Hacker News Reader

Comment by ausjke | Hacker News Reader

32-bit installer images are no longer provided for Ubuntu Desktop.

The Ubuntu Desktop now uses GNOME instead of Unity.

On supported systems, Wayland is now the default display server. The older display server is still available: just choose Ubuntu on Xorg from the cog on the log in screen.

GDM has replaced LightDM as the default display manager.

The login screen now uses virtual terminal 1 instead of virtual terminal 7.

Window control buttons are back on the right for the first time since 2010.

Python 2 is no longer installed by default. Python 3 has been updated to 3.6.

The Ubuntu GNOME flavor has been discontinued. If you are using Ubuntu GNOME, you will be upgraded to Ubuntu. Choose the Ubuntu session from the cog on the login screen if you would like the default Ubuntu experience.

Additionally, there are quite a few "Known issues" for Desktop that made me dare not to upgrade. I will stay with 16.04 and wait for 18.04 then.

View on HN

In other words, they've made a lot of big changes right before an LTS version so that they can get wider usage with those who don't mind being on the bleeding edge. Sounds like they're doing it right :)

I'm putting a lot of hope into 18.04. Been using Ubuntu for over a decade now and my happiness with it has been steadily decreasing. Mostly at this point due to very laggy graphics performance (whether using OSS or closed drivers) on a system that should be very fast.

If 18.04 isn't awesome I'm moving on to something else. So I'm glad to see they're breaking some eggs with 17.10!

If 18.04 isn't awesome, I'd suggest you give 18.04.1 a try. Even LTS releases have a fair number of issues just after release, in my experience, which the first point release fixes.

Yes, agreed. In general I guess my point is, I'm not willing to spend several more years of my life while they continually rearrange things that don't matter. I just want a stable, well-supported distro that gets out of my way.

The time cost of switching has still been high enough that I haven't looked elsewhere, but that barrier is approaching...

Like me. :)

I stay with LTS. A do-release-upgrade for LTS-only will only upgrade at 18.04.1 anyways.

Although they've been slipping a bit lately, I'd still recommend Debian. There's a reason so many other distro's base themselves off of it.

I use Ubuntu for programming and it is great.

Still use Windows for HTPC though because I gave up on trying to get Ubuntu to sync video playback correctly after banging my head against the wall for a while.

It is my understanding that difficult tasks should be attempted before banging one's head against the wall.

Directions unlear; head stuck in a computer

Redditization of HN, ladies and gentlemen. Jokes/Puns will ruin this place.

If you want to try Wayland already today, the last 3 or 4 Fedora-releases have had this as an option already. On the latest Fedora-releases enabled by default.

And yes, it's nice and smooth.

It breaks VLC though.

I'm pretty sure VLC works fine. Sure you don't mean VNC?

VLC was broken on Fedora 25 (I had the problem 2-3 months ago I think) because of Wayland, but maybe it has been fixed since then.

> Python 2 is no longer installed by default. Python 3 has been updated to 3.6.

And so it begins. I think/hope that the next RHEL will do the same thing, at which point the final nail will be in Py2's coffin.

Fabric is still not supporting py3, it's important tool for a lot of admins.

There's a maintained Fabric fork [0] for Python 3, it is basically a drop-in and available via pip.

[0] https://github.com/mathiasertl/fabric/

In addition, fabric 2 is making progress.

Plenty of things don't have python 3 support, but you can still use python2 without it being /usr/bin/python.

I doubt very much Ubuntu has made python3 /usr/bin/python, since the official recommendation of the Python project is to not do that.

Still true of course that it doesn't have to be installed by default even if some applications still need it.

> I doubt very much Ubuntu has made python3 /usr/bin/python, since the official recommendation of the Python project is to not do that.

Tell that to Arch. :(

I know. If I remember right, Arch did it before the Python project published any official guidance/Arch triggered one being released.

There is no /usr/bin/python in the default Ubuntu install. There's a /usr/bin/python3, and if you `apt install python` you can get /usr/bin/python. But all of the system's code that uses Python has been converted to Python 3.

Yeah, that's one of the only things I still use Python2 for.

But it seems that they have a v2 in the works that's supposed to support Python3: https://github.com/fabric/fabric/tree/v2

And there's also a fork: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Fabric3

Fabric is reacting to what the most conservative group or Linux users (sysadmins for RHEL) are asking for. That's why RHEL moving to Python 3 would be the last push needed.

So we'll get it in 2024?

There is overlap between RHEL release support periods, from what I see it's about 3-4 years on average. So 2021? :)

> Fabric is reacting to what the most conservative group or Linux users (sysadmins for RHEL) are asking for.

I'm not familiar with the details, but does this mean that they're resisting patches to support 3.x? Given the existence of a fork it seems likely. It's not-at-all difficult to write a single Python package that works on both 2.7 and 3.x. Especially if you are willing to use `six`.

I'll admit that it's a little harder to stay compatible with earlier-than-2.7, though.

Ah, now I remember.

I think the actual argument against Py3-compatibility is exactly that: Fabric needs to support 2.6 because it is the default in RHEL/SLES versions which are still quite popular in enterprise environments and maintaining compatibility with both Py 2.6 and Py 3 is quite difficult, as you said.

To be clear, you can still install Python 2 the usual way. The only thing that's changing is that it's not installed by default (and by extension, that none of the base system depends on it).

I love, love, love python. I am probably irrational in my affection for the language. But it's python3 that I know and will work in python2 if needed but I think python2 needs to die a quick death.

No kind of death at this point would be considered quick for python2

I've been looking forward to Python 4 for a long time now.

Has there been anything posted about it? I'd be interested to read up on it.

I have heard no one even mention what it might be like. I'm just thinking that I liked the change from Python 2 to Python 3, so I'm hoping for more things to enjoy. :-)

It’s just going to be one after 3.9. Nothing special.

https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2014/09/17/why-python-4-0...

If they're going to do that, they may as well just drop the dot.

Why specifically 3.9?

I have been using python2 for veey long time and a lot of software that I've written is made with it and is providing consistingly value to me. I have no idea why these people want to kill the technology that has brought so much value and joy to my life.

If you like python3, great for you. But why do you want to kill python2 if other people are happy with it?

Tough question but a good portion likely has to do with the divisiveness of the ecosystem. A bit selfish of the 3’ers but the utilitarian viewpoint is that if everyone comes to the same ecosystem then everyone can benefit.

I offer no opinion whatsoever on which is better, only that it’s probably better for everyone if dev efforts are not split between two versions of the same language.

It's end-of-life (pretty much anyway). Time to port your software if it's used by anyone more than yourself or open source it. It needs to die like dos and 16bit compatibility in windows needs to die.

> you like python3, great for you. But why do you want to kill python2 if other people are happy with it?

You can make the same argument for any software suite which moves over time. Why should Firefox 10 die, just because Firefox 57 is out in a month or so?

Well.. Duh. The new code has to live somewhere, and we don't want to spend eternity backporting fixes to the old codebase.

Please do note: You can still use Python 2 if you like. But if you rely on really old and antiquated technology, you can't expected modern OSes to ship it by default. Now it becomes your liability to instruct your users in how to obtain your antiquated dependencies for your software to work.

Maybe that is a good enough solution, or maybe some day you will find that it's more beneficial to move along with the rest of the ecosystem.

Nobody writes new code in Python 2 any more. It's the programming language equivalent of Windows XP at this point.

I can't wait for people to stop expecting that putting #!/usr/bin/env python at the top of their scripts will lead to python2 being used.

Currently on most distorts you’ll get an error. You’ll need to use python3 explicitally for now.

Considering RHEL 7 doesn’t even have Python 3 available in the core packages, I bet RHEL 8 will at least have Python 2 available as a package, just not installed by default.

I would be surprised if they didn’t give any overlap between 2 and 3 in RHEL 8.

Wayland finally. The tortuous Mir and Unity crusade is over, I'm willing to bear with whatever is broken in this release if it means Ubuntu working with actual industry standards, specially in the graphics area.

It's not the first time they've done this, they adopted SystemD instead of their own Upstart as soon as it was deemed the standard.

Really nice to see how much they're reducing fragmentation with this release!

> The Ubuntu GNOME flavor has been discontinued. If you are using Ubuntu GNOME, you will be upgraded to Ubuntu. Choose the Ubuntu session from the cog on the login screen if you would like the default Ubuntu experience.

Installing "gnome-session" should provide the default GNOME desktop (the default GNOME is a heavily modified one). I have not upgraded yet, so have not tried, but read on OMGUbuntu.

There are 32bit desktop ISO images for Lubuntu.

So " ubuntu-17.10-server-i386.iso" is 64-bit?

No, also it’s not “Ubuntu Desktop”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com