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Comment by Iv | Hacker News Reader

And here again, of course, they are going to change the behavior of default shortcuts in a totally unnecessary way (Alt-Tab, really?) and move settings in different places so that all of stackoverflow's answers become obsolete.

They also mention a "better" multi-monitor support. that scares me. I have a multi-monitor setup that works. I could do with a few more options but it works. Every change of behavior has required me to whack down some quirks. I am pretty sure the behavior when booting/rebooting with our without the screen connected, with or without the power plugged, is going to change in a way they found "logical, practical and intuitive" and that will waste me a few hours of correcting.

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>(Alt-Tab, really?)

Yeah, but they're changing it _back_ to the way it should have been, and the way it used to be. Which is wayyyyyyyy better.

>They also mention a "better" multi-monitor support. that scares me. I have a multi-monitor setup that works. I could do with a few more options but it works.

I share your fear, but I have a multi-monitor setup that doesn't work. Half the the time I disconnect the monitor, all my windows get stranded in never-never land and I have to come up with some arcane way to rescue them from the desktop that isn't really there. So I don't think they have a particularly great framework with the status quo.

If you're running under Xorg, alt-f2, 'r', enter will get you your lost windows back.

For harder freezes I've been seeing where I can't interact with the GUI anymore, switching to a tty and running 'killall -3 gnome-shell' gives the best chance of recovering without losing all my processes.

Not excuses for the bugs, but best workarounds I have so far.

Funny, I read the "Alt-Tab" change and said "Finally!" I have a "scratch box" that I noodle around with and that I'm just running the stock desktop, and the alt-tab default was driving me crazy. It's unexpected, as someone who doesn't use it very often. (My normal desktop is i3wm).

As far as better multimonitor support, one of my coworkers has had a lot of problems with his third monitor, some kernels are working and some aren't. I have no problems with my 3 monitors, but again I3...

It really bears repeating and pointing out that a lot of the really awesome things about i3 "just works" in a way that Gnome has lost many years ago.

Considering its 'rough-hack-a-text-config.file' roots to make changes I really am impressed with it. I've used i3 for many years, (I recently moved to sway but I'm going to move back) and I am so impressed with how it gets out of my way.

I hadn't heard of sway, it looks interesting. But, you are switching away from it, so I guess not? I'm a little bit stuck, but it looks like sway has "gaps" support, in that my new monitor has a bug where the very left and right edges have a parallax issue with the backlight: so you can't read the left or right ~8 pixels of the screen. I'm using an undocumented feature of I3 to work around it.

Don't want to change to a different monitor because otherwise I love this "cheap" 4K 42" panel. I had gone around and around about a new monitor, and don't want to open that process up again. So I'm using a kludge.

I have one dislike of a 'Feature'; window-resizing, and one bug (related to window-resizing).

Using keyboard+mouse: To resize you bring the mouse to the vertical or horizontal frame that you want to adjust, hold down the meta key (Win in my case), and right-click+move to adjust it. In i3: you only adjust that single frame. In Sway: you adjust the whole vertical & horizontal window size. This effects all other 'attached/touching' windows and unintentionally screws up some formatting for me.

Like I said, 'feature'.

I am using this on a cheap 42" 4k AOC monitor. I get 4k@60Hz.

> they are going to change the behavior of default shortcuts in a totally unnecessary way (Alt-Tab, really?)

Well, in this case I believe they are changing defaults back from when they were last changed in a "totally unnecessary way" (I believe it was unnecessary when Gnome changed it originally, I'm sure others that prefer this mode disagree). At this point complaining about it just a roundabout way of stating your preferring window manager application switching mode.

> Alt+Tab handling now switches windows by default. Switching applications by default can be done with Super+Tab

So if you have multiple windows of the same application, it will now switch between them? that's a good thing and that's how it used to be a while ago

+1 from someone who -despite multiple attempts - cannot reprogram his brain to accept anything but "alt-tab switches windows".

(And I think it should be configurable so people who prefer weird alt-tab behaviour won't have to suffer the way I had to ;-)

I don't understand what the problem was. Alt tab to get to the program, then alt tilde to get to the window. It was a very natural feeling action.

It's the difference between MacOS or Windows default behavior. Alt-tab between windows has always been the default on Windows, and it was the default for most open source window managers for a long time too. I believe Gnome changed their default to follow how MacOS worked a few years back. Now it seems Ubuntu is reverting back (or is this a Gnome change again?).

Different people prefer different defaults. Personally I can't stand the MacOS version, and for the few years I used MacOS, it drove me nuts. That said, I don't use Ubuntu, so this doesn't matter to me either way.

Every once-in-a-while I go on a Googling spree to see if there's a way I can switch Mac OS to the Windows/early Gnome style. I cannot fathom the Mac OS style being better. Maybe if you only had one monitor, one desktop, and minimized all windows not specific to your current task?

Are you looking for Hyperswitch[0]? I've been using it ever since I needed to start using a mac.

[0] https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch

Yes! This is great, thank you!

I don’t understand the problem though. Alt+tilde for windows, alt+tab for applications. I intentionally will use one over the other depending on what I want to switch to, and it has become second nature. I find the OS X approach way more manageable when working with many windows/apps.

For me, the problem is I have to alt-tab to get to the right window, pause, remember that alt-tilde exists, alt-tab to get to the right program, pause, alt-tilde to get to the right window in that program.

I've only got a half-dozen or so things open. For me, it's just faster to have one shortcut (alt-tab) let me cycle directly to what I want, instead of having to bounce between multiple shortcut commands.

I recently saw Mozilla was looking into what benefit people gain from Electron as opposed to just running stuff in a browser tab. I can answer that for Mac users quite simply: If you run Slack in a Firefox window, and want to switch to Slack, this is how to do it in Mac OS:

* If you have a Firefox window focused, press alt-`

* If you have anything other than Firefox focused, press alt-tab

If you have Slack running as an Electron app, this is how you switch to Slack:

* Press alt-tab.

When I want to switch to the last window I had focused, the decision should be to press the "switch to the last window you had focused" key combo, NOT "figure out which application you currently have focused, and press a key combination based on whether it's the same or not".

Having multiple windows and multiple desktops makes it worse. One thing I hit far too often:

Monitor X has vscode on Desktop 1, Firefox window A on Desktop 2.

Monitor Y has Firefox window B.

I want to switch from Firefox window A to vscode. I press alt+tab. It works -- monitor X changes to Desktop 1 and vscode is the active window.

I now want to change batch to Firefox window A. I press alt-tab. FAIL: Active window is Firefox window B on monitor Y. (Subsequently pressing alt+` to switch doesn't help. there's only one Firefox window on the current desktops, so nothing happens.)

Thus, I can switch OFF of a desktop using alt-tab, but I can't switch back to it without some other key combo I don't know. (I end up having to just use the mouse.)

An additional example that isn't strictly alt-tab / alt-`, but related to how it's implemented:

I have two Firefox windows open. If I alt-tab to one, they both come up to the front, including the one I'm not using -- which may now be obscuring another window I was using.

Monitor X has vscode + a Firefox window A I'm not currently using.

monitor Y has the Firefox window B I am using.

When I alt-tab from vscode to the Firefox window B on the other monitor, the other Firefox window A also moves to the foreground, obscuring my vscode window. They could fix this while still using the alt-tab/alt-` system. It's just a related issue.

I'm sure I could get around this by aggressively minimizing whatever window I'm not currently using, but it's aggravating that I have to do that for, as best I can tell, no benefit whatsoever.

I will say that pre-Windows 95 I was on 3.11 and switching wasn't "last-focused" based. It was simply in the order of when your applications were opened. At the time I thought the change to last-focused was stupid. (I think today I'd probably still be okay with the old method, but it does make less sense when you have a lot of windows open at once.)

However, I'm now about four years into Mac OS as my only environment, so this isn't doesn't seem to just be about what I'm used to. I'm not quite to the 10k hour mark yet, but I'm well past the halfway mark.

That was me as well until I got back to safety ;-)

That and:

- ctrl and fn being swapped on the laptop keyboard (but not on the full size keyboard), with no way to fix it in settings or bios.

- movement and selection key combos varying wildly between apps.

Rumours has it both can be fixed now. Meanwhile Windows is now less annoying to me than it has been since XP was fresh and KDE has left the 4 series behind so, all while Apple fans are raging furiously everywhere about the new keyboards, so I'm not asking dor a Mac bext time either it seems.

I use alt-tab, I get a window that looks a bit like this: https://i.imgur.com/mtynAgC.png

However most of the time I switch focus by pointing my mouse to another window (mouse focus / click to raise)

As a user, I don't think in terms of applications, I can think in terms of workflow which spans applications. I might be switching between certain browser windows, a terminal etc and I shouldn't be having to think "wait, this is an app switch vs a window switch".

I don't think it's too different than switching between browser tabs.

    - Ctrl + Tab: within window
    - Alt + Tab: between windows
    - Alt + ~: between applications

I think the main problem is that these shortcuts are difficult to learn. For example, I didn't know about Alt + ~ until this thread (!), and I'm confused at how users are meant to learn shortcuts like that.

One difference between ctrl-tab and alt-~ (or alt-`, depending on your keyboard layout) is that tabs within a window are very close to each other, and obviously distinct from windows in their own right, whereas it's frequently not immediately obvious whether two windows belong to the same application.

and this is the reason I don't use tabs in browsers. To me, there is no "app x is a web page, I need to alt tab to browser then ctrl tab to the right tab". I don't use tabs in browsers, so it's always just aLt tab to get where I want

Situation: have three iTerm windows (let's say X/Y/Z) and two Chrome windows (C/D).

X/Y are running some stuff I'm not interested right now. Related stackoverflow answers are in tabs in C. Z is in the left part of the mornitor: I'm currently working on it. D is on the right side showing some dashboard.

Was looking at D, pressed Alt-Tab to go back to Z.

X and Y pop up from behind, completely obscuring D. Disgusted, press Alt-Tab again, and watch C covering Z.

Groan.

Yes, yes, I know, a true developer should be able to afford enough monitors to spread all windows evenly. Or use a tile-based window manager and memorize 12 hot keys for each mixture of task. Sigh.

My thoughts exactly. I actually prefer the alt-tab alt-tilde because it feels more natural to me. Thumb positioning is less accurate than finger (at least for me).

I do dislike the constant changes, but I also think there's far more exciting things in the post to praise :-)

- takes twice as long time,

- forces me move your hands around

- and forces me to think

I get the other two, but how does moving your finger from tab to the key right above it qualify as "moving your hands around"? I hit tab with my middle finger, which reaches ~ quite naturally. I'm really happy to find out about this, it works on macOS, so I'm going to be using it!

Staying with the LTS release is a perfectly valid choice if you want a slower pace of changes.

The way Linux distros have no conception of separating "system" from "application" ensures that anyone sticking with an LTS release will have a much harder time getting new software installed.

Is it really so crazy to want a stable platform on which to run current applications? In the Linux world: yes.

Canonical's Snap system is intended to solve this. Snaps are packages that bundle their dependencies, so they are bigger, but they run successfully on most modern versions of Linux.

https://snapcraft.io/

AppImage solves the problem in a different way, although AppImage doesn't have a concept of automatic upgrades like Snap:

https://appimage.org/

I suppose one could put an appimage in a snap, leading to either the best or worst of both worlds.

One of the problems with these systems - maybe they've solved it by now? - is that they bundle up virtually everything for a running system, including the GUI - so any custom theme you have outside of the "package" doesn't translate over.

There are other downsides, too.

At the same time, the upsides of such systems are really nice; they are very much reminiscent of MacOS apps - and that I really like. If the whole theming and such can be fixed - it would be perfect.

Unfortunately they have to do that, because there the only thing you can count on being present in any given Linux system is the kernel.

They don't really need any new system for that, apt can perfectly handle that.

For example, they could have an optional "recent applications" repository that you add if you want up-to-date applications. This way Firefox, LibreOffice, etc would be up2date but the system would be stable.

If you install Chrome on an LTS by the way, it will come with the Google repository and be always up2date.

> although AppImage doesn't have a concept of automatic upgrades

It does: https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageUpdate

Thanks, I had no idea. I don't know how to update the AppImages I use except by downloading new AppImages manually.

I really really wish AppImages were embraced by more of the Linux Desktop community.

> although AppImage doesn't have a concept of automatic upgrades like Snap

And that's a good thing. If I wanted my system to force software updates on me, I'd use windows.

Users should always have the ability to control updates. Always.

I use snaps at work and they are damn slow at opening, insomnia takes a got 30 seconds to open and viscose takes 5-10.

I7 4/8 16gb and ssd. Laptop isn't a slouch

I think snaps magnify developer mistakes. These are probably really badly written nodejs apps.

I have tons of snaps and the only one that is really slow is Cura.

thanks so much for saying this. It has always baffled me. On a desktop I want to run up-to-date applications with a stable system, I don't want a feature freeze. Ideally the OS is a platform where software runs on, not in, with a standardised, backwards-compatible surface.

I'm only an occasional linux user as a developer, I never dove into the history or the design. Is there a particular reason why linux distributions couple the system so heavily with the application layer?

When I ran Gentoo Linux, a rolling release, I came to appreciate exactly what's going on in the Linux desktop ecosystem. I enjoyed the new features that came with new releases of libraries and apps, but it was shocking to see how often library releases had new ABIs. Sometimes I could get away with running apps on old ABIs, but more often than not I would see stability issues, and those stability issues disappeared when I recompiled the apps. I learned that there are simply a lot of improvements happening at every layer of the system, all the time, and there is no one in charge.

The proprietary solution to that instability is to appoint people who ensure ABIs don't change. Microsoft is a great example of that strategy. Many apps made for Windows 3.1 still run today on Windows 10, almost 30 years later.

The typical open source solution to ABI instability is to freeze library ABIs and build all the applications on those temporarily frozen libraries. Applications are built for a particular release. While it would be possible to keep updating the applications during the release cycle, it appears no one has yet figured out how to do that economically.

An interesting exception to the rule is web browsers. Firefox and Chromium get regular feature updates in major Linux distributions. That's probably because browsers have a very large attack surface, yet people use them all day long, so they deserve extra attention from software distributors.

I think this is a very reasonable complaint from a user. I get a lot of arguments against thing like this from an admin and os perspective.

In any case Things like ostree and flatpak seem to be heading in this direction.

There are snaps and PPAs for this.

At least the PPAs are actually a better solution than a platform like Windows (whose "system" is separated from "application"), where you download binaries for upgrades, since you have visibility of the source code and build process.

I have around two dozen PPAs for the software I need to keep up to date. In the past, I used to upgrade Ubuntu on every release; now, I barely do it on every LTS.

As a quasi-fanatic Linux user, I can say that the one thing I envy from Windows is installing things the Windows way.

Half of the time, PPAs don't work. Snaps and Flatpaks are a step forward, but they still require a central server for fetching dependencies.

AppImages are good.

> Half of the time, PPAs don't work

I don't believe this, and I suspect you're doing something unorthodox with your apt sources (it wouldn't be the first time I hear a story like this).

PPAs build from source on a vanilla platform for the given configuration, so they're guaranteed to have standard output (binaries etc.) and dependencies. When there is a problem with a certain configuration, such build won't be available to the user.

Can you list the PPAs that don't work?

I hate PPAs, and the entire repo model, because it's just so much overly complicated bullshit for a simple task. And they don't cover everything.

Example: recently I had need of the of the DOSBox debugger, which you need to enable at compilation. On Windows this was as simple as finding some zip file from someone who'd done it and extracting the executable. On my Lubuntu system though, it wasn't in the repo for my version, nor was there a PPA. It was, however, in the very newest repo for Ubuntu and required up to date dependencies and I didn't want to upgrade my perfectly working base system.

Ultimately I had to manually download the package and its dependencies, extract their contents, and use LD_LIBRARY_PATH and the like to get it to run out of a self-contained directory.

That's what's fascinating to me. All the technology is there to distribute portable self-contained applications on Linux, but basically no one does it, or they pull a flatpak and still tie it into the horrifically silly repo model (and still aren't portable!). Only AppImage makes any sense, but hardly anyone embraces it.

There's an interesting project from Fedora recently. I haven't used it yet, but I'm really curious to try one day: https://silverblue.fedoraproject.org/

It seems essentially to be what you want - separation of "system" and "apps". An immutable containers host with custom things running on top.

I don't think I've seen any software for many years that would target the latest non-LTS release. If anything, it's more typical that proprietary apps fall out of date and require obsolete packages from an LTS that's no longer current.

> The way Linux distros have no conception of separating "system" from "application" ..

That's a novel concept if you don't mind me saying so ;]

This is working well with nixOS: have a stable channel for the system and the unstable channel for the user.

Wake me when I don't have to learn a new language to use it or compile anything from source.

If you want immutability with a normal distro, like Ubuntu, use Darch.

https://godarch.com

With a very brief look, it seems like I still have to manually putz with a text configuration format (learning a new language) the same way I would with Nix.

The configuration is a shell script with regular "apt install" commands.

There is a config.json for defining inheritance only.

edit: Here are my recipes: https://github.com/pauldotknopf/darch-recipes/tree/master/re...

The secret to making this more bearable is to install your OS on a partition separate from /home - put home on it's own partition (ideally, different drives).

I did this - and it saved my bacon recently.

I had a 14.04 LTS install, from around the time that that Crunchbang "went away" (just before Bunsen and CB++). At the time, it was my upgrade (completely new system). I decided to make it look as close to CB as I could; in a large part, I was very successful and happy with the result. But when I installed the OS, I decided to put in on an SSD (with certain partitions done as ramfs, so as not to kill the SSD). My /home went on another drive.

All was good and happy, but over time, things became more and more difficult to get newer software, etc. Over the years I really buggered my system; the nearly final blow was doing a "hand-upgrade" to the latest gcc so I could get certain features needed to compile some stuff for a Udacity course I was taking (also got CUDA installed and working for that course as well). Doing this upgrade, though, ended up breaking a portion of the standard "upgrade" process to the point where it would fail if I tried to move to say, 15.04 LTS or similar. Even simple installs of software from the repos would sometimes throw errors in the logs. It was really messed up.

Then one day last year, I decided to try to upgrade my NVidia drivers, and in the process fubar'd the whole system; all I could do was land to a console. Ultimately, I ended up switching over to the FB drivers just to get X back so I could do some research easier with a browser, and to see what I could recover to. I decided that since my /home was still ok - that I would attempt to just upgrade the OS and see what happened pointing /home at the old drive.

So - I bought a new SSD and pulled the old one (so I'd have something to fall back on), and then tried out a variety of distros to see what things had gotten up to in the years I'd been away. I had considered just moving to Bunsen, but as I started to think about things, and research stuff, I decided that I wanted something less compact.

Ultimately, via a series of steps which I won't delve into, I settled on Ubuntu Budgie 18.04 LTS.

The install went perfectly, and it had no problem picking up my old /home partition and such; I ended creating a new user instead of going through the rigamarole of trying to get the old user and such all configured with the login system (I've been there and done that, and it's a damn pain); besides, that also allowed me a "backup" of my old user directory in /home - a good thing, I could move over what I wanted as I needed it or such, and keep the old one around for a while.

It turned out to be a fairly easy and painless upgrade. Since then, I've decided and stuck with the idea of not using any software that isn't from a repo, or .deb file or such. No more compiling from source and wondering where/what I have on my system. Instead, I either do without, or install it on a VM, or build a .deb package myself, or try a snap or appimage, etc. Basically, I'm trying to keep my system clean and "uncontaminated" so I don't fall into this issue of a broken upgrade system again.

Now I need to see if Ubuntu Budgie 19.04 LTS is available yet - when it comes out, it's supposed to have all the newer features of the latest Budgie desktop; I had played with that and the distro (I forget the name), but I didn't like the package manager that distro used; it felt too limiting since most things out there are distributed as .deb or .rpm packages, etc.

Except that these changes will eventually be part of 19.04 LTS and then what? As someone who stayed on 16.04 LTS until apt-get update started reporting "can't find respository, ignoring" on the Canonical servers, I can attest to the fact that this strategy only works for so long :-).

There is no 19.x LTS, next LTS release would be 20.04.

Which itself is not obvious to many users. I made the mistake of installing 17.04 and it was a major headache to upgrade it after support was dropped.

I don't remember how long it's been the case, but these days LTS is the first option that they show you, and it's clearly marked as such: https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

LTS releases also don't offer upgrades to non-LTS versions unless you explicitly enable that via the "Software & Updates" tool.

My first Ubuntu install was 8.04 LTS - I'm pretty sure it was made clear then how it worked and that it was a more preferred install for "stability-over-time" reasons.

It was also a revelation to me - easiest install ever. Prior to that I was running some version of Mandrake (and prior to that, Woody).

I've been running Linux in some form or another since around 1995; I started with Turbo Linux 2.0 (ok, ok - my first Linux was Monkey Linux over DOS, but it was more a plaything). I'm not unfamiliar with the intricacies of installing Linux (and I've compiled my own kernel before just to get certain things working - did that for a 486 laptop just to get everything on it working - sound, modem, PCMCIA, ethernet card, video, etc).

Being able to just "point and click" - while Mandrake allowed it, and SuSe also to an extent - it wasn't anywhere near as clean as what Ubuntu allowed for. I've pretty much stuck with Ubuntu since then (though not with their wm/desktop - blech at times).

The Linux world has a lot of conventions you just 'need to know about' in order to navigate. It works very well for experienced people, but it isn't helpful for newcomers. When I was first starting out I didn't understand the versioning system or what it meant. Were releases named something like "Ubuntu Standard 18.04", or "Ubuntu Preview 19.04" it would have helped clarity. LTS doesn't mean anything to average people.

Small things like would help me convince family members to switch

> Were releases named something like "Ubuntu Standard 18.04", or "Ubuntu Preview 19.04" it would have helped clarity.

They should be just “Ubuntu 18.04” but “Ubuntu Preview 0.1810”, “Ubuntu Preview 0.1904” etc.

The non-LTS releases are really not for everyone, and should not even attract the normal users with the "bigger" number. They should really warn the "normal users" that only 18.04, 20.04 are somewhat "safer" for them (I've personally had significant problems with 17.10 which used "wayland" as default even if a lot of applications just didn't work correctly under it, then 18.04 thankfully changed that default. And even 18.04 had initial issues which were removed only some months later -- so who wants less issues shouldn't install 20.04 before, let's say, September 2020).

I've also actually tried to keep up with upgrading every 6 months, and it's... such a waste of time when something breaks... and it will. Once the breakage was such that eventually the answer was "oh, you upgrade in place? We don't test it much like this, you should back up your home partition, install clean, copy back your home partition, then it will work."

That being said, given that I haven't paid for it, except with my time, sometimes the price is right. But sometimes, once can actually decide to trade money for the time spent debugging the OS... unless it's just about programming. Linux has some advantages there.

Additionally, to me it seems that KDE is still easier to use, so most users should start with Kubuntu and only LTS.

I split my /home partition off from the root - separate drives, in fact. This helped save my bacon (I posted elsewhere here if you want to read about it). Basically, it allowed me to "upgrade in place" by using a new drive for the OS, after I totally fubar'd my 14.04 LTS (long-in-the-tooth) system...

Ubuntu could try to make things clearer - but one would think that "LTS" would be clear enough. "Long Term Support" - and they give enough other warnings about things...

I've been running Linux in some fashion since 1995; if installing Ubuntu isn't easy enough, I don't know how you could make it much easier (that said - my latest install was Ubuntu Budgie 18.04 LTS - and that was probably the best install experience I've ever had).

> The Linux world has a lot of conventions you just 'need to know about' in order to navigate. It works very well for experienced people, but it isn't helpful for newcomers. When I was first starting out I didn't understand the versioning system or what it meant. Were releases named something like "Ubuntu Standard 18.04", or "Ubuntu Preview 19.04" it would have helped clarity. LTS doesn't mean anything to average people. Small things like would help me convince family members to switch

Are you posting from some parallel universe, I've sat Windows users down in front of this Ubuntu desktop and they can't tell the difference. What's complicated about clicking on 'software Updater'?

While I understand what you're trying to say; Software updater isn't available pre-install. The context of the quoted post seems to be based on the pre-install experience of choosing which version to install without previous knowledge of Ubuntu's versioning system.

It should be noted that while the website typically steers you towards LTS; that's only if you find your own way there and aren't linked to a specific image by someone else. I think it's entirely understandable why some people might get confused.

NinjaEdit: Also of note is people brand new to linux probably won't know anything about Ubuntu being based on Debian or what that even means, so the idea of Stable, Testing, Unstable is a wildly new idea to them.

> The Linux world has a lot of conventions you just 'need to know about' in order to navigate. It works very well for experienced people, but it isn't helpful for newcomers.

The Windows world also has a lot of conventions you just need to know about that aren't friendly for newcomers.

If you are dealing with the version number, it means you are installing the system. How many everyday Windows users do you think have ever had to install their own system?

You could take a non-advanced user, sit them in front of the first step of the Ubuntu install procedure, and I can guarantee you that they would make it to the end and boot into a perfectly working system. Do the same with a Windows install procedure, and if you are lucky they will make it to the end and boot into an absolutely useless machine that doesn't even connect to the internet because it's missing drivers. Now good luck sending your user on a drivers scavenger hunt over the internet. 30 seconds in they will have installed some ad-ware "Driver Doctor 2019 Express Deluxe TM" and will require a new install anyway.

The reality is that the Linux world today is really not bad at all. I would argue that Linux major distros today aren't any less friendly than anything else on the market. The article mentions Jason Evangelho's article, and I would encourage anyone who thinks Linux is not user friendly to go check out his articles and his Twitter feed. He also recently started a podcast called ChooseLinux, where they talk about the challenges and experiments in having a complete newcomer (himself) approach Linux from different angles (gaming included).

Go to ubuntu.com, try to download it and you'll get to this page: https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

- The LTS is the first one listed, on the top, and it is actually the best choice for anyone who doesn't know what to pick

- The meaning of LTS is explained pretty clearly on this page

I don't know who they could make it any more explicit.

Totally understandable. Basically, even.04 are LTS releases and odd.04 are beta/experimental/very early rc's.

wait... do all versions end in .04?

No, there are two releases every year; a <year>.04 in April and <year>.10 in October.

Ubuntu releases a new LTS release for the first release every two years. Ubuntu usually has two releases a year, one in April (.04) and one in October (.10). So 16.04 is a LTS release, as it was the first release in an even year. 16.10, 17.04, 17.10 were all regular non-LTS releases. 18.04 was an LTS release. 18.10 and 19.04 are regular non-LTS releases.

https://www.ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

16.04 is still supported for two more years. 14.04 support ends in 12 days (or longer if you pay Canonical).

https://www.ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

This page also shows a nicely presented table with Ubuntu versions and expected support dates:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

Slower is not the same as not moving. Long Term Support is not Infinite Term Support.

I think you mean 20.04 LTS.

Agreed, but in this specific case Gnome had some performance issues that are addressed by the 18.10 / 19.04 update that really help with quality of life. Hopefully 20.04 will be snappy enough that I can use the huge support window for longer.

I am a huge GNOME fan (the interface, the ideas behind it, the look). But I made my peace with the fact that I need stability and performance so Kubuntu 18.04LTS it is (edit: and Gnome hasn't achieved UI coherence yet despite being 10 years in the making,so...).

Performance issues shouldn't appear between LTS-1 and LTS. Ideally LTS should be the polished and stable version from all that came before it and not a rushed testbed for DE that aren't battle-tested.

Hmm. I run Xfce, and have all important key bindings explicitly written in one of its config files. For last about 10 years I just carried these files between machines, upgrades, and different distributions, and had all my binding, and most other desktop settings, intact.

Is something similar possible with Gnome? That is, once you explicitly configured something, even if your setting is the same as the current default value, would it be preserved?

That sound pretty nice. For the life of me I can’t figure out how to override certain key settings in KDE like “windows” key pulling up the kde menu. Gnome I think might allow that but then the other 99 other shortcuts seem hard coded. Much less have those changes persist for years. How does xfce commands interact with bindings in gtk/qt based apps? Can you set commands actions that work in say Firefox?

On a side note, Windows key in Linux should map to meta and behave like command key in OS X so I can use GUI commands without screwing up emacs/vim/etc. Super/Meta are all over historical Unix programs but modern x11/guis/distros seem to refuse to allow you to actually bind keys to them.

P.S. OS X has similar feature to xfce to setup key commands and have them just keep working across os updates for years. It’s easy to setup emacs like key binding for alt-f, ctrl-e, etc and have almost every text widget just inherit those commands. You just need to use the terminal/finder to set them.

> For the life of me I can’t figure out how to override certain key settings in KDE > like “windows” key pulling up the kde menu

Do this from a shell:

    kwriteconfig5 --file ~/.config/kwinrc --group ModifierOnlyShortcuts --key Meta ""

    qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin reconfigure

Pulling up the KDE menu was added at some point, but I also find it annoying. It's redundant with Alt+F1 too. I guess it's nicer for newcomers from Windows thought.

> Windows key in Linux should map to meta

That's what KDE does. But for emacs it's Super, with Meta on Alt. It's likely fixable, but I'm used to it now so just leave it like that. What's nice with KDE is that you can use the application window settings to force passing all keyboard shortcuts to the apps. So for example KDE shortcuts don't override emacs ones when emacs has the focus.

Thanks! That `ModifierOnlyShortcuts` works great for disabling the kde menu. It's annoying as otherwise the windows key is switched to the `alt` key for most things but randomly pops up that menu.

> What's nice with KDE is that you can use the application window settings to force passing all keyboard shortcuts to the apps. So for example KDE shortcuts don't override emacs ones when emacs has the focus.

Oddly I want the opposite, at least for 95% of the apps. That's where I find the MacOS command-key as a generally a superior solution. `Ctrl-F` and `Cmd-F` don't conflict.

As mentioned before on MacOS (OS X) you only need to add a couple of text files to the key-bindings subsystem to add broad support for "emacs like" keybindings to every (default) text field [1,2]. So shortcuts like `Ctrl-Y` does replace-yank, `Ctrl-P` does line up, `Alt-F` word-forward, etc. KDE has shortcuts for those but they don't affect Firefox or Chrome, etc. It's _really_ annoying now that I have the muscle memory for those basics Emacs ops, but can't use them in Jupyter notebooks or similar in Linux, or the email client, or whatever random app comes up. Sure the shell uses them, but typing a message in Slack doesn't.

I had hopes the "Pop! OS" people would do something similar to the OS X/Cocoa sub-system, but they seem to be stuck in the same mode of copying the inconsistent mishmash of Windows and old-school Unix shortcuts. Seriously, that one MacOS feature keeps me switching back to my MacBook despite having a much faster Linux desktop, bigger screen and all of that.

1: http://simonganz.com/2013/06/add-emacs-key-bindings-to-mac-o... 2: http://ttscoff.github.io/KeyBindings/

How well can you control your xfce desktop with keyboard shortcuts? One of the main reasons I use gnome is how easy it is to avoid touching my mouse.

Outrageously easy. I just discovered its full tiling ability in start->window manager -> Keybard tab, then scroll to "tiling". You can tile a window to left, right, top, bottom, top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right. Alt tabbing works just like windows.

I recommend using the Xubuntu distribution. It's has been much more stable with respect to the UI: https://xubuntu.org/

The Xubuntu has significant drawbacks, which need to be considered.

Primarily, they have very low resources (and/or skills, it's unclear), which is a problem, since resources need to be distributed between bug fixes, improvements, and chasing library updates (see: GTK3 updates).

A few days ago I've booted the 19.04 beta Xubuntu live image, and it was showing minuscule fonts on a 3000x2000 screen. This is a bit embarrassing for a stable DE.

I don't discourage it in an active way, but one should consider it very carefully (there are alternatives nowadays, that are equally lean, but more stable and flexibile).

Not sure about 19.04. But 18.04 xfce runs great on my 40 " 4k monitor/Samsung tv

I no longer bother with Alt-Tab, I just use jumpapp[1] to switch between windows quickly.

[1]: https://github.com/mkropat/jumpapp

Funny, I do the same, but without a separate app: pressing Super+1 does that for the first application on the launcher, Super+2 for the second one, etc. By default.

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