntu Studio is moving to Kubuntu leaving Xubuntu from the next release i.e release 20.10.
38 • Ubuntu/Xubuntu 20.04/Chromium Snap (by John on 2020-05-04 12:20:00 GMT from United Kingdom)
I am a happy Xubuntu 18.04 LTS user. I have installed Xubuntu 20.04 on my spare computer, it works fine, and I would like to upgrade my main computer as soon as possible. However at present I need Unetbootin which currently won't work on 20.04. I need this to produce a bootable USB which can have bootia32.efi written to it so that I can install distros on a baytrail processor Linx tablet (most other apps leave the USB drive as read only file system). I added bootia32.efi to the Ubuntu 20.04 iso and installed it on my Linx. As usual the cameras don't work, but everything else does. However, the system occasionally freezes, then recovers, then tells me that Ubuntu has suffered an internal error - irritating, but not bad enough to require a reboot or to lose any work.
Also just to confirm that Chromium only seems to install as a snap package, and that it takes at least twice as long to load as Firefox or Vivaldi - and I share the frustration of many others that like me would be happier with a deb!
39 • @Jesse: (by dragonmouth on 2020-05-04 12:53:40 GMT from United States)
"Perhaps the oddest decision Canonical has made with this release is to make the software centre work only with Snap packages."
Not odd at all. SNAP is a Canonical product. If they don't push it, nobody else will. Give Snap a year or two and it will follow Mir and Unity into oblivion.
40 • Ubuntu 20.04 (by fox on 2020-05-04 13:05:22 GMT from Canada)
My experience with Ubuntu 20.04 has been generally positive, and where I have found problems, they were carried over from the previous 19.10 release. The most annoying bug is with the copy/paste command, which seems to work only once every two times. This problem is particular to the Gnome desktop, and occurs on three computers. Change the desktop to Cinnamon and then I don't have it. Also, it seems to have been introduced with Gnome 3.34, as I didn't see it until Ubuntu 19.10. The most potentially serious bug only occurs on one of my three computers, a 2015 5k iMac. Booting with the new LTS kernel (5.4) takes about 3 minutes on this computer, and both waking from display sleep and shutting down take about 2 minutes. However, I carried over the 4.15 LTS kernel from Ubuntu 18.04, and this kernel doesn't have any of these problems. The two other computers, a 2011 iMac and a Dell xps 13 2-in-1, don't have this problem, so I think it may related to the AMD r9390x video card. I did extensive testing of different kernels on the affected computer, and the problem starts with the 5.3 kernel that was introduced with Ubuntu 19.10. Fortunately, the 4.15 LTS kernel gets another 3 years of support, but after that, then what?
41 • Ubuntu 20.04 (by Utku B. on 2020-05-04 13:16:19 GMT from Turkey)
I use a linux-friendly laptop and I can say 20.04 is the fastest Ubuntu I have ever used. Only drawback is snap store imho. I removed Snap Store and install Synaptic and Gnome Software Center.
42 • Kubuntu (by Benevolent on 2020-05-04 14:05:09 GMT from United States)
@22, I was just getting ready to say the same thing. In my own testing, Kubuntu actually uses less RAM than Xubuntu and seems to be easier on my CPU too. I don't really understand why people seem to like the GTK desktops so much. Plasma is so much faster, comprehensive and stable in my opinion.
I think one could probably even set up Kubuntu to look like Gnome with a panel on top that shows little information, default actions that ignore typical workflows and a desktop that is for looks only. The only difference is that the Plasma Gnome experience would work better on laptops with 4GB of RAM than the actual Gnome does.
43 • Unity, Snap ,and Mir (by Jesse on 2020-05-04 14:07:34 GMT from Canada)
@39: "Give Snap a year or two and it will follow Mir and Unity into oblivion. "
Those are interesting choices for examples. Canonical still actively develops Mir and have turned it into a Wayland implementation. Unity7 has been dropped, but Unity8 is still in active development for mobile and single board computers.
44 • Ubuntu 20.04 (by bison on 2020-05-04 14:37:08 GMT from United States)
Ubuntu 20.04: I am *not* using it, and am neutral, which is not a poll choice. I briefly tried Lubuntu, Xubuntu, and Ubuntu Studio. They seemed OK, but not interesting enough to explore further.
45 • Ubuntu (by Sam on 2020-05-04 14:40:16 GMT from United States)
I'm glad I'm not the only one who ran into bugs with the latest Ubuntu release. I ran into the super-slow-to-boot issue, realized the software center was downloading snap packages after trying to install Gnumeric was taking forever (I thought it was my wifi connection at first, then I noticed the file size and the way Gnumeric ignored my desktop theme), screen rotation (Wayland) which was just about flawless on 19.10, left open windows with a big black region that I couldn't get rid of except to exit and restart the app, and, maybe most annoying, rearranging icons in the side app bar would take up to 60 seconds to refresh (i.e. move Firefox below Thunderbird, the bar would leave the Firefox icon where it used to be, but then magically about a minute later the bar would refresh with Firefox's icon where I tried to move it).
Searching online, I found not solutions to these issues as nobody else seemed to be reporting them -- in fact, everybody was posting about how "flawless" the install went. Ugh.
46 • CS (by CS on 2020-05-04 14:58:55 GMT from United States)
@39
"Not odd at all. SNAP is a Canonical product. If they don't push it, nobody else will. Give Snap a year or two and it will follow Mir and Unity into oblivion."
Thank you for the hearty chuckle. Still can't believe what a dumpster fire Unity was and how long they kept riding that dead horse. In that vein, give Snaps at least 5 years. Canonical: "Complain all you want, we're not listening!"
@43
"Those are interesting choices for examples. Canonical still actively develops Mir and have turned it into a Wayland implementation. Unity7 has been dropped, but Unity8 is still in active development for mobile and single board computers. "
Reminds me of a Monty Python skit Unity8: "I'm getting better!" The entire world: "No you aren't you'll be stone dead in a moment."
47 • Ubuntu and Linux Mint (by bison on 2020-05-04 15:14:34 GMT from United States)
@34
This has been my experience as well. I switched from Ubuntu to Linux Mint when Unity came along, and I reluctantly "upgraded" to Mint 18, only because going back to Ubuntu wasn't any better.
I think I may try MX Linux. The default desktop configuration is a hot mess, but I can fix that in less than an hour, and I'm already using Xfce on a Debian-based distro, so the move makes sense.
48 • Software Center (by dolphin oracle on 2020-05-04 15:26:05 GMT from United States)
In my experience with ubuntu 20.04, the software store does show deb/apt packages, but it will show snaps first. For instance, ffmpeg is listed twice when I do a search. the package descriptions do show whether they are snaps or not, and a little box in the upper right appears when multiple snap channels are present.
49 • Kubuntu - no problems (by Dark Man on 2020-05-04 16:49:09 GMT from United States)
@23 @25 @42 I installed Kubuntu and had no problems. Kubuntu 20.04 is an excellent distro, quick and polished, and I look forward to several years running it as my everyday OS. Sorry that Jesse had issues with another flavor but there were none here.
50 • 20.04 (by Roy Davies on 2020-05-04 17:04:54 GMT from United Kingdom)
I have mixed feelings about the Ubuntu 20.04 suite of distros.
In my six years of using Linux, have never been a fan of the main Ubuntu distro, nor the Unity or Gnome desktop environments, however I am a fan of Xubuntu. In my opinion it is the most solid and reliable of all distros for a novice user coming from Windows. For this reason, I have happily recommended and installed it on many laptops and desktops used by former Windows users who just need a basic home or home-office computer that works with little or no hiccups.
The other Ubuntu based distros have their place, but I personally have only used Mate, Lubuntu and Budgie. I do not like the KDE desktop, so Kubuntu is a non-starter.
51 • Mixed experience so far - Xubuntu, live server (by mikef90000 on 2020-05-04 17:25:33 GMT from United States)
I didn't have any significant issues with Xubuntu 20.04 installation, although the above review refers to the Whisker Menu. AFAIK Xubuntu *still* does not install it by default!
Remembered to protect myself by 'apt purge snapd'.
OTOH 'live-server' install attempts were a disaster. On two different systems, EFI and legacy BIOS, physical and virtual, the install stopped at the partition selection screen; the contents didn't make much sense and the cursor automagically jumped around on its own.
Fortunately I had found the well hidden mini.iso which works OK for custom / minimal installs of server AND desktop. Does anyone know why Canonical has deprecated this image and Where did they discuss the decision?
52 • Xubuntu High Memory Usage (by Xfce Nation on 2020-05-04 17:37:04 GMT from United Arab Emirates)
It is possible that the high memory usage in xubuntu is caused by a window manager compositor issue.
Fix can be found here: https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=13233
53 • Ubuntu ecosystems (by vern on 2020-05-04 17:43:14 GMT from United States)
I tried and used Ubuntu, Ubuntu-budgie, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu-mate, and even the newest step-child Ubuntu-DDE. All these worked without errors of any kind. I never used XFS , only EXT4 filesystem. I did try btrfs a long time ago. I have no need for snapshots.
I also get rid of several unwanted files including snapd, Flatpak, or anything related. I use only deb.
I also update my system using terminal. No software update files
54 • @ Jesse - Ubuntu - have you noticed? (by akoy on 2020-05-04 17:50:52 GMT from Canada)
Have you noticed that Ubuntu devs still can't find a solution for the problem of longer app names getting truncated in the Gnome shell app grid? This was never a problem with Unity.
55 • Ubuntu boot times (by cykodrone on 2020-05-04 18:23:41 GMT from Germany)
THREE MINUTES?! Oh, but but, systemd, lol.
The 2 Lin's (not systemd) I have on this machine, 10-15 seconds, and that's on a slow day. Mind you, I turn a lot of unnecessary frills off. Which begs the question, what is Ubuntu booting 'under the hood'? I dumped KDE years ago for this very reason, way too many frills, and just plain bloat, much of which the user could not turn off.
Also, 'Unity' reminds me of a hilarious episode of Rick and Morty. Hive mind. :D
56 • Ubuntu (by hank on 2020-05-04 18:47:41 GMT from Austria)
Among the many distros I have used my worst ever experience. Very surprised to end up with the system behind the no 1 distro in the tables. MX is based on Antix.
Antix seemed at first a backward step, it is for sure not. Fast booting, stable running, low resource usage,
choice of desktops.
Takes a little while to setup then you realize no need for a new faster computer.
57 • I don't see a reason to use Ubuntu (by Rop75 on 2020-05-04 18:51:38 GMT from Spain)
i've got a problem, I am only intrested in distros that provide me with something special/unique.
Ubuntu used to have a desktop that was ITS desktop (Unity), you could like it or lump it (I did like it), but Unity made Ubuntu different. Now, apart from the PPAs, I don't see any practical difference between Ubuntu and mother Debian (well... there is one difference: Debian testing is more stable than any Ubuntu LTS). Now Ubuntu is just another gnome shell distro (and there are many of them)
Anyway long ago I moved to LinuxMint (I find cinnamon a very nice and bug free desktop).
58 • UBUNTU 20.04 LTS (by Mitchell on 2020-05-04 19:23:03 GMT from United States)
I had no real issues with installation - painless here. I did note the software app took a while to "find itself" though, a little wonky in the beginning. I did expect a little snappier feel, but I am currently without that satisfaction. All of those Gnome speed thrills haven't materialized here yet! No deal breaker; I am sure this will get ironed out by Summer. Am I correct in noting that the Power Off/Reboot selection process has a few extra steps? Bloat - needs an antacid for sure.
59 • Ubuntu 20.04 (by KC1DI on 2020-05-04 20:19:23 GMT from United States)
I've installed Ubuntu 20.04 on my Lenovo Think pad T450 without any of the Problems Jessie found. Only problem I had was with one windows program under wine which takes about 3 to 5 minutes to launch. This is the first ubuntu release that has had that problem. I haven't had time to try to find a solution yet. Other than that it runs smooth.
60 • I agree with #56 (by magical on 2020-05-04 20:46:51 GMT from United States)
I first installed Mandrake on New Years Day of the year 2000. Ever since then I have ran about 30 different distros. Early on I found no good thing in ubuntu to be enamered over so I take no interest in it now.
My main goto distro is PCLinuxOS running KDE. About a month ago, I went distro hopping again and found antiX19 running icewm. I like it
61 • Ubuntu -Experimental ZFS support? (by Jack on 2020-05-04 21:07:09 GMT from United States)
I'm curious if ZFS is causing some of the problems documented in the review. It is experimental after all. I recall SUSE having a number of btrfs issues in the very beginning. Same with XFS several years ago. In all these cases, issues cropped up when the mainstream distro offered "experimental" support. To me, the most unusual thing about the review is that an LTS version is offering experimental support for something as critical as the FS. It seems this should be left to the non-LTS releases.
62 • ZFS (by Jesse on 2020-05-04 21:13:39 GMT from Canada)
@61: "I'm curious if ZFS is causing some of the problems documented in the review. It is experimental after all. "
Almost certainly not, for four reasons:
1. As I mentioned in the review, I also tried ext4 and it wouldn't boot at all.
2. ZFS is an experimental feature of the installer. (That is the setup process is the experimental part, not using ZFS.) ZFS itself is not experimental. ZFS on Linux has been solid for years - I've been using it for five years on other Linux distros without any problems.
3. None of the glitches seemed to be related to filesystem issues. Performance maybe could be ZFS-related, but past releases run on Btrfs and ext4 were also slow. So it seems unlikely ZFS was to blame for anything I encountered.
4. As I mentioned in the review I used ZFS on Xubuntu 19.10 and had no problems with it. It's unlikely that ZFS support in Ubuntu's repos regressed so far in six months as to make the distro virtually unusable after it was working near-perfectly ix months ago.
63 • What's Ubuntu good for, anyway?!? (by randomly generated entity on 2020-05-04 22:06:25 GMT from United States)
Hoo boy, so much Ubuntu derision in the comments. No surprise really. It happens everywhere experienced (non-"noob") Linux users comment, and not without some good reasons (Unity, Amazon, snaps, etc.), but there are some good things about Ubuntu as well:
- Fonts! Ubuntu has always done something magical with fonts, you gotta admit. It's not just that they use their own font family either, as I always switch to Liberation and that looks better on the 'buntus than elsewhere too. Fonts are getting better in Linux across the board, finally, but Ubuntu's the king here IMO.
- Graphics drivers. Lots of folks say they're moving to Fedora because of Ubuntu's idiosyncrasies (snaps!), but I hope they know that it's much more difficult to get the proper drivers installed, for Nvidia especially. Downright impossible for owners of perfectly functional legacy hardware like mine. Ubuntu and its descendants are the gold standard with this issue, period.
- Ubiquity. Like it or not, the 'buntus are the top of the heap, meaning there's tons of support/infrastructure in place for its users. Need an obscure piece of software? If it's been packaged for anything it's been packaged for 'buntu. Questions about how to use that software on your kit? Chances are the only people talking about it are using a 'buntu. It's the opposite of security through obscurity.
That's just a smattering off the top of my head. Basically, the 'buntus are just plain simple - to install, configure, etc., and so many folks use 'em in one form or another that any question you could possibly have has been asked and answered hundreds of times over the years, making it super easy to solve problems on your own.
Look, it's been a long long time since I've use a 'buntu as daily driver, unless Neon counts (I guess it should). I've been primarily on Arch or Gentoo for years now, with occasional Debian forays when things get sticky. I don't like most of what Canonical has done over the years either. I think they've shot themselves in the foot multiple times by pushing Unity, then Gnome, while Plasma has been doing nothing but overtaking the competition in myriad ways. IMO, Canonical could have carved out a bigger piece of the Windows refugee market by going with KDE, but they chose instead to try very hard to be as different from that standard as possible. It's almost as if they're actively avoiding a larger market share! Not that Kubuntu isn't a fine distro, but let's face it, it's not the flagship.
Ubuntu's here to stay, with all the good and bad that entails. And while it's easy to dwell on the negative, I like to remind the vocal minority that there are reasons Ubuntu has remained the de facto standard in Linux. It's weathered the Unity and Gnome storms, it will weather the snapd storm and whatever their next boneheaded user-unfriendly move turns out to be. If they ever decide to focus on actual users and genuine productivity rather than new/shiny/ours they could really be something, huh?
64 • buntu 20.04 (by hotdiggettydog on 2020-05-04 23:11:41 GMT from Canada)
Tried ubuntu, lubuntu, and xubuntu in virtualbox.
Ubuntu lasted a couple of hours till I had enough. It is awful and awkward. Unity and gnome suck so bad.
Lubuntu has really went downhill. I liked it a few versions back.
Xubuntu was the keeper. Works fine. Easy to work with and does everything I ask of it.
Ubuntu would be well advised to move to xfce as their flagship product.
65 • *buntus?.. (by bobtron on 2020-05-04 23:37:27 GMT from United States)
while a fair *buntus review from Jesse and a seemingly variable and differing opinions, i think i will just take a deep breath and wait for the next point releasei prefer to take a "floor wax" debian and then trowel on the "dessert toppings" later....current system disk "commits" {dailydrivers} are MX19..MX18.3..PCLOS...Devuan MIYO...all good...and in the USB "crash-kit-toolbox"...a couple "puppies", "clonzilla", "rescatux" and "knoppix"...ahhh, the good ol' days!
cheers from Illinois land!
be well and safe everybody!
stay home! {and submit bug reports to the devs, you have all been drafted!-haha)
66 • Ubuntu 20.04 (by Mr.Bob on 2020-05-05 00:05:55 GMT from Mexico)
I installed Ubuntu 20.04 on my friends Asus laptop and finally, after years of frustration the internal Mediatek MT7630e wireless adapter was found. It wasn't in 18.04 but thank god that it was added. I don't need to use a Linksys dongle anymore, everything just works...well, not the bluetooth but everything else.
First think I did after installing was completely remove Snaps. What a piece of crap software. I am happy to use Synaptic and AppImages for software. Snaps get bent.
Otherwise my impression of Ubuntu.....horrible icon theme. A real eyesore. So out with the Yaru and in with something more pleasant, not just for the icons but also for Gnome. Now i have everything set, i am fine with Ubuntu for the next 5 years.
My only irk...why can't they offer drive encryption like Fedora or Pop on install???
67 • Ubuntu again (by Angel on 2020-05-05 02:05:30 GMT from Philippines)
I recommend and sometimes install distros for others often, so I was looking at some of the problems Jesse had, and checking the comments to see if they were reproduced by anyone. So far I see opinion stuff: bloated, ugly, Gnome sucks, hate snaps, etc. I've installed both Ubuntu and Kubuntu (xt4, no ZFS) and had few if any glitches, but that doesn't mean Jesse didn't.
I don't care much for snaps (or flatpaks) either and I normally don't run Gnome, but if you are on a PC that's borderline, you probably shouldn't be using Gnome (or derivatives) anyhow. I've set up my desktop pretty much the same way since I bought an iMac many years ago. I like docks. I can set up pretty much any DE to my liking. Yes, that includes Gnome. Look at Elementary. What is Pantheon other than a gussied up Gnome with the Plank dock at the bottom? I prefer KDE because of the endless configuration options. Some times minor things, like "shutdown/logout" visible without extra clicks. But Gnome will do in a pinch. Matters of preference. What concerned me was whether people for whom I install or recommend will have substantive issues. I see nothing in the comments that says "tea" or "nay." .
@66,Mr.Bob: A Linksys dongle? Geez, you should have asked or googled. I have an Asus 300TP, and installed the driver for the MT7630 with 14.04. It's been available a long time for download and install. A couple of minutes following simple instructions.. On 18.04, one could just upgrade the kernel. The Asus is now being used by a relative, with Windows as the sole OS, but I still have the installer.
BTW: One can install a distro that doesn't have the WiFi driver by sharing a smartphone's WiFi connection. Then the driver can be downloaded if available.
68 • Survey answer (by Richard on 2020-05-05 02:37:28 GMT from New Zealand)
So I voted "I have not used it yet" as I will wait for "my" favourite distro to release their 20.04-based, but de-spudified, de-invasived release. Patience in this case is definitely a virtue and pays dividends.
69 • Ubuntu 20.04 - Issues that no one is talking about. (by Walt on 2020-05-05 02:48:23 GMT from United States)
Ubuntu 20.04 has issues that no one is talking about. I have not heard anyone address the problems with the software store. There are snap issues, and installing flatpaks requires installing the older version of the store.
It installs Nemo alongside the Nautilus file manager, after install, and without any notice. There sometimes there is a line of glitch above the top bar.
No one talks about these things, and it is annoying that no one else cares. Yet, they put Fedora down, and turn around and praise Ubuntu for its theme, but every install guide suggests installing a new theme.
I want to like Ubuntu because it is on the radar of Microsoft and Adobe, and the community is huge. It is easier to get things for Ubuntu. I have nothing against the people that make Ubuntu happen or the company that pays for it. I want to know that someone is actively addressing and solving these problems.
I will wait for the point release.
70 • Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU (by Ben Myers on 2020-05-05 03:18:11 GMT from United States)
Jesse, a dual-core 2.8GHz AMD CPU is getting a little long in the tooth. That may explain the sluggishness of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Gnome is not known for being lean and mean. As another comment stated, the system is borderline for 20.04 and Gnome.
What I think is happening here is that Canonical, like Microsoft, provides its developers with fairly new and fairly fast equipment, so they lose sight of the need to run on older gear.
71 • Xubuntu 20.04 and Firefox (by Ben Myers on 2020-05-05 03:23:35 GMT from United States)
Jeff, It is easy to blame Xubuntu for high CPU uiilization when running Firefox. But the reality is that in their STUPID race to be the fastest browsers ever, Edge, Firefox, Chrome and maybe Safari all consume outlandish resources in CPU, memory and browser cache simply to be recognized as the fastest. Been seeing this across various OS platforms for a few years now.
72 • Ubuntu 20.04 and its approved sidekicks (by Alberto on 2020-05-05 04:44:36 GMT from Uruguay)
I started my road through the linux lands with Ubuntu back in 2009 I think; then I really liked it. However, things began changing: Unity appeared (I dislike it up to this moment), later Gnome 3 was chosen for the flagship version and I couldn't understand this move. I realized that even with the Unity desktop Ubuntu was something that worked. At first -and for years- Gnome 3 was a desktop I couldn't possibly work with. But not only the desktop was a problem (The Mate version was created, Kubuntu and Xubuntu were still there), serious stability issues also appeared and all of this together alienated me from Ubuntu. I began searching for alternatives and began using multi-boot setups. I tried several Debian derivatives and so Debian itself became easier to use. I could also see that Debian and Arch-based systems were able to play certain codecs that the ...buntus could not. Even so, every time there was an Ubuntu LTS release I downloaded the Mate version, Kubuntu or Xubuntu, to see how things were going.
Now that we have the 20.04 LTS release, I downloaded the main version, the Mate one, Kubuntu (I have just downloaded Xubuntu, but not seen it yet). I have tried the three of them only on virtualbox without installing them on real hardware. With respect to the first one, the Gnome version, I saw that it had improved a lot with time (It is no longer the disaster it used to be), now it's something you can work with even though I can't stand its layout. Mate performed fairly good to me (no issues with it), whereas kubuntu didn't work in full screen.
I have not noticed a remarkable slowness on Ubuntu, but I admit that Gnome has not ever been praised for being fast and very responsive.
With regard to the Software Centers, I keep and use them occasionally but I always install the old Synaptic on all debian derivatives: in spite of not being a brand new tool it features some unrivalled characterictics: it provides you with access to low-level pieces of software, you can download packages in batches and it is relatively fast (the slowness of Discover comes to my mind now).
I have to acknowledge that this is an incomplete impression about these systems, since I have not tested them on real hardware and, except for Kubuntu perhaps, I doubt I will ever do that.
Why? Because there is something called Linux Mint which is not a mere rebranded copy of Ubuntu with a better appearance: it offers things like Mintstick and Timeshift. I incorporate these tools into every Debian or Debian derivative I like and even into the Arch derivatives.
Oh, I was forgetting to mention that the issue with the audio/video codecs has been overcome in this edition of Ubuntu.
Regards.
73 • Ubuntu/Canonical (by Cynic on 2020-05-05 05:46:53 GMT from Ghana)
@70 - I think you hit the nail on the head. Most Canonical developers seem to have lost touch with the rest of the world. Not everyone has/can afford more recent hardware. Due to the digital divide, there are many who would be in awe of the chance to own a simple Pentium 4 or AMD K6 if it meant they "actually had a computer now".
Ubuntu used to be that for me in my teenage years - getting old PCs that friends and family were replacing if I'd help them setup things. Linux brought new life into those PCs - sometimes even a Ubuntu LTS!
Sadly those days are gone - being able to run Ubuntu or any of its close derivatives on older/lower end hardware is simply a fruitless endeavor. Canonical has become like Microsoft in the Linux world - so devoted to it's own goals that the community it claims to have consists almost entirely of those who simply agree with them. If you state something contrary to what they want to do.. it'll just get ignored.
Snaps have ruined the system for many worldwide simply due to increased data costs in less developed nations. Who knows what mistake they'll make next but eventually they'll have to give in or give up. The constant assumption that someone should know they need to enable some PPA or 3rd party repository if being advertised as a "beginner friendly" distro seems a bit off point as well..
I remember the days of liking Ubuntu and even had my parents using it before.. last release I used was 6.10.. I guess "those were the days" .. :)
74 • PCLOS instead Ubuntu. (by bert on 2020-05-05 07:56:24 GMT from Netherlands)
I use Linux over 10 years in various ways. Now I have PCLOS installed and everythings works. No problems anymore about new versions or upgrades. Semi-rolling works perfect. Forme nothing else anymore!! Compliment for the makers of this rock solid distro. Also very ease for beginners!!!
75 • Ubuntu version update, flavour, Snaps (by TheTKS on 2020-05-05 11:45:29 GMT from Canada)
Staying with Xubuntu 18.04.x until 20.04.1, as I waited for 18.04.1. I use Xubuntu for things where stability is important and having the newest version immediately upon release isn’t. Xubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 have given me mostly stable operation, from first day of installation.
Not installing Ubuntu. Still don’t like GNOME.
Snaps: the only bother for me is slow opening (Chromium being a prominent example) although if they fix that then I will be fine with them if their security is at least as good as .deb versions, but I don’t know how they compare today.
Since, for productive work, I rarely use the applications that are Snaps by default in 18.04, the slowness hardly affects me. But notice I do and if packages I use most heavily go mandatory Snap and slow me down, that will be a problem.
Still install and use Synaptic.
Wayland: when I used Ubuntu 18.04 for a few months, some packages, like Synaptic, would not launch in the Ubuntu with Wayland. Does anyone know if that has been fixed yet?
Note to self: try to find good security comparison of a hardened browser, as Snap vs .deb restrained ex. by firejail.
TKS
76 • Ubuntu 20.04 (by Cor on 2020-05-05 13:27:04 GMT from United States)
I also had no issues whatsoever with this new release. I am testing through Virtualbox. So far. so good. I didn't have any issues with Discovery. All of the packages I have installed on 18.04 are installable. I do not use Snap.
77 • Running GNOME (by Jesse on 2020-05-05 13:50:11 GMT from Canada)
@70: "Jesse, a dual-core 2.8GHz AMD CPU is getting a little long in the tooth. That may explain the sluggishness of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Gnome is not known for being lean and mean. As another comment stated, the system is borderline for 20.04 and Gnome."
Maybe, though I'd like to point out that the same equipment ran Ubuntu GNOME (on Wayland) beautifully a year ago. Has GNOME really gotten 20% slower/heavier in one year? If so that seems to be a big problem. Alternatively, if GNOME hasn't gotten much worse in the past year, then there is some noticeable problem in Ubuntu (maybe a driver) that is causing performance issues.
I'd like to point out that Linux Mint's Cinnamon edition runs pretty well on this same equipment and it is mostly GNOME technology under the hood. Which makes me wonder if Canonical's GNOME custommizations are an issue. I'll probably find out in a month when Mint 20 comes out and I can compare its performance to Ubuntu 20.04.
78 • Love it, with some hickup.. (by dhoni on 2020-05-05 14:41:25 GMT from Indonesia)
Im going from kde manjaro to ubuntu 20.04, well i love to do a distro hopping..
installing start at 9 Am, and im finish seting up all of my office stuff at 1 Pm, well its fast because almost all app im using is available for ubuntu. SAP gui, asbru, vnc,keepas, navicat, notepadqq, fortivpn, and some other network tool stuff installed with ease.
Booting time is good, but it seem i got some problem with jesse review. I got lot of slow down, and usualy it happen when im accesing network storage using ftp or smb. deleting 10 small jpg file from my nas take almost whole minute, wow its suck..
One more thing to mention is ubuntu software apps is buggy as hell, if not fail, it need almost 2 minute just to find some app with search feature. man i miss pamac alot.. T_T ..
Hope those problem will go away with couple of update. If its not working, then ill hoping again.. sigh..
79 • UbuntuMATE 20.04 with SDR and Tecsun PL-880. Hardware over Software. (by Roy on 2020-05-05 16:51:37 GMT from United States)
After the hail storm that did a number on my loop I tried to rebuild in the muddy area which is like a corner in the loop. I had mud head to toe on me and covered in ticks. To have a strong signal on 7490 is so cool because during the scan it has always been the first station to come up but no signal in regards to hearing the station. Some time ago I quit hearing the time signal on 2.5 MHZ but could get 5.0 MHZ time signal good. But to hear a weak signal on the 10 MHZ time signal was amazing to me since 5 MHZ time signal was coming in, too but stronger. All together I was hearing 32 stations coming in after the storm had past. I installed Windows 10 on another drive but trying to keep the two operating systems isolated except for the Grub 2 of Linux. I am having the same problem with Linux and Windows working with SDR# and HDSDR on Windows. Yup. Its the driver. Except working with Zadig is quite peculiar since RTL-SDR says to not install the driver that comes with Windows. PLSDR won't even work with the 20.04 version of UbuntuMATE. The closest I can get to have something that almost works with this Linux is CubicSDR. Maybe I can get the WCID the recognize in Windows if I keep working on it.
80 • @77 Speed of Ubuntu (by OstroL on 2020-05-05 18:44:35 GMT from Poland)
Jesse, if you have time, install Unity on the same Ubuntu 20.04, and even without uninstalling Gnome Shell, dual boot and see how fast Unity works with Ubuntu 20.04. This is after 2 and 1/2 years Ubuntu going gnome.
81 • Ubuntu 20.04 flavour Mate (by Mim Yucel on 2020-05-05 18:50:16 GMT from Turkey)
I am using Ubuntu 20.04 Mate (RedMond) and Mint (Debian) Cinnamon in dual booting in my 10 years old HP Compaq Laptop PC, and am very very satisfied with both.
(I am not IT specialist, am a stright PC user (LibreOffice, Internet etc user).
82 • Ubuntu Mate 20.04 (by Roger on 2020-05-05 22:55:47 GMT from Belgium)
I have installed Ubuntu Mate 20.04 on a Sony laptop with a Dual Core Intel.
It went without a glitch, so no problems for now.
I always have at least one Ubuntu Mate running to keep an eye on how Mate is evolving, it's my desktop of choice on Linux Mint.
If ever Mint stops with Mate I switch to Ubuntu Mate, don't like Cinnamon at al.
83 • Ubuntu (by M.Z. on 2020-05-05 23:39:46 GMT from United States)
Well the more positive review from Ars Technica & the fact that Unity/Snooping Lens has been gone for a couple of releases now gives me enough cause to give the new Ubuntu LTS a try - I think I'll stick in Between Mageia & a Fresh LMDE 4 copy sometime soonish. I'm not a fan of Gnome 3, but I've been wanting to see how they have been smoothing the rough & ugly edges at Ubuntu & it is one of the things that makes the Distro distinctive.
Some interesting points from the Ars review: a 21,000 Ubuntu user survey from Canonical indicated that 85% use the main edition, followed by Kubuntu, Xubuntu, & Ubuntu Mate which have a similar slice of users. Also exactly one of the 21K users would miss the Amazon shopping app that got removed from the sidebar - the leading theory on that being that is was Jeff Bezos : )
84 • Ubuntu 20.04 problems redux (by Angel on 2020-05-06 01:42:10 GMT from Philippines)
Could be driver problems with Ubuntu, as Jesse says, hardware specific. I'm not exactly running powerhouses here: Desktop with i5 6th gen and laptop with i3 7th gen. VMs and hardware installs are both on an external USB drive . A bit of slow boot to be expected, but otherwise running nicely. No problems installing. Still not crazy about the snaps, so probably will use Manjaro KDE as my main distro for a while, just to see.
Pretty strict lock-down here due to the COVID virus, so time on my hands to doodle and play. Decided to see just how configurable Gnome has become with time. I still prefer KDE, but it's not so bad really. Ubuntu and Elementary, side by side:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/187863106@N02/
85 • Ubuntu and elementaryOS side by side, sort of (by TheTKS on 2020-05-06 11:17:50 GMT from Canada)
@84 Angel, you shown the desktops with Ubuntu GNOME modified to look similar to elementary’s, but you didn’t mention how you find the usage comparing the two, and I’m curious what you and other people think.
I used Ubuntu 18.04 for months alongside elementary, but haven’t tried 20.04. I never liked how GNOME works on 18.04 or earlier, but I have mostly gotten used to the action/workflow of Pantheon. Put another way, mostly when I encounter how something is done in GNOME or Pantheon that’s different from my how my KDE or Xfce setups do it, I usually find the Pantheon way interesting, even intriguing. I generally have found the GNOME way either unobtrusive or annoying, not much middle ground and nothing I really liked.
To each his or her own.
Do you find GNOME on 20.04 so much different from it on 18.04?
I still have 18.04 on a partition, not updated in a year. I was going to just blast it, but I might try to upgrade and see how different GNOME is from then.
TKS
86 • Xubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu Mate (by jan on 2020-05-06 12:38:14 GMT from Poland)
I'm on Xubuntu for the last 6 years or so, and come every new version, I try other Ubuntu derivatives just to see how they compare to Xubuntu. This year I tried them out in Oracle Virtualbox All Distro version 6.1.97 r137621 (Qt5.6.1) on Xubuntu 19.10, kernel 5.6.7 on 2 PC's - a 2010 Thinkpad R500, Intel Core Duo 2,53, AMD 3400 and a 2015 Lenovo Z70-80, i7 5200 Intel 5500/NVidia GF 840M.
Well, not a single one time could I finish at all the installation of Kubuntu and U Mate. Each time I tried, the install would stall at the moment of unpacking the linux kernel headers 5.4.0-0.29.33. Either the whole Virtualbox would freeze or the whole computer(!).
I tried finally to install Mate without the internet connection and it succeeded. I was able to play with the system and check all its nice features. I then restored the wi-fi connection and tried to update the system. When all the available updates were presented, I carefully unchecked all items related to the Ubuntu Special kernel 5.4.0-0.29 - but it turned out to no avail. All of them were FORCE FED to my Mate install update regardless of my choosing otherwise.
So I stick with Xubuntu - its reliable, I know it well, I can pretty much always get the same results from the same input. However, it seems that Ubuntu distros cannot be trusted much - snaps signed by fake developer names, forced updates (exactly contrary to the user choice), I guess I smell money, but hey, pecunia non olet!
87 • last time i tried any ubs (by fonz on 2020-05-06 13:46:03 GMT from Indonesia)
was back in 16. it felt like a big let down as snaps marketed themselves as portable, cross platform whatnots, as appimages (ai) are pretty much what snaps were supposed to be. luckily im seeing a ton more ais than before. i dont think ive had any annoyances running any ais, and i honestly tend to use a puppy derivatives due to its frugality (wow, thats actually a word, its not underlined lol). even on a very different-from-the-norm system, ais work just fine here i also dont like the boot screen thing, since opensuse allowed us to remove it without issues, last i read on the ubs forum plymouth is too involved with the boot. they also double whammy themselves a long time ago announcing to drop 32bit and replacing debs with snaps -_-
to all those that like xub, id like to offer an alternative, try xub core (slimmed down xub) or go for debian testing xfce (i call it detest, an even more slimmed down xub). dont be too alarmed by the semi rolling testing branch, one can easily swap out apt sources. its actually not that scary IMHO as ive never had any system wide failures, only some minor quirks fixed quickly. easily on par with arch/majaro, ive had unlucky experiences with tumbleweed, rawhide, void and others before
i might start distro hopping again later on as im not liking where things are going, of course on a test pc before saying bye to detest, hopefully that wont happen...
88 • Ubuntu review by Jesse Smith (by denPes on 2020-05-06 14:08:20 GMT from Belgium)
I am a little bit disappointed in this Ubuntu review.
A +/- 9 year old laptop was used with a mediocre CPU, even for back then, and it is not even using a Solid State Drive. I am not saying one should use the latest hardware, but this is quite ancient.
Obviously the system will be quite sluggish, and the first impression will be negative, especially with the indexing and all that stuff going on in a modern OS.
All the other stuff mentioned were probably valid points. The issues in the Software Center could have been solved with some reading, but in all fairness, this is how Ubuntu presents it to its users, and it was the experience of the reviewer.
I am not a user of Ubuntu, but I think a big release like this deserves a better chance during a review, i.o.w. with less then a 5 year old machine with ssd/nvme.
89 • Hardware (by Jesse on 2020-05-06 14:32:01 GMT from Canada)
@88 "A +/- 9 year old laptop was used with a mediocre CPU, even for back then, and it is not even using a Solid State Drive. I am not saying one should use the latest hardware, but this is quite ancient."
Sure, the workstation is older, however, I'd like to point out that most (almost all) Linux distributions run smoothly on the same hardware. With the exceptions of Ubuntu and Fedora, pretty much every distro in the few hundred active projects we track run well on the same equipment. So, yes, the workstation is older, but I think this serves as an interesting comparison as to the performance of Ubuntu versus just about every other distro available today, including other members of the Ubuntu community editions.
Keep in mind Xubuntu, Kubuntu, and Ubuntu MATE all run very well on this same equipment. Which means, while older, the equipment is fine, it is just that Ubuntu's flagship distro is so much slower/heavier than the rest it managed to bring the system to a crawl.
Turn the perspective around for a second. Instead of thinking "Well sure Ubuntu runs slow, look at how old the hardware is." Look at it as "Why does Ubuntu require newer hardware when almost every other distro runs fine on a 10 year old workstation?"
90 • @88 (by Andy Prough on 2020-05-06 15:09:59 GMT from United States)
> I am not a user of Ubuntu, but I think a big release like this deserves a better chance during a review, i.o.w. with less then a 5 year old machine with ssd/nvme.
If an $800+ laptop with ssd/nvme is required to use it, Ubuntu should say so. However, here's their recommended specs from their own website - well within the specs of the system used in this review:
"Recommended system requirements:
2 GHz dual core processor or better
4 GB system memory
25 GB of free hard drive space
Either a DVD drive or a USB port for the installer media
Internet access is helpful"
If it is basically non-functional on a machine that exceeds Ubuntu's own recommended specs, then the problem is with Ubuntu itself.
91 • From what I've read (comments) (by cykodrone on 2020-05-06 15:42:27 GMT from Luxembourg)
This is mostly my opinion, 'buntu has gone mostly off the rails, it's definitely no longer FOSS, and more of a hybrid of corp/foss, this makes it barrel towards proprietary, and fostering a ecosystem of its own. I am a 'if it aint broke, don't fix it' person, but it seems (especially corporate) developers have to make themselves look useful (the gang at Goggle are a good example), possibly to keep their jobs, guzzle a gallon of coffee before their shifts, and let their somewhat misguided 'creativity' take over. Also, 'buntu markets itself as 'user friendly', and if us seasoned Linux people have to 'fight' with it, I pity the poor noobs who buy in to the 'mystique'. I gave up trying it years ago, I noticed their 'train' going off the rails back then, and haven't looked back, I won't even waste the bandwidth to try it 'live'. Canonical is on a mission to take some of the enterprise Linux and Windows market, they are a corporation, but the typical user (like students, etc) are left scratching their heads. At least RH has been upfront about who and what they are, no ambiguity.
92 • Ubuntu 20.04 addendum (by fox on 2020-05-06 15:47:50 GMT from Canada)
Referring to my earlier review (@40), I may have spoken too soon. Now I'm having sound problems, which I didn't have in 19.10 or earlier versions. Especially with Zoom. Twice in the last two days I could get no sound in a Zoom conference. In both cases, I switched to a Mint 19.3 partition and had no such problems. I have always liked Ubuntu, but now I'm considering either reverting to 18.04 or using Mint as my regular driver.
93 • @89 • Hardware (by denPes on 2020-05-06 17:43:00 GMT from Belgium)
Hi Jesse, Yes it is fine to use that same equipment what was used to review other distro's as a comparison. I would have preferred that as an extra. Now I am not here to tell you how to review a distro, since you have far more experience with that then I have.
I just think that Ubuntu, Redhat/CentOS distro's are a bit in a different category, when it comes to the desktop then the majority of other distro's. These are used for productivity, flexibility, and support. (with of course the exception of those coders that can get away with using their own toolsets while running for example their arch with i3/xfce) That's why Ubuntu 20.04 is quite a big release.
Ubuntu runs Gnome, which has stuff like tracker and other stuff going on. Stuff I don't like, and why I don't run these distro's. But I know that my slackware install would not stand a chance against the flexibilty and support that Ubuntu offers for nowadays productive desktop environment.
My point is just that a release like this deserves the appropriate hardware for a review. (which imo should be at least have an SSD )
fyi, I've tested Ubuntu 20.04 on a 2011 laptop with an SSD, and the performance was fine, for a Gnome desktop.
94 • *buntus (by Cheker on 2020-05-06 18:03:30 GMT from Portugal)
I don't think very highly of the flagship Ubuntu either. It has that corporate stench that defines that Redmond company. I don't have the fervent hatred for snaps that other people seem to have though. They SHOULDN'T be pushed over the native debs but as an alternative they're inoffensive.
I do sympathize with the alternative flavors, specially Xubuntu and Ubuntu MATE. I tested the 20.04 betas a fair bit before they officially released and I like them, I still have a Ubuntu MATE partition on my laptop.
@86 That happened to me on Oracle VB with Ubuntu MATE too. I fixed it by enabling host i/o cache in the storage settings.
95 • Hardware (by Jesse on 2020-05-06 18:42:37 GMT from Canada)
@93: "My point is just that a release like this deserves the appropriate hardware for a review. (which imo should be at least have an SSD )"
It's unlikely that SSDs are going to be featured in any of my reviews in the near future. The cost/storage ratio isn't practical. Around here SSDs are about four times more expensive and don't offer much benefit. Sure they'll access random files faster, which is nice for start-up, but once a program or file is cached in memory it doesn't help.
Apart from boot times and launching applications an SSD doesn't convey any benefit, it's not going to affect desktop performance or cause programs to behave differently.
96 • MATE (by Cheker on 2020-05-06 19:15:49 GMT from Portugal)
Speaking of MATE though, it seems to have a problem not exclusive to Ubuntu. The application launchers have no icons if the installation is in Portuguese. Why is this the case? This makes it unlikely for me to recommend a MATE distro to someone who doesn't play well with English.
97 • @95 (by denPes on 2020-05-06 19:57:31 GMT from Belgium)
SSD's are more resilient then regular hard drives, especially in mobile devices. They are silent and often use less power.
Copying files is faster, boot times are faster. Loading programs is faster. The whole desktop experience with a SSD is quite a difference compared to a HHD. Pretty much everyone will tell you that the best and cheapest upgrade for an old computer is an SSD.
With modern desktops, Windows, Gnome with tracker, KDE with baloo, indexing happens behind your back regularly. This affects performance as well, and an SSD makes a big difference in performance.
Most programs indeed load into cache, and after that it doesn't matter, but bigger programs and games not always load everything into memory on the get go. They load a lot of stuff on demand during their execution. I have a few games that just can't perform well without an SSD, especially with loads of modfiles.
Long story short. Your view on SSD's must be because of a very specific user case. Because it is objectively wrong.
98 • @88, no SSD needed (by Angel on 2020-05-06 20:09:03 GMT from Philippines)
As I posted earlier, I'm running Ubuntu 20.04, both as a VM and installed on disk. It runs fine even though it's on an external USB spinning HDD. My PC is only 5 years old, but I've installed 18.04 on Intel Core Duos from 2006 with no problems. I doubt if 20.04 would be much different. If Jesse has a problem it may be his particular configuration, not the age or capability of the machine.
99 • Hardware (by Jesse on 2020-05-06 20:20:14 GMT from Canada)
@97: I've worked in IT a long time and I think your views on SSDs are, to put it mildly, optimistic. They're definitely not in line with my observations and work when switching back and forth between machines running SSDs and HDDs. You suggested I'm looking at a "very specific user case" but this just isn't the situation, if anything I'd say you have it backward.
The two situations you suggest SSDs are better are file indexing and gaming where assets can't be held in memory. I don't use desktop indexing and don't generally need to run games (or at least not ones where performance is negatively affected by hard drive type). In other words, while I agree SSDs can have benefits, storage isn't generally my bottleneck for performance. Network typically is.
As I mentioned above, I agree SSDs can assist boot performance and, in some case, initial application loading. But copying throughput and desktop performance aren't affected in most scenarios I deal with. I just don't have any heavy IO tasks that run while I'm working. Once the initial session loading is done, all my programs and most files are cached in RAM and stay that way. The underlying storage type (HDD, SDD or NAS) isn't going to affect me 90+% of the time. For the most part, people I work with are the same way. After their half dozen apps are open, applications are all running from RAM and data files are mostly pulled in over the network. The network, rather than local storage, is the biggest bottleneck.
100 • SSD (by Lupus on 2020-05-06 20:25:51 GMT from Germany)
@95 @97 Dear Jesse please just try a stupid cheap SSD as a boot drive, your eyes will water in regret not to have tried this earlier. I´m almost apalled and I´m feeling the irk of not even wanting to read here anymore because of this blunt disregard for facts even my 10 year old knows. My dear Sir when you write about snappiness of desktop experiences you seem to be clueless... what a pity
101 • @100 Lupus: (by dragonmouth on 2020-05-06 20:59:30 GMT from United States)
I tried SSDs and my eyes did water. They watered with regret about the wasted money.
Somehow I think calling a man of Jesse's experience clueless just proves that you, Sir, have a lot to learn about computers and about life.
102 • @85, TKS, G vs P (by Angel on 2020-05-06 21:01:54 GMT from Philippines)
To your questions: Pantheon is set up as I like it, top panel, bottom dock, but I'd rather use Gnome and do my own configuring, or Cinnamon. As limited as Gnome may be, it still has a lot more choices. I like that Pantheon brings up a list of shortcuts on "Super." Once memorized, the workflow is better. I like the menu. I don't like the tiny buttons on the toolbar, lack of right-click on desktop, and the placing of max-minimize and close on opposite ends. Also the crippling of just about any adjustments. I see that someone has come up with a tweak tool to at least change themes. With my failing eyes, dark theme is a must.
Nothing new or different about working with Gnome. You like the workflow or you don't. Just seems a bit snappier, and it's more configurable, with extensions and the tweak tool of course. It irks me, as in Pantheon, that one needs to mouse over to the top right, click on a small area, then down and click again, then yet a third time, just to shut down/log out. Yes, there is a shortcut, but still. . .
I like dark themes, big buttons and icons front and center and as little glare as possible. I spend a bit of time in front of the screen almost daily, and I find it less tiring. Here's my Manjaro KDE:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/187863106@N02/with/49864545232/
103 • SSDs (by Angel on 2020-05-06 21:25:32 GMT from Philippines)
@97, 100, 101- I swapped all my internal drives for SSDs, and I don't see it as wasted money. Response is much improved, and if nothing else, they make my computer use more enjoyable. Prices are no so bad unless you want lots of storage. What is not to true is that somehow one needs an SSD to properly test or run Ubuntu, or any other Linux.
104 • Ubuntu 20.04 (by Landor on 2020-05-06 23:50:01 GMT from Canada)
While I'm not a fan of (U)buntus to say the least, especially regarding their inclusion of non-free, etc, I don't feel there's really anything glaringly wrong with this current release.
The people that use this comments section are not the average GNU/Linux user by far. If the average users came here this section alone would be flooded with comments. That said, the average person using (U)buntus for their average daily uses will more than likely have absolutely no problem using it. Nor will they really care about any technical or even philosophical changes whatsoever. They definitely have their user base and it's far from disappearing.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
105 • (K)ubuntu 20.04 with severe problems (by JMB on 2020-05-07 01:13:49 GMT from Germany)
I am really astonished about so many positive experiences.
After installing both Kubuntu 18.04.4 HWE and 20.04 on an old machine to be imaged and used for a new machine which is about to arrive incl. AMD Navi 10 card, concerning the visible changes for Kubuntu all I spotted are really an improvement. Very well done!
While it is no surprise that 18.04.4 LTS is very stable without any real problem (HWE is using 5.3 like EON), this is not the case using 20.04 (using only 5.4 due to being an LTS kernel - which may not be a wise decision with a good deal of backporting necessities).
After installing a lot of packages for 20.04 (as for all of my installations), the package manager had more than hundred packages that are claimed not to be used by anything ... and are recommended for deletion.
Something is broken with package management - this happened with a former release and was fixed in a few weeks. But THIS was an STS version before final and 20.04.0 should be a final LTS release ...
A second problem was my KDE configuration resulting in the KDE logo no longer starting the main menu when clicking at it (I am new to KDE - but 18.04.4 made no problem with my configuration). As KDE of 20.04 is also LTS this is really strange ...
I removed my local configuration and did my changes a second time, with the same result.
With a third round it keeps working (so it is not the things I changed but something more subtle) - but the question is for how long (i.e. if a simple configuration change may ruin the installation again ...).
For Xubuntu it was clearly expressed:
"Users with AMD graphics may experience significant graphical issues and should consider waiting until the release of 20.04.1 later this year." (see https://xubuntu.org/news/xubuntu-20-04-released/ 1st point under `Known Issues').
I am a longtime user of XFCE but the last two releases made me thinking about using KDE instead. But I would never expect such an official statement.
After my first impression it may even be advisable not using 20.04.0 LTS now - maybe in several weeks. But 20.04.1 is announced to be released 23. July 2020 ... so waiting so long is just madness if you want to use new HW right now.
So the final release of 20.04.0 is in no way stable / functioning as one would expect ... and concerning Linux and a fresh release I think AMD support is well on top of any Linux desktop list (the only vendor of performant graphics with free and thus mainlined drivers).
This situation is really strange - and 16.04 and 18.04 did not have such extreme problems after final release ... so this is NOT a normal situation. But I hope it will be fixed in weeks - and not months as indicated hinting to 20.04.1.
106 • @104 Landor (by Verndog on 2020-05-07 01:18:15 GMT from United States)
Landor, it been ages since I last read your comments. I was thinking of you recently. Glad your back.
I've tried several several non-ubuntu OS's, but keep coming back. I tweak the heck out of them. One thing goes is snapd. I think that Arch doesn't use snap if I'm right.
107 • @102 Angel, GNOME vs Pantheon vs KDE (and a mention of Xfce and JWM) (by TheTKS on 2020-05-07 03:02:57 GMT from Canada)
Yeah, there’s no perfect DE. I have elementaryOS for specific uses, and use it for little else. For those uses, it suits me.
Some things about Pantheon I would change, too. No right click on the desktop was one of the biggest for me to get used to. I would still like to have it, but have adapted and gotten more and more comfortable with Pantheon as I’ve learned its features.
In GNOME, even as I’ve learned its features, I have found nothing it does that the other DEs I use don’t do equally well or better for me, whether KDE, Xfce or Pantheon (depending on what I’m doing) or in Puppies, JWM and their apps.
I’m happy for the choice in *nix DEs/WMs we have, including GNOME since it suits some best.
Your KDE on Manjaro is very slick!
TKS
108 • Ubuntu 20.04 (by TheTKS on 2020-05-07 03:14:20 GMT from Canada)
Upgraded the old Ubuntu 18.04 partition today and gave 20.04 a test run.
I still don’t like GNOME.
I haven’t yet run into the problems Jesse described. 18.04 ran stably and quickly enough, 20.04 has so far as well, although it’s still early, but no early bad surprises.
As I wrote earlier today, I was going to wipe my Ubuntu partition, but I will keep 20.04 on for awhile longer and try it from time to time to stay current with it.
TKS
109 • Average Linux (Ubuntu) user (by OstroL on 2020-05-07 07:40:24 GMT from Poland)
There are two types of Linux users; one who installs a Linux distro on one's computer, or one who buys a computer with Linux installed. Well, those people working in companies that has Linux computers has someone else to install them. I am not that sure these days whether the Linux user base is growing, only the oldsters and the young, who wants to experiment would install Linux on their computers.
110 • SSD Ubuntu fanboys (by curious on 2020-05-07 08:43:39 GMT from Germany)
Oh, come on, please! An SSD might make performance better, but the problems Jesse encountered in his review obviously had nothing to do with this.
And even if not having an SSD was the cause (which it isn't), requiring such expensive hardware would itself be a MAJOR drawback for what is supposed to be a universal, mainstream distro released with "long term support".
I find it odd, a little bit amusing, but mainly dissappointing, that so many people seem to think that if an experienced reviewer has had a bad experience, it MUST be the reviewer's fault - certainly, Ubuntu could not be to blame!
111 • @110; and starting at #88 and going forward...and getting more idiotic. (by R. Cain on 2020-05-07 16:12:44 GMT from United States)
"Reading comprehension is a big problem in open-source"
Updated: February 24, 2016
https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-reading-comprehension.html
******************************************************************************************
"...articles that praise products never ever get any reaction from the wider community. .."
"...People [COMMENTERS] do not see technical bugs and problems - all beautifully documented with tons of words, snippets of errors and bloody screenshots - they see users and how nooby or not they might be in handling these bugs..."
“...people [REVIEWERS] usually cave in under pressure. Which means, over time, you end up with software reviewers who are too scared to discuss bad things, controversial topics or problems in products, lest they provoke the wrath of the Righteous Brigade. They go away, do something else, give up, while the technological issues remain behind. That won't do either. Nope..."
“...When people [REVIEWERS, or OTHER objective, truthful COMMENTERS] complain about technology, they are not attacking YOU [dear self-serving, non-objective, non-technically competent myopic reader]. They are attacking lousy products. They want shit done. As long as the commentary diverges into discussions about noobs, someone's ability to gstreamer their sister and such, Linux will NEVER rise mighty as a consumer product. If your first instinct is to discuss the reviewer, you should shift-delete your Internet. It's all about being able to receive constructive feedback. Once that happens, we might actually end up with some decent software. Kapish? "
112 • You folks and yer drives...sheesh (by cykodrone on 2020-05-07 17:24:54 GMT from Sweden)
PC, OS=SSD, storage=HDD (lower cost per TiB).
Laptop=SSD, all the way, SSDs laugh at g-force, and slower mobile CPUs need all the help they can get. Get a decent USB stick to move files between machines.
Not taking sides, but the diff between SSD/HDD loading of LibreOffice, etc, was quite noticeable. Money can be an issue, SSDs are a total 'burn', the phony market valuation dictates the price (much like the romantic hype behind inflated diamond prices). Then there is migration, some people do not want to lose their setups, data, etc, and don't have the tech know-how to 'ghost' over to an SSD.
I've been a speed demon nut for years, even doing a Raid 0 with 2 SSDs once, just for a laugh, averaged 1GiB per second rw.
Oh, and if you do go SSD, get a good one, lower end junk has a nasty longevity/failure rate, the extra few bucks will save some anguish. Back in the day, I dumped a distro because it didn't have HDD Raid support, now that the boot drive is SSD, I'm using it again.
113 • Sponsorship & Storage (by M.Z. on 2020-05-07 22:25:29 GMT from United States)
On the hard drive issue - the Ubuntu specs page doesn't list SSD as a requirement so logically the company should have set their distro up to use spinning HDD which are still plenty common and were common on in the days of several OSs that the specs page says Ubuntu should be able to replace. My previous SSD experience was basically 3 times faster booting, which was nice but shouldn't be a requirement especially if you list your distro as a good replacement for things like Win XP & Vista.
@91
If you think FOSS can't or shouldn't come from corporate environments you're not living in reality. Even the author of the GPL mentioned that the 'free as in speech' software he advocated would likely end up being sold & supported by some sort of companies & he intended to let it happen so long as the code remained open & belong to the users & community as much as the companies. The fact that Canonical took their code from the non-profit Debian project to create Ubuntu & in turn had dozens other community projects like Mint base their distros on Ubuntu proves that the GPL is largely working as intended.
All that being said Canonical has a history of screwing up & they did wrong their users in the Unity era, so preferring community projects is perfectly understandable. Even so corporate sponsored Linux projects get a heck of a lot done for the rest of us & are a big benefit to the community when they are well behaved & aren't doing things like the Unity 'Shopping Lens'. The world becomes a lot better place if you don't turn potential allies into enemies & even more so when you realize that your community can use rights under the GPL to rip out any offensive code & fork a project you don't like into one that you do & take back code for the community any time they feel they need to.
114 • RE: 106 & 110 (by Landor on 2020-05-07 22:39:24 GMT from Canada)
@106
I posted here about a year ago I believe, once. I've wondered about you and others as well, and thank you.
I've mainly stuck with libre distributions. My main system was the Parkes release of gNewSense and even manually updated it beyond its EOL. I didn't want to switch to their last release which was gnome 3 based. Currently I'm using Devuan Ascii stripped down (libre kernel and a few things removed) and heavily modified with either openbox or icewm, whichever I'm in the mood for that boot. I actually have pulled a lot of pieces out of a number of distributions like antiX. I still feel anti creates one of the best distributions in our community, and even surpasses the collaboration in MX. I basically just have been lurking though, here and there. I may actually join in the community at Devuan, I like how they do things over there. I still check out a lot of distributions just to see what I may personally find useful for adding to my own build(s). Actually, just recently I learned that my favourite Gentoo has a USE flag for building a free only system, something I didn't know of before, if it existed then.
@110
I'm not knocking Jesse here at all, nor am I implying that he is at fault for his review. I will say though that your belief in an experienced reviewer doesn't hold water. Car analogy coming: I've known many mechanics that were older and believed their work was flawless and their knowledge unsurpassed due to their years of experience. That has lead them argue until they were blue in the face that their work was flawless, including the diagnosis, when it wasn't. I've also seen many younger mechanics who instantly considered their methodology was wrong, or expertise. That said, anything could be a culprit, a bad burn, etc. I've found many times when I had a problem with a live system and or an install the best thing to do was check for similar issues "with my exact, or close to it, hardware". That doesn't always work either, but it's a starting point. If I haven't found anything that satisfies the reason for the issue(s) I then will normally do a fresh download and burn the new iso to a different cd/dvd or flash a usb and go from there. The latter has fixed the problem at least 90% of the time. That's just my personal experience on this topic though.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
115 • Corporate FOSS (by cykodrone on 2020-05-08 01:41:10 GMT from France)
@113
Not saying corporations shouldn't dabble in FOSS, and yes, they have made some good contributions (I love gufw). My point was, Ubuntu started being a 'dog's breakfast' years ago (reminiscent of MS's Franken-OSes, bolted together Vista comes to mind), and your point about spin off distros defunking Ubuntu and slapping on a pretty, usable GUI is proof. My op-ed was a sum of the complaints, much of which I have experienced myself. Maybe Ubuntu should do like other distros have done, make a home and an enterprise version, a home version should be sans all the (enterprise) junk the typical home user would not use, or start in the OS upon booting. Hope that clears things up. I'm old school, I even dumped Debian (which I so loved) when they went systemd, and switched to Devuan (my saviors). I understand the new 'tricks', but this old dawg just don't care for them.
116 • FOSS .. Corporate (by Otis on 2020-05-08 15:01:22 GMT from United States)
@113 / @115
It's just that there is a perception that it seems to be taking over, if we tie in FOSS Corporate with systemd (as mentioned by cykodrone in @115).
117 • GPL stays open (by M.Z. on 2020-05-08 22:02:02 GMT from United States)
@116
I hear that sort of talk about 'control' reasonably often, and yet there is Devuan forked from Debian because of the init you talk about. Any honest assessment would show that GPL software that isn't liked leads to more forking & anarchy. The exact opposite of the control so often talked about. If you piss off enough of the right people you get your project forked & have not only less control, but some new potential for competition. I can't see why you would think anyone would bother trying to control something that is GPL given the obvious results.
118 • Xubuntu 20.04 (by Mark B on 2020-05-09 09:30:51 GMT from United Kingdom)
I decided not to wait until the point release in July and upgraded to 20.04. The upgrade process took quite a while but worked OK, as far as I could tell. How wrong was I?
I tried a watch a movie, stored on a samba share, from my old Seagate GoFlex media player but it would not connect. I tried changing the smb.conf file as detailed in this article: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/ubuntu-beaver-samba-shares.html
No joy. After some research I found there is a bug in samba, which means samba was broken in the last TWO LTS releases.
In my 10+ years of using Linux (quite happily), NOTHING has given me more trouble than samba. It's essential and a massive pain in the backside.
If, like me, you use a flavour of Ubuntu as a server, take my advice and hold off upgrading to 20.04 until samba works properly with old devices that can only use the SMBv1 protocol.
Did I mention, I hate samba?
119 • Fedora 32 (by penguinx86 on 2020-05-09 11:36:32 GMT from United States)
I'm giving Fedora 32 a try. I really don't like Gnome 3, so i tried Fedora Spins with LXDE, MATE and Cinnamon. LXDE was very fast, but kind of quirky. I'm a long time fan of MATE, but lately it seems a bit slow and hangs sometimes with both Mint and Fedora. Also MATE looks more like Gnome 2 with the Fedora distro. So, I'm giving up on MATE and switching to Cinnamon. Cinnamon seems less quirky, more stable and it's faster than MATE with both Mint and Fedora.
There's definitely a learning curve switching from Mint to Fedora. Fedora didn't offer 3rd party drivers and codecs during the installation for example. I find it necessary to use the command line more with Fedora than I did with Mint, but it's a good learning experience. Fedora uses LVM by default instead of normal disk partitions. No Synaptic package manager with Fedora either. But at least Fedora 32 included a driver for my Intel AC 7260 wifi adapter, when Mint, Ubuntu and Debian did not.
120 • 118, Experiences with Samba (by barnabyh on 2020-05-10 10:32:08 GMT from Germany)
Samba is not essential - if you don't have any Windows shares. Always found it too much of a headache. Just use an FTP server and you can stream with VLC.
121 • Wonky samba shares in (X)ubuntu 20.04 (by Mark B on 2020-05-10 12:34:47 GMT from United Kingdom)
@120 I totally agree that samba is a headache but I think you will find that millions of people will disagree with you about it being essential. If you don't need it, great, good luck to you. However, my media player does not handle FTP nor does it have VLC. The only option is SMBv1 because Seagate won't release updated firmware for an old product. For my needs, samba is utterly vital to success.
I have managed to solve my issue using the suggestions given in this article: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2432909
What worked for me was to add BOTH the following lines to the [global] section of the smb.conf file:
client min protocol = NT1
server min protocol = NT1
I rebooted as well.
122 • update (by dhoni on 2020-05-10 12:45:08 GMT from Indonesia)
@78 after several day on newest Ubuntu i cant stand the slowness and froze thing that happen when accessing samba drive. i tried 3 file manager, all of them got same issue. weird bug.
then i decide to replace it with debian 10. install and setting it up took bit longer thsn ubuntu. After that i move it to testing.. Man.. it feel like day and night, all is smooth. no slowness, froze, etc when accessing samba drive.
maybe ill pass ubuntu for now and stick to debian.
123 • Samba (by Friar Tux on 2020-05-10 13:35:04 GMT from Canada)
@121 (Mark B) I have to agree with the samba issue. The only place samba ever worked for me was with my Blackberry Playbook. It was the only way to access the files on it. Even directly connecting it to my laptop could not access the file system. Samba worked like a charm, but through the MSWindows shares (even though the laptop was Linux and I believe so was the Blackberry OS). However, so far, samba hasn't worked for anything else.
124 • Statistical Significance: sometimes "no answer" is a very good answer. (by R. Cain on 2020-05-10 14:19:48 GMT from United States)
Based on this week's survey, would you say that Ubuntu 20.04 is liked or disliked?
Consider--
First, there are ≈1425 respondents; enough of a 'population' (as the statisticians say) from which to draw some meaningful conclusions.
Secondly, ALWAYS remember that 'statistics' is the Mathematics of Large Numbers; personal opinions are completely irrelevant.
Now, to the data--
1).Almost as many say they like it (Ubuntu 20.04) as those who say they don't. (22% vs. 24%)
2) Almost half (≈ 45%) say they haven't tried it.
3) Almost 10% say they are neutral on the subject.
Conclusion? The respondents are, within a hair's breadth, of being evenly split on the subject; particularly when one considers the '10%-neutral' population.
SO--did DistroWatch waste all our time running this survey? Not at all--quite the contrary. The result is extremely valuable. It affirms and confirms the fact that there is (at the current time) no compelling reason to consider Ubuntu 20.04 as your "distro of choice", other than for strictly personal reasons.
This is a very well done survey; now you all can apply for that high-paying job as Data Scientist".
125 • "Control" (by Otis on 2020-05-10 15:38:07 GMT from United States)
@117
"..I can't see why you would think anyone would bother trying to control something that is GPL given the obvious results."
Considering the rabid proliferation of systemd distros as compared to the few non-systsemd distros, and the successes of the corporate model in our little GPL/Linux world, I'd say that the "control" mission is doing well.
Unfortunately.
Perhaps not enough people are pissed off.
126 • @117--You need to read more. A LOT more... (by R. Cain on 2020-05-10 17:22:00 GMT from United States)
"... I can't see why you would think anyone would bother trying to control something that is GPL...."
Never heard of the "Linux Foundation", have you.
You obviously are highly deficient in the area of 'control' as regards Linux. A superb beginning to rectifying your deficiencies would be to start reading everything you can find on the subject on Techrights.org, by Dr. Roy Schestowitz, et al.
And don't stop there.
Best of luck...
127 • Techrights (by cykodrone on 2020-05-10 20:49:27 GMT from Sweden)
@126
Why on Earth is Techrights.org not https? Or onion for that matter. My locked down TB also complained about the login dialogue. Love sites like that, but not very fond of the NSA, etc. Sad and disappointed.
128 • Statistics & Control (by M.Z. on 2020-05-10 21:33:42 GMT from United States)
@124
"SO--did DistroWatch waste all our time running this survey? Not at all--quite the contrary. The result is extremely valuable."
If you're talking about statistical significance, then taking about a poll done on a website & clearly composed of responses from the people who read said website & feel like responding to said poll you seem to be missing a lot about statistical significance. If you want a high quality poll you need to get at least 1000 totally random people & get all significant sub groups to respond to questions at a reasonable rate, then correct for any imbalance from what the overall average of the group studied would be if everyone had responded at the needed rate to begin with. As one example, there is a rather infamous picture of a fellow named Truman holding a paper declaring he lost an election based on incorrectly adjusted phone poll data that turned out to be completely wrong.
At any rate statistical significance if far more complicated than meeting any simple threshold & saying 'sounds good enough' & reaching conclusions form there.
@125/126
Feel free to look up the case of Gnome 3 & see what happened when someone at the Gnome organization decided that a consistent Gnome desktop that was identifiable & would have better brand identification decided to lock down Gnome 3, break extensions & generate a new desktop paradigm. There would be no Mate or Cinnamon if Gnome hadn't annoyed enough of the right people. The same could be said of Devuan & init, or of Oracle OpenOffice & LibreOffice. Feel free to continue to reach your own self assured conclusions, most people do; however, to me you truths look like barely the tip of a very big iceberg that you are ignoring the vast majority of.
129 • Huh? (by Otis on 2020-05-10 22:13:36 GMT from United States)
@128
Systemd/corporate Linux is/are, unfortunately, gradually becoming so prolific that the devs thereof don't even bother to argue about the relative merits/lack of having to do with alternatives. Look at the 100 phr here, man. Who cares who got angry in the Gnome camp and did a walling of 3. That's a pretty small portion of the overall picture that has been morphing steadily for decades and then SUDDENLY in the past 5 years into what we have now as to init takeover and corporate influence.
130 • @128--Lack of reading comprehension (by R. Cain on 2020-05-10 23:17:10 GMT from United States)
It has not escaped notice that the subject of The Linux Foundation, and its being taken to task for subverting Linux by Techrights.org, has been very adroitly ignored. Again--
"...Never heard of the "Linux Foundation", have you.
You obviously are highly deficient in the area of 'control' as regards Linux. A superb beginning to rectifying your deficiencies would be to start reading everything you can find on the subject on Techrights.org, by Dr. Roy Schestowitz, et al.
And don't stop there.
Best of luck..."
***********************************************************************
"I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would affront your intelligence."-- William F. Buckley, Jr.
“No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld
Number of Comments: 130
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| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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| Random Distribution | 
Server Optimized Linux
SoL (Server optimized Linux) was a Linux distribution completely independent from other Linux distributions. It was built from the original source packages and was optimised for heavy-duty server work. It contains all common server applications, and features XML boot and script technology that makes it easy to configure and make the server work.
Status: Discontinued
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| TUXEDO |
TUXEDO Computers - Linux Hardware in a tailor made suite
Choose from a wide range of laptops and PCs in various sizes and shapes at TUXEDOComputers.com. Every machine comes pre-installed and ready-to-run with Linux. Full 24 months of warranty and lifetime support included!
Learn more about our full service package and all benefits from buying at TUXEDO.
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| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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