Lubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)
lubuntu.me
lubuntu.me
I have been using Linux for for almost 15 years now. Mint, RHEL, CentOS and most recently Ubuntu. For some reason, though, I can't understand all these variations in Ubuntu flavors. For example, other than the Desktop Environment, what else does Lubuntu offer that vanilla Ubuntu doesn't? Can't one just install the desktop environment on Ubuntu? Isn't this stuff modular, take in what you want take out what you don't?
So what exactly is Lubuntu's value proposition over Ubuntu?
It also has zram configured by default, if I remember right.
I've never used it, but unlike most spins of distributions, it seems to have some interesting changes to the base.
Lubuntu isn't really a "different distribution". The different "flavors" of Ubuntu are all the same distribution, they just differ in their default install and settings.
If you remove lxqt from lubuntu, install kde you can morph it into kubuntu.
apt install lubuntu-desktopNow, it's been forked and resurrected as LXQt, which uses the Qt framework (KDE faction) as opposed to GTK (GNOME et al faction).
It was a DE for when your 2003 laptop is so weak or when your neurotic minimalism is so hellbent that even Xfce feels too heavy.
Now, I guess it can also be a Qt-flavored Xfce.
(Edit: I see now that Lubuntu 20.04 LTS comes with Libreoffice, whereas 18.04 did not.)
Yes to both. I run Window Maker on Ubuntu to the exclusion of any other desktop environment, and it works. It's in the package repositories, and there's no barrier to making it your GUI.
The big difference is the libraries installed in the initial OS install: Ubuntu has the libraries required to support Gnome, Kubuntu has the libraries to support KDE, and I don't know what libraries Lubuntu has by default. But since we have dependency-tracking package management, if you install Ubuntu and then install a KDE-based application, the packaging system will install all of the libraries required for it to work.
Maybe they don't want to confuse the new users with choices they don't understand, and give them the most reasonable defaults they can.
Is quite a surprising note for an official Ubuntu flavor.
Ubuntu focuses its efforts on ill-advised efforts like writing its own compositor (Mir) and Desktop environment (Unity).
Currently, most work to advance the Linux desktop is focused on a new project called Wayland (Used by Fedora for last few releases), yet Ubuntu has decided to double down on X11, a legacy project that clearly has no future and has issues like screen tearing that are basically impossible to fix.
Another tangible example related to developers: On Fedora/Arch you can run docker containers without requiring root due to Red Hat's work pushing podman forward, however you cannot do this on Ubuntu/debian because they lag behind upstream
What was wrong with unity? Plenty of people preferred it.
Also Mir was ill-advised back in 2013 and was dropped in like 2017.
Wayland has been around as long and is only just becoming usable.
Or are you saying that Ubuntu should have funded Wayland development?
Any proof they're "doubling down" on Wayland?
If Ubuntu isn't pushing desktop Linux forward. Gentoo, Arch or Fedora sure ain't.
Also lol. Podman seems to be an alternative to docker. Why should I use that? Why isn't that ill-advised? Is it because Red Hat made it?
What's wrong with this?
See details here: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/02/21/podman-and-bui...
I'm not sure what you mean by Ubuntu doubling down on Wayland. They have no plans to migrate to Wayland.
Honestly it seems like a clone of docker selling the slight advantage of root less.
Which docker already does.
I don't understand why I should care that it's a Daemon. In fact that blog post says that they won't go into why it's bad. Just that they do things different.
In fact it seems like it's a "Not invented here" implementation from Red Hat.
Searching Hacker news there's not many posts on it. Seems like it'd be as silly as using Mir to run this in production.
Also on my doubling down, I misquoted you saying they're doubling down on X11.
There doesn't seem to be any evidence of this. I wasted time googling it and it looks like they decided not to use Wayland by default in 20.04 because of certain bugs they didn't deep acceptable.
But it comes with Wayland out of the box, and you select it on the login screen.
I'd never run Ubuntu on the server by choice, mind you, but servers are constrained by other considerations.
I see a lot of people in IT who don't directly do systems-related work (think of QA people for example).
Without Ubuntu they'd be either running mac os or windows.
Ubuntu lowers the bar of linux-on-desktop accessibilty by a lot.
For a lot of people it's okay not to have a good understaning og how all the components fit together.
I don't know how it is now, but many years ago it was a running joke that most Gentoo users hadn't the faintest idea of how anything worked, but felt "hardcore" because they could pass many command line flags to the build and felt they were "optimizing" their system -- actual gains were not demonstrably noticeable, but they "felt fast" -- and they had no understanding whatsoever of gcc flags for example. Experienced users had to patiently explain that no, you shouldn't pass that experimental flag to gcc or everything would break.
"Hardcore" Gentoo users believed that by "installing from source" they somehow magically ended up with a faster system. No empirical evidence, of course, just a heartfelt belief compiling source code was magical.
This kind of "hardcore" Gentoo users was very, very, very annoying. Users of Ubuntu were better off: they understood what they worked with regularly and didn't pretend to understand what they didn't need to understand.
I've tried one such "hardcore" distro once (Crux to be exact) and while it was fun for a while, I also wasted a lot of time. Nowadays, I just stick Ubuntu Flavor (am actually running Lubuntu right now) because everything works mostly out of the box. Yes, I know it has its own set of problems, but I have different priorities. I dont particularly care if I get labeled a noob for it.
I'm not saying everyone should run Gentoo, I'm just saying that there is a much more of a justification for Gentoo existing than Ubuntu.
Ubuntu just re-invents the wheel with a bunch of nonstandard stuff so Canonical can sell support see AppArmor, Snaps, Mir, Unity etc...
For similar reasons (stability), I always go for the current stable (although I've a couple machines on oldoldstable, because it takes a while to upgrade...).
i would assume that testing should be rock solid.
I never could bring myself to ask if they were ok with being down for 2 weeks if they needed to re-install. Say, in a case where they had an intrusion and didn't trust their backups...
Really, though, nowadays compiling everything, even compiling things for optimal performance, doesn't take that long. Your production machines shouldn't have web browsers, and without the C++ garbage behemoths on it, compilation takes like half an hour on most machines.
I'm not a Gentoo user, but it's kind of silly to act like it makes recovering substantially harder than any other distribution.
Another interesting point from these times: it was even then often written that the Linux and Ubuntu are better for the use of older computers compared to Windows. That wasn't true either. With every new version less of my hardware worked as expected. The memory demands only for the GUI installer were bigger than the demands of Windows, forcing me to attempt to install from the text mode, and still having the issues later. Windows just worked on the same machine (with the existing drivers).
I've also lived through my (other) old hardware breaking on Windows too: my notebook on which all the hardware worked as expected on Windows 7 was declared by the Windows 10 as "totally would work" and it totally didn't -- the Intel devices on it never got the drivers that worked on Windows 10, neither by Microsoft nor by Intel who simply stopped supporting them.
No OS is immune from the scenario (or even the company claims) "it will work" which than turns out not to be true with a new version.
Long story short, in this case, backup your /home, install from scratch. Backups are good anyway. Any other attempt will probably give more pain. Also don't expect the newest OS to always work with the old hardware. Be prepared for these kinds of events too.
For a real long term, there's Red Hat.
I pin my Debian machines to the "Testing" branch and "apt-get dist-upgrade" once a month, and I've never had a problem, except once or twice when NVIDIA drivers needed to be re-installed. It's worked great for me for 15 years, but YMMV.
The CPU/memory usage almost certainly has more to do with the software being used than with the distro. The Linux kernel and GNU system utilities can run on very low resource machines, but most "desktop environments," like GNOME, KDE, and even XFCE, are targeting up to date systems. IME, using old hardware usually means putting in some effort to find and configure software that will run well on it - I'm pretty sure it's the same on any OS.
I've personally had the same install across six Ubuntu installs in total and I know other people like that as well. Anecdotal experience but so is claiming Ubuntu's breakage ratio is higher.
"the Lubuntu team does not support upgrading from 18.04 or below to any greater release. Doing so will result in a broken system. If you are on 18.04 or below and would like to upgrade, please do a fresh install."
Note that 18.04 was also LTS, so whoever tries to upgrade from one LTS to another, will probably be able to start the process (like before) but at the end will with huge probability be better off just biting the bullet... and fresh install.
If the "people you know" upgrade faster then LTS to LTS they won't see a problem this time.
But being able to upgrade from one LTS to the next LTS is completely reasonable user expectation. I don't even want to try to prove that it will be broken this time.
The one I replied to said Ubuntu not Lubuntu. Big difference.
There are certain situations where a Debian upgrade will break a specific package - maybe due to upstream messing up really badly, or maybe due to some unusual way of configuring it. But in that case, the release notes that Debian publishes for each release would cover that particular problem for sure. Mistakes happen, and noone's perfect - but Debian tries to be, and they're very near that ideal in terms of ensuring your ability to upgrade your installation.
Personally, I don't think that Ubuntu is less perfect that Debian wrt. upgrade quality, it's just that (it seems to me that) the workforce is not as large, and that they also have other projects on their plate (not to say it should be that way or not, I'm merely trying to state the facts).
So if libreoffice depends on package P, and that one is not ready, is Debian going to simply drop libreoffice until next release?
At a very high level, it works like this:
New versions of stuff go into Unstable. When they've been tested a while they get pushed to Testing. Periodically Testing is frozen and branched into a new Stable release. If a package doesn't make it into Testing before the freeze then it's out of luck and has to wait for the next release.
For example, assume libreoffice 1.0 and libfoo 1.0 are in Unstable, Testing and Stable. If libreoffice 1.1 comes out and depends on libfoo 1.1, but libfoo 1.1 is broken in Unstable, then libfoo 1.1 and libreoffice 1.1 won't be pushed to Testing until the issue is fixed. If they don't make it into Testing before the release freeze then the next stable will ship with libreoffice 1.0.
After the freeze, when the libfoo 1.1 is fixed in Unstable, then libreoffice 1.1 and libfoo 1.1 will go into Testing and wait for the next Stable to get branched.
In order of stability from most to least.
LTS -> Bleeding Edge -> 6 month release cycle distros
Stuff like Ubuntu non LTS seems to break as much as bleeding edge but take longer to fix it. It's the worst of both worlds.
This is not tenable, really.
The things I change are all over the place. From say /var/lib/mysql to /usr/local/bin and of course various /etc things ... it's not enough to say "backup /home and wipe the rest".
A dose of a "normal-user"-hostility is kind of a given in Linux platforms, the best reflected by:
and sometimes it's, unfortunately, unavoidable for us when we are in the user's role to have to "just change as root that x y somewhere."
Long term, the goal should be to raise the awareness that there is a real need for most of the configuration to be easily transferable from the installation to the installation. But what we get instead is "just change as root wherever" and the containers for containers being run in the containers -- more bloat, but still not less demanding to maintain.
I really think Red Hat is not appreciated enough for their work on maintaining stability. The optimal solution will be when we have really stable platforms on which we will be able to easily and cheaply have recent languages, but also stable. Knowing how unstable practically a lot of programming platforms are, I am aware we're still not there. But... raise the awareness!
Arch is like the CI/CD analogue of operating systems. Small upgrades makes breakages much less common, and much easier to repair. This comes as a trade-off of less battle-tested stability than e.g. Debian, but if you're able to make small repairs proficiently then Arch is the way to go. I'd strongly recommend Arch on a personal computer - it makes a good OS for a pet (although Debian, because versioned releases are much more thoroughly tested, makes for much better cattle OS).
I wonder how's Arch in that regard. You speak about breakage less common, but there has to be some significant breakage from time to time: for instance, for a shift as important as moving from traditional sys-v init scripts to systemd, it must be expected that a lot of OS configuration related packages would break, unless every package maintainer is made aware that this change would happen, and that he/she has to prepare its package (if necessary) to that shift, AND that the shift only happens when everyone's ready. But Debian (and I suspect Arch as well) do not follow such a rigid scheme, and so there has to be breakages and fixes to follow.
When you install arch, you install each piece on-demand. So only the pieces you have chosen are dragged through updates.
my arch installations tend to be quite lightweight.
That may explain why you don't get that many problems.
If you start pulling in many different components, the set of potential interactions grows exponentially. And if you add to that external software, it easily becomes nightmarish.
I've seen other comments saying that they've been running Debian or what have you for years without any upgrade hickups, and personally I've never had that. The easiest way was always to simply remove as much as possible, start the upgrade, and then pull back whatever I removed, so that the system setup would correctly fall back in to place. And even with that, I sometimes get problems.
The main issue is probably not that upgrades are issue-less. The problem is perhaps the lack of cooperation between distros so that everyone could benefit from the experience others built along the way. But How does one organize that sort of cooperation?
Or maybe there's too much friction between distros and upstream developers?
But if you've made that choice, you will likely be more aware of what you're dealing with.
There are definitely valid reasons to go with big-upgrade-every-year-or-two kinds of distributions. It can make developing software that depends on other software easier, especially if you need binary compatibility. A book or article about that system won't be out-of-date immediately.
Personally I wouldn't mind a few spread-out glitches throughout the year compared to frantically trying to repair a broken system after a dist-upgrade and losing a weekend.
I have had a few glitches with arch, but I think they were mostly some manual intervention for signing keys and didn't harm the system.
But sadly I also really can not recommend it, to anyone who does not know english, nor the command line (or have someone close, who knows).
If you're not on LTS, then you should upgrade every 6 months when the OS tells you a new distribution is ready, and you'll be fine.
I accidentally deleted my desktop background once while I don't remember exactly which component failed, I remember my desktop wouldnt properly start. I think it was something about pcmanfm-qt (which would no longer start) being so coupled the desktop environment.
I have never experienced any odd behaviour or faults. It certainly is not the most beautiful desktop environment but it is stable and very very performant.
(This was using Debian + LXDE)
To me, it felt like they started believing themselves to be great innovators in an Apple model of "we know what's best for you, this is revolutionary. You'll take it and you'll like it. Witness our works and tremble." [1]
I may be slightly hyperbolic there, but I worked on minor bits of the gtk code base and the way some of lead devs were talking I found frankly alienating.
To be fair there were also practical reasons to limit customization for greater testing coverage and I think some of the changes were driven by RedHat's move towards being an enterprise vendor. But those changes in addition to the change in tone I was hearing was jarring.
In any case several efforts attempted to move forward with the earlier code base or at least with the earlier philosophy. And I found one that was near enough to ok.
[1] and eventually stuff like https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/05/open-letter-stop-gtk-the...
Whereas apple stuff generally just works on the desktop, is super polished and generally fast, gnome3 is cumulatively an amass of crap.
Which is very bad because gnome2 used to be very functional.
They tried to become Apple, but they are not.
They literally dumbed down the whole thing.
But maybe I'm overlooking something, so if somebody with a distro maintainance or third party appdev background could share why settling on snaps causes trouble or undue extra work or is less-than-optimal I'd appreciate it.
Can you please write who "everyone else" is?
(It was running 14.04, and that, I think, had a CLI installer with package selection)
Anyone know if 20.04 lets you install without LibreOffice and the like or have some tips on how to get to the old installer?
This is an old Xubuntu article, but describes the general approach for a minimal install: https://xubuntu.org/news/introducing-xubuntu-core/
Even in Windows 10 it's possible to more or less have the original behaviour after some tweaking.
In Linux, tree support comes and go in file managers. For me that's really infuriating. Programmers in charge of desktop environments wake up some day and decide that I shouldn't be working the way I've been working last 25 years and deprecate it. Not cool.
Edit: it seems PCMan got a qt version. It seems I'll take a look after all.
And I did give Xubuntu, Lubuntu and Unity an sincere chance.
For hardcore work sessions nothing beats i3wm productivity tho.