Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish Released | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish Released

wiki.ubuntu.com

147 pointsnanna174 comments

Despite recieving enormous amounts of backlash and criticism from the tech comunity every release Canonical is the one company making Linux desktops available for less technical people and I applaud them for doing so!

Rocking the latest LTS here, and Ubuntu server on my homeserver. Wish them all the luck!

Honestly though, how many non- technical people do you know who run any form of Linux? Steve Jobs came along and gobbled up that market 15 years ago.

The parents and girlfriends of technical people (like mine).

Yep. Siblings, wife, and in-laws here.

Not sure what the definition of "non-technical" is but I'm finding that among friends who've never heard, say, of emacs, they're increasingly getting tired of how corporate macOS feels, and they feel cheated into having to buy new hardware when apple has dropped support for theirs. I think the question of linux adoption is more just about spreading the word and supporting people to migrate, rather than advocacy of the need.

> and they feel cheated into having to buy new hardware when apple has dropped support for theirs

When has Apple dropped the ball on support there? mac OS Mojave supports machines made in 2012...

Wow, a whole 6 years?

Thats officially supported. I have personally run stuff a year or two older than official support multiple times with 0 issues.

And 6 years is typically the lifecycle of any laptop. By that point most people start looking for a new one.

My 2011 mbp is doing very well with a new battery, ssd and some extra RAM. I will still receive security updates for years if I'm correct but no more mayor updates indeed.

Man I love my 2012 rMBP. I recently left it on a flight and was devastated. Got it back, luckily. Greatest laptop ever made. I'm taking that thing to the grave...

my father (61 yo) uses xubuntu daily. I installed it for him years ago instead of Windows 7 and he loves it. He doesn't need to pay for an antivirus anymore and from his prospective it's much faster.

I converted several of my non-technical friends to Ubuntu, including various other people I know.

Many of them are running Ubuntu on a laptop that would cover half the cost of a macbook. Not everyone can afford Jobs' prices.

Even if Apples were cheap, I consider Ubuntu a much better choice for an aspiring hacker / programmer.

What does a Linux machine do better than a Mac, if price were not a factor?

Support machines older than 6 years. Got a ThinkPad from 2008 that's still kicking, rocking the latest Fedora release.

That's not really a feature, if cost isn't an issue you can run OSX on a new Mac.

I get it if you're trying to avoid the cost of an operating system, but that wasn't what you said or what I asked..

Your typical Linux stack is far more configurable and customizable than the Mac stack.

You typically have far more configuration levers, as well as deeper customization access. The stack is built entirely from open, accessible source, so you can ultimately customize every single part of it to your exact liking.

For example, KDE has an order of magnitude more levers than the OS X DE.

You realize OSX is BSD, right? Just because they didn't build you a configuration button for everything doesn't mean it's not configurable.

Uhm, no. Somewhere at the core it's BSD, but can I patch and recompile the DE?

Not only is most of OS X closed source, it's also not particularly configurable.

What, specifically, are you trying to configure that you can't?

It really is BSD, although the window manager isn't open source a lot of the rest is.

My dad! :-P

For non-technical people, I think there's not much difference between using a computer with Ubuntu, Mac or Windows, for regular tasks like browsing the internet, online shopping, sending email, doing stuff in spreadsheets, sharing photographs, etc. Software's mostly the same, in fact. And with this trend to make everything browser based, even more.

Of course things can go wrong, but it doesn't really matter which OS they're using. For example, should this last week botched Windows 10-HP upgrade happened to my father, there's nothing he could have done on his own to restore his computer.

That's true only so far as using MS Office is not needed...

Most people's computing needs would be adequately served by an iPad -- but those who aren't are typically doing more with their computers than can be met by any OS.

Right. While Office has still some unpaired features, it's also true that not everybody using Office needs Office, specially the home users who need only daily finance, writting letters, etc.

That's true -- and most of those customers could just as easily use an ipad (or equivalent, it doesn't really matter at that point and I think they all run some subset of Office applications). The age of the personal computer is almost over, unfortunately. Those of us who still use them do expect more out of them though.

The non-technical people in my life did not realize you don’t need Office to open Office documents. This important when they interact with accountants, lawyers and such.

Once I show them Libre, they still want Office because Libre looks like it’s from Excel 2003 era and loses credibility in their eyes.

Then I show them Google Docs and Sheets and it looks nice. Literally all they need is something that looks modern. But in fact Google apps have actually been quite slick. Perfect amount of functionality at the moment. Google seems to follow keyboard behaviour and shortcuts for easy transition (especially Excel). Hope Google doesn’t bloat their apps over time.

All of those applications are ok if you don't actually need to produce commercial documents. Libreoffice and Google Docs aren't good enough, and if you're doing anything other than basic data presentation with Excel it's not compatible with any of them.

Google sheets isn't the only option available though. You can even use Microsoft's own online implementation if you want compatibility to excel (without vba)

https://office.live.com/start/Excel.aspx

Those are limited subsets of functionality, and vba isn't all that's not there.

Literally anyone with an Android or Chrome OS device. Granted, they didn't download and install it themselves, but I don't think that invalidates the point.

My best friend. She saw me being happy to use Linux and that I do everything on it she did on Windows before.

Of course it still needs an opened mindset to use Linux but its disadvantages in some use cases.

She is using OpenSuse.

Using Ubuntu in our development and production environment. It's rock solid. However might switch to Kubuntu as it appears to have better HiDPI support through plasma compared to gnome.

You should also consider KDE Neon, an 18.04 base but KDE/Plasma directly from the devs. If you use Snaps for your useland tools you have very stable base and a super up-to-date userland. I'm very happy with it.

Isn't Neon the bleeding edge release for plasma though? Or would you just call it 1st party supported

It's what the plasma devs (supposedly) run. It feels very stable. Plasma/KDE/QT are of course pretty mature and stable.

They have two editions:

User edition

and

Developer Edition Git-Unstable64

Just wanted to add my support for KDE neon. I used kubuntu back in 16.04 and switched to neon instead.of the next LTS kubuntu and I haven't regretted it. Plasma feels a lot more stable and up to date than it did with kubuntu and I haven't had any problems since switching.

I don't see how Ubuntu is any less complicated than say, Fedora. I also really don't like their use of CLAs and their attempt to use their desktop presence to push Ubuntu-specific technologies like Mir, Unity, and Snap.

Fedora is a community distro.

to be fair, snap is the only technology that canonical got right from the start and is actually really good, even on other distributions.

>I don't see how Ubuntu is any less complicated than say, Fedora.

You mean the distro that coudn't even play an mp3 out of the box? Jeez, I don't know how non-tech people could see this as more complicated...

But now it can play MP3s out of the box. Not that I'd ever suggest Linux to someone who doesn't know what a codec is anyway. Fresh installs with friends/family are always fine, but its after an major version upgrade (or many years of version upgrades) that the system will eventually get into a state where Dad can't debug it. I stopped this recommendation after a family friend (who bought a laptop with Ubuntu) had a system update that overwrote xorg.conf, leaving them completely without a GUI.

ChromeOS is an ideal Linux for users like this. Keep updates atomic and the underlying system completely hidden.

How long ago that `xorg.conf` update was?

I disagree I have some friends and family who rarely use a computer and I installed Ubuntu because they didn't want to buy a new one and Vista simply sucked. As long as you dont dist-upgrade everything is rock stable.

I set apt-get upgrades to go every month or so automatically. Kernel upgrades happen on reboot. Doesn't even notice!

> I set apt-get upgrades to go every month or so automatically. Kernel upgrades happen on reboot. Doesn't even notice!

From experience, this is a terrible idea.

ChromeOS is the only one that I have never had issues with when it comes to silent updates. Windows (document deletion in RS3), MacOS (scanner issues in Sierra), Ubuntu (rsyslog errors preventing Bionic upgrades) have had various issues over the years that I would not impose upon non-technical users. Granted these were major releases, but silent updates are generally trouble.

I like the definition above; a non-technical user is one that does not know what a codec is.

>> I set apt-get upgrades to go every month or so automatically. Kernel upgrades happen on reboot. Doesn't even notice!

> From experience, this is a terrible idea.

> ... Granted these were major releases, but silent updates are generally trouble.

Running major updates automatically doesn't seem like a good idea, no.

But I've had few problems with running security updates automatically.

> their attempt to use their desktop presence to push Ubuntu-specific technologies like Mir, Unity, and Snap.

Snap was here before flatpack, what should a company like Canonical do if they want to try something new? Use planted developers in GNOME or other projects to push projects as dependencies into all distributions?

If you do not like Canonical do not use their products, use other distro or BSD. Unity was a nice attempt to get a simple desktop that is not a slave of GNOME designers ideas, unfortunately it fails but I do not understand why people like you are against of options (only if the option is from Canonical) even if Canonical always tried to support all the DEs.

> Snap was here before flatpack, what should a company like Canonical do if they want to try something new? Use planted developers in GNOME or other projects to push projects as dependencies into all distributions?

They shouldn't hardcode Snap to depend on snapcraft.io, its really that simple.

I understand that, maybe they will do it in future or someone will fork it to change the store url,,, but do we want each distro to create it's own snaps, we get back to duplicated efforts in packaging and review(snap team reviews apps that ask for elevated permissions)

Not every distro but different stores with different policies for including snaps. I personally am completely uninterested in using any of the security and usability disasters that are the new universal package types but that would definitely make sense.

Snaps could work great on servers, at work we have a CentOS server (via hosting is not our own), I am a developer not a sysadmin and I don't want to mess with the package manager and break something on this server(it is running a bunch of stuff)...anyway today I had to download and run a linux binary , it was a .tar.xz and it worked, would have been even better if I could be sure this binary was sandboxed.

On the desktop I use Kubuntu LTS, snaps will allow me to test or run software that is not in the repo or it is an older but sable version in the repo, IMO snaps provides extra options so if you do not need it you should not use it.

> Snap was here before flatpack

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9oddtb/flatpaks_sand...

Dude Canonical had a package manager similar to snap for mobile, snap is inspired from that. Plus flatpack is a side project of a RedHat dev, this explains why it moves slow, also flatpack is desktop based where snap works with servers and IOT

Anyway I see some colaboration between the 2 projects so let's not create conflict between this 2 projects where there is none, snap covers more at this moment then flatpack

What I don't like about Fedora is its release cycle, forcing you to upgrade every year or so. With Ubuntu I can still be getting updates for a sytem installed four years ago now. I also don't like the lack of many packages inside the official repositories, compared to Canonical's. And lastly, well, I feel a little bit uncomfortable when using their specific tools like, for example, dnf, or their configuration conventions, which differ from that of Debian based distributions. This is a matter of taste, though.

Would RHEL/CentOS not serve a similar purpose to the Ubuntu LTS releases, if a little less suitable for workstation use?

I guess so. I've never used CentOS but it may be somewhat similar, despite being considered more of a server distribution.

CentOS would be more similar to Debian stable

As a Fedora user, I'd be one of the first to admit that Ubuntu is more user friendly. The installation of the graphics drivers for example was a HUGE pain on Fedora. Getting everything in gnome setup was quite a chore. Printer setup was a pain

That said, i've found the long term stability of Fedora to be better than Ubuntu. The main reason I switched was I had a few instances where I upgraded, and several things on my system just broke. That hasn't happened to me with Fedora.

I've found that, at least with Fedora 28, Nouveau is sufficient, surprisingly even for a modern GTX 1070. Of course I'm missing out on much of what it is capable of however for a standard desktop experience it's fine. I still use Windows for any games. If you wanted CUDA on Linux then I suppose it might be better to stick to the beaten path.

From Fedora 26-on Drivers have been pretty good. Nvidia card works great with the binary-blob from the RPMfusion repo, and no issues with using the Brother network printer.

Pre-26 I'd agree with you.

I had been running Ubuntu but I recently switched to Fedora as a desktop OS. I've found it a much more pleasant experience. Ubuntu is by no means bad but their changes from upstream seem to cause friction.

Been using Fedora as a daily driver since '09. Generally liked it more, and I do CentOS/Red Hat all day at work so I'm a little more familiar with the internals.

Steam and Proton work pretty well on it, too.

From the perspective of a desktop user they are phoning it in. Gnome is upgraded to the latest release and they made some theme tweaks. The desktop feature list is humiliatingly short.

It's not entirely Canonical's fault. No one ever figured out how to make money off of desktop, consumer Linux. Mark was at least honest about it, they tried, it didn't work, server is a better way to make money, they aren't investing anymore.

But there is no one out there now who is investing in desktop Linux in order to win. Meanwhile Apple and Microsoft still invest in the desktop, but it seems like nowadays they invest to lose as neither of their desktop operating systems are really getting better. We live in interesting times.

I get the feeling that Ubuntu is basically a finished product. What major changes would you have expected to see if Canonical had more money?

The only thing I can think of is to replace the god awful default text editor. I noticed they changed it a while ago (from when it was called Gedit) but it's still garbage. Not that this really matters when we have Emacs...

As a user, I'm happy with ubuntu. Stability is important to me.

As always, kudos to Canonical to deliver one of the most mature distribution.

But. 2018. And still no fractional scaling. This drives me mad. (changing the text scaling is not a solution).

Ok, there was Mir, Wayland is late (again)... how can this problem not be solved in 10 years? (genuine question)

Maybe it's because when you set fractional scaling you lose pixel perfect design (icons, images, and so).

https://icons8.com/articles/make-pixel-perfect-icons/

It dosen't happen that way on windows. I had scaling set to 1.25 and got no issues anywhere.

The issue with linux is that X wasn't designed for this and Wayland is still unstable/unusable (thanks nvidia)

I think it's an issue with SVG icons (this format doesn't support fractional scaling, but TTF fonts do).

>I think it's an issue with SVG icons

How so??? SVG is a vector format

The whole point of svg and (vector graphics) is that you can scale them to whatever you want.

If you do fractional scaling on a svg image, pixels will not align to the pixel grid and the image will look blury. You won't notice that on big svg images, but tiny ui icons will definitely look blurry.

There was even a (never implemented) proposal to allow svg files to handle this problem.

https://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/WG/wiki/Proposals/SVG_hintin...

That's why svg icons are often designed using a 24x24 pixel grid, so you can scale them at 48X48 (x2), 72x72 (x3), 96x96 (x4) and they remain pixel perfect and crisp at those sizes.

It's still better than scaling bitmaps, so it's weird to single out SVG as the culprit. It makes things better in general, not worse.

Wayland is actually pretty stable. Nvidia has problem with OpenGL in Xwayland (i.e. 3d accel for x11 apps), otherwise, it should work.

There are warts though, when using Wayland. When using scaling (doesn't have to be fractional, either), X11 apps are being upscaled, not downscaled, resulting in blurriness. Unfortunately, neither Firefox nor Chrome does support Wayland natively, and who wants to use their most used app on their computer in blurry mode?

Must admit I don't understand what Wayland is, or X server for that matter. Would someone mind explaining it, for someone a bit dull of mind as myself?

In short: X.org is a decade old display server that became the standard to display graphical window on the majority of Linux distribution. GNOME, KDE, XFCE and others are/were client to this display server.

Wayland is a new protocol where the window manager (ie GNOME, KDE,...) is responsible of directly managing the display. Each window manager must reimplement this protocol (or use a library already doing this work) which enable them to have more control over the windows.

Applications must also directly support Wayland like they did for X.org before (which was the default commonly used, so no problem) or the user just have XWayland installed on their computer to show X.org windows inside a Wayland WM but then the application may not display correctly (blur, artifcats,...)

It is perhaps worth noting that while X.org is about a decade old, it is an implementation of the X Window System protocol which dates back to the mid 80s.

Suffice to say, quite a lot has changed in computer graphics/interfaces since that time, and most modern *nix operating systems end up circumventing quite a lot of X to offer modern features. Thus X brings quite a lot of legacy debt to the table which can't be easily removed.

Also, even back in the day, X wasn't considered the best tech around, at least by some. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS was around.

However NeWS' licensing was proprietary and X won out.

Gopher and HTTP had a similar situation. Gopher had a lot going for it, but the future licensing situation was unclear. HTTP was free, clear, and widespread by the time Gopher became GPL.

After 10 years of work you still can't do much useful unless you run X and shim it with XWayland. "Stable" is a strange descriptor given this context.

"Stable" and "popular" are two different concepts. Yes, some apps and frameworks didn't bother yet with the switch. Some did, Qt5 or Gtk3 are fine.

Firefox has recently added wayland support, it isn’t enabled by default.

It doesn't play nice with OMTC, or 3d accel in general (see EGL bugs in bugzilla), and has problems with scaling and input. It is a work in progress, that's why it is disabled.

> It dosen't happen that way on windows. I had scaling set to 1.25 and got no issues anywhere.

You do get scaled (and hence somewhat blurry) icons if you do 1.25x on Windows as well. 1.5x usually works better, because icons scaled by that much tend to hit the next size tier that is often available prescaled to look good (16x16 -> 24x24, 32x24 -> 48x48).

Who on earth would prefer that to proper scaling?

I realllyyyyyyyyyy hate blurry pixmaps

Ahh Linux, you’ll catch up in a few decades maybe.

I use KDE with x1.3 scaling and it mostly works, but e.g. VirtualBox is unusable with scaling, pdf fonts in Okular look torn, some pixel maps scale poorly giving artefacts.

Still, I don't have better options: 13" FullHD doesn't play well with 2x scaling (and even 1.5x would usable, but too big for my taste).

I find this as a failing, at least partially, of desktop monitors. Once the DPS is high enough you kind of stop caring about individual pixels. However most laptops and desktops out in the wild have screens which are 1080p at best. Nota bene: I'm talking globally, developed countries are doing better int his regard.

It's 2018. We have had SVG icons for years on Linux, which scale beautifully. Bitmap icons shouldn't be used any longer.

On desktops/laptops, 1366x768 is still by far the most common resolution.

SVG or not, but on a 13" - 15" 1366x768 screens icons need to be pixel-perfect or they will look crap.

If you have a 1366x768 screen why would you need DPI scaling? You shouldn't be affected by this issue at all if your resolution is below a certain threshold.

Many commonly used apps do not support Wayland - yet. https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/102936/graphical-a...

It's available as an option at login, and mostly works without issues. The preference is sticky until you change it and I mostly boot into Wayland.

Unity7 worked well enough with fractal scaling IIRC :(

It still does. 18.04 with Unity here, no problems whatsoever with existing fractional scaling on several screens ranging from 13 to 27 inch.

I have my Xubuntu desktop set to 1+3/16 if I'm not mistaken (which in 96dpi units is 114) and everything works well. I'm not sure what you mean.

I don't know much about the issue, but is this fractional scaling thing a problem only in Ubuntu, or Linux in general?

(If specific, I guess it should be easier to fix now, once they decided to use GNOME as their desktop environment, right?)

Canonical can only be blamed for this if you disagree with their decision to move to Wayland and Gnome. Fractional scaling has been planned in Gnome for some time now (it was originally supposed to be in 3.26).

17.10 had fractal scaling setting on Wayland (not X.org). Not sure if you can enable it in 18.04, probably possible.

Unfortunately, I think Canonical has lost their focus on the desktop user. Every version of Ubuntu since 16.04 has had major issues for me. I have given every one of them a chance to redeem themselves, right up to today trying 18.10. Still no dice...

For me, as boring as it sounds, Debian 9 (Stretch) with XFCE is rock solid as a daily driver. I'm not some fuddy duddy doing nothing but text editing either. I code every day with Golang and Postgres 11 using VSCode. I make music using Bitwig (and sometimes Ardour). I use Shotwell and Gimp for my photography. I run the latest Krita in the (probably vain) hope that I can become a better artist. And I write my always-in-progress novels with the latest Libreoffice 6.1 and FocusWriter.

So to the people asking for a distro that has a better policy on quality, I don't think you can go past Debian.

I havent had issues with Kubuntu honestly, but that's for my needs. The only thing that's gotten awful is the Nvidia driver I'm being offered up breaks my distro. I am never buying Nvidia after all the issues with them, I'm hoping AMD can push forward superrior graphics drivers for Linux, but I have had more issues with Nvidia on any OS I use (including Windows) than I ever had with AMD / ATI (only with Linux, or overclocked till it died).

I'm kind of excited about trying out Ubuntu Budgie though, it looks pretty smooth.

I switched to budgie but got bitten by Nvidia bug which prevented Ubuntu loading. None of the solutions I tried from forums worked so I threw in the towel. I haven’t touched my home computer in a few months but when I do I’ll be going to fedora.

Did you check if the "nouveau" OSS Nvidia driver was still installed? Happened to me all the time, so I got used to always checking and removing it manually before letting him reboot.

What major issues you encountered on 18.04?

Well for one, at release, if you mistype your password, and then type it correctly, gdm would crash and you had to hard reboot.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1031797/ubuntu-18-upgrade-fa...

One of the most significant ones is with constant network dropouts. I'm not talking about Wifi or some weird and wonderful adapter either. Wired ethernet on an Intel i219 - constant dropouts and when you're browsing (e.g. with Firefox) it regularly fails to resolve the host and/or load a page. I've tested this and confirmed it is a problem in Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Neon.

Another issue is with the Gnome version of Ubuntu (doesn't appear in Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Neon etc). When you install BitWarden into Firefox, any time you tab into the password field, it crashes the plugin. Sounds like a problem with the plugin, except it isn't. It's known that Ubuntu packaged an old and/or incompatible library that causes it, and they didn't make any attempt to fix it. Meanwhile, Fedora, Elementary, other flavours of Ubuntu, and Debian all work perfectly with Firefox and Bitwarden.

They may be little things, but they aren't edge cases. They're usability 101 for normal desktop users, and they should just work. I understand though that Ubuntu does "just work" for millions of other users, and I hope that continues to be the case.

They just have decided like Red-Hat did before them, that there is no money to be made on the Linux desktops and they better focus on IoT and server as long term survival plan.

There was a blog post about it.

Yet they still have one of the best laptop support.

> They just have decided like Red-Hat did before them, that there is no money to be made on the Linux desktops

And can you blame them?

Not at all, OS X/iOS, Windows, ChromeOS and Android is where money is for anyone that wants to sell desktop/laptop/mobile software.

And the fact that Linux kernel is at the bottom layer of ChromeOS and Android is only an implementation detail to app developers.

To be honest, I've seen this kind of post written for pretty much every Ubuntu version since 10.04

Can you recommend any particular tutorial or resource for getting a music production setup like yours going in Linux? Last time I tried was in 2014 and I couldn’t figure out (or find documentation at my level on) wiring JACK up.

I use Mint, Ubuntu based, no issues whatsoever. Great modern desktop with cinnamon and a devteam that respects their users.

Canonical got out of the personal computing business in April of 2017. They have a handful of people still contributing to Ubuntu as leverage into the potentially lucrative IoT and In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) developer markets, and that's it.

If you're benefiting, it's collateral interest.

what issues does ubuntu have that debian doesn't? i think the average desktop user is likely to get further with the latter than the former (joke about how debian gives you the choice of old or broken). for reference i have both oses on various machines.

If you don't mind being stuck with old version of software, Debian stable is, appropriately, very stable. If you want more recent versions, Debian testing or unstable will require more maintenance than Ubuntu.

A decade ago I used to recompile the kernel for fine tweaking, but I'm too busy to do that anymore. Ubuntu needs less fiddling than other distributions, in my experience.

A point that's not been discussed in the Ubuntu vs Debian discussion here is the difference in communities. A major reason I prefer Ubuntu - ok specifically Kubuntu - is because I find the community around it warm, welcoming, positive, encouraging and inclusive, whereas I found the Debian-user email list cantankerous to say the least. I'm glad there's a place for the kinds of posters out there in the world, but it's not for me. Horses for courses, as we say in the UK. Linux isn't just a bunch of software that I can use, but a community which I am a part of.

OT: cantankerous - bad-tempered, argumentative, and uncooperative

thanks for the vocabulary expansion!

I (and probably the person you replied to) take all these words for granted. It didn't occur to me someone hadn't heard of them.

Check out the thesaurus entry for cantankerous for some more useful, related, and probably less common than I think terms: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/cantankerous

Thanks!

And I don't wish people to stop using less common words - I do enjoy an expanded vocabulary, just for the record. The comment was just to save others a couple of clicks :).

Must admit that the OT (OP?) needed some help from a spell checker to write it though ;)

To add that the word generally springs to my mind everything you said, plus elderly.

I'm amazed at Canonical policy of releasing new versions with these kind of bugs open https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CosmicCuttlefish/ReleaseNotes#Known_...

Anyone care to recommend a distro which has better policy on quality? (for desktop usage)

Depends what you want. If you like Debian based distros, maybe just use Debian?

Ubuntu LTS? Fedora?

The planned release of Fedora 29 was just yesterday pushed back by a week due to blocker bugs. Personally, this sort of quality control is what makes me really appreciate Fedora.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-2...

Sample-size of one here, but I switched to Fedora a few years back after growing tired of Ubuntu's bugs. I haven't had any real issues since, it's just solid.

Here is a counter sample of one. I switched to Fedora from Ubuntu. Eventually switched back to Ubuntu once I got tired of my system breaking in some new way each time Fedora released a new version. Ubuntu has been rock solid for me.

I'll make it a sample-size of two, Fedora has been rock solid on my desktop and my Chromebook-turned-laptop. Relatively recent software but no noticable bugs. I am using Nouveau and Intel graphics drivers so I'm not sure what it's like if you want Nvidia's proprietary stuff or AMDs, but for me it's great.

Sample-size of one here, but I switched to Fedora a few years back after growing tired of Ubuntu lagging with Wayland. I haven't had any real issues since, but I really wanted ZFS so I’m back on Ubuntu.

Debian Stretch (see my separate post here for more info)

Alternative view: all distros have issues. It's better to go with the ones which clearly document the big issues in release notes. And possibly skip the initial big releases - use LTS after it gets some testing in public.

Heh, I've been running Cosmic for a month or so now and come across the VPN bug frequently. I find disconnecting and reconnecting to the wi-fi network resolves it. Other than that it's been very solid for me on my Dell XPS 15 9560.

18.04 has the same VPN bug.

As quantummkv says, you could go for Ubuntu Long Term Support, or give 18.10 a go after a while when these bugs have been ironed out. No one's forcing an immediate adoption of the Short Term Support version, and it functions as a testing ground for the next LTS anyway.

My concern and question should be more clear. I'm already bummed that Ubuntu out-of-box apps Firefox/Thunderbird have already in the LTS dumb bugs.

* Thunderbird can't display subjects with emojis correctly (a distro issue). * Firefox (actually a Gnome issue) trying to login on lastpass/onepass is broken.

In both cases the issues aren't new and haven't enough priority to be fixed which I think it's weird.

Install a LTS versions 6 months after it is released, the .1 release

Canonical need to be clearer that the LTS releases are the real releases, and the interim 6-monthly releases are more like developer previews.

Humm, didn't think of them that way.

The harsh reality is that every distribution has these last-minute creepers. More user engagement would help here, much more than crying for the next distro.

Use whatever you like since each has their own policies for a reason that makes sense IMHO.

If you do not care for professional/commercial use cases, install Arch Linux. It almost never breaks (zero times for me in six years of use) and always has the latest and gives you stuff mostly unmodified (as in just patching needed to make it run somehow).

I would recommend Manjaro. Arch based, updates come after two weeks of testing by the developers. It is even possible to install on f2fs. Never broke for me.

Is that realistic to test thousands of packages in two weeks? Automated build tests are everywhere anyway and more than that is not done for Manjaro as well.

The real testers here are probably Arch users having access to these updates weeks earlier and reporting bugs and fixing them.

I railed aganinst Red Hat and Fedora for years, then gave in to peer pressure eventually - it's been an extremely pleasant and productive experience.

Considering the workstation, server and atomic types in the fedora page I'm not sure about using it for desktop/home usage.

Personally, I've only ever had issues with Ubuntu Server and have since switched back to Debian.

I don't know if I'm extremely unlucky or if the choices I make are really that bad;

- I've hit a bug with amavisd and bitdefender[1]

- Recently, Ubuntu pushed for 'netplan' instead of ifupdown and that didn't work with an empty bridge for LXC[2][3]

- They broke a (convenience) script for remotely unlocking a LUKS rootfs[4]

- postconf segfaulting every 5 minutes[5], nothing bad but it just looks ugly in the server logs

That's the major annoyances that I've experienced in the last 3 years. Never had anything like it on Debian. :/

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/amavisd-new/+bug/1...

[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/netplan/+bug/1736975

[3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/netplan/+bug/1773997

[4] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/busybox/+bug/16518...

[5] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/postfix/+bug/17534...

Most Debian packages are years behind the current stable release. This debate is as old as Ubuntu itself. It is the very reason Ubuntu exists. Stable, free, current: pick any two

netplan seems to be a nightmare, I ended up falling back to ifupdown when trying to setup libvirtd.

Great to see a new release. Looks like TLS 1.3 is supported OOTB.

To get nginx with TLS 1.3 support currently required compiling from source on Bionic. "The Ubuntu project is currently evaluating replacing OpenSSL 1.1.0 with backported OpenSSL 1.1.1 in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Bug 1797386"

Fingers crossed...

Lubuntu 18.10 will have LXQt -- it's still beta:

https://lubuntu.me/cosmic-beta-released/

Curiously I can't install it on a laptop so I've hot to go back to 16.04. None of the new versions want to install, get stuck at Installing grub2...

Are You online or offline while installing? 18.04 won't install in my laptop if I was not online.

Something needed to be downloaded to properly finish the setup process.

Online, though my internet doesn't work properly today, so it may be that... I'll try again later...

Two quick questions for anyone that has already tested it:

- Does it include a dark theme by default, or not yet? :-/

- Can you install flatpak with `apt-get` or do you need to install some apt sources first?

You can install any theme you want... This is linux, not macos. The point is for you to customize to your liking.

Same for flatpack, I don't see why you expect it to be bundled over snaps (which is included if I recall) or appimages...

> You can install any theme you want... This is linux, not macos. The point is for you to customize to your liking.

Not that easy without security risks. See: https://askubuntu.com/questions/854253/how-to-install-a-cust...

That's why I ask if it has been included by default, in the preferences menu or wherever the theme preferences are.

> Same for flatpack, I don't see why you expect it to be bundled over snaps

I didn't ask if it's bundled. I asked if it's in the default repos to install it remotely (opt-in) without changing the repos configuration.

You can install ubuntu-budgie-themes, they come with Pocillo, including a dark variant.

`apt install flatpak` totally works. Why wouldn't it?

Cool thanks. I had a conversation with a debian developer recently and by what he said, I (mis)understood that Ubuntu was not including flatpak by default. Maybe he meant installing it (opt-out).

Does 18.10 solve the Dropbox sync problem?

You mean the fact that Dropbox only supports unencrypted ext4 now?

No, that is Dropbox's new intentional behavior, they have no plans to resume sync support for linux.

Couldn't you just fake it in a container pretending it was ext4? Apart from the real question: why Dropbox when you can rsync and others.

Obligatory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 (yes that's a four-digit post ID)

... because dropbox is cross-platform, user-friendly, doesn't require use of the commandline or configuring an upstream source, has a web interface, simple sharing with others, etc etc etc etc

Those kinds of "can't you just..." or "why use [easy user-friendly popular thing] when you could [complicated nerdy feature-bare alternative]" answers are rarely helpful and typically come across as condescending.

Yes, there are complicated containerized or fancy disk volume spoofing workarounds, and there are also alternatives (I like SpiderOak), but none are as simple as using dropbox was.

That's the risk you run when you choose convenience over sustainability. If you spent some time and used syncthing you'd get something that won't just disappear some day.

This was merely a technical question, whereas your reply was... far from appropriate.

I got 1 TB for free with TransIP STACK. They use encryption on their end, I use on mine as well (Cryptomator). Its cross-platform (basically their clients are a fork from OwnCloud/NextCloud), there's a web interface, simple to share with others, and it works on every filesystem AFAIK. No vendor lock-in.

The only thing Dropbox has going for it, is that it was the first one which was both easy and popular when there was demand for it. That's all. Network effect example numero uno.

Couldn't you just fake it in a container pretending it was ext4?

Creating a workaround for Dropbox doesn't sound like a problem Canonical itself should work on.

Considering the amount of harsh replies this got:

I merely wanted to know if it is technically possible. Not if it is feasible, nice, makes sense.

It was a question. Do not 4chan me.

If you wanted to know "can you use rsync?" (a technical yes/no question), perhaps you should have asked that, instead of asking "why use dropbox?" (a subjective preference question)?

To answer the question of "can you use rsync instead of dropbox?" - yes, it is "technically possible" to use rsync to transfer files between multiple devices.

I don't understand why you would ask this question though, because everything is "technically possible" if you ignore all the constraints that stop it from being possible...

You did not read as well. The only question I asked was if you could fake the ext4 using docker. Nothing else. The rest does not have a question mark.

You answered a question I did never ask.

I assume English is not your first language? If you say "X? But the real question is Y", then it's quite valid to assume that "X" was hypothetical, and the real question was "Y" :)

> why Dropbox when you can rsync

I've been thinking about this attitude a lot recently, and realising how much it's holding back open source -

- since everybody said "rsync is good enough", we stopped innovating file sync tools in the 90's; and it was only when dropbox came along that we realised what we were missing, and now open-source is playing catch-up and is still behind (I'm using syncthing myself, but I still recommend dropbox to non-technical friends & family as it's easier to set up)

- everybody said "IRC is good enough", and so chat protocol innovation stopped in the 80's (except for XMPP, which was a better protocol that never really took off because the implementations of that protocol were a mess); and now Slack & Discord have come along and eaten IRC's lunch, and again open-source is trying to clone those

- "Mobile chat apps are dumb, don't bother creating one of those; you can just set up IRC on your phone, with ZNC as a bouncer on your server"... now closed-source closed-protocol whatsapp has literally billions of users, and no open-source open-protocol chat app has even 1% of that

- VNC got made the standard remote-desktop tool, and has recieved only incremental improvements since the 90's. Last week I discovered Parsec, which is simpler, faster, lower latency, higher quality, and includes sound - which are all objectively useful traits for a remote desktop system. Why did the open source community never come up with a tool that's "similar to VNC except simpler, faster, lower latency, higher quality, and with sound"? There's no technical reason that we couldn't have created that in a free and open source way a decade ago - but we chose not to, because VNC was "good enough"

Alas, I have no idea what can actually be done about this situation; and I have a minor fear that I'd be crucified for even suggesting "let's stop incrementally polishing all our 80's software, and use 30 years of hindsight to create something better" (witness all the resistence to wayland / pulseaudio / etc), but I'm open to suggestions...

One thing you keep forgetting: your polished 80s software is running the world. Not Slack, not Discord.

You can kill of Slack, no one will be less productive, have a worse work day.

Shut down something old like shell scripting, and almost every IT company on this planet will be down for months if not years.

If you want to improve, you have to start where it begins. Tech starts with small things, but not with Electron apps.

Innovate for all tech people, and thus enable fancy stuff. Make shell scripting as good as writing shell tools in go.

I am with you in terms of iteration and improvements but I get the feeling you have never had to deal with scenarios where guarantees needed to be given for life or death situations. And those are usually the reasons for things you find antiquated or odd. It's worth investigating, I promise.

> your polished 80s software is running the world. Not Slack, not Discord.

Comparing chat apps to shell scripting is apples to oranges - let's compare apples to apples:

- Discord: 130 million users

- Slack: 8 million (3 million business users)

- IRC: Optimistically 0.2 million (The best data I can find say 0.1 million, let's be generous and double that)

Given that slack has 15x as many business users as all IRC users combined, I think it's fair to say that Slack has a lot more effect on real-world productivity than IRC does.

The numbers of dropbox users vs rsync users are even more hugely different.

My point here is that there's no technical reason why we can't have great, useful, user-friendly, world-leading open-source software; but the culture of open-source says "let's focus on making shell scripting better, forget about electron apps", and the result of that is that while our developer tools are ok, all of our non-developer software is half-assed clones of proprietary stuff and we're always playing catch-up instead of leading. My worry is that attitude is making the open source community largely irrelevant in modern computing, which is going to be bad for its long-term health :/

And you have not yet encountered the backlash you get from users as on Open Source developer when you try to implement said useful, user-friendly things?

I have been at that spot various times and users almost always start unleashing hell if your next commit / PR is not that fix etc. they wait for but some general improvement for everyone.

You do that a few times, then the emails arrive, trying to coerce you into doing exactly what a very specific user wants and later threats of DDoS arrive.

Also... those nice tools are usually developed by the same open source people. They pay their salary.

Wait, if I have ext4 on LUKS Dropbox will refuse to sync? That kinda blows.

Any suggestions for a xplat alternative to Dropbox that works well for Windows, Android and Linux? Up until this Dropbox seemed like the best bet.

Hello fingerprint scanner!

Can you elaborate on that? I saw the fingerprint scanner libraries being added but does this add a significant amount of the hardware installed these days?

Can you explain?

I've been using my fingerprint scanner for years.

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