Ubuntu Desktop: charting a course for the future | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu Desktop: charting a course for the future

ubuntu.com

53 pointsjandeboevrie61 comments

Not related to the post, but related to the feeling:

I miss the dreams of two decades ago. It was like a cause to fight for, a bunch of hackers against a billion dollar industry. Actually, we already had support from part of that "billion dollar industry" but there was still a fight against antagonists. Every contribution was a small step, every new version, new improvements, a new program covering a feature we missed from some evil proprietary software... The points where we were ahead like security, stability and performance made every enthusiast user feel like part of great opus, a soldier in a somewhat silent war.

Fast forward 20 years, linux is now "the kernel that powers billions of end-users devices". We're still way behind on the desktop, but the "war for the end-user" has a clear leader. Many other markets were also taken entirely or partially: HPC, embedded, auto, entertainment, routers, servers, cloud... The thing matured. If you want to get a contribution in the kernel, you'll have to convince the "billion dollar industry" we seemed to be fighting against in another era. You could say they are on our side now, but I really don't know what difference it makes. Those teens of two decades ago should be proud of what was achieved and, I'm sure, many are.

The situation is good, stable, mature. Always a bit better. But the feeling, the enthusiasm, the hope... all that seems gone, and I sorely miss that. I'd love to have that feeling again. The feeling that heavy investments will be made, the feeling that the desktop is a good cause to fight for, that a small circle of hackers are willing to make something BIG.

Yes, I miss that.

a bunch of hackers against a billion dollar industry

What if this framing was holding us back the whole time?

That was definitely not holding us back. Rejection was not the weapon. The effort was to write the best software, not to kick the other side on the butt.

The "other side" did indeed act in probably unethical ways that hold us back. Legal threats, defamation campaigns, lobby... All that was used by "the other side" and that really did hold us back. The SCO scandal and Halloween documents are just very good examples.

With reagard to the "bunch of hackers"... well, those were just trying to write awesome software. And they did.

It's fine, you can still get the same feeling and experience working on mobile computing.

User-respecting mobile OSes and hardware are still as unusable as the desktop Linux of 20 years ago, the incumbents are not helping at all, and the stakes are even higher (users get their freedom violated 24/7 instead of only when they sit down to their desktop).

Every user I know who has left Ubuntu has cited snaps as a push factor. And their only mention of snap in this post is to say that they are fixing a regression from native Chromium? Tone deaf.

But what is the goal of the distro? If the goal is appeal to every user, then they should remove Snaps. But what if the goal is to appeal to casual users only?

Flatpak is probably less buggy than Snaps for casual users.

Really? Can you provide citations for that?

I went looking around the web to understand why people dislike Snap in the first place. The top reasons cited on Reddit are:

(1) "Controlled by Canonical, not an open format" (This seems to be a mis-explanation of the complaint that the Snap server itself, which Canonical runs, is closed-source. As though a Snap server would be hard to create, it's a simple CRUD webapp) Anyway, this in no way causes problems for the "casual users" I mentioned, so irrelevant (unless the people who claim that closed-source software is invariably hopelessly buggy compared to open-source are right, that is).

(2) "Ubuntu reinvented the wheel, Flatpak was fine" But does that affect the "casual user" in any way? People are still going to package software for Snap. The casual user isn't going to miss a minute of sleep over their packages coming from a store that existed after a perfectly-good store already existed. It's just not top of mind at all.

(3) "Ubuntu did a bad job designing the system. You have to close Snap apps to update them, but the updater doesn't have a friendly UI for killing apps so they can be updated, which just confuses the average user" (This seems valid. Flatpak updates the app in the background and the new container isn't launched until you quit the app and reopen it normally).

(4) "Forced updates" (This is actually a positive for most casual users, who don't want to think about updates, they just want it to happen).

1A. Its a negative because it imposes both a third parties control on global open source software or possibly worse the control imposed by the parties country of residence. Literally the only reason one would keep in closed source is to profit from designing the system in a fashion that is disadvantageous to others.

For instance if it works like channels its virtually impossible to charge a percentage like Apple's app store because people will just publish to a free channel, every distro will include the free channel, and users will just ignore the paid channel. Consider the paucity of software on the Mac app store vs the iphone app store.

1B. There will never be an open source Snap store backend because it would both be more work than you imagine and continued work to retain compatibility of both front and back. If you try you will most likely end up with something that sometimes work sometimes fails and takes a full time maintenance. You may as well call it "snap but shittier how I burned 200k figuring out how moats work"

2. The problem isn't merely re-inventing the wheel its reinventing it for no reason and doing it poorly then not integrating it in a fashion that makes it easy on the average user. The casual user of ubuntu may end up end up needing traditional packages, snaps, flatpaks, ppas. If I understand correctly the current state of software management they can easily install both traditional and snap packages but will have to turn to additional cli tools to integrate ppas and flatpaks.

Arch with the AUR enabled provides funny enough an easier and simpler experience.

3.Agreed

4. The is a positive wherein new versions never fuck things up or remove features that users rely on. This doesn't seem to be the current state of play and pinning a version or launching an older version seems to be table stakes for dealing with flawed software.

Snap is a resource hog. My server is on a constant load of 2+ because snapd is doing something. It is impossible to debug what it actually is doing. The only snap installed is lxd and certbot. Laziness is the reason I have not yet replaced those.

Putting lxd/lxc in snap also baffles me. Layers upon layers of abstraction and virtualization for no reason. But that's a different story.

The "if you're going through hell, keep going" strategy. I don't see any way out for Ubuntu; it's too late to cancel Snaps and also too late to fix the architectural problems.

Why is it too late to change? They replaced Mir with Wayland, for example; why not replace snaps with flatpak?

Out of interest, what have people moved to? I'm a pretty happy Ubuntu user (and the Snaps issue doesn't really bother me personally), but I'm curious if I'm missing out on something better elsewhere?

My distro-hopping ended at Fedora Silverblue.

For me, ArchLinux. It was more painful at first (worried about installing it the first time), but the other side of the coin is that I understand my system much, much better. ArchWiki is a jewel.

And yeah, it was because of Snap.

I ironically get the most stability out of arch. Like you said, you front load a lot of the effort. Tweaking, setting up important packages, etc. Once that is done, as long as you update it really gets out of your way. Occasionally something will break and there will be a notice on the front page of the arch site.

Ubuntu suffers something that effects windows really badly. In an attempt to polish, you obfuscate a lot of moving parts. When one of those parts break down, it becomes far harder to repair.

I also understand the irony of wanting people to switch to Linux then being against a polished distro.

I've used ubuntu server for over a decade. I moved servers to debian and enjoyed it. My laptops have always been Arch.

Fedora, Debian, Arch seem to be common replacements.

I have two laptops, one with mint/x11/cinnamon that is working well, quite happy with. Another with fedora/wayland/kde and am mostly happy, although synergy/barrier doesn’t support wayland(may not be possible) which is a big problem on my desk. :-/

I moved two startups to Debian Stable.

Ubuntu Snap wasn't the only reason, but one of them.

I've also been a happy Ubuntu user for a long time, but with the direction Canonical is going, it's become pretty evident that sooner or later I'm gonna have to move on.

I recently gave the new Debian a try on my laptop, and I've been happy with it so far. I've also been pleasantly surprised that it's noticeably snappier than Ubuntu for some reason.

My main machine is still running Ubuntu, but when the time comes to reinstall or upgrade, especially if the snap situation becomes even worse, I will probably switch to Debian entirely.

I used Ubuntu as my daily driver for 14 years. I'm now on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. A stable rolling distro plus automatic Btrfs snapshots out of the box.

Ditto for me, except, it was only around 1.5 years on (K)Ubuntu before I got fed up and left. Tumbleweed is such an amazing distro; I don't think I'll be distro hopping for a very long time, if ever.

After distro-hopping for years, while still also using Windows for gaming, I have settled on Mint Cinnamon on my two circa-2010s laptops and the same on my new-ish Dell laptop at work (nothing we do requires Windows).

I gave away my gaming computer to a teen whose mainboard broke. I don't miss Windows one bit.

May I ask how are you feeling about your trackpad on Mint? On my HP the scrolling acceleration is way too fast, one scroll and I'm at the end of the page I'm trying to scroll on. Mint does not provide any options to change trackpad scroll speed only trackpad movement speed.

My parents have a Lenovo yoga with mint and overall everything but the track pad are fine, diagonal move isn't smooth and seems discrete, I haven't been able to fix it by changing drivers and config over the holidays.

Interestingly, this doesn't show in live mode, only after install.

NixOS and never look back.

I used Ubuntu for many years, and I switched to Fedora about a year ago, and I've been really enjoying the experience.

I've moved to dumping binaries straight into /opt folders.

Honestly, this whole "if it's not a .deb it's a nightmare" mentality is baffling to me.

I can’t say I have left because of snaps, but I sure am close. When they work, they are great. If you have to debug or diagnose something? Forget it.

Even when they work I just can't handle the long startup times of most snap applications that are just instant without snap. Makes me feel like I'm running my system off a spinning disk again.

Snaps.. I would not have minded it so much where it not for the fact that Canonical is:

1. keeping the store part of it closed. 2. forcing the use of snaps on me.

Those two feel really off to me, like a poison-pill.

> Ubuntu Desktop is the most used desktop Linux distribution for gaming (when you include older LTS and interim releases grouped inside the ‘Other category’ on the Steam hardware survey)

Where do they see that? Opening the link they reference gives the following table:

"SteamOS Holo" 64 bit 42.07% +2.74%

"Arch Linux" 64 bit 7.94% -0.39%

Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS 64 bit 7.38% -0.49%

Freedesktop.org SDK 22.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 5.99% -0.03%

"Manjaro Linux" 64 bit 4.29% -0.08%

Linux Mint 21.1 64 bit 3.84% -0.71%

Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 2.97% +2.97%

Other 25.52% -4.02%

They're probably excluding SteamOS as not a desktop distro (very debatable), and it's not hard to see how including other Ubuntu releases from Other would push Ubuntu up at least another 0.6% to move above Arch.

A week ago I switched to Manjaro after spending the last 12 years pretty significantly on Ubuntu. While I did it for unrelated reasons, it's amazing how many minor niggles that I'd gotten used to on my Thinkpad laptop have completely disappeared:

* My wifi used to slow down multiple times a day, and speed up again after I turned it off and on.

* Right-click context menu in Firefox often failed to copy links to the clipboard.

* The file dialogs in Firefox became weird after an upgrade a year or so ago. I could no longer hit Esc to dismiss them. 50% of the time, pressing ctrl+o to bring up the file open dialog and continue spamming o's into it until I killed Firefox. Or it would spam ctrl+o's spawning ever more file open dialogs until I killed Firefox.

I blamed Firefox for many of these. But now I'm not so sure. Manjaro has been great.

I didn't realize the extent to which software can vary at all levels between distributions. Now I think of distributions like different places with different weather. If you don't like the climate in one, try another one (maybe just off a USB stick). It might be very different.

“ We are currently working on a highly experimental implementation of hardware-backed full disk encryption”

Why does Canonical always reinvent the wheel. Just ship ZFS or BTRFS please.

I think this is referring to using an encryption key from the TPM so that you can get to a login screen without having to type in your encryption password. (And your login credentials would then unlock your encrypted home directory).

Is that not already possible with systemd-cryptenroll? Would be nice if they can make that accessible to a standard distribution, it's been standard on Android, Apple and Windows for so long now.

The top comment only quoted part of the sentence... This is what they snipped out:

as an option in the Ubuntu installer

So yeah they'll probably be using systemd-cryptenroll under the hood, but just make it more accessible for end users.

It took them years to move away from Unity and unitD. They always reinvent.

Also Snap push is huge tun off for me. My next install will be Debian.

I liked Unity though.

What do you miss in Gnome that you had in unity?

heads up display (HUD) was a good feature that I haven't seen re-implemented as a an option out of the box in another desktop environment.

The first two things that comes to my mind:

- HUD/search via global-menu - You could find any option in menus by typing them (https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/01/hud-new-unity-feature).

- Menus in the top bar (like KDE/macOS), but also in the title bar of application (quite unique approach - https://ubunlog.com/en/ubuntu-14-04-menus-in-the-title-bar/).

I don't mind them doing stuff like this, hardware-backed disk encryption shouldn't take the massive amounts of time/effort that designing, building and maintaining a desktop environment or display server will.

I guess they need to say something other than "we're the systemd/dpkg/GNOME distro that everyone's familiar with".

If they just shipped vanilla GNOME and vanilla ZFS that would literally be a perfect distro.

> Just ship ZFS or BTRFS please.

ZFS has been an installer option since 20.04 and it's been working great for me.

https://ubuntu.com/blog/zfs-focus-on-ubuntu-20-04-lts-whats-...

Do you mean LUKS? Those fs aren’t encrypted by default.

I think BTRFS doesn’t support encryption yet. If it does, I should edit the Wikipedia page.

Maybe they will improve the LUKS user experience.

Ubuntu with it's push toward snap have finally let down ALL real users, the first move was unity.

So Ubuntu now is just a "goto" for newbies not anymore "something good for both expert and newcomer" so have a fate already depicted. Sorry.

NisOS probably will be the future Ubuntu in 4-6 years.

I agree that Ubuntu has problems, but I can't see NixOS ever replacing it; Ubuntu's whole thing has traditionally been that it's user-friendly, and especially beginner-friendly. NixOS is beautiful, but it's not an easy learning curve.

Going through the necessary steps to outline a course toward a stated goal, and focus efforts to achieve it just make sense.

I'm glad to see the Ubuntu Desktop project move in this direction - it strikes me as a mark of maturity.

Congrats!

So much negativity for this. I would like to say I appreciate the efforts they put in towards making an excellent developer environment. I've not found anything as fast and snappy (pardon) for development as well as light gaming. It's true they do have frayed edges, but all OSes do. As they said, their intention is to put their intentions on paper to hold themselves to it, and that is commendable.

What did he actually say?

What is the desktop going to be?

Seems like just a list of empty feelgood to me.

What is a moat of Ubuntu (Desktop) today? Don't say snap, please :)

Being the Debian-based distro that's willing to bundle proprietary drivers. For someone like me who doesn't want to deal with driver issues, Ubuntu generally* just works out of the box.

* Looking at you, Nvidia

Isn't there any PPA for Debian with proprietary drivers, for example for aforementioned Nvidia graphic cards?

Probably, but that's exactly the kind of research and juggling that I'm trying to avoid. The Ubuntu installer has just has a checkbox that says "please give me proprietary drivers".

Also, to be clear, my asterisk is that Nvidia drivers seem to be no easier on Ubuntu than on Debian (you have to seek them out), and for me they've often caused problems once installed.

The most stable solution to Nvidia drivers on Linux has always been "download the deb when you set it up, hope it was a "good" release, and forget about it for a year until something requires a newer driver.

It always felt like going through the distro's included stuff was a waste of time.

Debian relaxed their policy here for the latest release.

There is firmware in the main ISO, which means your WiFi might work. The Nvidia driver is an `apt install` away.

Either way, Nvidia needs to be installed by you on Debian or Ubuntu, and GUI vs CLI is no different to me.

That's good to know! Wifi has been the main dealbreaker, so I might give it a shot next time.

And yes, I was calling out Nvidia as the exception to "it just works" even on Ubuntu. I realize that wasn't clear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com