Ubuntu 16.04 proves even an LTS release can live at Linux’s bleeding edge | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu 16.04 proves even an LTS release can live at Linux’s bleeding edge

arstechnica.com

156 pointsbpierre157 comments

> now with 100% less "spyware"

> Canonical dug itself an even deeper hole when it went after [...] FixUbuntu.com for trademark violations.

1. I find it both positive and daunting that the first section of this press release is "They're not being assholes this time". Linux systems should be the guardians of nonspying/noncloud systems.

2. It's excellent they have a theme on stability. I'm not sure how many customers it costs them every year. I personally when to Mac after my second Ubuntu upgrade (1st: the mouse, 2nd: the network).

3. I'd pay $200/yr for a free OS on a developer machine which just works, where I don't even know whether I'm running Gnome, Unity or KDE. I also want UX improvements (the Amazon search) to be well-UX tested (or rejected) before publication. Something like elementary.io, without the installation errors (yeah I've tried), and with on-the-phone magicians if there's a problem. Something like Mac OS X, but paid. I hope they'll do it one day, I wonder whether there's enough customers for that.

If you are careful with your hardware selection, #3 is totally doable. For example my work PC (Xeon E5-1650, nVidia Quadro K2000) has had absolutely no compatibility or stability issues. I had the exact opposite experience trying to install Linux on my macbook pro. I have heard good things about the Dell XPS (the one that comes in a 'developer' edition).

You also might try virtualization. With paravirtualized drivers, and VT-x support in the CPU, you run at near native speeds, and it is all very stable.

Word of warning, The XPS DE is definitely _not_ perfect. When I got my XPS 13 DE last year they had a multitude of issues I could go on and on about, but the bottom line is that the laptop was completely unusable out of the box.

Part of the issue is that the Sputnik team has to take the XPS 13 hardware as is (as it was designed for Windows) and try to support it. They are releasing the drivers upstream (at least they were when I last checked) so that's awesome! But it meant I had crazy stability issues until the 3.19 kernel release.

The newer models of the XPS 13 DE seem to have better hardware for linux (Intel vs. Broadcom wireless for example) so it may be better, but I would still encourage anyone looking at the Sputnik projects to consider the Precision M3800 instead (15" workstation version of the XPS 13). There are also some other Dell workstations available now that might have better hardware for Linux.

Edit: Also I have owned a couple of System76 laptops and have had 0 issues with them out of the box. But their drivers are proprietary (AFAIK) and their chassis are Clevo...so definitely not in the same ballpark as the XPS when it comes to build quality.

For 3., I've been interested in the same. How would it work though? Would it include non-free components, or be open source? If it's open source, why would the majority of people pay?

I say this as someone who would definitely pay. I'd love to see something like an XPS developer edition, but with a (relatively) coherent graphics paradigm like OS X.

> If it's open source, why would the majority of people pay?

We could have paid access to the repositories. Yes anyone can redistribute it, but it's cumbersome and it gives you a delay for the bugfixes, so people with the ability to pay will prefer the official method. Especially if they know they're funding open-source and if they get a good service. However, to stay legit in the OSS ecosystem we need to redistribute part of the donations.

This isn't a press release, it's a review

On #3, I'll just plug Mageia again. I use the KDE version (I know, I know, you didn't want to know) since 2011, and it's the only linux I've ever used that "just works". I've had it on several laptops and a desktop, and haven't once touched a config file by hand. I've more or less forgotten all of my old Linux hand-editing juju.

They're the community-driven spinoff from Mandriva, and they're the only Linux I'd recommend to anyone anymore: https://www.mageia.org/

You don't have to pay anyone for something that just works, take that 200$/yr and pay it to yourself as you investigate if your hardware is well supported by Linux.

Alternatively, go for System76 or Entroware hardware. That hardware ships with Linux.

This assumes the time taken and effort will be worth less then 200 dollars, which may not be true for all.

Time is money- plenty of people would trade $200 for not having to spend time doing that. That's the sort of thing that's really fun and cool and interesting if someone's a hobbyist and/or student and/or in the larval hacker stage, but at some point in life after spending decades having to make sure their hardware is supported by Linux/FreeBSD/whatever, the bloom can come off that rose pretty hard and it's a blessing to just give someone money to worry about something you don't want (or don't have the time) to spend time doing.

Of course, plenty of people do have plenty of time to read HOWTOs and hardware compatibility lists and so on and still enjoy doing so- more power to them. Especially if $200 (or whatever) is still a meaningful amount of money to them that they need for other things. But I've always felt that a big reason why so many people advocate that approach and present it as a rational choice is because they themselves enjoy doing that and would do it anyway regardless of the time/money tradeoff.

I don't think Linux has that much of a hardware compatibility problem these days.

I've built several intel PCs over the last few years without ever researching hardware compatibility and every one Just Worked with a basic Ubuntu install.

Integrated wifi, and even AMD graphics cards are supported out of the box.

Home built PCs are generally not a problem since they all use common, fairly generic, parts. Laptops on the other hand tend to rely more on custom hardware and solutions.

I've got an AMD laptop with AMD graphics and have to install the Catalyst software to get responsiveness from Ubuntu graphics. If I don't completely uninstall and purge Catalyst before allowing system updates, then reboot using a custom boot command, then shut down and reboot (with the custom command again), and then reinstall Catalyst, I end up with a machine that boots to a black screen and is essentially useless until I wipe the drive and reinstall from scratch. With 15.10 I thought this had changed with a new set of non-Catalyst drivers, but the problem reappeared.

I hadn't expected this, as my previous two Dells with Intel or Nvidia graphics hadn't caused any problems since years ago when wireless issues got sorted out. Linux has made a lot of progress with hardware compatibility, but if you find one of the weird issues it can be damn near intractable and user forums are a maze to sort through.

> Alternatively, go for System76 or Entroware hardware. That hardware ships with Linux.

In both cases, it ships with Ubuntu, and doesn't necessarily support Linux (or BSD) distros in general.

I was able to install Debian on my old System76 laptop, but the graphics card and wireless networking have never been completely happy. Now that I'm upgrading, I'm going to get a zareason — I've been very happy with the desktop & laptop I've used from them already.

I used to be an Ubuntu user, but it got progressively more difficult to customise my machine to run the way I want it to. I don't want GNOME or Unity: I run stumpwm. Tiling window managers are the future.

Ok, not necessarily but I know for example that for the Entroware Apollo they worked with upstream Ubuntu Mate to get the touchpad working. Everyone benefits from that. In practice, you will have very little problem installing other disto's on System 76 systems from what I have heard.

As an order of magnitude, if I maintained a Linux desktop myself, I'd be in for both ~10 days per year (direct and indirect) = 4500$. I've already tried.

Just buy a Macbook Air and install Ubuntu on it. It will Just Work. Wifi, screen brightness buttons, volume buttons, suspend on lid close... everything will Just Work.

How does the trackpad feel? How's the battery life?

Trackpad is great, battery life probably a bit less than os x, Im using a mid 2012 and get 3 hours, want to upgrade to the next model with the 9-12 hour life.

Em...that's just half of what OS X can do. I have the same model, but my laptop can last at least 7hours in a coffee shop.

This is the 11" mid 2012, 13" has larger battery -- I was lucky to get 4 hours with os x when I first bought the machine, the battery is now 4 years old and gives me 2:30-3 hours under latest Ubuntu.

This! but YMMV, here's my journey so far...

Using Ubuntu on a 2016 MBP Retina 15"

1. First 14.x: mostly functional, trackpad was buggy. Brightness wont work. No Bluetooth. Blame on kernel 3.x

2. Then 15.x: almost functional! mostly everything worked great wth kernel 4.x, but no bluetooth nor camera. That's ok, I can live without that

3. Now 16.10: almost perfect. Bluetooth works again. Still no camera, but I have trust it will soonish :)

Also the machine never shutdown nor suspend correctly. I need to restart the machine, press ESC, write "exit" at grub, and then pick "poweroff" form the UEFI menu.

But even with all this drawbacks, I don't regret and full recommend to try this setup. This is the best hardware/software combo. And even the battery last more than 12 hours with linux!

16.04?

yes! ..but edit window is closed

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Send your $200/yr to the free OS that comes the closest to "just works" for you, even if you don't use it. If everyone did that, our free OSes would be far better than any other alternative.

"If everyone did that", yes, but everyone isn't. That's where marketing is important. I wish Elementary.io were a fully-assumed for-profit able to trigger a snowball effect of customers around a Mac-level quality. Especially as Mac OS X quality is decreasing.

It's hard to decide to give them something with this list of options - really what can you choose here http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/contribute/?version=1... the alternatives are:

1. Ubuntu for personal and mobile computing - I want convergence now! - really? I'm just afraid it will push the desktop version to suck more like Unity.

2. Ubuntu for cloud computing - I want Ubuntu running my cloud and as a guest in my cloud of choice. - well I'd rather have Ubuntu be my desktop choice and have them more focused on that.

3.Ubuntu for things - I want a secure, upgradeable Internet of Things, powered by Ubuntu. - Well, Raspbian lite has got that covered, will ubuntu further strip down a debian or where do they think they want to improve for IoT?

4.Community projects I support LoCo teams, UbuCons and other events, upstream projects and all the good work the community does. - well I'm afraid the money will mostly go into t-shirts and beer conferences. If you guarantee the money goes to upstream projects I'm down for that option at least.

5.Tip to Canonical - Hats off for making Ubuntu possible. Keep it up. - Well yeah, but what does that mean considering from the other options(convergence, cloud, iot) does a tip mean I endorse this new path instead of desktop focus?

At least before they had some option about addressing driver incompatibilities.. Someone please help me/us choose.. I want to spend money for an open source OS for my desktop as to to not make me feel naked in front of Microsoft employees when I browse the internet.

> Something like elementary.io, without the installation errors

Or with toolbars in the apps. Or with context menus on the video player. Or with a decent dock that doesn't show three Chrome buttons if you choose to not use their crippled browser.

Yeah, I have also tried elementary.io.

Speaking of upgrading, I can't recommend this setup enough:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/provisioning-your-computer-one-...

My laptop was getting bogged down with cruft acquired in my homedir over the years, so I decided to reinstall 16.04 from scratch. It took a few minutes to get Ubuntu on the disk, and a single command to get every setting and configuration file back on the machine, the way it was.

Not only that, but you can synchronize settings and installed programs across computers as well. I love it.

Are you using this only for dot files?

How does putting them all in git prevent you getting bogged down with cruft?

> Be judicious in choosing which files you add to the repository. Don’t just add everything that’s in your home directory, or even most of it, because that will just require unnecessary commits and make your repository larger. It does take a bit more time to figure out where programs store their preferences, but it’s nothing you can’t find out in two minutes, and it will ensure you only sync the things you really need to.

So it doesn't prevent you being bogged down with cruft?

...it does. You don't add them all.

Something about `git clean` being capable of deleting your entire home directory just sounds messy. It's a cool project, I think it could use better implementation.

Yeah, definitely agreed. You should use a better implementation, this one just suits me.

Am I alone in being scared of the tone of this thread?

So many people are saying "yep, installed it and all works ok"

Were you expecting it to NOT work? This is a LTS release, I'd hope the Ubuntu team tested it enough to ensure there isn't major issue.

Not to get off topic but maybe because I've solely run *BSDs for the last few years I take for granted releases "just working".

Worse than that: "The only things that aren't working is the webcam and suspend / hibernate, but I don't really care about those and suspend even seems fixable."

SRSLY?

I go to great lengths to be able to run Linux, cannot live without a properly functioning tiling window manager. I don't mind that the webcam support is coming in a (couple of) year(s). As the laptop (re)boots in a couple of seconds, I don't mind the shutdown when I go to bed (eco friendly even ;))

> I go to great lengths to be able to run Linux

What do you mean by this?

That I might have invested 100+ hours tweaking & patching stuff to get linux to run properly on apple hardware. a lot of this time was spent with getting nvidia drivers to work on my macbook pro 6,1 as it has a weird EFI version. (I don't mind because I like tinkering with stuff and learning about underlying causes of problems)

> I don't mind the shutdown when I go to bed (eco friendly even ;))

What exactly is eco friendly about shutdown versus suspend where it uses < 1W? Besides, the wear and tear of repeated shutdown/powerup cycles might mean it is a less "eco" friendly option in the end.

I don't think the way you run your laptop has appreciable environmental impact. The damage is in manufacturing and disposal. The best way to be eco friendly is to buy laptops that don't need to be replaced as often.

> Besides, the wear and tear of repeated shutdown/powerup cycles might mean it is a less "eco" friendly option in the end.

Assuming grandparent comment is shutting down the computer once or twice a day, it should be fine, I'm pretty sure the hard drive isn't going to fail from that.

I shouldn't try to be joking on the internet, especially not on HN, anyways, my "eco" comment was meant as a joke, hence the wink.

I think it's amazing it works as well as it does on a completely closed hardware(macbook).

Not only that, but even Microsoft can't get suspend working right across every model of laptop. I can link to countless threads on the Windows 10 forums where people are having issues with suspend, webcams, BSODs, anything you want really.

OSX isn't expected to work on any hardware that isn't curated by apple.

GNU/Linux apparently is held to the highest standards of all operating systems. Which is probably why it's the most used kernel/OS in the world and dominates nearly every market (mobile, IoT, servers, super computers, etc.).

I've installed Centos7 and Debian8 on a slightly sick laptop (display light power is dead for some reasons. ) Both system with systemd; they managed to send the laptop to sleep. every. single. minute.

suspend/hibernate not working is still better :D

I've got no idea of the state of BSDs running on laptops, but as a long time ubuntu user the primary things I used to have trouble with are dual gfx (i.e. nvidia+intel) and shitty wifi cards - even on LTS releases. That's something that can be avoided by investigating linux compatibility of the laptop hardware before buying it.

I wish it was really easy like that.

ubuntu developers take all effort to give you a userspace with everything working together, but there simply far too many choices of hardware which will break things.

I've a skylake laptop - power management sucks in all distro because kernel hasn't caught up yet[1]

I use a broadcom wifi chip which just got their firmware merged into mainline.

I don't know how *BSDs can import support for all shiny new hardware as they are launched. (Disclaimer: I have a thinkpad edge 2010 that runs openBSD happily)

[1] https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/41713.html

I stopped taking that blog seriously long ago. "mjg59" just spends all their time digging up stuff on ubuntu to spread FUD. They're a developer of coreOS and compete with Canonical. Honestly it just makes coreOS look unprofessional.

As far as I can remember, there always have been problems with Linux. You just expect it because of experience.

On the other hand, saying BSD just works is dishonest. They don't target the same users and don't do the same thing, it's like saying versioning in LibreOffice is buggy while git "just works". Try to give git in the hand of your mum and tell her to version her spreadsheet with it. It doesn't make sense.

Its not just Linux. Macs have problems, and Windows too.

For me, Windows is the worst of them all. It's the one that's supposed to work on every machine flawlessly then you buy a new laptop with Windows 10 and it won't wake from sleep unless you open and close the lid twice and then when it does wake from sleep the wifi is broken and won't work until you reboot.

This was my experience on a new laptop from dell. And it's not uncommon, just go to the windows 10 forums and you can find people with thousands of hardware issues even on brand new systems that shipped with Windows.

What's even more sad is that I expect that kind of experience with a brand-new consumer Windows machine from the store. In the corporate world, a "clean" install is done and you don't see these kinds of issues.

Yes, my goal is not to make a * context, just answering to the fact it's no suprise people are stating "cool it works". They do so because:

- often something doesn't; - it's nice share the experience and will help people to decide wether to install or not; - they are not thinking about comparing it to something else like BSD, but to previous experiences of the same kind of product.

You may have heard the term "snow crash" which originally referred to CRT monitors. I have only seen a snow crash once in real life and it was on a Mac Mini.

Well, I tried to upgrade my 15.05 (desktop PC) and during the update I got several error messages and now my installation is completely bricked :(

What makes me especially angry is that I had an almost completely vanilla installation, apart from a few dev applications.

Alone? probably not. On the other hand, I suspect the most people who are installing Ubuntu Desktop 16.04 are less interested in LTS than 16.04. Ubuntu Server, though, may be a different kettle of fish.

To put it another way, there are people for whom 16.04 is an upgrade from 15.10 and for whom 16.10 will be an upgrade to 16.04. I'm in that camp because it's a desktop and I'd rather not wait two years for the next version of my application software.

None of the BSDs "just work" on a Macbook.

> *BSDs for the last few years I take for granted releases "just working".

That is true. There are unexplained caveats however, such as you'd need to know, for example, not to give the full disk to ZFS, because if you encrypt it, and you're not aware you need to do an off-machine metadata backup, after a power loss, you're screwed.

Linux distros may not always be perfect on release (hell, they are usually pretty shitty on release), but I never lost data like with FreeBSD before in the past 10 years of using linux.

Hold on, are people seriously saying BSD has no issues with suspend and webcams "just work"?
I used FreeBSD as an FTP server for a few months about five years ago. I just don't see how it's better than Linux in anyway.

Debian, Arch, Ubuntu, Gentoo, RedHat, all have documentation that's just as good as FreeBSD, Gentoo has portage which is basically ports, If BSD was really so much more stable than Linux then it would be more widely used in environments where stability is necessary, Linux dominates pretty much every market that isn't the desktop. Sure some companies use BSD, but in the end Linux dominates because it does whatever task you give it and does it well.

BSD is great, but pretending like it's somehow miles ahead of Linux is just asinine. I'd argue it's miles behind Linux when it comes to most modern tasks.

I always do a fresh install of any distro (my files are on a separate drive and I use links to Doc, Vids, Pics etc). I wipe my home dir and start fresh. This has been the worst Ubuntu install for me. Lots of errors and issues (software center has alot of problems). Which BSD release do you run for easy install of GNOME?

You should read the release notes for 16.04. It covers some issues that will be rectified soon. Including that of the software centre.

Well that's rather the problem. Most people assume that "the Ubuntu team" tests everything. It's an LTS. Of course it's going to work, right?

In practice, we rely on users to test and report. There are simply too many hardware configurations, use cases and user hacks out there to assume everything will just work.

And if people are unwilling to do this before release, why would you expect anything other than a big bucket of bugs when it did finally release? So no, don't assume it'll just work. Get involved before the next release.

And all this is why the LTS→LTS upgrades aren't issued until the first point release. The .0 is still considered unsuitable for production.

The LTS stability doesn't really start until the .1 release.

I've left Ubuntu quite a while ago so here's my biased version: I'd expect my usb wifi key not to work, to suffer to get my 9 series geforce card to run full speed, to have to fight each program independently to set up my preferred i18n configuration (English language but Italian keyboard with Italian number format and iso date format), to have to mess with dependencies to get a recent official java version running.

plus weird specific things, like at some point I had some issue with 15.04 having different security defaults requiring docker to run with some additional weird flag to let 32bit app run in the 64bit host, something which worked on 14.04 out of the box.

My (6 year old) macbook pro got bricked and I was daring enough to get the new Macbook Pro retina (MacBookPro11,4).

Before installing Arch (assuming I needed the latest kernel for anything to work) I tried installing Xubuntu 16.04, and it amazes me how well it works! After installing refind everything just seemed to work out of the box.

The only things that aren't working is the webcam and suspend / hibernate, but I don't really care about those and suspend even seems fixable.

For anyone interested, I got the intel graphics drivers installer to run by changing DISTRIB_CODENAME to "wily" in /etc/lsb-release and changing it back to "xenial" after installation (make a backup: sudo cp /etc/lsb-release.backup /etc/lsb-release)

I don't know if it's the same webcam in the newest Macbook, but the the reverse engineered driver works perfectly for me on a 2013 model: https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie/wiki

Just follow the instructions exactly. If it doesn't work first time, try `sudo modprobe -r bdc_pci` and then retry `sudo modprobe facetimehd` and see if it creates `/dev/video0` (which means it's working)

For suspend, is it waking up after you close the lid? I fixed this with:

    sudo -i
    echo XHC1 > /proc/acpi/wakeup

Then give it a test. If it works, pop it into a startup service somewhere.

Cool! will give those a try, lspci -v now gives me: http://hastebin.com/yosicucoku.xml

It seems to have loaded bdc_pci by default, will try your suggestions and report back.

Webcam works now, thanks for that!

I added that script to echo XHC1 to wakeup here: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/100macfix without any luck (made it executable)

I also removed light-locker (that was the cause wakeup problems on my old macbook pro (6,1), but no luck with that either.

I will play with it another time and report back here if I make progress.

Awesome that the webcam is working!

For suspend: did typing the commands manually work at all? (it should basically work until your next reboot)

I was assuming the issue is that when you close the lid, it sleeps for a few seconds, then wakes again. Is that what happens, or is it something else?

Typing the commands manually didn't work either, I also tried disabling LID0 (sudo sh -c 'echo LID0 > /proc/acpi/wakeup')

No luck with that too, I verified the command working with

    cat /proc/acpi/wakeup

It shows

    XHC1	  S3	*disabled   pci:0000:00:14.0

When I close the lid it suspends, when I open it again I just get a black screen (fans still on, no way to get to another tty)

I also tried suspending via the menu / power button: same results

Oh, right. That's a different issue. I've had my laptop do that a couple of times, closing the lid again and re-opening it has fixed it each time, so I never dug into it. I'll have a poke about and see if I can find anything.

Note: You want LID0 to be enabled, so that opening the lid wakes it up.

After a bit of poking around, this is perhaps a kernel bug that is fixed in 4.4.8

You could try upgrading your kernel if you're feeling adventurous. If that is the issue, it will probably be backported at some point though.

Cool, I'll wait it out as it isn't really an issue for me, thanks for helping out though, it's really appreciated!

Can we come up with a different archetypal bad/clueless user than "grandma"? My son's grandma manned a crew-served grenade launcher and ran radio intercept equipment in the Army and now owns her own database consulting company. The way it's used brings to mind a crooked, old, white haired woman who spent her life in the kitchen. That's increasingly not anyone's grandma. Using the name in this way is both sexist and ageist.

Agreed. My daughter's grandma was programming path following algorithms for industrial robots before I was born. She has an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a masters in physics. She is also a 3rd degree black belt. I expect that within 20 years grandmas will be running half of all tech companies.

Can we not say people are generally dumb? Einstein is a person and he was not dumb.

I can do syllogisms all day long.

Except you can't be "general people-ist".

It's funny. You'd think that, with our industry's reputation for being both sexist and ageist, we'd work to try to understand how we've gained that perception, rather than just double-downing on it and claiming there is no problem.

Here we go, why don't we just say "clueless user" instead? That would cover all the Millenials who have to google search to find the Facebook login page, too.

People are less sympathetic to "clueless user" than grandma or grandpa. That's probably also the reason to prefer grandma, not sexism.

-isms don't rest on whether or not negative qualities are being assigned, or if the assigned qualities make the character more sympathetic. -isms are about denying the agency of individuals, by treating everyone as objects that are carbon-copies of their demographic.

You're the first person in this thread to use the word "grandpa" in this context. If it were really "just as good" of a term, it should be random chance whether people use "grandma" or "grandpa". But there are eight instances of the word "grandma" used in context in this thread alone, and the first time anyone even thought to use "grandpa" was in trying to defend their subconscious sexism, rather than try to use it as an opportunity to learn how to reduce narcissism in their life and be more compassionate to others.

We all have narcissistic tendencies. Our contemporary culture promotes it and contributes to its growth. We all have to work hard to fight the trend and remove it.

> You're the first person in this thread to use the word "grandpa" in this context.

That's because it's common to talk about "grandma's house" and similar things with feelings of quaint comfort. The reason to pick that arbitrary sex is not because of an -ism, it's because it's cliche. It's like using 'he' for unknown gender. It's biased, and that bias is bad, but it's not done out of sexism. It's not out of preference for people of either gender.

> treating everyone as objects

It's a rhetorical device. You're not supposed to be talking about real people. The stronger the disconnect there the better. That's why "clueless user" is also bad. It makes things a bit too personal.

Ubuntu LTS + a few carefully selected apps as upstream APT repositories or PPAs is the best of both worlds; solid predictable base and the latest software where it matters: Chrome & dev tools in my case.

Except for the browser and local dev tools, I don't think I miss or have any use for desktop software. Everything from music (the Spotify web player is excellent, if little known), videos, calendars to email all happen in the browser these days, making it easier than ever to switch to Linux even as desktop usage declines. Increasingly the OS should fade to the background instead of trying to woo with apps or functionality. You don't have to provide an office suite or an email client at all, and I think it would be interesting to see what a distro could do with that kind of sharp focus. I think the core apps of say GNOME, while of generally good quality, probably see fairly limited use in practice.

Personally I look forward to not having to think about the OS until the next LTS in a few years time. It's a great environment for getting stuff done.

You must have a rock solid internet coverage in your world. I do use offline stuff.

Installed it on my old laptop, a Dell XPS 15Z, and everything is running fine so far. Only issue I had at install was control panel crashing right after installing the nvidia driver, was solved with logging out and in again.

I don't see that much difference compared to 14.04. Everything just seems to work.

A few packages that make the experience evern better: Guake for a quick access (quake style) console. Kupfer for a fast launcher (I'm not a fan of the unity launcher).

Edit: I'm waiting a while to install it on my main work laptop, a lenovo t450s, since I use it with a dock and when trying 16.04 out on it (live usb), it would sometimes crash when undocking :/

I have the same machine (t450s), and I've just upgraded from 15.10. No issues with docking, or even suspend for that matter.

Are you also using the ultra dock[1]? I've got 1 DVI and 1 HDMI screen attached.

I tried just when it came out, so could have been fixed in updates ofc.

[1] = http://shop.lenovo.com/ISS_Static/ww/emea/merchandising/opti...

I ran into a bug in the installer myself: if you select "download and install updates" then for some reason the dialog that says "We autodetected your timezone as America/New York" cannot ever be closed (and it never unfroze for me)

This is apparently a bug that spans multiple sub-distributions (Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu) and dates back to at least 11.04, it was reported over five years ago. Now, once you know the solution it's easy to get around, but it was by no means easy to track down the problem - and who wouldn't want to install fresher packages? It's kind of amateurish to allow major bugs like that to linger in your installer for multiple years.

I was installing Lubuntu on a Liva X mini-PC with N2808 processor and eMMC memory. I actually still couldn't get it to boot after I finished the install - the UEFI doesn't see the eMMC drive as a valid boot target in the boot menu and it just goes straight to BIOS. Not sure if I don't have GRUB installed to the right place, or if there's some other Ubuntu-specific bug cropping up, or what.

I just updated my Ubuntu mail server recipe for Ubuntu 16.04 (https://www.exratione.com/2016/05/a-mailserver-on-ubuntu-16-...). It only took a day of work to find all the holes and fall into them.

Everything core Ubuntu and core mailserver worked fairly well. The standard issue Apache/PHP 7 seems to have some odd kinks around the edges, though - at one point the only thing that worked to make it recognize a newly installed PHP module package was to restart the whole server. I have to wonder if this was something relating to systemd, but I'm not familiar enough yet to tell.

Subsidiary packages had a number of issues, but this is probably just standard PHP ecosystem raggedness at the edges for a new distribution. The Roundcube version installed via package is just outright broken due to bad symlinks, for example.

On the whole I was pleasantly surprised as to how much of a nonissue the transition to systemd was.

Hey there - thanks for your guide! I used it as a base for my own guide but tweaked for Slackware64 14.1 (https://gerardozamudio.mx/2015/04/25/slackware-mail-server-w...). I'm in the process of updating it for the upcoming Slackware 14.2 release. I'd love to get your feedback on it if you ever have some spare time.

It worked great for me on my Thinkpad. These days I have to use gekkio's PPA to get xmonad working nicely with Gnome but that was available the first week 16.04 was out and everything installed smoothly.

I have been facing networking issues. The network list completely disappears. "sudo systemctl restart network-manager.service" is needed to bring those back. Read somewhere that it has something to do with systemd.

This bug has been reported, but the Gnome folks need a Network Manager log to fix the problem. Can you reproduce and send them the log? Here are the bug trackers:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=765831 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+b...

Installed 16.04 last Saturday no large issues but then my scope of customization is really small. Nvidia drivers also installed without an issue which is honestly a first (for me on any distro).

I had a few weird small things - I was using Gnome on the desktop and after the update I couldn't mouse click on anything (MS wireless mouse), but all works in Unity. One of my ssh keys stopped working, the font (possibly consolas) i was using in the terminal stopped rendering nicely and for a while Terminator thought a pipe symbol was a < (despite it being ok elsewhere). I am using an nvidia card and have had no issues with that.

Your ssh key probably stopped working because they deprecated support for older, weaker keys. I had an old dss key stop working. You need this line in ssh_config and sshd_config:

PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes=+ssh-dss

The actual Nvidia drivers from Nvidia? That's great news. In the past, it has always been quite a bit of a struggle to get nouveau fully blacklisted, and has made me dread new installs.

I was very careful in my base install to ensure Nouveau wasn't included initially or updated in.

Fedora makes this far easier as there is a kernel module (which sits in RPM Fusion) that will download proper driver, install driver, strip nouveau, modify x on boot. But I'm not sure what changed in Fedora23 but I can't make boot-able USB's anymore. It just hangs on an early memory mapping error.

They worked for me too (Nvidia Quadro K1100M).

I don't like Unity because of the top bar (I move everything to the bottom) so I use Gnome Flashback with Compiz. It works well, almost good as 10.04 and much better than any intermediate release. It's not perfect because of some work still to be done by Gnome on supporting the flashback environment (eg: no File, Edit menu on Nautilus, a menu which I very seldom use). Apparently they're working on that.

Overall I'm happy with the upgrade (I was coming from 12.04 on this laptop).

Although I am mostly a Windows guy nowadays, I started using GNU/Linux distributions back in the day with Slackware 2.0.

Tried dozens of distributions and spent endless hours trying out desktop themes and other desktop customizations.

Nowadays I just use whatever defaults are there. Probably the only customizations I do are related to power management and what should happen when closing the laptop lid.

>Nowadays I just use whatever defaults are there. Probably the only customizations I do are related to power management and what should happen when closing the laptop lid.

Same boat. After ~15 years of nearly daily fighting with computers to do the right thing. Fighting with them to look pretty WHILE doing the right thing just seemed like wasted effort.

Also modern slackware is pretty nice.

What's kind of annoying is that Ubuntu has moved most of the system from upstart to systemd, but user sessions are still managed by upstart. If I want to customize my user sessions, I need to learn how to use a system that's being phased out and is incompatible with the rest of the world.

Come try Arch, you might like it here :)

My upgrade to 16.04 (Xubuntu) hit a rather unsuspected bump. During the upgrade process my computer froze (the lone mechanical HD was at fault). Only thing to do was cut the power/reset. Alas the upgrade was stuck in a limbo state and I had to manually remove some stuff with dpkg but eventually everything upgraded smoothly.

Interestingly I hadn't noticed that resolv.conf isn't a thing anymore and the resolvconf package is used now...yikes how long didn't I configure a network interface via the command line to not notice that :D

Runs very smoothly on my systems and my parents' systems.

In 16.04 they broke importing a saved VPN configuration. Again. Previous time they broke it with a previous LTS release, 14.04 (sic!) [1]

Another failure of such magnitude that affected me - breaking the switching between keyboard layouts with Ctrl+Shift (to introduce a new dialog in place of the one that worked for years) was in 13.10 - not the LTS release, at least.

I wonder if they will fix the VPN by 16.04.1, due in July.

Sometimes I wish they were not so strict about time-based releases, if only to allow for the bugs like this one to be fixed.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager-op...

According to the bug you linked, it works fine on 16.04.

Well, according to my experience, and this thread[1], it doesn't.

Also, the bug is confirmed and high priority[2]

[1] https://cryptostorm.org/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=9026#p15888

[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager-op...

What did you mean about their strictness? Does Ubuntu not push out fixes for critical problems like this except at certain times?

I mean they rather strictly hold on to the release schedule [1]: ready or not, you can count on .04 version to come by the end of April, rather than in May. I'd prefer that they didn't release with such glaring bugs as I mentioned, even if a bit late.

[1] Xenial Xerus Release Schedule https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/ReleaseSchedule

That is an upstream issue. I do not see a link to bugzilla.gnome.org on launchpad.

So, in the last few weeks I updated an old Kubuntu 14.04 desktop installation (which has seen little or no use in the last few years) up to 16.04. Now kwin dies as soon as I login and I open any window. The underlying reason is probably some badly updated package or config file. Still, attaching the debugger I can see kwin segfaulting inside the Qt Javascript interpreter. I have no idea why a window manager would need to run a javascript interpreter nor why it would be a good idea.

Bottom line, tonight I'm installing Debian testing and switching to Xfce (which I have been using for years on my latptop).

I did a double take at one sentence in the article: "In order to retain some file browser functionality, Nautilus remains at version 3.14." That sounds like the current version of Nautilus has no file browser functionality--which struck me as ironic, because a while back I tried everything I found suggested to stop Nautilus from changing my wallpaper (um, Unix philosophy?) to no avail, and ended up reconfiguring Cinnamon so it would always run Nemo and never run Nautilus.

I hope what was meant was that 3.14 had some particular features related to file browsing that later versions dropped.

Question for those who have an install of 16.04 - if you type `hostname -f`, do you get the "command not found" error? I didn't have time to dig into it, but the man pages indicated that `-f` was still a valid option, but it appears that `hostname` was shifted to quasi-function.

I came upon this while trying to bring up my vagrant development box against 16.04, part of which was to set the hostname via `server.vm.hostname`.

You mean in a console? Works fine here.

    $ vu development-16
    Bringing machine 'development-16' up with 'virtualbox' provider...
    ==> development-16: Importing base box 'ubuntu/xenial64'...
    ==> development-16: Matching MAC address for NAT networking...
    ==> development-16: Checking if box 'ubuntu/xenial64' is up to date...
    ==> development-16: Setting the name of the VM: ubuntu-xenial-16.04-cloudimg
    [...]
    ==> development-16: Machine booted and ready!
    ==> development-16: Checking for guest additions in VM...
    ==> development-16: Setting hostname...
    The following SSH command responded with a non-zero exit status.
    Vagrant assumes that this means the command failed!

    hostname -f

    Stdout from the command:



    Stderr from the command:

    sudo: unable to resolve host ubuntu-xenial
    mesg: ttyname failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
    hostname: Name or service not known

    $ vssh development-16
    Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.0-22-generic x86_64)

     * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com/

      Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest:
        http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud

    0 packages can be updated.
    0 updates are security updates.


    ubuntu@ubuntu-xenial:~$ hostname
    ubuntu-xenial
    ubuntu@ubuntu-xenial:~$ hostname -f
    hostname: Name or service not known
    ubuntu@ubuntu-xenial:~$ which hostname
    /bin/hostname
    ubuntu@ubuntu-xenial:~$ \hostname -f
    hostname: Name or service not known
    ubuntu@ubuntu-xenial:~$ cat /etc/lsb-release
    DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
    DISTRIB_RELEASE=16.04
    DISTRIB_CODENAME=xenial
    DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 16.04 LTS"

Fun times.

Seems very odd, here it works

  clemme@ubuntu:~ $ hostname -f
  ubuntu

  clemme@ubuntu:~ $ cat /etc/lsb-release 
  DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
  DISTRIB_RELEASE=16.04
  DISTRIB_CODENAME=xenial
  DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 16.04 LTS"

Yeah, does seem odd. Looks like I'll need to ping Vagrant, since `ubuntu/xenial64` is their managed box.

Based on feedback here and on reddit, I plan to jump on with the next minor release. Maybe Mate will fix the issues found in using the Citrix receiver on Unity.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4h58mj/ubuntu_1604_i...

I installed it from scratch on my laptop, had trouble installing chrome and virtualbox. Two straightforward installs required me to fix using the command-line, that was a deal breaker for me. Not the smooth start I was hoping for, I don't have the time to manually fix everything. Back to 14.04

It seems that the new gnome store thingie, does not pull dependencies when you try to install deb file directly, not sure why (at least it does that in ubuntu gnome 16.04). A command line install will indeed work just fine.

I've been running 16.04 with cairo-dock, which has been my favorite non i3/awesome setup in a while.

The only thing stopping me from using it is the window shadows. I wish there was an easy way to turn it off.

The shadows are quite subtle. How does it annoy you?

You can disable through 'compizsettings'.

When I installed 12.04 LTS, I was shocked at how radically different it was than 11.10, and that it was going to be an LTS release. This introduced Unity as the default, among other changes, and I was concerned that they were being too aggressive.

It's odd to be applauding them for this attitude, frankly.

Unity was switched on as the default in 11.04.

I loved 10.10. That would have been a perfect LTS distro.

Yup. My all time favourite Ubuntu releases were 6.06 (Dapper Drake) and 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat); 14.04 has also been rock solid.

I remember fglrx being essential for gaming, even if it was awful. Are the open-source drivers better now, such that dropping fglrx support won't be a big problem?

For most games, amdgpu is ok. If your game requires fglrx, then stick to 14.04 or 15.10.

fglrx does not work on 16.04 and all resources from AMD now go to amdgpu so it gets fully useful by the end of 2016.

The Dell XPS 2016 doesn't work properly, there is a graphic bug where your screen keeps flickering. It seems fixed using the 4.6 DRM kernel.

Anyone tried ZFS from 16.04 yet? How did that go?

Why is never anyone talking about using Ubuntu with Gnome 3? Mate is outdated by design, LXDE a Win95 clone and don't even let us get started with unity.

The only 2 modern and productivity focused WMs (except from everything tiled) are KDE and Gnome 3.

There is also cinnamon which builds on top of gnome 3 tech.

Forgot about that one, but its also just a Win95 desktop clone (with awesome tech in the background tho)

Maybe, but i find the "win95" approach the one I'm the most productive with.

You say modern and productivity focused, I say bloated and opinionated. Gnome and KDE seem to want to show off, while Mate/LXDE wants to get out of my way and let me work.

Gnome brings nothing new or interesting to the UI table. An "activities" system that doesn't match the way actual people use their computers, a mobile-first design that I swear was cribbed from Microsoft, just with a rough file taken to the window corners. (This looks more and more out of place when you see something like, say, the Boxes app. Why does my virtualization tool look like a tablet toy?), and oh yeah, developers who will break your shit and then tell you its for your own good when you go to complain, if they respond at all.

(Me? Bitter?)

KDE at least doesn't suffer from those problems, but I find the UI to be gaudy (think WinXP Luna), and unless you like bright themes, unusable.

Personally i love to use Gnome because it gets out of my way so perfectly. Its like it is only there when i just need it, and this works flawlessly with 2 screens (where most WMs including Metro have annoying issues)

It really comes down to personal preference, i am aware of that. But using a UX style that was invented more than 20 years ago seems a bit strange to me as well. (Cinnamon, Mate, LXDE, XFCE, ...)

I agree that it is a bit bloated. Before i had my current machine i used fluxbox with FBpanel, because Gnome, KDE and unity would lag like mad.

It's because the "old styles" worked well and were easily discoverable, tested over decades instead of at random whim.

The new fischer-price look and feel desktops however target grandma and tablets, and are not what I need in a workstation at all. Mate is almost as good as the XP/Classic theme was, it's all been downhill from there, where every good new feature comes with debilitating regressions.

I'm also curious about using it with Cinnamon. Cinnamon to me brings the best of Gnome 3, without the interface I've come to dislike.

You forgot to mention Xfce

what's the Linux's bleeding edge ??

Fedora Rawhide, Debian Sid, Arch, Ubuntu Development Version, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Of these Tumbleweed waits a while before upgrading from upstream so it's not literally the bleeding edge. So is Ubuntu Development version.

And only Arch and Tumbleweed are recommended to be used by plain users (as opposed to developers and beta testers).

Debian testing used to be recommended.

Yes, but Testing isn't a full rolling release AFAIK. It undergoes a lengthy freeze before a new Stable is released and I believe manual intervention is needed to continue staying on Testing. Plus security patches take a bit of time to land on Testing from Sid, so the Debian guys don't recommend Testing if you need the fastest access to security updates.

> Yes, but Testing isn't a full rolling release AFAIK. It undergoes a lengthy freeze before a new Stable is released

Not more than unstable really. The only difference, testing is more polished overall. Other than that, they are both semi-rolling. Debian tried to reduce freeze period for a while already, and the last one was shorter than one before that.

> and I believe manual intervention is needed to continue staying on Testing.

What kind? Normally it should just roll forward.

I think simply rolling distros.

When I clicked yes to upgrading Kubuntu to 16.04, it broke hard, into a state which would be 100% unrecoverable for grandma (and quite likely the support guy she would have shipped it too as well).

Me, too. But, this happens every time, so I know to drag out the ol' dpkg --configure -a.

One thing I've noticed this release is that KDE5's Plasma fails quite often when I'm switching Wifi access points.

It somehow ended up without a working boot image entirely, and that wasn't the only thing that broke (lots of central packages weren't installed, apparently). So I thought it wasn't worth the effort trying to disentangle it, and I just installed regular Ubuntu over it.

There should be an Ubuntu-distribution called Gubuntu, (Ubuntu for grandmas).

No, seriously, there's a serious market for this -- Ubuntu's UI is crap (with the little triangles indicating which windows are open? Give me a break, I'm mid-20s and I have trouble seeing that). We cannot have that for our grandmas, gnome would probably be better.

Also, grandmas don't need a lot of bells and whistles... only the absolute bare essentials. Like wordprocessing and and internet browser... the minimalism nature would make support easier for you.

Lastly, I guess consider Windows 7. Windows 7 was probably the high point in terms of "oh, it's obvious how I do this..." for grandmas (I think the flat theming in Win10 took that away).

ChromeOS. http://www.neverware.com/ make a PC installable version.

You do end up having to use web based apps for everything, but for basic jobs (with a tethered net connection) that's fine. And it's so nice having something where everything works, everything either obvious or simply not present [ * ], and which has a UI which doesn't try to be different just for the sake of being different.

[ * ] Keyboard layout settings notwithstanding. They really need cleaning up.

Since a few years I've settled upon Xubuntu, because I like the Ubuntu base and the XFCE desktop environment. Personally, I think it hits close to the happy middle ground between lean and minimalistic on the one hand and flashy with everything including the kitchen sink on the other hand. I think MATE (UbuntuMATE) is also virtually equivalent to XFCE (Xubuntu).

Something like Xubuntu, UbuntuMATE, Linux Mint or elementaryOS might fit the bill for grandmas (and for me, as I want something that just works, is relatively simple and resource efficient and based on the traditional desktop paradigm).

Not only for grandmas. XFCE with Compton is perfect for any user.

What did you click on?

AFAIK, the update from 14.04 to 16.04 is not yet offered to end-users (including grandmas). It will take 16.04.1 in order for them to be able to update.

Download new version in KDE's update tool. Same as doing apt-get dist-upgrade as far as I know. It was certainly offered to me.

In the end I reinstalled regular old Ubuntu, because there are no real alternatives, and it's at least marginally less in need of grandma-hard maintenance. (I still had to go into Grub's hidden boot menu and fiddle with the boot flags to get it to work - Ubuntu's installer doesn't do nomodeset by default, even though many brand new graphics cards will boot you into a black screen without it).

In Ubuntu, apt-get dist-upgrade does not upgrade to new release. It has just "smart" dependency resolution. I'm using it to upgrade kernels from command line, because normal apt-get upgrade won't upgrade them. If you want to upgrade entire distribution from a command line to a new one, you have to run 'do-release-upgrade'.

I was asking what you clicked, because at least in the main/normal/unity version, the upgrade isn't offered to the user. I was wondering why and after a bit of googling, I've found that statement about waiting for 16.04.1 before flipping the switch.

About alternatives: if your grandma can live without bleeding edge packages and third-party ppas, I think that Centos is a good alternative. Once installed, it will run for years. There's also Fedora, which looks nicer and more polished, but you have to go through pain of upgrading at least once per year (basically just like non-LTS Ubuntu).

GRUB: nomodeset disables KMS, that's why it is not default. Do you have an Nvidia card?

Well then, I didn't know that about dist-upgrade. But either way, I have used the graphical update tool's "A new version of Ubuntu is available", and it always did a proper upgrade. I assumed the Kubuntu version would do the same (and indeed, it certainly tried).

Yup, a GTX 980 Ti. Surely for the installer nomodeset is a sensible default - once the Nvidia drivers are installed it doesn't matter, but it's tricky to get the drivers without a functioning display.

I'm not actually looking for something for my grandma, of course. And I can usually recover my system when stuff like this happens, as long as I have a different online connection and a few hours to spare. I just hate doing it.

> I'm not actually looking for something for my grandma, of course. And I can usually recover my system when stuff like this happens, as long as I have a different online connection and a few hours to spare. I just hate doing it.

Well, me too. I have an HTPC (2009-ish box with Atom and Nvidia ION) running minimal Ubuntu installation, and that means that updates are always exciting (i.e. there is X server, but no display manager, no desktop environment and no gnome/kde/whatever config tools, the only X client is kodi run as an upstart service). Boy, how I hate upgrading that... Usually only after kodi stops supporting the version I'm running. Last time (12.04->14.04) the problem was that the kernel in 14.04.2 installer was too new for the nvidia driver (304) in the repo. Next upgrade (hopefully no sooner than next year) I'm going to learn at least how to change upstart service into systemd service.

On the other hand, the Ubuntu machine that my parents use (literally definition of grandma and grandpa :) ) updates smoothly and it really is just pressing the button.

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