Canonical releases Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster
canonical.com
canonical.com
> Updates for running snaps download in the background and are applied automatically when the app is closed.
Boom, that's a big one.
> Users and administrators can now pause automatic updates of specific snaps as long as desired.
What, wow.
Something tells me the usual critics still won't be satisfied, but these are both a big deal and tell a story about listening to the improvements that were desired by users.
> Ubuntu 23.04 includes GNOME 44, delivering further usability improvements with a focus on new quick settings options for bluetooth device management and dark mode.
Not a small change...
> The Firefox snap also benefits from significant performance gains on the Raspberry Pi with hardware accelerated rendering.
Q: Is this limited to Raspberry Pi, or not so much?
The Steam changes also seem like potentially huge conveniences to me.
Nice job Ubuntu team! Satisfied user since 2004 here; I do switch between the various buntus (kurrently Kubuntu) & love to discover other distros too.
I was thinking back today...Ubuntu was awesome to me when I Photoshopped and Netflixed in Windows in 2009 [1], played with various hardware & learned to stream video to some of those devices on the WLAN, like my n810 [2] (does VLC encode & stream the given RSS feed at this point in time? That was part of the experiment...), and got really into creating my own journaling and notetaking methods for life-improvement purposes and extreme weight loss [3] in recent years. It's supported everything I wanted to do and has effectively run my local business admin & creative this whole time as well.
Being a Linux enthusiast since the late '90s, this is way more than I would have dared hope for! Very happy to reflect on all those experiences.
1. https://www.friendlyskies.net/images/435t.jpg
Critic here. apt is still handicapped and snap is still being pushed down users' throats for profit. Improvement of undesired change resulting in less user control than the state before undesired change is an act of pulling the wool over people's eyes. snap is an unfriendly garbage with which you never know if you should use `--classic` without trial and error. Doing small fixes to this garbage doesn't fix the fiasco that handicapping apt to push snap was.
- Chrome Stable - 112.0.5615.137
- Debian Bullseye (stable) - 108.0.5359.94
- Debian Bookworm (testing) - 112.0.5615.49
Most people I know who run Debian for personal desktops uses Testing, not Stable. Vice-versa for servers.
https://wiki.debian.org/Chromium
https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/c...
- buster 90.0.4430.212-1~deb10u1
- bullseye 108.0.5359.94-1~deb11u1
- bullseye (security) 112.0.5615.121-1~deb11u1
- bookworm 112.0.5615.49-2
- sid 112.0.5615.138-1
I think I downloaded the installer from Google and I got this
deb [arch=amd64] https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main
a) ubuntu had newer packages
b) ubuntu had a much nicer installer
c) ubuntu had nice defaults/polish on the ui and fonts
Maybe Debian has changed since, but that's why I'd been hesitant to install it in the past.
Debian 12 is newer than 22.04 right now, and probably about the same as Ubuntu 23.04. It's in hard freeze, and soon to be released though.
The Debian live DVDs are using the Calamares installer now, if that's more your style. Debian's normal installer is still the same as it always was.
Debian is still more default, you set it up for yourself than Ubuntu. I don't like Ubuntu's defaults, but I know what you mean. GNOME's defaults are better now, if that helps out.
For b/ I don't install my OS often enough that it matters that much to me (I think on a laptop I went from Ubuntu 9.04 to 18.04 without ever re installing)
These days I like old and stable and use Debian stable + backport (mostly for kernel) even for desktop, and I'm really happy :)
I am interested to see how they will fare in the long term as ubuntu moves farther and farther away from debian though.
Switching to a new OS isn’t something that’s either easy or a decision that can be made lightly.
That said, I'm on Fedora as a daily driver and it's pretty good.
The package manager is the installer, and the package is the archive to install. This seems ridiculous
Unless you are paying for Ubuntu, there is little point complaining. Change distro if you don’t like what they are doing - there’s plenty of choice out there.
Alternatively pay for Windows 11 and get way more advertisements!
Oh, ubuntu beem making decisions that many users think make things worse since it was first released
and yet it's still quite popular
Give it a few years and they will switch to Flatpack.
As a current user of Ubuntu (and someone who has only defaulted to Ubuntu from the day Shuttleworth shipped a set of like 10 CDs for me to install Ubuntu), I hope this isn’t Canonical’s take in this situation.
Automatic updates and replacements while using the app was egregious behavior by default, and the fact that users couldn’t turn it off for years is not something that is resolved by them fixing it after users suffered with it for years. The fact that they introduced it without an off switch, something that even Apple, which is the ultimate control freak still provides on iOS, the ultimate corporate control freak platform, is not something to be proud of.
The question it raises is what insane settingless default Ubuntu might push onto its users next. And fixing it years later does not answer that question at all.
The only thing it does is Ubuntu admitting that they were wrong after spending years pretending otherwise. Something they’ve also done with other insane decisions, such as Mir, for example.
Yes. It's still a turd under the polish.
I'm curious about who gets excited about and uses these non-LTS Ubuntu releases. It seems to me that the five-year LTS offering is the main reason to use Ubuntu, if you want stability and don't like Debian and don't need to pay for RHEL. If you want fresher, why not Fedora or an Arch derivative?
Moving to LTS later on as an experiment was extremely stable but I had to ask how much stability I really needed, as the excitement with my desktop was waning. :-)
Want a recent kernel ? Ubuntu is relatively good at that. Want software that's more or less up to date, without needing the bleeding edge ? Their repos are good at that. Not in the repos ? You can probably add-apt-repository something and you'll be good to go. Need a reliable DE ? Gnome is fine. Hate Gnome ? It's alright, there's a KDE and Xfce version too. What's that, you want snaps ? Yeah, it's there. Flatpaks ? There too. Is more or less Debian compatible, which is pretty much the only distro you can expect people to properly package for ? Gotcha. Weird setups like Optimus that end up being broken in most places ? Works just fine. Proprietary nvidia drivers ? Sure.
I'm done fucking around for hours getting Arch to not be crap, or Fedora to not use fucking pacman, give me apt. I just want a work distro that will handle 99% of what I throw at it without any issues.
why might somebody not like Debian?
We can't change all of our platforms as quickly as Debian retires old releases. Especially not while also doing our other operations work. In some cases we can just lay down the new OS and run Ansible and we're good, but in other cases porting to new OS releases can take months of effort.
I expected the answer to the parent's question to be Ubuntu's support for non-free things out-of-the-box.
I personally mostly stick to LTS and then add any package via nixpkgs where I either want the absolute latest version or want some sort of decoupling from the distro package manager but still not build on my own.
(I loathe snaps, but they do mostly work IME)
nodejs deb, there wont be errors.
weird snaps.
Sure maybe they're great if you're dealing with it all day, but to I have to Google which version is newer half the time. Or sit there and sing the alphabet song to myself cause I forget if h or k comes first.
Wasn't a problem when doing OS stuff with servers every day, sure.
Slight tangent - is 22.04 in a good place as a daily driver? I know it's an LTS release. Mostly recalling concerns around wayland and zoom playing well together. Running a thinkpad t15 gen 2 if that helps.
Note, I don't generally take the upgrade path and install from scratch before migrating my home folder & cron jobs and all that. Apt-clone can help as well.
The sole caveat, not all of my Steam library has been ported to Linux. Other than that, I hardly ever boot Windows on that machine anymore.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LunarLobster/ReleaseNotes
(Can’t see Canonical’s site behind the tracking popup.)
For AAPL investors - every version after that is more "significant", especially after OS X was renamed to macOS and dark mode was used to keep nose-y media out of anti-privacy changes like user being informed what is "shared with Apple" instead of being asked whether anything should be "shared with Apple".
Downhill after that - children are used in hideous manner by Cook to invade users' privacy, like scanning and profiling their files as a pretense of looking for child porn. I find Cook's use of child porn argument to spy on all users absolutely disgusting.
I want to pay for my Linux.
I’d write a wishlist but anyone could write another one, but I’d take any OS that convinces me to pay $300 a year.
I’d pay for anything as nice as macOS (with the old control panel). I pay that price for my IDE and an OS is worth way more, open-source at that, which actually advances humanity. Linux is the VIIth wonder of the human civilization, a demonstration of human selflessness, as opposed to Windows, Linux will be here in 50 years becauE OSS is a donation of code to our children; Also no human construction has ever been so widespread across the world and even on other planets (Linux is powering the helicopter flying on Mars), of course I wish I could pay for… for a Linux that made me productive, not like Ubuntu.
Also paying means it would actually receive good marketing teams.
Is this not the theory behind Red Hat?
You're welcome to use that $300/year to sponsor individual projects / developers.
Go for it: https://ubuntu.com/pro/subscribe.
It’s been systematic that each time someone says “I’d pay for a good linux”, they’re given the link as if to assume we’re not already paying. You forgot that I want a nice OS in exchange.
Moreover, I left Ubuntu. It’s software that I can’t be convinced to use even if it were free. Canonical’s choices (with Unity at the time, but also the mouse issue, and so on) are of the rare kind that they can convince someone to uninstall it and go buy 2x more expensive hardware to run macOS.
What’s missing is, I’d pay good money, but I don’t want to fiddle around with the OS. I’d pay for the betterment of the OS, but with distribs, if you pay, you’re still not the customer.
And I pay for Debian. But it’s not my desktop OS.
> It’s been systematic that each time someone says “I’d pay for a good linux”, they’re given the link as if to assume we’re not already paying.
Sorry, maybe I misunderstood what you said. You said that "you want to pay". "Wanting to pay" kind of implies that you don't pay today but you would if given an option. I simply thought you were being a jerk. Thanks for clarifying. No offence.
> You forgot that I want a nice OS in exchange.
Ah, special wishes. The guy next to you wants something that looks like ... beos. Or windows. It's all customizable. You know how it works because
> And I pay for Debian. But it’s not my desktop OS.
You don't want to, you already pay for some Linux distribution. Apologies, it's difficult to predict what you wanted to say when so much context is missing :)
Everyone has special requests, especially around the idea of having a decent UI that doesn’t make you lose heaps of time with Linux, and as I said, what Linux lacks is proper PMs and marketing guys who would sort and address these UX issues.
And fewer obnoxious mobs who just give you the link to pay up and ask you to shut up about your special requests.
That's... let's go with unlikely to happen.
All of those were pretty major changes and definitely not just incremental. And that is just top of my head, I probably missed lot of things. On the other hand, most gnome2 era releases are pretty much a blur in my mind. What to you made those feel more significant?
> addition of zfs, snap, livepatch, lxd, and dropping 32bit support.
It was our (my personal, actually) mistake to move from Centos to Ubuntu some years ago: plus another big mistake was not to feel it coming (the PRO move, I mean), even by reading HN daily! I figured it out only the day I saw, in the cli, the pretty explicit message, which to me sounded like:
* there are security patches available, but you don't get it until you give us 500$
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting
It is a good idea to install security updates from unstable since they take extra time to reach testing and the security team only releases updates to unstable