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Comment by brendaningram | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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