Ask HN: Is it a good time to switch to Ubuntu 18.04 desktop?
I've been doing my dev work on Ubuntu 16.04 for years now and I love it. How are people who have updated to the latest version liking it? Would you recommend upgrading?
All the technologies that won out (systemd, gnome, Wayland,etc) were created at Fedora. So the level of integration is unparalleled.
Ubuntu still seems to be fighting it's choices.
I was making a comparison between two Gnome based distros. In case you were not aware, Ubuntu is now Gnome.
it was fedora vs ubuntu - gnome, wayland and systemd had their equivalents in ubuntu (unity, mir and upstart) which lost the battle. Ubuntu then adopted the winners. I meant that specifically - not a general comment across Linux
Can you elaborate?
Then I install the latest and greatest on the free space or a much older distro partition, leaving my current work distro safe on its own partition,
Next I copy over as much of the contents my current home folder as I can. Now, I can truly "taste" the new distro and if it isn't a good transition I just go back to my current favorite. I've found I probably install a new favorite distro twice, first time is to check it out, mess with stuff decide if its an improvement or not, and ensure everything still works. Then re-install the second time, now knowing what I like from the new one and just install with the packages/settings that work.
Any time I get stuck or have some unexpected difficulty I still have the previous favorite distro to boot back to in an emergency.
And of course, you can always use KVM's to take a look at distros as well.
If you want to hop on board a rolling release, firmware-buster-DI-alpha3-amd64-DVD-1.iso will give you a fully working debian testing install with closed source drivers.
(Weekly builds are known to fail from time to time)
Then, pair that with a sources.list generator: https://debgen.simplylinux.ch/
And one more ingredient: if you use gnome 3, you may have to copy a file to get gnome extension installation via chrome working. Copy the contents of /etc/chromium/native-messaging-hosts/ to /etc/opt/chrome/native-messaging-hosts/.
A bit off topic: for gnome 3 extensions, this has been indispensable: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/723/pixel-saver/
For tiling window managers, I recommend i3: https://i3wm.org/
I'm sure if I spent more time looking at it I could fix it, or at least work around it. I won't go into all the details of what I've looked at so far in this post. But how many hours do I want to devote to this?
There are also other unpleasant things like this in 18.04, like - https://askubuntu.com/a/1028857 . Starting in 18.04, right clicking on a touchpad is turned off by default, in order to be more "Mac-like" (if Ubuntu wants to be more Mac-like, they should get power management working, not shifting me from three Unix mouse buttons to two and now to one).
I should also add I have been burned in the past by upgrading to Ubuntu on the week the new release comes out ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1674838 ), so now I usually wait about six weeks for the major bugs to get squashed before upgrading to the new release (in the past, when I had more time, I would do the opposite - I would put Ubuntu beta into a KVM virtual instance, or even a partition on my machine, ferret out bugs, and report them, maybe send patches etc.)
If I need a desktop, I always configure the system to use xfce which means 16.04 and 18.04's desktop GUI are the same.
It also means that the vm with GUI under Mac/Windows has the same GUI and also very light. I can configure 512M -2G RAM per VM and they works just fine.
* When copying a file in the gui, a progress window doesn't pop-up for the operation. Took me a little while to realize there is now a little icon on the window's titlebar that shows a pie-chart style of progress. Until I look for that icon, it feels like I don't know if the copy even started. * The "start menu?"/launcher thing blows up into a big, full-screen, icon menu. Seems mentally jarring to have all of my current work overlaid by the launcher. * And, my biggest gripe is the least consequential, but, I want my wobbly windows and 3D desktop cube back! There, I admitted it. I used them and liked it :)
Upgrading was bad. For my local machine, when it first came out trying to run the upgrade script would lock my system, and force me to hard reboot. I tried several fixes, but ended up just doing an install from CD over the old system.
For my web server, not copying 1 file to a new location before running the upgrade script caused me to destroy the whole system. I restored from backup. After researching about that file, I was able to do the upgrade with only a few broken packages needing my attention.
Anyway, it works pretty well now for some dev work and light browsing. Hope you manage to fix yours!
Otherwise, Kubuntu 18.04 has been very stable for me for several months.
I still feel that 16.04 was a bit more traditional, and I liked that a lot. If you're happy with 16.04, I'd reccomend sticking. I won't be upgrading my machine at work for a long while, which is still 16.04.
It was an X/driver issue and it took me a few hours to fix to just get X to load. Meanwhile, Windows worked fine as I furiously Googled the issue.
Use it for a few weeks and decide.
How is maintaining an Arch installation "so much smoother"? The user must carefully review a PKGBUILD every time any installed AUR package needs to be updated[1], which will happen frequently because the user will need many AUR packages to make up for the fact that there are only 10,200 Arch packages[2], much less than Ubuntu's 81,563 packages[3].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/3yiq4s/is_the_au...
[2] https://www.archlinux.org/packages/
[3] https://packages.ubuntu.com/cosmic/allpackages?format=txt.gz
I moved back to Ubuntu only so I could use the same ansible scripts locally as prod.
You can chose unity at login over the new default gnome which I thought was a nice touch by the Ubuntu developers.
It's not as great as developing on my 2015 Macbook Pro but its acceptable.
Or at least do some extensive testing with your hardware on a separate disk.
I did some testing and faced hard freezes and bugs (looked like Nvidia PCIE issues).
I personally use Debian Testing, maybe take this chance to try it? I've never had a stability issue across the 4 different devices I use.
Also, many upstream developers who provide packages for Debian and Ubuntu (e.g., PostgreSQL[1][2] and Spotify[3]) only test their software on Debian Stable and Ubuntu LTS.
Lastly, Debian Testing has the worst security update speed and should not be preferred if security is a concern.[4]
[1] https://www.postgresql.org/download/linux/debian/
[2] https://www.postgresql.org/download/linux/ubuntu/
My question to you is, why use an old kernel + packages when you could have newish ones with a reasonable degree of trust? Is avoiding the extremely rare bug worth it?
re:PPAs I prefer my machines packages to be downloaded from trusted sources. The distro developer package vetting and accountability adds value.
I just bought a new drive, so took the opportunity to install 18.04 to see how it goes. I'm using a Latitude E7450 with a 1920x1080 touchscreen. I'm not a developer, I'm primarily a network engineer, so I spent a lot of time in terminal windows configuring routers/switches,etc... YMMV.
I hate it. Most of my hates are around the gui, likely due to the switch from Wayland/Unity. I can no longer alt-tab between open windows with one hand when you have multiple windows of the same program open. Selecting which window you want requires either using the mouse, or using the arrow keys(with right hand).
The "launcher" -- not sure what it's actually called, the equivalent of the Windows Start menu, reminds me of the jarring experience that the original Windows 8 was. It goes into full-screen task selection mode, instead of a partial window overlay like 16.04 did.
Somehow I keep grabbing the icons on the left side('favorited' programs), and then the cursor won't let them go. I wind up spamming enough buttons and keys that eventually it drops it, but a simple click doesn't do it.
Sometimes the mouse quits registering clicks. As if the OS thinks there something on top of what I'm clicking on. I click on a tab in Chrome, and nothing happens. Usually a few alt-tabs to switch active programs will clear it up.
If you touch the screen, most of the time an onscreen keyboard will pop up, and you have to move the mouse to make it go away. I understand why, but I don't use the touchscreen that way and it just gets in my way.
1920x1080 on a 14" screen it just a little too small for me to comfortably read the text at a normal distance. I used the DPI scaling in 16.04 to compensate. But the scaling in 18.04 doesn't work the same way. I changed the fonts around and sort-of got something workable, but it's not as graceful as it was in 16.04.
The alt-space window that drops down the minimize/maximize options doesn't accept keyboard commands. A common key sequence for me is alt-space, x (for maximize window) -- this doesn't work in 18.04
That's my annoyances so far that I can think of after using it for 2-3 weeks.
Things that I like? Multiple tabs in the terminal window. But I could probably get that in 16.04 too.
The network manager is better and more intuitive. I've actually caught myself using it a couple of times. 16.04's manager does nothing but fight with me constantly.
There was an annoying issue with Chrome on 16.04 that occasionally in full-screen video mode, the UI would lock up and I would have to kill -9 chrome to get it back. This hasn't happened yet in 18.04. Not sure if a chrome or Wayland issue.
The relocation of the gui window close/min/max elements doesn't bother me, either layout works for me.
I can't think of any other things that jumped out at me about 18.04, good or bad.
Gnome is configurable using the browser.
The non-registering clicks thing, yes.
The rest...are likely just preference issues, difference in features, and intended behavior. Such as the lack of keyboard shortcuts in the alt-space menu.
Most can probably be dealt with in one way or another. It's just going to be time consuming to go dig and find out how to make the OS stay out of my way. I'll likely be going back to 16.04 soon until 18.04 gets a little more baked.
It looks like I can get Wayland with 18.04[1], so I may try that first.
[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/1029436/enable-fractional-sc...
That describes the state of ubuntu these days. More often than not when you get an issue you can find a bug report for it to and the bug report was opened 3 versions ago, never addressed and closed automatically by a bot. It seems they've been busy chasing squirrels and ignored the desktop.
My pet peeve with all recent versions (so xorg and wayland) has been user switching not working, but at least 18.04 is the first version that doesn't boot to an unusable resolution.
Doesn't the combination Alt+` do what you intend to do? Alt+tab changes between different apps, and Alt+` changes between different windows of the same app.
It’s a little scary at first, but 4 major key combos are all you need.
mod+enter: open terminal
mod+d: open launcher; the default is dmenu, but rofi is amazing.
mod+h: split horizontally when opening next window
mod+v: above but vertically
I personally have a setup with i3-gaps, rofi, and polybar: https://u.cubeupload.com/Bwbw223/170E026006774C45A65E.png
It’s a bit ugly stock, though...
I highly recommend the xfce4 version, (most user issues on the forums are kde based and not manjaros fault) even though I am fully over on awesome now. I also don't like lightdm that much so I like replacing that too. In general, that's the arch principle (KISS, remove the cruft, use what you want, replace things and customize them)
Source: someone who distro hops all the time, maintains all kinds of systems, and who has been using manjaro as a daily for ~1 yr.
I have spent some time looking at bug tracking for Ubuntu with regards to PDF files.
IMHO, FLOSS support of PDF's on Linux has never been that good, although it has gotten better over time (although it is still problematic). For example this file - https://web.archive.org/web/20100215043153/http://www.ratp.i... - loads fine on most platforms, but in Linux FLOSS (evince with poppler) it might take over 30 seconds to render. Because it had an O(n^2) algorithm running over part of the PDF, something other software on other platforms seems to avoid (even the closed source Adobe reader for Linux).
So I spent a lot of time looking at it. But it takes a little bit of domain knowledge to deal with it. Most people load up evince and have a problem reading a PDF and report it to Ubuntu evince bug channel. But the problem with PDF rendering is often up the library dependency chain - with poppler the PDF renderer. So sometimes I curate tickets and move the ticket from the evince queue to the poppler queue when I see there is a problem.
But poppler often depends on cairo, and sometimes (not often) the rendering problem is in cairo, not poppler. So it goes even higher up the library dependency chain, kicked from evince up to poppler up to cairo.
But sometimes it can't be dealt with locally at Ubuntu, so you log into freedesktop.org and report the problem to them there (or chime in to an existing ticket about another manifestation of a problem). Then you link the Ubuntu cairo queue ticket to the upstream fd.o cairo one.
So some domain knowledge is needed - I informally curate the Ubuntu evince queue, and kick a ticket up to poppler, then with a closer look kick it further up to cairo, then I kick that ticket up to the official cairo queue at fd.o and link the ticket (actually sometimes the chain is evince -> poppler -> cairo -> pixman, as some seeming cairo issues are actually pixman issues).
One reason I've done some curation of this is, as I demonstrated with the pdf above, Linux FLOSS pdf support is not so hot, despite the heroic efforts of Albert Astals Cid of poppler and his cohorts. So I jumped in and did some curation of Ubuntu tickets, and fd.o tickets, and even tickets of other Linux distros. I even attempted to write patches for this complex C++ program, but I lacked the time to get a handle on the code base.
In summary, it takes some domain knowledge to upstream things properly for any distro.