 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 966, 2 May 2022 |
|
Welcome to this year's 18th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
There are a lot of different branches of the Linux family tree. One of the more widely used flavours of Linux is Ubuntu, along with its many community editions and derivatives. This week we begin with a look at Ubuntu 22.04, a long-term support release of the distribution which features a custom GNOME desktop and Snap packages. How do you feel about Ubuntu migrating some popular applications, such as Firefox and Chromium, from traditional Deb packages to Snap packages? Let us know in this week's Opinion Poll. While Ubuntu uses the GNOME interface some of its children use alternatives and a few have even created their own desktop environments to replace GNOME. One of the distributions working on their own desktop environment is System76's Pop!_OS. The Pop!_OS team are close to releasing their first development snapshot of their COSMIC desktop and we report on this in our News section. While Pop!_OS is preparing the first release of COSMIC, the Unity desktop is making a comeback after six years of inactivity. We also share a fix from EndeavourOS which corrects a common install issue and report on how Active Directory authentication works on Ubuntu. In this week's Questions and Answers column we discuss running programs from a data partition and some of the security features which can block the execution of applications. Plus we are pleased to share highlights of last week's releases and list the torrents we are seeding. We wish you all a fantastic week and happy reading!
Content:
|
| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
Just over a week ago Canonical launched Ubuntu 22.04, a long-term support (LTS) release that will receive free security updates for five years. The distribution is available in a number of flavours, including Desktop, Server, and Raspberry Pi builds.
Ubuntu 22.04 ships with a mixture of GNOME 41 and GNOME 42 packages. The Firefox browser is now provided as a Snap package instead of a native Deb package (following in the steps of the Chromium browser). This release defaults to running the distribution's customized GNOME desktop on a Wayland session rather than on the X.Org display server. (There is an exception to this: machines with NVIDIA video cards will run GNOME on X.Org by default.)
I feel it worth observing the bulk of the changes in Ubuntu 22.04, compared to the past version or two of the distribution, are almost all behind the scenes adjustments. The distribution ships with an updated kernel, newer compiler, an updated version of OpenSSL, and there is the Firefox packaging change I mentioned. But almost all of these adjustments are under the surface, minor changes to the way things work rather than visible changes the user can see.
I downloaded the 64-bit (x86_64) Desktop edition of Ubuntu which was provided as a 3.4GB ISO. Booting from the media brings up a welcome window where we can pick our preferred language from a list and then choose to Try the distribution's live desktop or Install it. When running Ubuntu in a VirtualBox test environment the distribution's live media booted quickly. When I tried the distribution on physical hardware it took about five minutes to boot to the welcome screen and at two separate points the boot process appeared to stall for a minute.
Taking the Try option presents us with a customized GNOME desktop. The expected panel at the top of the screen is there with the Activities menu and system tray. Down the left side of the screen we find a thick dock which offers quick launch buttons and an application menu. On the desktop are two icons for launching the system installer and opening the GNOME Files file manager. The desktop and basic hardware testing worked well and I quickly jumped into the install process.
Installing
Ubuntu uses the Ubiquity installer which hasn't changed much in the past few years. We're shown a link to the project's release notes which, when clicked, displays the release information in Firefox. We're walked through the normal steps of selecting a language and picking our keyboard's layout. We're asked if we would like a Normal or Minimal install. The former includes several popular desktop applications while the latter offers a bare GNOME desktop and just a few core applications. We're also asked if we would like to install third-party software such as non-free device drivers and media codecs. I opted to take the Normal install with third-party add-ons.
The next screen asks if we would like to use manual or guided partitioning. The guided option has a few extra options. We can choose to set up a plain ext4 filesystem, LVM volume, or ZFS storage pool. Under the guided options we can also choose to encrypt the filesystem. The manual partitioning approach offers a nice, friendly partition manager where we can assign mount points.
Toward the end of the install process we are asked to select our time zone and make up and username and password for ourselves. Then the installer finishes its work and offers to restart the computer.
Early impressions
My freshly installed copy of Ubuntu booted to a graphical login screen. Text in the centre of the screen asked "Not listed?" There was no text box or icons to click to access a user account. Clicking the "Not listed?" button did not do anything. In fact, I couldn't click on anything as the icons on the panel didn't respond to the mouse. I forced a reboot and this time the system booted and showed me an icon where I could click to access my user account.
When I signed into GNOME a welcome window appeared and offered to connect me with on-line accounts from Google, Microsoft, Nextcloud, and Ubuntu's Single Sign-on service. The welcome screen also offers to send hardware information to Canonical and to enable location services. The final screen shows us a list of popular programs with their icons. The welcome window then offers to launch the software centre so we can install these items. I'll come back to the software centre later.
The GNOME desktop, whether run on Wayland or X.Org, is fairly responsive. Not amazingly so, but about average. The desktop actually appears slower than it really is because many actions are accompanied by visual effects that play out on the screen. The desktop is fluid and can respond quickly, but each action incurs a slight delay while the animations play. There doesn't appear to be any way to disable these visual effects with the default settings panel.
Ubuntu 22.04 -- Trying the dark theme
(full image size: 393kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
The desktop has the nasty habit of turning off and locking the screen after five minutes of inactivity. This is quite common these days and one of the first things I like to change in most distributions. On Ubuntu the settings to adjust screen timeouts can be found in the settings panel under the Power options.
Included software
One of the early quirks I noticed while using Ubuntu 22.04 was that programs shown on the desktop dock are not present in the application menu. The reverse is also true, if an icon appears in the application menu, it is not also on the dock. We can right-click on a launcher to choose where it should appear, but there doesn't appear to be any way to have the icon appear in both places. This seems unusual behaviour and something I found jarring when I was browsing the application menu. I can see the logic, not wanting to clutter the menu, but it meant I sometimes had to mentally switch contexts in order to find what I wanted.
Speaking of software in the menu (and on the dock) we're treated to the Firefox browser, Thunderbird e-mail client, the GNOME Files file manager, Rhythmbox audio player, and LibreOffice. Transmission is included along with the Cheese webcam utility and the Shotwell photo manager. The Totem video player is included too.
There is a launcher called Additional Drivers which opens the Software and Updates utility. This tool helps us select repositories, update checks, install new device drivers, and manage live kernel updates. The live kernel updates feature requires an Advantage support account from Canonical.
Digging further into the distribution we find the GNU command line utilities, manual pages, and the systemd init software. Ubuntu runs on version 5.15 of the Linux kernel.
Hardware
I experimented with running Ubuntu 22.04 on a physical workstation and in a VirtualBox virtual machine. As I mentioned earlier, the live media booted quickly in VirtualBox, but took around five minutes to boot on the workstation. Otherwise the experiences on the two platforms were virtually identical. My workstation's hardware was all recognized and I was able to get on-line, watch YouTube videos, and performance was usually good. There were a few glitches which I'll mention below, but in general the desktop ran smoothly.
A fresh install of the distribution occupied about 5GB of disk space. The distribution consumes about 1GB of RAM when running on the ext4 filesystem and about 1.3GB when running on a ZFS volume. This makes Ubuntu, even with the lighter filesystem, nearly twice as memory hungry as many other mainstream distributions.
Using Ubuntu and various observations
An issue I ran into early on was when I double-clicked on a video file to play it, the Totem application launched and reported "The specified movie could not be found." When I then tried to open another video file, either by dragging it from GNOME Files into the Totem window or selecting it from within Totem, the video player would crash. At least this is what happened when running Totem in the Wayland session. When I switched to running GNOME on the X.Org session Totem was able to open and play both audio and video files. When I switched back later to using Wayland, Totem stopped working again and the error "The specified movie could not be found," returned. This situation, Totem working in X.Org and not Wayland, occurred whether I was running the distribution on my workstation or in a virtual machine which makes me suspect it's not a driver issue.
Ubuntu 22.04 -- Trying to open media files in Totem
(full image size: 79kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
This problem with Totem bothered me for two reasons. One was it seems not enough testing was done with Wayland before making it the default display option. The other is the error isn't accurate. Totem can find the file and there clearly isn't anything wrong with the file or its permissions (since Totem can play it in the X.Org session), but the error suggests the file cannot be accessed.
For comparison's sake, I downloaded the VLC media player. By default, the software centre grabs the Snap package for VLC. The VLC player could open both audio and video files whether it was running in the Wayland session or on the X.Org display server. However, I could not get VLC to produce sound, only display video. This looks like it may be a permission issue with the Snap package, though I have not confirmed the cause at the time of writing.
Something else I found interesting is the Software Centre application has the opposite issue as Totem. The Software Centre will open when running on Wayland, but it crashed every time I tried to open it in the X.Org session. In effect this meant I had to play videos on X.Org, but had to switch to Wayland to manage software packages.
There doesn't appear to be any tool included in Ubuntu by default to manage advanced filesystems such as Btrfs and ZFS. Both have been included in the distribution for several releases, but Canonical hasn't really embraced the functionality of either yet the way openSUSE has with Snapper and Linux Mint has with Timeshift.
I ran into an unusual bug when trying to access the user account management tool in the settings panel. When trying to unlock the account manager a password prompt appeared. I was unable to type anything into the prompt and dismissed it. I then found, from then on, the desktop failed to respond to keyboard input. I had to use the mouse to select the Restart option in the user menu to reboot the computer, at which point keyboard functionality returned. This only happened the once, future trips into the user manager module worked smoothly. Well, mostly smoothly. The account manager demands new accounts be created with complex, non-dictionary passwords and can be quite demanding compared to most other user management tools.
Ubuntu 22.04 -- Exploring the settings panel
(full image size: 515kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
Software management
While Ubuntu does have a minimal, dedicated utility for checking for software updates which can be used to select which items we'd like to fetch and install, most software management is handled by Software Centre. The Software Centre application is divided into three tabs which allow us to browse for new software, see installed items, and check for updates, respectively.
Software Centre made a good first impression. It was quick to respond, it has a nice, clear interface. I like that in the upper-right corner of the window we can see if an application we are looking at is a Snap or Deb package. We can also click this indicator to check for alternative packages. For instance, we can often select a stable Snap, a development Snap, or a Deb package for many applications. The default behaviour seems to be to grab the stable Snap when one is available. I don't like this behaviour as the Snap packages are massive and often take a long time to load compared to their Deb counterparts.
Ubuntu 22.04 -- Exploring Software Centre
(full image size: 719kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
The Software Centre did cause me a few problems. For instance, I was unable to remove any pre-installed applications. Trying to remove any of the default software would result in an error message saying "No packages to remove." I also found that trying to install a Snap and a Deb package at the same time would bring the operating system to its knees while both package managers tried to consume all available resources rather than having one run followed by the other.
Ubuntu 22.04 -- Attempting to remove software
(full image size: 649kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
Conclusions
A handful of thoughts and themes kept crossing my mind while I was experimenting with Ubuntu 22.04. One was that the distribution does not appear to have evolved or changed significantly in the past two years since I last spent several days with the project. The installer, the desktop, the settings panel, the software manager, the default software all seemed mostly the same. If you're looking for a desktop experience which doesn't change much, Ubuntu is doing that. But rather than appearing to be focused on stability or consistency, it just feels like the Desktop flavour of Ubuntu is being neglected. Ever since Canonical dropped Unity for their highly customized GNOME environment, it seems like the company has lost interest in the desktop experience and is choosing to ignore it.
Another thing which regularly stood out is just how inconsistent the customized GNOME experience is. Some of this may be a result of Ubuntu mixing versions of GNOME together (some components are from GNOME 41 while others are from GNOME 42). I saw three different styles of menu bar/button in the default applications - hamburger menu, classic menu bar, and compact menu - and the theme didn't seem to be consistent. Some applications defaulted to a light theme (GNOME Files being a prime example) while others, such as Totem, used a dark theme. This inconsistency extended to the settings panel. Some sections seemed minimal and tidy while others had nested options or pages of settings on a screen. Some admin functions required a password and others didn't. There doesn't seem to be any consistency in the GNOME experience.
What really made me surprised with regards to the current mismatched, stagnant status of the Ubuntu desktop was it feels all the stranger when comparing Ubuntu next to its close relatives. Canonical is a company which brings in $175 million a year, according to Mark Shuttleworth, but it seems to have no resources for desktop development, testing, or polishing the user interface. Default programs don't work with the default desktop display server; there is no consistency in the theme or menus; and audio output and keyboard input stopped working seemingly at random. There are no filesystem snapshot tools, despite both Btrfs and ZFS being supported options for years. Meanwhile smaller community projects, like Zorin OS and Linux Mint, are getting by with small sales figures and donations. Yet they are producing desktop environments which look better and act more consistently. Mint even develops its own Cinnamon desktop. Mint has filesystem snapshot tools which integrate with the default admin tools. These community projects use the same base and have a tiny fraction of the resources Canonical has, but are producing much more polished, well tested, and reliable tools.
I think the launch of Ubuntu 22.04 is a clear sign Canonical is much more interested in publishing releases on a set schedule than producing something worthwhile. This version was not ready for release and it is probably going to be a costly endeavour to maintain this collection of mixed versioned software and mixed display server and mixed designs for a full five years. It's a platform I would recommend avoiding.
* * * * *
Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was a Lenovo desktop with the following specifications:
- Processor: Hex-core Intel i5-10400 CPU @ 2.90GHz
- Storage: Western Digital 1TB hard drive
- Memory: 8GB of RAM
- Networking: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 wired network card, Realtek RTL8822CE 802.11ac PCIe wireless adapter
- Display: Intel CometLake-S GT2
* * * * *
Visitor supplied rating
Ubuntu has a visitor supplied average rating of: 7.7/10 from 328 review(s).
Have you used Ubuntu? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
|
| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Pop!_OS users waiting for COSMIC, EndeavourOS publishes hot fix, first Unity release in six years, Ubuntu's Active Directory authentication explained
Back in November we reported on the Pop!_OS distribution getting its own, Rust-based desktop environment. This April the launch of Pop!_OS 22.04 occurred, but there was no sign on the new COSMIC desktop. The new COSMIC environment is still in the early stages of development with an alpha snapshot expected in mid-2022. "What about COSMIC DE? It's in progress! Our UX Team has been testing new designs, and the Engineering Team has begun packaging various elements in the new Rust code base. An alpha release for the COSMIC desktop environment could be available as early as this summer!" The COSMIC interface is expected to replace GNOME in Pop!_OS.
* * * * *
The EndeavourOS team recently published EndeavourOS 21.1 "Apollo". The project has received feedback indicating some installs were failing and a fix has been released to address the problem. "We have received messages that our recent Apollo ISO resulted in failed installations due to the recently updated Arch Linux keyring. We have fixed the issue using our HotFix feature, a feature that allows us to send a fix on an already released ISO without the need to build a new one. Just connect to the Internet on the Live ISO and the installer will fetch the fix automatically." Additional information on the bug and fix can be found in the blog post.
* * * * *
People who enjoyed Canonical's custom desktop environment, called Unity, received some good news this week. The Unity 7 desktop had its first (unofficial) release in six years. The new version runs on Ubuntu 22.04 and has a number of minor fixes and adjustments to the visual look. "Unity 7.6 will be the first major release of Unity in 6 years (the last release was in May 2016). We have restarted the active development of Unity7 and will be releasing new versions with more features regularly. You can test it by running the following commands on Ubuntu Unity 22.04 (we'll be rolling it out to existing users of Ubuntu Unity 22.04 too, if you don't add the testing PPA)." A list of changes in Unity 7.6 can be found in the desktop environment's release announcement.
Many medium and large businesses use a central service to authenticate users. One of the more widely used authentication services is Active Directory. Recent versions of Ubuntu have included a feature which allows users to login using Active Directory. A blog post from Massimiliano Gori explains how this process works and what components are involved on the Ubuntu side of the process. "Linux desktops, including Debian and Ubuntu, supported Active Directory integration for a very long time through SSSD; however, that was limited to authentication and a small subset of related Group Policy Object policies. IT system administrators who wanted to use AD to enforce policy compliance or apply remote configuration faced a difficult choice: paying a premium for third-party privileged access management solutions (that are primarily tailored at servers) or relying on a plethora of custom developed tools and scripts."
* * * * *
These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
|
| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Running applications from a data partition
Making-things-go asks: I have a second disk in my computer for my data files, games, and so on. When I want to run something from this drive it always gives "permission denied" error. I'm the owner of the folder, the files, and I've got read, write, and execute so how can this happen?
DistroWatch answers: I suspect one of two things is happening in this situation. The most likely, based on the fact the files you want to run are on a second hard drive, is that your drive has been mounted with the noexec flag specified, either implicitly or explicitly. The noexec flag tells the kernel to not allow any executable files to be run from the filesystem, even if the user has the necessary permissions.
If you look in your /etc/fstab file with a text editor you should see an entry for your data drive. It'll probably look something like this:
UUID=0b9a883e-9985-4756-959a-b55e2ea5116d /data ext4 noexec 1 2
In the above example I've highlighted the options field which, in this case, says "noexec". If you see the word "noexec" in that position then it means the drive is being mounted with a lock on it preventing any programs from being run. You can change the word "noexec" to "defaults" to fix this.
Alternatively, you might see the word "user", as shown here:
UUID=0b9a883e-9985-4756-959a-b55e2ea5116d /data ext4 user 1 2
The user flag means regular user accounts, not just the administrator (or root user), can mount the filesystem. The user flag also implicitly specifies noexec. The mount manual page says: "This option implies the options noexec, nosuid, and nodev (unless overridden by subsequent options, as in the option line user,exec,dev,suid)." In other words, change the line to read as follows:
UUID=0b9a883e-9985-4756-959a-b55e2ea5116d /data ext4 user, exec 1 2
This will enable the ability to run programs from the drive. The reason the user flag also triggers the noexec security feature is this allows administrators to let regular users plug in USB thumb drives while preventing any malicious programs from running from the removable drive.
Earlier I said I have two ideas about this situation. I think a restrictive mount option is the most likely scenario, but there could also be a kernel level, access control security feature blocking your ability to run programs from the second hard drive. Tools like SELinux are quite useful at locking down a system and, especially in the case of SELinux, sometimes they are too effective.
Check to see if you have a text file on your system called /etc/selinux/config. If that file exists and contains a line as follows, then SELinux may be the cause of the problem.
SELINUX=enforcing
You can change the line to say "disabled" instead of "enforcing" and then reboot your system to see if that fixes your problem. However, if this proves not to fix the issue, remember to restore the file back to the way it was, switching "disabled" back to "enforcing" so it doesn't leave a security hole. More details on checking and changing the status of SELinux can be found in this tutorial.
* * * * *
Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
|
| Released Last Week |
Pop!_OS 22.04
Pop!_OS is a desktop distribution featuring the GNOME desktop, it is based on Ubuntu and developed by System76. The company's latest release is Pop!_OS 22.04 which is a long-term support (LTS) edition. "Automatic updates: update and upgrade Pop!_OS automatically from the 'OS Upgrade & Recovery' panel in Settings; minimize interruption by scheduling what day and time you want your computer to perform the updates; scheduled automatic updates include support for Debian, Flatpak and Nix packages; to reduce distractions, notifications for available updates are set to show weekly by default; the frequency can also be set to daily or monthly notifications; notifications won't show if you have automatic updates enabled; automatic updates are turned off by default; at the bottom of the Settings menu, you'll find the new Support panel - here, you'll have quick access to troubleshooting resources such as: documentation articles for both Pop!_OS and System76 hardware on the support page; the community support chat...." Additional information is provided in the distribution's release announcement. The distribution is provided in one 64-bit build for Intel and AMD video cards and a separate build for NVIDIA video cards. There is also a build for Raspberry Pi 4 computers.
Pop!_OS 22.04 -- Running the GNOME desktop
(full image size: 4.3MB, resolution: 2560x1600 pixels)
Voyager Live 22.04
Voyager Live is an Xubuntu-based distribution and live DVD showcasing the Xfce desktop environment. The Voyager Live project has published a new release, Voyager Live 22.04 LTS, which provides five years of security updates. This release ships with both the Xfce desktop and GNOME, allowing users to switch between the desktop environments from the login screen. "I introduce you Voyager 22.04 LTS Edition Explorer in its final version. A 2 in 1 version with for the first time, the GNOME and Xfce desktops unified in a single distribution. Voyager, let's you pick your preferred session. Everything has been completely redesigned in this old school adventure style for this duo. The GNOME 42 desktop coupled with the Xfce 4.16 desktop has been finally realized, producing 2 unified GNOME and Xfce systems, light, fast, modern, fluid, secure and efficient in a hybrid environment for PC and Tablet. The 2 desktops are quite distinct and their respective applications are for the most part seamless, for one or the other environment. This version is based on Linux kernel 5.15 and Ubuntu distribution Jammy Jellyfish. 22.04 is a 5-year LTS - long-term support - release for updates until July 2027 for Gnome and Xfce." Additional information can be found in the project's release announcement.
KaOS 2022.04
KaOS is a desktop Linux distribution that features the latest version of the KDE desktop environment. The latest snapshot of KaOS offers a number of desktop improvements: "With the release of KDE Gear 22.04, some nice new features and enhancements are introduced. Konsole's completely new feature is Quick Commands: open a quick commands pane from Plugins -> Show Quick Commands and you will be able to create short scripts you use frequently, Konsole's SSH plugin has been further enhanced and you can assign different visual profiles. For Kdenlive, two new options stick out: you can create customized profiles so that your rendered movie adapts perfectly to your needs, and you can also render by zones, using the guides you set up on the timeline as references. Okular now alerts you immediately when you go to sign a document but have no valid digital certificates." Additional information can be found in the distribution's release announcement.
Zephix 5
Zephix, a recent addition to DistroWatch, has been updated to version 5. Zephix is a live Linux distribution based on Debian's stable branch; its aim is to provide a free modular operating system that users can carry with them and use wherever there is a laptop or a desktop system available. Besides the main ISO image, the development team also provides various modules which can be added to the live image to extend its usability. The new Zephix 5 re-introduces the LXQt desktop and firmware modules directly into the live system and ads a "to RAM" boot option: "Zephix 5 has been released. Updated Syslinux and GRUB boot logos to reflect more the Zephix theme; added a 'to RAM' boot option - Zephix can now be loaded totally in memory (if enough RAM is available); changed the default console font; included the desktop and firmware modules by default in the ISO image to make it more usable - this decision was taken thanks to the feedback received from various users." Visit the distribution's About page which contains all the recent changelogs and several screenshots.
ExTiX 22.5
ExTiX is an Ubuntu-based desktop distribution which replaces the default desktop environment with alternatives. The latest version of ExTiX is 22.5 which is based on Ubuntu 22.04, a long-term support release. "I've made a new updated mini version of ExTiX - The Ultimate Linux System. It is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish. The ISO file is of only 1340 MB, which is good if you want to run the system super fast from RAM. It should be enough with 2GB RAM. When the boot process is ready you can eject the DVD or USB stick. Use Boot alternative 2. The best thing with ExTiX 22.5 is that while running the system live (from DVD/USB) or from hard drive you can use Refracta Snapshot (pre-installed) to create your own live installable Ubuntu 22.04 system. So easy that a ten year child can do it! ExTiX 22.5 uses kernel 5.17.2-amd64-exton. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will be supported until April 2027." Additional information and screenshots can be found in the project's release announcement.
* * * * *
Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
|
| 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: 2,716
- Total data uploaded: 41.9TB
|
| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
|
Summary of expected upcoming releases
|
| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
Ubuntu adopting more Snaps
Recent versions of Ubuntu have been moving more of the distribution's popular software applications from traditional Deb packages to Canoical's Snap package format. Applications such as Chromium and Firefox have been migrated to Snaps and the Ubuntu Software Centre now defaults to using the larger, portable Snap bundles by default. What do you think of this shift toward Snap packages? Do you like the protable nature and reduced maintenance Snap packages promise? Do you think Snap packages are too large and too slow to start? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
You can see the results of our previous poll on Peppermint OS switching its base distribution in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
|
Ubuntu migrating applications to Snap packages is...
| Something I like: | 67 (3%) |
| Something I do not like: | 1494 (70%) |
| I am indifferent: | 231 (11%) |
| I am unaffected by this change: | 336 (16%) |
|
|
| Website News |
New distributions added to waiting list
- Rolling Rhino Remix. Rolling Rhino Remix is an Ubuntu-based distribution featuring a rolling release update cycle.
* * * * *
DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 9 May 2022. 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)
|
|
| Tip Jar |
If you've enjoyed this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly, please consider sending us a tip.
(Tips this week: 2, value: US$29) |
|
|
|
 bc1qxes3k2wq3uqzr074tkwwjmwfe63z70gwzfu4lx  lnurl1dp68gurn8ghj7ampd3kx2ar0veekzar0wd5xjtnrdakj7tnhv4kxctttdehhwm30d3h82unvwqhhxarpw3jkc7tzw4ex6cfexyfua2nr  86fA3qPTeQtNb2k1vLwEQaAp3XxkvvvXt69gSG5LGunXXikK9koPWZaRQgfFPBPWhMgXjPjccy9LA9xRFchPWQAnPvxh5Le paypal.me/distrowatchweekly • patreon.com/distrowatch |
|
| Extended Lifecycle Support by TuxCare |
|
|
| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Ubuntu 22.04 (by Pumpino on 2022-05-02 00:45:31 GMT from Australia)
I suspect that 22.04 was deliberately conservative due to it being a LTS release. However, Ubuntu tends to be conservative as it is. I run the LTS releases on my VPS and I noticed that a number of server packages were synced from Debian unstable last year but never updated again. For example, we got stuck with postfix 3.6 instead of 3.7, despite 3.7 being in Debian unstable for months. There were minor updates to dovecot and apache that didn't make it, either. The final sync is supposed to occur closer to the release, according to the release schedule.
2 • ubuntu snaps (by Mike Perrin on 2022-05-02 00:48:07 GMT from United States)
My experience with Ubuntu's snap applications is not positive. I used Midori as a fast opening browser for my Raspberry Pi sprinkler control. In 22.04 it is only available as a snap, painfully slow to open on the first launch, and not much better on subsequent invocations. Fortunately Falkon is available in the deb repository and works well. I have a similar experience with Shortwave, the streaming radio tuner. It worked fine as a flatpak application in 20.04 but in 22.04 the flatpak version is missing some dependencies and fails to start. The snap version works but exhibits annoying glitches in the audio so I have reverted to invoking mpv from the command line.
3 • Ubuntu 22.04 (by Sam Crawford on 2022-05-02 00:51:18 GMT from United States)
I tried to install this and Ubuntu Mate on my Intel NUC. Both failed to run after installation. I installed them using encrypted ZFS so that might have been the problem.
LinuxMint LMDE 5 installed perfectly and runs well.
I used to think that Ubuntu was the gold standard. Not so much anymore.
As to today's question, I use Flatpaks with LMDE for a couple of reasons, the first is that Evolution that ships with Debian Bullseye doesn't play well with my gmail account but Flatpak is a newer version and second, Zoom updates automatically. I don't have any use for Snaps.
4 • Ubuntu and GNOME (by Guido on 2022-05-02 01:30:59 GMT from Philippines)
Media applications like gthumb, totem and others always use the dark theme on Gnome, not just Ubuntu. You can easily turn off the animations with Gnome Tweaks. There is also an extension to speed up the effects. Gnome 42 changes a lot in the design of the Apps.
By the way - I can also not recommend using Ubuntu or Snaps.
5 • Snap (by Mulya_Yiri on 2022-05-02 01:44:11 GMT from Australia)
Your polls selection forced me to choose "something I do not like". The thing is, in principal I think Snap or Flatpak are a good idea for the extra security they offer. I would encourage further development and polish before being forced on users as has been the case with Firefox. It would also have been good to see just one 'standard' Linux package manager.
6 • Ubuntu 22.04 (by Justme on 2022-05-02 01:48:41 GMT from United States)
I ran Ubuntu 22.04 for a few months, since the dailies were available, with no issues except for the Wayland-Xorg conundrum. Some apps run in the one, some in the other. Ended up on Xorg most of the time. It seems to be a Gnome problem, as I had the same experience with EndeavourOS Gnome. Also, desktop effects can be disabled with a click in the tweaks tool. I don't recall if it was pre-installed. Again, that's a Gnome "feature", not Ubuntu's. I don't think I ever used the App Store, so can't comment on that. I ran Firefox direct from the tarball and removed the Snap version. No other snaps were installed.
I've gone on to other distros and desktops since last week. I get bored easily. :-o)
7 • Ubuntu and GNOME (by Jesse on 2022-05-02 01:54:15 GMT from Canada)
@4: "You can easily turn off the animations with Gnome Tweaks. There is also an extension to speed up the effects. "
This is one of my main complaints with GNOME, especially one a supposedly user friendly distro like Ubuntu. I shouldn't need to install a bunch of third-party software (Tweaks) and extensions just to get the desktop working properly. Imagine if you bought a car and complained the car kept veering to the left and they told you to buy a third-party widget to keep the car in the proper lane. No one would go for that.
8 • On to the next one... (by tom joad on 2022-05-02 03:00:59 GMT from Romania)
Jesse, I read your review of Ubuntu and I am glad I did.
I, from time to time, though not as much anymore, do a bit of distro hopping. It is always nice to see what else might be worth playing around with. And of late I was thinking of giving Ubuntu a spin. I haven't loaded and used that for a very long time. Ubuntu was my intro to linux back in the day so I have just a bit of fondness for it.
But after reading your review, no thanks. I had to chuckle that it just seemed to be one thing after another. The term still born comes to mind. Canonical is way missing the point about any operating system. That point is folks want and need to get stuff done. What folks don't want to do is troubleshoot, troubleshoot, troubleshoot, troubleshoot, troubleshoot, troubleshoot...
You last paragraph not only clearly summarizes the short comings of the distro but also seems to elude to maybe some troubling issues with Cannonical that are bubbling just below the surface.
Allow me to add Linux Lite to the mentions of Mint and Zorin who are producing fine distros with far less resources that Canonical.
9 • I was going to criticize Ubuntu...but... (by Matt on 2022-05-02 03:12:00 GMT from United States)
Mark Shuttleworth managed to take stuff that is free and build something people pay him $175 million dollars a year for. Who am I to criticize? Never mind, what the hell, I'll go ahead and criticize:
I don't trust Ubuntu. Just like I don't trust Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, or Twitter. Ubuntu is partnering up with the tech giants and it will alienate anyone who cares about freedom and privacy. The Ubuntu folks probably are not too worried, though. People who care about privacy and freedom are not the ones paying Ubuntu millions of dollars.
10 • Mr Buggy (by mr mint on 2022-05-02 03:26:56 GMT from New Zealand)
I normally ignore all the in-between Ubuntu releases. Fluffy artwork, funny name, rarely ever anything significant - but they should be the place for Canonical to run experiments in. LTS releases on the other hand _are_ interesting, mainly as they are supposed to be a Long Term stable basis, which also feeds ever so many derivative distros.
The Jellyfish sounds more like one of those experimental in-between releases than an LTS. From the report, thank you Jesse, a _lot_ of things are broken. I will give it a wide berth. And to think Mr Canonical wants to IPO next year... hey, pay me $1 a share mate, take them off your hands and all that.
It is worrying that Pop!OS had a new 22.04 release within hours of the Ubuntu announcement. Makes _me_ think the same instabilities have just been copied forward with zero remediation. It was just a tad too quick for comfort.
Snaps. sigh. palmface. why? Snap and Flatpack might work for some environments where you spin something up and silo-operate short term. Being rather old school, if you need a server, make one. If its fleeting, find it a home on existing server(s). I have found that packages which are installed by either of these two methods are significantly slower and less stable - not quite the effect anyone wants.
11 • Ub (by grindstone on 2022-05-02 04:26:37 GMT from United States)
Thanks for another review of interest. I keep hoping that one day all the bloat will have justified itself in maintainability and maybe it does for someone. Maybe it will, yet, for the rest of us. Sounds like a sort of spin somebody made or something. One (high-vis) user report should not constitute statistical significance, so I'll just wish everyone luck. Must be that their paying customers (rightly) get more attention. I will always be grateful to the mothership for what they've historically done. It's not for me, but I'm glad it's still around and freely-offered and served-up. Maybe it's all a clever reminder of what our expectations have become--in large part due to their efforts over time?
12 • Ubuntu and review (by Friar Tux on 2022-05-02 04:44:16 GMT from Canada)
I find I concur with most of the comments, here, and will give Ubuntu a wide berth. To me, Ubuntu has become more of a kit OS to use to build a better OS, like what Mint has done. I, also, am no fan of Snaps (the sound made when most things break). Generally, I will use the default Software Manager, then a *.deb repository (or just google it), and last but not least, an AppImage file. Those three work best for me. I have read a couple of articles of Mr Shuttleworth's explanation of his beloved Snaps and why he insists on Snaps only. I don't agree with him, but it is his Canonical so he can do what he wants with it. I will simply move on to what I find is better. With the sheer number of choices in Linux, these is always something better.
13 • It´s not Ubuntu, it's GNOME (by Simon on 2022-05-02 05:18:14 GMT from Germany)
Some of your criticisms are valid.
Some are unfounded.
The whole evolution of GNOME to GTK4 is rushed and a nightmare for any distro that wants to add more individual touches than just a accent colours. Buggy software centre, inconsistencies, non-working and overly dumbed down GNOME apps with massive white space, pretty design and no-functionality (Weather etc) - you get all of that in Fedora too.
Could Canonical put more effort into the desktop? Yes. Does Canonical not focus on the desktop? Wrong in many ways. Without the help and contributions of Ubuntu, I don't know where GNOME would be today.
14 • Ubuntu review sounds really not good (by Andy Prough on 2022-05-02 05:40:52 GMT from Switzerland)
Jesse tends to be fairly forgiving of small mistakes in his reviews, so this one with its pointed criticisms makes me feel like this version of Ubuntu is definitely one to avoid. The only Ubuntu-based distro I've ever found acceptable for my needs is Trisquel - I guess that trend continues as I won't even bother to fire this one up in a vm.
15 • Ubuntu and snaps (by JeffC on 2022-05-02 06:19:33 GMT from United States)
Although I voted that I am unaffected by this, because I have been mostly unaffected by whatever Ubuntu does for over ten years now, that does not mean I like it.
Much like Fedora which I also do not use, in a greater sense what they do does have some affect on the open source world because of the monkey see monkey do nature of distro developers.
16 • @7, Ubuntu and Gnome (by Justme on 2022-05-02 06:21:37 GMT from United States)
I wouldn't call Tweaks a "bunch of third-party apps". Is is only one app and it is in fact a Gnome app., not third-party. Both can be included or omitted by distro developers. Fedora and others include it. Ubuntu does not, probably because of their fixed dock, which is actually a fork of the Dash-to Dock extension.
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Tweaks
As for extensions: The Extensions app is now bundled with Tweaks. If I want to change looks on Plasma, I add third-party themes. In Gnome, I add third-party extensions. If I want a dock, (which I do,) in Plasma I install Latte-dock or Plank. In Gnome, I install the Dash-to-dock extension or Plank. I see differences in procedure, but not in kind.
Yes, Plasma is much more configurable at default, but I think Gnome gets an undeserved bad rap. I ran mostly Gnome for over a year and I was satisfied. I am now mostly running Plasma and I am just as satisfied. Plasma does have its own glitches, but I find them small enough to overlook, as I did Gnome's.
17 • Running applications from a data partition (by Sai Vinob on 2022-05-02 06:32:37 GMT from India)
Thank you so much Jesse, your Q&A article is godsend!
I have a data partition on my laptop and place some binaries there (go, rustc etc) to be able to share between different distros. I used to get same error and would scratch my head why it is not working even though I have put `exec` in my `/etc/fstab`. As a workaround I used to manually remount the data partition as `exec` on each boot.
After reading your article, I just noticed my entry was `exec,user` (sorted alphabetically) instead of `user,exec`. Correcting the order fixed my issue.
18 • Ubuntu and Snaps (by Albert on 2022-05-02 06:56:20 GMT from United States)
I completely agree with Jesse on his review. I can't understand why Canonical insists on using Gnome, which I consider to be something unworkable and the way they have gone with ubuntu and their beloved snaps is scarcely believable. I began my journey into linux with ubuntu and it is sad to me to see into what it has been turned into.
Snaps are something that most people seem to avoid and with good reason.
19 • Ubuntu and Snaps (by Romane on 2022-05-02 07:57:41 GMT from Australia)
Ok, so who is doing the auditing to ensure the Snaps are not a problem in security or otherwise?
I won't use Snaps for the simple reason that every one I have ever tried (true, not too many, at all) have turned out to fail miserably - not run, and other significant problems. I run one Flatpak because it is one of what I consider one of my essential application, but even for that I am solidly considering a replacement. But the replacement MUST live in the repositories of my distribution (Debian), not off in some "foreign" format or place such as AppImage, Snap or Flatpak or otherwise downloaded from the big wild Internet - I trust what the Debian developers work on, but not fully anything not in the distributions repositories, and that includes my one Flatpak.
Romane
20 • SELinux fix (by Bill Dietrich on 2022-05-02 08:50:23 GMT from Spain)
Re: ' You can change the line to say "disabled" instead of "enforcing" ':
I think it is better to change to "permissive". In "disabled", new files won't be labeled properly, and you can end up with a mess if you ever change back to "enforcing".
21 • Ubuntu 22.04 (by Well on 2022-05-02 09:06:00 GMT from Spain)
I am a KDE guy but recently I've bought an i5 1155G7 based HP laptop which comes with Windows 11 preinstalled. I have tried Debian 11.3 KDE , Kubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 22.04. I personally do not like GNOME but Ubuntu 22.04 looked good and I decided to install it to dual boot. This laptop is not for serious work so I've decided that I can use Win11 and Ubuntu 22.04 for getting familiarized with the environments. So far so good. Ubuntu feels more fluid and polished and gives me 2 to 3 hours more battery life. Also the RAM usage in Windows 11 is much much more.
22 • Ubuntu (by Hank on 2022-05-02 09:16:14 GMT from Austria)
Regarding ubuntu not just latest flawed release
I have nothing much to add to the last line of Jesse`s review
It's a platform I would recommend avoiding.
Ridiculous RAM usage, forcing huge slow loading and nontransparent snap packages in to the system.
Inconsistent desktop working.
Distributions cared for by a small dedicated team make ubuntus showcase look like what it is, a sad bloated mess.
23 • Snaps (by penguinx86 on 2022-05-02 09:29:58 GMT from United States)
I don't like Snaps and they shouldn't appear as a filesystem when I type the df command.
24 • Buntu bloat (by TMan on 2022-05-02 10:07:56 GMT from United States)
@22,"Ridiculous RAM usage" By all means use something else, especially on an older computer, but there's no need for exaggeration. On my laptop Ubuntu idles at about 830 MB. On my desktop MX 21 KDE idles at about 580. Definitely a difference, but my desktop has 16 GB and my laptop has 8 GB RAM. So neither system is taxing memory and both run nicely and cool as cucumbers. Windows 11 uses almost 3 GB at idle. Windows 10 32 Bit uses almost 2 GB. But they still run well with no problems.
25 • Snaps (by Midi on 2022-05-02 10:10:04 GMT from Germany)
One thing I do not like about snaps is the careless attitude towards resource consumption. I wonder what will happen, when you try to install hundreds of tools and applications as snaps, each one allocating a loop device (limits?), and each one loading its own set of libraries.
Just because contemporary machines normally indeed _do_ have the resources to cope with that, it does not feel correct to misuse them for just being "lazy" sorting out the dependencies.
Snaps IMHO can indeed be a useful means of enabling a few large, complicated or specialized applications, that could not be made available across different Linux distributions, because their maintainers simply do not have enough manpower. But in most cases, I do not see a proper justification for switching to snaps.
26 • Snaps, cont'd (by Midi on 2022-05-02 10:13:13 GMT from Germany)
And energy efficiency might be another point to add...
27 • Snap packages (by James on 2022-05-02 10:37:56 GMT from United States)
I have been a long time Ubuntu Mate user, but due to snap packages I am now a Mint Mate user.
28 • Ubuntu 22.04 LTS review... (by Marc Visscher on 2022-05-02 10:58:26 GMT from Netherlands)
Ubuntu used to be some sort of a "Linux standard" back in the day. But it appears that Ubuntu is becoming the most annoying and badly configured distro in the Linux ecosystem. Such a shame...
If you compare Ubuntu with Linux Mint, the difference is just painful for Ubuntu. While Linux Mint is superior on every aspect compared to Ubuntu, while both have the same base, that would at least open someone's eye over there at Canonical?
I switched to Linux Mint (the best there is in my opinion) and Manjaro a long time ago, while I was using Ubuntu before. Manjaro has sometimes some small, but easy to resolve quirks after an upgrade (rolling release), but Linux Mint, that's quality stuff. I NEVER dissappointed me, it NEVER gave me quirks or unexpected behaviour, and it just works! It's as solid as a rock!
If I would run a business, I would go for Linux Mint. At home it's my daily driver on every machine I have. I have only one Ubuntu 20.04 LTS install on one machine, but I have to be honest: I rarely fire it up. Ubuntu just doesn't impress me anymore. While still Linux, I'm starting to really disliking it. Not as much as Microsoft Windows, but... Ubuntu and me aren't friends anymore. What a pity.
29 • antisnap (by antisnap on 2022-05-02 11:14:10 GMT from Turkey)
everybody knows that snap is horribly slow and disk space consuming
30 • Ubuntu, Snaps and Flatpak (by RetiredIT on 2022-05-02 11:15:26 GMT from United States)
Both Snaps and Flatpak packages are way too large, take too long to install and spometimes don't even work properly after installation. I left Ubuntu in 2012 after the Unity DE came out. I left Mint in 2020 after Ver. 20 failed to install on my selected partition. Since then I've been using MX Linux and will continue using Debian based distros since it appears that Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distros are becoming more and more "dumbed down" for the sake of so-called convenience.
31 • Ubuntu etc (by Fred on 2022-05-02 11:17:46 GMT from Sweden)
It's saddening to read the review but I ain't surprised. I left Ubuntu about 10 years ago and wen't upstream to Debian Stable. Today I would choose Fedora if I had problems with new hardware on Debian Stable. Just recently I built a computer wirh new hardware for a relative and installed Fedora 36 Beta Xfce and largely without problem. Soon Fedora 36 will be released. The remaining bugs seem to be related mostly to Gnome.
There are many projects downstream Ubuntu that are very viable, for example Mint so no need to despair.
32 • Ubuntu, snap & flatpak (by Antisnap on 2022-05-02 12:08:40 GMT from Italy)
I would prefer to be able to choose whether or not to install both snaps and flatpaks. Imposing the use of snaps (or flatpaks) is a lack of respect for users.
33 • snaps (by jc on 2022-05-02 12:24:47 GMT from Germany)
snaps is just one more example of the systemd debacle.
34 • Ubuntu's new applications politic (by mim yucel on 2022-05-02 12:48:31 GMT from Turkey)
So far I understood, Ubuntu has disqualified the low (unadequate) applications, that behaviorur find I rightful, So we had got off unpreciously defectful working (unworking) additional applications and saved time by not experienting them..
35 • Ubuntu 22.04 (by kc1di on 2022-05-02 13:04:15 GMT from United States)
Thank You Jesse for another honest and forth right review.
I believe that Ubuntu has strayed from it's original purpose and is floundering because of it. JMHO.
36 • Ubuntu, Debian and their children (by Dingodancer on 2022-05-02 14:07:23 GMT from Australia)
I agree with many of the comments here - to me, Ubuntu has become like its parent Debian, useful to base a desktop distro off, not to be that desktop distro.
I've always preferred Ubuntu MATE when using Ubuntu, but there are just too many issues with the flagship GNOME one this time around, which I tried for a few days and saw get progressively slower and worse in every respect after a promising start. The MATE version was a bit better, but there are still better options out there for me.
I don't have the issue with snaps as others here do - Firefox started slowly, but not much worse on my hardware than it used to when a deb file and every start after that was okay, but I really don't like Flatpaks as I've always had trouble with non-browser ones getting permissions sorted (the worst being a music player which couldn't access the music folder no matter what I tried, and was thus useless).
Pure Ubuntu seems to be headed for the server/IoT markets as specialities, which would seem sensible given the company's plan to go public, where it makes its existing money from, and as someone said above, the lack of love for its modified GNOME desktop. Also, snaps make more sense on those types of systems and Ubuntu would probably be well advised to have its own format there instead of depending on the Red Hat-driven/pushed (if not controlled - yet) Flatpaks.
To me Mint is desktop Ubuntu done right, and like other desktop Ubuntus is a fine system, but really in recent years I have always gone back to MX, which is desktop Debian done right for my money. The latest version (XFCE 21) is trouble-free on this machine (it uses 930MB of RAM on start up but there is 16GB available and it is light on the CPU as well as seeming to use that RAM well as everything flies along).
If I've got nothing to complain about, then I'm not changing.
37 • Snap verses small (by joyn on 2022-05-02 14:08:47 GMT from United States)
It seems to me that 'snap', patch to solve problems and friends are on the wrong path!
What happened to small, easy to understand and edit programs that do one thing well.
In particular I should be able to edit a piece of the one of the kernel or driver sources and try them out without having to modify the whole world. Build root is the wrong approach!
Snap gives yet another huge pile of impentrable bullshit.
John
38 • ubuntu (by Scott on 2022-05-02 16:37:17 GMT from United States)
The latest version of Ubuntu is the worst software i ever used and been on computers since Altair pc in 1974. The switch to snaps allows buggy software in no oversight by producer. Thats a fatal mistake by any development team. I never had a issue on this pc before with any ubuntu variant. I switched in Mint linux and fine ,debian cinnamon fine and fedora so must be issue caused by not using pure gnome and by adding snaps over debs. Bad decision ubuntu undo it or lose me and others as users of your product.
39 • Ubuntu and Snap (by Mauricio on 2022-05-02 16:38:19 GMT from Guatemala)
Ubuntu stopped being what it was since it implemented "Snap". It forces me to choose what I don't want. What happened to the principles of free software? Ubuntu is less and less free software and we all know the cause: obviously proprietary software that has a seat on the board of directors and for which it is not convenient to have competition. In other words, it is not the first time that proprietary software has resorted to "opaque" strategies to eliminate its competition, it is worth remembering some sanctions imposed on them in other continents where these practices were sanctioned. As if all this were not enough, it is so poorly implemented that it is extremely slow. The advantage of free software is that you can use another distribution.
40 • Ubuntu et al. (by DTB on 2022-05-02 16:58:44 GMT from United Kingdom)
I've been using MX (XFCE) for around three years now as my reliable system. Before that Mint was my preferred system. Mint eased my return to Linux after the Ubuntu Unity Desktop turned me completely off Linux.
I have other installs available on dscrete SSDs:. Windows10, Solus, Manjaro. But MX is the best of these (for my hardware - Athlon II). Planning an upgrade from MX19.4 patito feo shortly to the latest MX version. I hope the experience is as good as 19 has been. I'll be keeping this SSD as a backup!
41 • ubuntu sw management (by jc on 2022-05-02 17:42:35 GMT from Romania)
Trying to remove any of the default software would result in an error message saying "No packages to remove."
This may be an artifact of deb, as deb made it very difficult to remove some of the system commands/utilities. Probably got tired of users removing dependencies and then complaining of a broken system. Perhaps a more informative error message is required.
42 • Re #13 Ubuntu desktop (by silent on 2022-05-02 18:09:16 GMT from Hungary)
Yes, Ubuntu Mate with the tweaks is is really good, Xubuntu is OK, the problem is the ever changing concepts and compatibility issues with GS. It must have been a hell of a patchwork to mix GS 41 and 42 or rather a mission impossible, so this Ubuntu-bashing is sort of unfair. I still don't get the point in using snap for the most popular and critical apps, as there is a huge performance and security toll and there are some privacy questions. The communication was a bit scarce and I don't think that this would attract crowds to their Snap store to spend money there.
43 • Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (by bittermann on 2022-05-02 18:23:09 GMT from United States)
Good, now I'm just waiting for Mint to update their LTS version and it will be my daily driver.
PS: I did try out Ubuntu 22.04 and came away less than impressed but maybe Mint spoiled my bias somewhat. I appreciate all their efforts though.
44 • snap firefox does not work (by pierre hanser on 2022-05-02 18:42:02 GMT from France)
for historical reasons my home directory is a link to a non standard mount and this is enough to prevent snap firefox from starting with a snap directory error. Made me quite angry
45 • ubuntu update (by Will on 2022-05-02 18:44:30 GMT from United States)
Ubuntu's changed from a leader to a base, much like Debian. Mint is better at integrating and presenting a better user experience. I miss the elegance that Ubuntu used to have.
46 • Ub desktop jobs (by grindstone on 2022-05-02 19:05:29 GMT from United States)
For desktop, looks like they're trying to hire one throat to choke, someone to brand it, and one dev to work on it. 3 gigs among many. List reads like a shop trying to be a lot of very different things in a world demanding a lot from it.
https://canonical.com/careers/engineering
47 • Ubuntu + Desktops (by Bert on 2022-05-02 19:35:33 GMT from Belgium)
I agree with somewhat everything that has been written here.
Personally I think that most of the issues are more GNOME related than Ubuntu related. I tried Ubuntu MATE, Lubuntu, Xubuntu and the GNOME DE, and GNOME was the only one that really annoyed me. Xubuntu and Ubuntu MATE just worked okay on my machines. In Lubuntu and Gnome I did loose my Wi-Fi several times.
I do not really use Ubuntu any more, except for the XFCE or the MATE desktops I sometimes like to play around with.
I do not want Snap packages, and as for all the browsers I use, I just download the tar-balls and unpack them. Works okay for me.
My Linux base systems are Debian Bookworm MATE and Mageia MATE.
I have no complaints there.
48 • Ubuntu 22.04 (by exploder on 2022-05-02 20:20:08 GMT from United States)
I personally like Ubuntu 22.04 but there are some rough edges that should have been resolved before final release.
The software center is broken as far as debs are concerned... I use Synaptic but what about new user's? Snaps themselves are fine so long as they continue to improve them.
The whole Wayland by default is fine but it was clearly not working right on release! It was fine until about a week before final release... Firefox was going nuts on some sites until they patched it.
As far as all the different menu types, that's always going to be a problem. I did like the fact that everything carries the same theming. The Community Artwork Team did a great job of making everything look nice.
Hopefully, shortly, the major bugs will get sorted out.
49 • Valve’s choice of distro says it all (by far2fish on 2022-05-02 21:09:20 GMT from Denmark)
Ubuntu used to be the go to distro for Steam gaming on Linux. Now the steamdeck runs Arch. They probably saw early they couldn’t trust Ubuntu to deliver a stable experience and fast patching. I am by no means an Arch fan, and I think it is sad that Canonical no longer seems to care about the desktop.
50 • Ubuntu bias (by cor on 2022-05-02 21:42:25 GMT from United States)
There is a definite bias against Ubuntu in DW. I tend to not trust DW reviews for any of the Ubuntus. I do my own testing and reviewing. Thanks for nothing new.
51 • Ubuntu bias (by Bert on 2022-05-02 23:19:38 GMT from Belgium)
@50
"I do my own testing and reviewing"
So did all of the above.
52 • Ubuntu and the desktop (by Goron on 2022-05-03 00:07:02 GMT from United States)
Sad to hear that so many people are having so much trouble with 22.04. I can understand that and started to realize what was going to happen after they dropped Unity and went back to Gnome. Many had to start fining for themselves on their desktop environments and just stick to the Ubuntu core base. For the most part that is what has happened. Look at the numbers. Still Gnome is what it is. The bugs will craw down from Gnome to Ubuntu and into the rest of the ecosystem. I haven't had a super distro since Mepis and, no, MX, or antix are not the same by a long shot. Now Zorin, Mint, Pop, Linux Lite among others maybe are what people need. I'm going to check out MX Kde and see if any of the Woodford magic is there. You never know.
53 • Make sure you Fsck (by Noor on 2022-05-03 00:40:03 GMT from United States)
Re Making-things-go Q&A - your situation sounds almost exactly like what I just recently figured out on my own system. I ran through all the steps outlined above (and more) and was in a place where I could not even force my drive to mount rwx (it would only mount read only). As it turned out my drive had failed to unmount properly at some point and it was being mounted ro until I ran Fsck on the file system. Once I ran Fsck then I could do whatever I wanted with the drive again.
Make sure you run a quick disk check before working with them and sometimes you can save yourself a lot of time and trouble.
54 • Snaps (by Turtle (Snapping) on 2022-05-03 01:38:17 GMT from United States)
Regarding snaps, I can only say that if you run a Plex server the snap package for it is tops! Always up to date.
55 • Bias... (by Friar Tux on 2022-05-03 02:37:33 GMT from Canada)
@50 (cor) I have been reading DW for a long, long time, and have always found the reviews to be spot on. And quite honest. I have also found that, occasionally, the reviewer's findings are totally the opposite of my own. I don't take that as bias, I take that as the difference in hardware and/or testing machine specs. I'm sure that if the reviewers wanted to be bias against Ubuntu the reviews would be quite different, IF we would get any Ubuntu reviews at all. (I see a great April First prank here.) Years ago, when I first toyed with Linux, Ubuntu was the Holy Grail of the Linux distro. Unfortunately, over the years, it has fallen from its pedestal. But, it appears to work well for you. Consider yourself fortunate. It has ceased to work well for a lot of the rest of us.
56 • former ubuntu user (by dave on 2022-05-03 03:01:40 GMT from United States)
I used Ubuntu from 2004-2010 and will likely never touch it again. I had switched a normie friend to Ubuntu in 2010.. he seemed to like it. But when he 'upgraded' to 11.04, he was totally turned off. Having experienced Unity firsthand, I had tried to warn him to only do updates and not click upgrade.. but the terminology was apparently too blurred.
I managed to get him on Mint for a while, but the damage was done. He switched back to Windows, partly because of his job at the time, but partly because his trust in Linux was negatively impacted by the abrupt, jarring interface change. As far as I know, he never tried Linux again. I felt betrayed by Canonical. They didn't just damage their own reputation, but Linux's reputation and the reputation of all the 'computer people' who had 'converted' friends and families to Ubuntu, prior to the big Unity rugpull of 2011. Regular people who aren't in to Linux equated Ubuntu to Linux. When most of them find out about distributions, they are instantly overwhelmed and annoyed. I still remember my friend's exasperated quote when he saw Distrowatch: "Man, I don't have all day to try all these different things."
Even though Ubuntu is probably still a decent foundation upon which to build an OS, Canonical is irredeemably untrustworthy in my eyes. Watching them pull all these shenanigans from a distance might not directly affect me, but it still annoys me. (unity, amazon spyware integration, systemd, snaps, gnome, etc)
I choose to believe that there are alternative timelines in which derivative distros were promoted to mainline Ubuntu (that Xubuntu became Ubuntu and Canonical put their weight behind Xfce development, or Mate, or Cinnamon, etc) and that all of the Unity / Gnome Shell fiasco never happened. Unfortunately, we live in the perpetual nightmare timeline.
57 • "permission denied" error (by Flyingalone on 2022-05-03 04:56:13 GMT from Australia)
When I started on Linux it was on a Unity Ubuntu, had few too many problems moved onto KDE, worked with me not against, distrohopping is something most Linux user do and enjoy, I certainly did and after using KDE went on other distos KDE went back to try new versions Mate & Xfce and still would like to try again and enjoyed them they look good to use , until I had that no access to external harddrives problem again and again and again because of "permission denied" errors within a day I tried to put up with the problems help was not much help back then didn't understand a lot of the advice, so I'd go back yeah kde, cos I new how to work with it , no permission errors never , and it works for me..will I try Xfce etc again _ Don't know !
Big Thanks to Jesse, for explaining that issue, now I know this wasn't completely my doing something wrong in my early days with Linux.
Thank you , Jesse .
58 • Ubuntu 22.04 (by Simon on 2022-05-03 06:05:13 GMT from New Zealand)
Like Jesse (the reviewer), I tried the Jammy release and decided against it due to bugs, UI inconsistencies, and...well, GNOME, basically. I wouldn't be quite that harsh on Ubuntu for this though, and wouldn't recommend that people avoid it simply because its initial release is buggy (as so many initial releases are...in fact it's my understanding that most serious deployments wait a while rather than pouncing on the initial release) and aesthetically uninspired.
Also, it understates Ubuntu's value to contrast the "smaller" projects whose praises were being sung in that review (Mint and so on) with Ubuntu as if they were completely separate projects with separate budgets. Ubuntu-based distros receive every penny of those millions poured into Ubuntu, in the sense that they inherit all the benefits by inheriting the software...and then after inheriting all the work that Ubuntu has put into the underlying software, they tweak the UI and so on. To argue that they do a much better job with much less funding is to invite us to overlook the fact that they have the benefit of all that funding *and* their own resources on top of it.
Still, I agree with Jesse that it's a disappointing release, and I think that's largely thanks to GNOME. GNOME has become a deeply disappointing project: so much about it stinks of contempt for users (an arrogant top-down "they don't need freedom because they're already being given the best way by almighty us" developer attitude) that I haven't been able to bear using it (since about v3), though I've tried many times. I wind up installing so many third-party extensions and hacking my way around so many annoyances that it just feels pointless: if 90% of your installation efforts involve fixing a desktop that's been deliberately designed to be hard to fix, it's simply better to avoid that desktop.
Unfortunately corporate IT managers love GNOME's don't-let-users-change-stuff policies because they make their (identical, locked down) user environments so much easier to administer. So, even though Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and nearly every Ubuntu flavour or popular Ubuntu derivative distro all feel so much nicer to use than nasty GNOME-based Ubuntu, I suspect GNOME is here to stay. Plus it will likely continue to get worse and worse, threading its hideous monolithic tentacles into everything until you're not allowed to change your document fonts from the GNOME defaults, and even if you were allowed to change your fonts, you'd need systemd and 650GB of additional running services to do so.
59 • Gnome ... (by Mr Mint on 2022-05-03 06:18:53 GMT from New Zealand)
A lot of the Ubuntu and general UI woes do trace back to Gnome, but more so to a certain mindset.
Too late for "don't get me started on Gnome devs." ;)
In the nascent days of Linux things were Ok by the standards of that time. But as Linux spawned many distros and new ideas, the folks at Gnome developed total deafness as an art form. It seems the same deaf-to-users is active at Ubuntu and a few other circles in the Linux world.
The result, with Gnome, is all the desktops that were created: MATE, Cinnamon. I would venture to say that The Gnome guys have alienated so many users that even the keyboard centric WMs like OpenBox or i3 have grown and benefited from the stumbling and bungling with Gnome 3 and now 4 (or is it now called '40' for some reason?).
One bit of recent realization - everyone is trying to copy Apple. Look at Win 8 and onward, look at Gnome, Deepin, etc - all built around a similar usage flow as Apple. Find your app in a few screens of icons,... some implementations are better, most a worse.
60 • @ 50 • Ubuntu bias (by James on 2022-05-03 10:15:15 GMT from United States)
I personally think if their is a bias against Ubuntu it is well deserved by their own actions. From following Windows 8 to push convergence down users throats with the Unity desktop to snaps almost nobody wants. No one would be complaining about snaps if they still offered the .deb files and let users make their own choice.
61 • Selinux (by penguinx86 on 2022-05-03 11:07:30 GMT from United States)
I tried a trial version of Red Hat. When logged in as root, I could not copy and past text. I tried everything but couldn't get it to work. This was a real pain to set up config files on a new system.
But as s a normal user, I could copy and paste text, no problem. Why can a normal user do something root can't do? I figured this must be a bug, so I submitted a bug report. It turns out that Selinux was the culprit. The default for Selinux was 'enforcing', which disables just about everything useful, like cut and paste as root. After changing Selinux to 'disabled', I could copy and paste text as root no problem. It took me several days to figure out this 'bug' was actually caused by Selinux 'features'. I learned a lot about Selinux during this exercise. I also learned that Selinux is a real pain and I never want to be sysadmin on a system that's locked down so tightly by Selinux. When my Red Hat trial expired, I decided to never use Red Hat again.
62 • Ubuntu bias (by qwerty99 on 2022-05-03 11:50:00 GMT from United Kingdom)
People have rightly pointed out that Canonical have shifted emphasis onto servers and embedded devices, that's where the growth is and follow the money, as they day. Those looking for a unique experience have to put up with the short-term basis of a lot of these smaller distro's, developers don't necessarily put in the long term commitment that can come from a solid business setup. The reviews on here are pretty superficial as they seem to be the result of a few days trial with a couple of samples from the particular distro under review. This means that the particular needs of those users with limited vision or physical ability are overlooked (just one example of the limits of these reviews). That said, I think lots of the discussion here can be overlooked, there are more useful pointers elsewhere - even on Distrowatch the reader ratings/discussion is a better source of varied user experience. Those responding on here would help their cause by spell checking their replies, and by avoiding all those "me too" posts - we don't care!
63 • Put the fun back in computing (by penguinx86 on 2022-05-03 14:17:39 GMT from United States)
Ubuntu just isn't fun anymore. Ubuntu used to be fun before Gnome 3, Unity, Systemd, Wayland and Snaps. Maybe that's why Ubuntu doesn't make it in the Distrowatch top 5 page hit rankings anymore.
64 • Ubuntu bias and bias to other distros (by far2fish on 2022-05-03 14:26:47 GMT from Denmark)
I think one of the reasons Ubuntu are/were popular on the server is because it was popular on the desktop and visa versa.
Fedora is popular on the desktop by people who use RHEL, CentOS, CentOS Stream or other downstream distros and visa versa.
Hense I suspect that Canonical will eventually loose business on Ubuntu Server if their poorer desktop edition bring the customer's IT people to start using other desktop distros and realise that there is more to Linux servers than Ubuntu.
65 • Guh..gnome (by Tad Strange on 2022-05-03 14:51:13 GMT from Canada)
I wonder if the review would have been different if something other than the dumpster fire desktop version had been tested.
I get it, though - the official release is where the company is supposed to be putting their best foot forward - you're not supposed to find more polish in a community spin.
I've not found anything unsatisfactory in Kubuntu, after running it for a few years. I only went with it because the kernel shipping in my preferred OS did not support the hard drive controller on my new laptop. Now I really don't feel like wiping and starting over.
Snaps may eventually become a deal breaker, though. I see nothing wrong with the concept, as opposed to having your entire ecosystem versioned to some upstream master: it ought to provide greater flexibility. It's the implementation that's kind of poor..
I'd like nothing more than to be able to download whatever software and whatever version I want and have an excellent chance of it running on whichever OS version and patch level I have.
66 • Ubuntu and snaps (by Rosika on 2022-05-03 16:42:55 GMT from Germany)
I don´t like snaps because of one simple reason: they don´t work with firejail (sandbox).
I like firejail a lot as you can do incredible things with it, and its profiles for various applications are highly configurable.
I wouldn´t trade firejail´s superb functionality for the "security" snaps are supposed to provide.
Greetings from Rosika
67 • Pot/Kettle (by Otis on 2022-05-03 17:06:35 GMT from United States)
@62 "... that's where the growth is and follow the money, as they day."
"Those responding on here would help their cause by spell checking their replies."
68 • What happened to the ideals? (by mchlbk on 2022-05-03 17:21:11 GMT from Denmark)
Ubuntu 22.04 makes me long for the days of Damn Small Linux. A time when linux was about simplicity, transparency and efficient use of system resources. Alas, those ideals are completely forgotten today.
69 • Snapbuntu (by Cheker on 2022-05-03 18:44:53 GMT from Portugal)
Anything I could've said on Snap and the pathetic state of desktop, upstream Ubuntu has already been said. I feel like the tone was the same 2 years ago, though perhaps not as bad.
Not all is bad news though. I found the piece about Active Directory interesting.
70 • What happened to the ideals? (by anticapitalista on 2022-05-03 20:13:06 GMT from Greece)
@68 - There are plenty of distros that keep to (your) ideals of simplicity, transparency and efficient use of system resources. You need to try them.
71 • @62 (by Andy Prough on 2022-05-04 02:33:27 GMT from United States)
>"That said, I think lots of the discussion here can be overlooked, there are more useful pointers elsewhere - even on Distrowatch the reader ratings/discussion is a better source of varied user experience."
The user reviews on DW for Ubuntu are only a 7.6 - 37 other distros have better user reviews. And this week's user poll shows that only 3% of readers are interested in using Ubuntu's key technology of Snaps.
I think this review is reflective of a lot of people's experiences with Ubuntu.
72 • moving away from Ubuntu (by Daily Ubuntu user on 2022-05-04 02:49:34 GMT from United States)
" It's a platform I would recommend avoiding."
I recently tried 22.04, and the gui kept crashing and turning black. Something about my GPU crashing.
22.04 is ugly and buggy, and slow to load. This was the release that has me switching away to another distro.
Also, what's up with a DVD-based OS that doesn't include a DVD burning program?
73 • Ubuntu (by vmclark on 2022-05-04 04:37:32 GMT from United States)
"I think this review is reflective of a lot of people's experiences with Ubuntu."
Only here at Distrowatch.
I'm using Ubuntu 22.04 and have none of the problems or issues the reviewer posted.
What I think is most Ubuntu users just don't bother with DW comments. I normally don't reply. In fact, for years I never ventured into the comment section. Their just opinions, nothing more or less.
74 • Enjoying Ubuntu, @21, @73 (by Dr.Hu on 2022-05-04 10:07:57 GMT from Philippines)
In agreement here. Jammy is running smoothly, no hiccups. I\m even trying out the Unity remix. Looks good and runs well so far.
75 • Ubuntu (by fox on 2022-05-04 12:00:17 GMT from Canada)
I am also a regular DistroWatch reader who normally doesn't comment on reviews. But like @73 and @74, I have found 22.04 to work pretty well. In my case, this is on two iMacs; one updated from 21.10 and the other from 20.04. The only problem I have had so far is that the wifi on the 2011 iMac is flaky since the upgrade and from some digging, I found out that this is a bug in the 5.15 kernel that is due to be rectified with the next revision. To get me by, I downloaded the 5.13 kernel (default for Ubuntu 21.10) from Ubuntu Mainline Kernels, and now the wifi works properly.
76 • Command Line Ineptitude (by Trihexagonal on 2022-05-04 13:03:39 GMT from United States)
@61 "When logged in as root, I could not copy and past text. I tried everything but couldn't get it to work. This was a real pain to set up config files on a new system."
Selinux was trying to prevent you from doing what most people consider bad practice. Logging in as root.
The correct procedure would be to log into a user account, then su to root to work as root, then log out of that account when done working as root..
77 • Did you report all the issues to Ubuntu? (by Don Rhummy on 2022-05-04 13:12:44 GMT from United States)
Did you report all the issues you mention in this article to Ubuntu's issues tracker? I see complaints about open source software frequently where the person facing it complains but never reports it. If you don't, how can they fix it?
78 • Ubuntu/DW Reviews (by Otis on 2022-05-04 13:28:50 GMT from United States)
More than once I've read reviews here and tried the reviewed distro with vastly differing results. I think that often speaks to hardware differences, along with differences in what we actually bring out in the distro. By that I mean what we look for instinctively and then what we do with it when/if we find it. That's the weakness in any review of just about anything: It's one person showcasing their attitudes going in and what they, with their eyes and ears detect.
Also, hyperbole is often the rule of the day if we get gong on a downloaded and installed distro and hit a glitch; that thing we hit is going to dominate our review or at least our impression of the dev's work.
That said, Ubuntu has stunk from my first try.. that and Fedora and a few others that I now just stay away from; caveat being I do revel in many distros that are based on both Ubuntu and Fedora, or at least strongly influenced by them. So... here's to spin-offs, siblings, and forks.
79 • Ubuntu Gnome (by Bert on 2022-05-04 14:02:19 GMT from Belgium)
True, I so not like GNOME3.
GNOME3 is a desktop that doesn't seems to bother about user experience.
But that's okay. There are other desktops.
With Ubuntu Mate as beta till now, I had no problems at all in Ubuntu, nor do I have any problems with the Xubuntu flavour. So what makes the Ubuntu flagship sink? I do not know. But in the other do versions you can easily manipulate the behaviour of the system.
The only problem I experienced in Ubuntu Gnome and Lubuntu, was that I lost my Wi-Fi several times.
Clearly, this release came definitely to soon. Ubuntu GNOME is/was not ready to be released.But indeed, what do I care. I don't use GNOME. I just tested it for a while, and it filed as it did from the start. GNOME2 was something everyone could work with. GNOME3 is just for the few.
As so many others, I turned to MATE, just from his (almost) earliest release.
Another problem I experience is GRUB2 and Grub-Costumizer.
GRUB (now legacy) was once so easy customizable. GRUB2 is a pain in the ass when having more than 2 distro's installed.
But that's another topic for some ware else and hopefully in the very near future.
80 • To many sheep (by Garon on 2022-05-04 15:42:00 GMT from United States)
A lot of nonsense going on in the comments section. All of these so called Linux users seem to want to follow whatever is being said and fondled over and whatever seems to be more popular. Distrowatch reviews are not widely accepted as the best reviews on a distro. It's more of a wham bam thank you mam and not an honest test of a distro, unless all the sheep agree lol. It didn't use to be that way long ago. Reading the comments section now is like trying to watch The View. The caterwauling just makes no sense. Think for yourself and for a reason. This is just my opinion and as such is not up for debate.
81 • Canonical (by Justin on 2022-05-04 17:13:25 GMT from United States)
Re: Problems being Ubuntu vs. Gnome, it doesn't matter. Ubuntu has the reputation of making things easier, that is what Ubuntu started out to be, and they should have taken care of things. Does anyone say "it's not Mint, it's Ubuntu"? No. That's because Mint partly exists to solve the problems of Ubuntu. Ubuntu not producing a polished desktop is a failure of their mission, and the review rightly points that out.
Re: Canonical, they are moving away from the desktop. I was surprised to find at work that we pay Canonical a lot of money to maintain packages for us for applications that aren't part of the normal repositories. Redhat does the same thing, but they are pickier about what they pick up (they don't do special orders; it's a bit more all or nothing when they support something). So, you either can make money having enterprises pay you for maintainer/packaging duties, or you can give it away for free on your desktop. Fedora anyone? Redhat uses a similar strategy. Ever wonder why there are certifications and such a large support business? It's because they're stuff sucks in isolation, is overly complicated, but they are more than happy to take your money to run the system for you. At some level such a business needs to exist anyway (people want to get stuff done, not manage internals), but the incentive is to offer value of "do it for you," and what better way to do that than to have a lot you need them to do.
Re: a "Linux" package format, the developers want a universal one, too, just like users. If you're Canoical, you want the format to be Snap. If you're Redhat, you want it to be Flatpaks. It's Mir/Wayland, upstart/systemd, etc. Different people have different ideas of what to do, so they try them out. The bigger money holder wins (more resources, more ways to ingrain their ways into the system). Canonical is trying to get there, but to do it, they have to follow the blueprints that work. It's another version of Intel/AMD where AMD was clearly behind for a long time but is finally breaking through.
82 • @80 (by Andy Prough on 2022-05-04 17:44:29 GMT from United States)
>"Distrowatch reviews are not widely accepted as the best reviews on a distro."
That's a falsehood. Jesse is widely known as one of the very few reviewers online that routinely spends up to a week working with the distro he's reviewing as his daily driver. He's also one of the very few reviewers that spends the time fixing problems that he finds. And when DW publishes reviews from other reviewers, they sometimes spend several weeks using and tweaking the distro. Jesse and the entire DW crew definitely deserve our wholehearted support (including financial support) for the efforts they've put into this on a weekly basis for many long years. Many of us use DW's weekly reviews as a jumping off point for our distro-hopping adventures, and for that purpose they are basically the gold standard in online distro reviews. I personally know of several distro maintainer groups that follow Jesse's reviews and the DW reader feedback closely.
83 • distrotest.com (by Jay on 2022-05-04 20:15:52 GMT from United States)
I went to try Ubuntu 22.04 and saw that distrotest.net is trying to sell its domains. Too bad, I really liked that site.
84 • Distros lacking. (by qwerty99 on 2022-05-05 11:58:39 GMT from United Kingdom)
@68 - There are plenty of distros that keep to (your) ideals of simplicity, transparency and efficient use of system resources. You need to try them. If only! Please list a few!
I see that Linuxmint is popular, as a well polished distro. But why is it so dog-on slow to install? Part of the issue seems to be the time taken to work through the endless locale variants for the libreoffice installer - why is this in the installation set and not left to users to install later from the repos, preferably with some attention given to trimming down the language options on offer?
Lunduke doesn't seem to get round to listing installing issues in the lunux-sucks litany, maybe he should.
85 • Re: too many sheep (by Matt on 2022-05-05 19:42:41 GMT from United States)
The sheep that comment here are real experienced Linux users. Maybe you think the complaints are "caterwauling" and the reviews are superficial, but the comments are real. The various rationales given for opinions are from an important audience of actual experienced users. This week, the comments reveal that Ubuntu has problems when it comes to the desktop/workstation. It is what it is. If Ubuntu cares, they should not dismiss them. Personally, I don't have a horse in the race and I'm not going to campaign or complain about anything. Trying to change someone else's mind is virtually always futile.
Number of Comments: 85
Display mode: DWW Only • Comments Only • Both DWW and Comments
| | |
| 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.
|
| Archives |
| • Issue 1119 (2025-04-28): Ubuntu MATE 25.04, what is missing from Linux, CachyOS ships OCCT, Debian enters soft freeze, Fedora discusses removing X11 session from GNOME, Murena plans business services, NetBSD on a Wii |
| • Issue 1118 (2025-04-21): Fedora 42, strange characters in Vim, Nitrux introduces new package tools, Fedora extends reproducibility efforts, PINE64 updates multiple devices running Debian |
| • Issue 1117 (2025-04-14): Shebang 25.0, EndeavourOS 2025.03.19, running applications from other distros on the desktop, Debian gets APT upgrade, Mint introduces OEM options for LMDE, postmarketOS packages GNOME 48 and COSMIC, Redox testing USB support |
| • Issue 1116 (2025-04-07): The Sense HAT, Android and mobile operating systems, FreeBSD improves on laptops, openSUSE publishes many new updates, Fedora appoints new Project Leader, UBports testing VoLTE |
| • Issue 1115 (2025-03-31): GrapheneOS 2025, the rise of portable package formats, MidnightBSD and openSUSE experiment with new package management features, Plank dock reborn, key infrastructure projects lose funding, postmarketOS to focus on reliability |
| • Issue 1114 (2025-03-24): Bazzite 41, checking which processes are writing to disk, Rocky unveils new Hardened branch, GNOME 48 released, generating images for the Raspberry Pi |
| • Issue 1113 (2025-03-17): MocaccinoOS 1.8.1, how to contribute to open source, Murena extends on-line installer, Garuda tests COSMIC edition, Ubuntu to replace coreutils with Rust alternatives, Chimera Linux drops RISC-V builds |
| • Issue 1112 (2025-03-10): Solus 4.7, distros which work with Secure Boot, UBports publishes bug fix, postmarketOS considers a new name, Debian running on Android |
| • Issue 1111 (2025-03-03): Orbitiny 0.01, the effect of Ubuntu Core Desktop, Gentoo offers disk images, elementary OS invites feature ideas, FreeBSD starts PinePhone Pro port, Mint warns of upcoming Firefox issue |
| • Issue 1110 (2025-02-24): iodeOS 6.0, learning to program, Arch retiring old repositories, openSUSE makes progress on reproducible builds, Fedora is getting more serious about open hardware, Tails changes its install instructions to offer better privacy, Murena's de-Googled tablet goes on sale |
| • Issue 1109 (2025-02-17): Rhino Linux 2025.1, MX Linux 23.5 with Xfce 4.20, replacing X.Org tools with Wayland tools, GhostBSD moving its base to FreeBSD -RELEASE, Redox stabilizes its ABI, UBports testing 24.04, Asahi changing its leadership, OBS in dispute with Fedora |
| • Issue 1108 (2025-02-10): Serpent OS 0.24.6, Aurora, sharing swap between distros, Peppermint tries Void base, GTK removinglegacy technologies, Red Hat plans more AI tools for Fedora, TrueNAS merges its editions |
| • Issue 1107 (2025-02-03): siduction 2024.1.0, timing tasks, Lomiri ported to postmarketOS, Alpine joins Open Collective, a new desktop for Linux called Orbitiny |
| • Issue 1106 (2025-01-27): Adelie Linux 1.0 Beta 6, Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha 5, detecting whether a process is inside a virtual machine, drawing graphics to NetBSD terminal, Nix ported to FreeBSD, GhostBSD hosting desktop conference |
| • Issue 1105 (2025-01-20): CentOS 10 Stream, old Flatpak bundles in software centres, Haiku ports Iceweasel, Oracle shows off debugging tools, rsync vulnerability patched |
| • Issue 1104 (2025-01-13): DAT Linux 2.0, Silly things to do with a minimal computer, Budgie prepares Wayland only releases, SteamOS coming to third-party devices, Murena upgrades its base |
| • Issue 1103 (2025-01-06): elementary OS 8.0, filtering ads with Pi-hole, Debian testing its installer, Pop!_OS faces delays, Ubuntu Studio upgrades not working, Absolute discontinued |
| • Issue 1102 (2024-12-23): Best distros of 2024, changing a process name, Fedora to expand Btrfs support and releases Asahi Remix 41, openSUSE patches out security sandbox and donations from Bottles while ending support for Leap 15.5 |
| • Issue 1101 (2024-12-16): GhostBSD 24.10.1, sending attachments from the command line, openSUSE shows off GPU assignment tool, UBports publishes security update, Murena launches its first tablet, Xfce 4.20 released |
| • Issue 1100 (2024-12-09): Oreon 9.3, differences in speed, IPFire's new appliance, Fedora Asahi Remix gets new video drivers, openSUSE Leap Micro updated, Redox OS running Redox OS |
| • Issue 1099 (2024-12-02): AnduinOS 1.0.1, measuring RAM usage, SUSE continues rebranding efforts, UBports prepares for next major version, Murena offering non-NFC phone |
| • Issue 1098 (2024-11-25): Linux Lite 7.2, backing up specific folders, Murena and Fairphone partner in fair trade deal, Arch installer gets new text interface, Ubuntu security tool patched |
| • Issue 1097 (2024-11-18): Chimera Linux vs Chimera OS, choosing between AlmaLinux and Debian, Fedora elevates KDE spin to an edition, Fedora previews new installer, KDE testing its own distro, Qubes-style isolation coming to FreeBSD |
| • Issue 1096 (2024-11-11): Bazzite 40, Playtron OS Alpha 1, Tucana Linux 3.1, detecting Screen sessions, Redox imports COSMIC software centre, FreeBSD booting on the PinePhone Pro, LXQt supports Wayland window managers |
| • Issue 1095 (2024-11-04): Fedora 41 Kinoite, transferring applications between computers, openSUSE Tumbleweed receives multiple upgrades, Ubuntu testing compiler optimizations, Mint partners with Framework |
| • Issue 1094 (2024-10-28): DebLight OS 1, backing up crontab, AlmaLinux introduces Litten branch, openSUSE unveils refreshed look, Ubuntu turns 20
| | • Issue 1093 (2024-10-21): Kubuntu 24.10, atomic vs immutable distributions, Debian upgrading Perl packages, UBports adding VoLTE support, Android to gain native GNU/Linux application support |
| • Issue 1092 (2024-10-14): FunOS 24.04.1, a home directory inside a file, work starts of openSUSE Leap 16.0, improvements in Haiku, KDE neon upgrades its base |
| • Issue 1091 (2024-10-07): Redox OS 0.9.0, Unified package management vs universal package formats, Redox begins RISC-V port, Mint polishes interface, Qubes certifies new laptop |
| • Issue 1090 (2024-09-30): Rhino Linux 2024.2, commercial distros with alternative desktops, Valve seeks to improve Wayland performance, HardenedBSD parterns with Protectli, Tails merges with Tor Project, Quantum Leap partners with the FreeBSD Foundation |
| • Issue 1089 (2024-09-23): Expirion 6.0, openKylin 2.0, managing configuration files, the future of Linux development, fixing bugs in Haiku, Slackware packages dracut |
| • Issue 1088 (2024-09-16): PorteuX 1.6, migrating from Windows 10 to which Linux distro, making NetBSD immutable, AlmaLinux offers hardware certification, Mint updates old APT tools |
| • Issue 1087 (2024-09-09): COSMIC desktop, running cron jobs at variable times, UBports highlights new apps, HardenedBSD offers work around for FreeBSD change, Debian considers how to cull old packages, systemd ported to musl |
| • Issue 1086 (2024-09-02): Vanilla OS 2, command line tips for simple tasks, FreeBSD receives investment from STF, openSUSE Tumbleweed update can break network connections, Debian refreshes media |
| • Issue 1085 (2024-08-26): Nobara 40, OpenMandriva 24.07 "ROME", distros which include source code, FreeBSD publishes quarterly report, Microsoft updates breaks Linux in dual-boot environments |
| • Issue 1084 (2024-08-19): Liya 2.0, dual boot with encryption, Haiku introduces performance improvements, Gentoo dropping IA-64, Redcore merges major upgrade |
| • Issue 1083 (2024-08-12): TrueNAS 24.04.2 "SCALE", Linux distros for smartphones, Redox OS introduces web server, PipeWire exposes battery drain on Linux, Canonical updates kernel version policy |
| • Issue 1082 (2024-08-05): Linux Mint 22, taking snapshots of UFS on FreeBSD, openSUSE updates Tumbleweed and Aeon, Debian creates Tiny QA Tasks, Manjaro testing immutable images |
| • Issue 1081 (2024-07-29): SysLinuxOS 12.4, OpenBSD gain hardware acceleration, Slackware changes kernel naming, Mint publishes upgrade instructions |
| • Issue 1080 (2024-07-22): Running GNU/Linux on Android with Andronix, protecting network services, Solus dropping AppArmor and Snap, openSUSE Aeon Desktop gaining full disk encryption, SUSE asks openSUSE to change its branding |
| • Issue 1079 (2024-07-15): Ubuntu Core 24, hiding files on Linux, Fedora dropping X11 packages on Workstation, Red Hat phasing out GRUB, new OpenSSH vulnerability, FreeBSD speeds up release cycle, UBports testing new first-run wizard |
| • Issue 1078 (2024-07-08): Changing init software, server machines running desktop environments, OpenSSH vulnerability patched, Peppermint launches new edition, HardenedBSD updates ports |
| • Issue 1077 (2024-07-01): The Unity and Lomiri interfaces, different distros for different tasks, Ubuntu plans to run Wayland on NVIDIA cards, openSUSE updates Leap Micro, Debian releases refreshed media, UBports gaining contact synchronisation, FreeDOS celebrates its 30th anniversary |
| • Issue 1076 (2024-06-24): openSUSE 15.6, what makes Linux unique, SUSE Liberty Linux to support CentOS Linux 7, SLE receives 19 years of support, openSUSE testing Leap Micro edition |
| • Issue 1075 (2024-06-17): Redox OS, X11 and Wayland on the BSDs, AlmaLinux releases Pi build, Canonical announces RISC-V laptop with Ubuntu, key changes in systemd |
| • Issue 1074 (2024-06-10): Endless OS 6.0.0, distros with init diversity, Mint to filter unverified Flatpaks, Debian adds systemd-boot options, Redox adopts COSMIC desktop, OpenSSH gains new security features |
| • Issue 1073 (2024-06-03): LXQt 2.0.0, an overview of Linux desktop environments, Canonical partners with Milk-V, openSUSE introduces new features in Aeon Desktop, Fedora mirrors see rise in traffic, Wayland adds OpenBSD support |
| • Issue 1072 (2024-05-27): Manjaro 24.0, comparing init software, OpenBSD ports Plasma 6, Arch community debates mirror requirements, ThinOS to upgrade its FreeBSD core |
| • Issue 1071 (2024-05-20): Archcraft 2024.04.06, common command line mistakes, ReactOS imports WINE improvements, Haiku makes adjusting themes easier, NetBSD takes a stand against code generated by chatbots |
| • Issue 1070 (2024-05-13): Damn Small Linux 2024, hiding kernel messages during boot, Red Hat offers AI edition, new web browser for UBports, Fedora Asahi Remix 40 released, Qubes extends support for version 4.1 |
| • Issue 1069 (2024-05-06): Ubuntu 24.04, installing packages in alternative locations, systemd creates sudo alternative, Mint encourages XApps collaboration, FreeBSD publishes quarterly update |
| • Issue 1068 (2024-04-29): Fedora 40, transforming one distro into another, Debian elects new Project Leader, Red Hat extends support cycle, Emmabuntus adds accessibility features, Canonical's new security features |
| • Full list of all issues |
| 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.
|
| Random Distribution | 
APODIO
APODIO is a Linux live and installation DVD with a large collection of open source audio and video software, as well as graphical utilities for making system administration as simple and intuitive as possible. It is based on Ubuntu.
Status: Dormant
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
|
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
