Ubuntu 24.04 Noble Numbat | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu 24.04 Noble Numbat

releases.ubuntu.com

180 pointsjeswin179 comments

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Looks like a no-brainer if you're on the Ubuntu treadmill.

Key differences versus the previous LTS version:

* Distribution packages built with additional security-hardening features

* Linux Kernel 6.8

* Gnome 46

* Updated utils and apps

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Users who train AI models on Ubuntu machines should wait until their ML stack (typically, Nvidia + PyTorch) is known to run without issues on 24.04.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40157645

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Source: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/noble-numbat-release-notes/39...

Asking genuinely, what causes Ubuntu to be more of a treadmill from say Debian?

Sorry, I don't understand your question. By "treadmill" I mean sticking to a particular distro year after year, upgrading regularly -- it could be Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, CentOS, etc. Unless you're constantly switching distros, you're on a treadmill. I wasn't comparing Ubuntu to other distros.

"Treadmill" is usually used pejoratively, e.g. hedonistic treadmill.

Thanks. Yes, you're right, sometimes "treadmill" is used pejoratively to describe forced upgrades that otherwise would be unnecessary. I was referring to the fact that we are all voluntarily installing security updates and/or improved versions of the software we use, year after year.

Fwiw i did not understand your original comment as pejorative, and thought it was a well done turn of phrase

FWIW, I did pick up the pejorative connotation at first, but then realized it probably wasn't intended that way due to the complete lack of other negativity in the post.

It's hackernews. I would recognize that this is in a joking manner

Oh I see. I interpreted your comment as if it were more of a treadmill than other distributions.

If you use the non-LTS versions of Ubuntu then you are expected to upgrade to each new version in short order, the previous version (23.10) is only supported until July.

Django has the same problem. You either have to upgrade all the time, or you have to jump LTS to LTS, which is also not advised from Django's perspective.

There are so many ways in which the Django upgrade process could be worse, and IMO very few ways in which it could be better. Not really sure how this is a “problem”.

I wish Debian was a treadmill with fixed release dates like Ubuntu has.

I mean it's not the same month every time, but it seems to be on a pretty stable 2 year cycle?

What benefit would that have? Even if new versions are not released on a fixed schedule, you don't have to upgrade immediately.

Migration scheduling and planning for total software lifetime. Everything is just smoother on a fixed cadence.

You can do a fixed cadence even if Debian doesn't though. Just every year, upgrade to the new stable if it is available.

Yeah, but now you have your own problems instead of pain shared by millions of other users. A lot of orgs on the same cadence is a great and under-estimated thing. I'm just sayin'

I don't get what you mean, actually. A lot of orgs upgrading simultaneously means that none of them have prior experience to look to. A staggered rollout of new software versions is often viewed as a less risky deployment method.

Whatever problems you will have, you aren’t alone. It’s fine to not prefer this. I do.

What makes you think you'll be alone on Debian? Plenty of people run testing. I don't mean to be argumentative, I simply cannot follow your logic.

I'm fairly sure I'm not insane. :)

For one, there are more people on Ubuntu. I believe, a large part of the reason for that, is the cadence. I don't exactly like Ubuntu and I decided to depart for Debian last year, I had had just about enough of Ubuntu quirks and antics. But I held fast for so long because of the cadence. You can set your corporate schedule on month == April && (year % 4) == 0 and be done with it, for the LTS releases. With Debian you have to be at least a little tuned in to current events. I don't like that, I have other things going on.

Ubuntu also has a cadence to the non LTS. So if you want to study ahead what could break, test your stuff currently deployed on LTS, on the latest regular stable.

This is my que to off on a tangent and remark that easy cloud and Kubernetes (oh dear don't get me started but it's also useful, so what can I say) has made whatever OS runs on the servers less important. But I still care for some things.

And I don't want to run testing. I like to keep just one step behind. Of course, not everyone can be like that or there wouldn't be any experimentation and progress, but there are plenty of other people filling that niche.

Thanks for asking in earnest.

> I don't exactly like Ubuntu and I decided to depart for Debian last year

Ditto here. Their adding advertising in the cli was the straw that completely broke that camels back (for me).

Wait, what is this?? I am on Kubuntu 22.04 and have never seen any advertising. I might need to pivot if the upgrade is going to hurt.

They are probably referring to the Ubuntu Pro (previously Advantage I believe) notices that appear when you login via SSH or do apt updates. They can be disabled/hidden anyway, but they are still conceptually invasive.

I have never seen them. Odd.

If you don't use the cli for updating systems then you might not see it.

At least, until they expand the advertising to other tools as well.

To let you know - you are not alone with such considerations and I completely share the point of massive scale makes sense and cadence makes sense for planning

Or run debian testing. It's what ubuntu is built from anyway.

> Looks like a no-brainer if you're on the Ubuntu treadmill.

It'll take forever for ML packages to upgrade. The Python/ML/PyTorch ecosystem is slow to move.

Good point! I'll edit my comment.

I'll be trying to get PyTorch working on Docker with 24.04 and an AMD card. Lets see how that works out.

I've been running my ML stack on Arch for the last six months and haven't had any issues so far. So perhaps not a big issue on a more stable distro like Ubuntu.

"Users who train AI models on Ubuntu machines should wait until their ML stack (typically, Nvidia + PyTorch) is known to run without issues on 24.04."

NVIDIA + PyTorch user here. No issues at all (w/ 550.54.15).

I'm here for the upstreamed Arc GPU support, lol. I could probably have made it work with 22.04 with enough poking but I don't generally like upgrading major versions anyway. I was actually checking earlier but it hadn't released yet, lol.

Probably jumping the gun anyway - it doesn't look like Arc has a release of the dev tooling for 24.04 yet anyway, no `noble` repo yet either.

I figured at least I could get passthrough working to a 22.04 container, couldn't get the intel_iommu to behave, looks like it was still getting sucked up by the parent OS despite my GRUB kernel options. Might need to try HWE on the VM host too, or maybe it's just a fact of life based on how the outputs are wired up on my serpent canyon NUC (headless might work better, perhaps?).

I'm actually fine if the ML stuff takes a bit, I kinda just want to play with GPGPU and I definitely want to play with the AV1 encoder.

I ended up bumping into the same issue that stalled me out before, it happens in both 22.04 HWE and 24.04, the step about installing the out-of-kernel modules is busted. Installing the i915-dkms can't be done at the same time as the platform-vsec-dkms and platform-cse-dkms, apparently? But I pushed on it a little harder, and it seems like it works if you run two separate apt commands.

I've got a couple of these weird environments, I need to set up a way to virtualize and passthrough them so I don't have to maintain actual machines for it. Not sure exactly what that looks like, maybe proxmox and some qemu machines in a pseudo-ESXi configuration or something. When I get around to getting the new disks in my NAS, I can also do iscsi/iPXE I guess (and I have optane for write cache).

Some of the other flavors/architectures are available now, too:

- Kubuntu https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/24.04/release/

- Xubuntu https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/24.04/release/

- Lubuntu https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/24.04/release/

- Budgie https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-budgie/releases/24.04/rele...

- MATE https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/releases/24.04/releas...

- Cinnamon https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntucinnamon/releases/24.04/rel...

- Unity https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-unity/releases/24.04/relea...

- Kylin https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/releases/24.04/releas...

- Alternate "Ubuntu" Builds https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/24.04/release/

The "new", reforged, Unity spin is very underrated.

It's actually a very nice DE, wish Ubuntu never abandoned it https://unityd.org/

That's slightly confusing, it is not this, right?

https://ubuntuunity.org/posts/ubuntu-unity-2404-released/

That is a flavor of Ubuntu with Unity as its DE. unityd.org is the website of the DE itself.

>Alternate "Ubuntu" Builds https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/24.04/release/

Including RISC-V, and ready to use images for many boards such as VisionFive 2.

I'm still torn about whether I want to stick with Ubuntu a little longer or move onto Debian/Fedora. I've been a happy Ubuntu user for a long time, but each package that gets converted to snap makes it harder for me to stay. I'm getting really tired of having to fight the distro and look for a bunch of my applications elsewhere to get a version that doesn't suck.

Give Fedora a try! If you already know a bit about Linux configuration and are not afraid of the terminal, as it's a tiny bit more hands on and blank than Ubuntu.

I switched about two years ago and it's the best Linux experience I've ever had and I do regret not trying sooner. No bloat at all. DNF is awesome. Flatpak > snap. The release cycle is a nice compromise. Really, I am in fucking love!

I did try it a couple times in the past, it just never quite felt like home. I don't know why, I couldn't give you an objective reason as to why I didn't like it. I probably should give it another try soon.

I guess, it's in a way boring and unexciting. Very in the middle of things. It's a "get things done" experience for me.

Once a debian... Also we've seen what Red Hat/IBM did with CentOS, they might pull something similar to Fedora, It's unlikely which make it very appealing for IBM

> they might pull something similar to Fedora

I don't think they could actually do that. They provide funding for Fedora's infra, but they don't make up the majority of contributors, and if you read through the actual governence model (note that the higher up the group, the less power it seems to have — the Fedora Council or whatever basically only exists to solve disputes that bubble up from lower, entirely community run and elected, groups), while Red Hat does have some influence/positions, they have far, far less power than the community just by numbers and also by who controls various things, and everything is also done by consensus to boot, so Red Hat couldn't just unilaterally change how Fedora works. At best they could withdraw funding (making Fedora less well-tested) and their people on the governing bodies, but it wouldn't amount to much. And Fedora is upstream from Red Hat Linux and CentOS and provides them with an utterly massive amount of labor and testing they couldn't hope to achieve on their own that they get by virtue of it being FOSS, so it would be a pure harm to them to shut Fedora down or make it closed even if they could, whereas the story is very different with CentOS and RHEL.

Agreed. The IBM acquisition of Red Hat, then the CentOS 8 (and onwards) shenanigans have made that entire Linux family unworkable to me personally.

Debian seems to be the remaining major family, and looks "good enough" to me. :)

Did using CentOS Stream screw you or you're just complaining for nothing?

[deleted]

I've been using fedora for the last year and a half and been enjoying it much more then when I gave it a try 9 years ago.

Not only did it get much needed improvements everywhere, but software availability has improved by a lot. The official repos has more software available than it used to and flatpak helps compliment it a bunch. But what sealed the deal was using distrobox to easily create containers based on any popular distros that integrate almost seamlessly with your user/session. There are gotchas and it's not meant for more casual users, but you can have pretty much any software available from other distros to supplant missing stuff on fedora.

Also RPM Fusion helps easily skirt over any copyright restricted software. It's fairly easy to install the full set of hardware accelerated video codecs for your hardware this way.

When I was younger, hands on felt like a good thing (we kinda had no options) and it let to learning a lot.

But, for desktop and being productive, specially now a days, the least I want is to be hands on with my system.

I kinda want something that’s mostly out of the way. Heck, when looking at platforms, depending on scale, I prefer something opinionated to something that lets me shoot myself on the foot 30k different ways.

It’s not that I don’t want to be able to tune it. It’s just that if I need to spend hours on that tweaking vs using it, there’s eventually a loss. I’m also not saying something that can’t be tweaked, just that if it has a set of best practices, let’s start with those vs trying to rewrite it all.

To each their own but I find Fedora upgrade cycle is just a bit too tight for my preference. Properly planned you can get away with yearly but it still feels like I'm due for a dist upgrade every few months.

I'm curious to try out Silverblue, though, where this shouldn't be an issue in the same way.

Why wouldn't you be able to upgrade yearly? N-1 is always supported until the next release so at worst you do a double upgrade once a year. Only 2 reboots are needed.

Anyway for personal systems I don't see the issue with upgrading every 6 months. The process isn't much different than regular updates. If you are wary of issues you can always delay the dist-upgrade of a few weeks so that any quirk not detected during beta is solved after feedback from the early adopters.

I have 2 personal laptops, one on silverblue, one on regular release with data synced. One shared laptop that is mostly used by my daughters, also on silverblue, and my professional laptop on regular fedora. I usually upgrade my 2 personal laptops on release week. The shared one however is only updated some weeks later because this is the lowest maintenance one and my professional laptop is usually upgraded the last, it usually stays in N-1 until the next release enter beta.

From personal experience, so far there haven't been any problems with dist-upgrades. Apart from DNF messing up bash/fish completions once, which was an easy fix.

Mind you, Fedora uses BTRFS by default, which means you could also easily do an incremental snapshot before any upgrade.

That's kind of the thing for me, though: Fedora is a very up-to-date, yet very reliable experience for me. It feels, functionally, almost as bleeding edge as Arch, but with much, much less tinkering and worries about upgrades. And again, DNF is my new favorite package manager. Incredibly powerful, but as intuitive as apt. (Whereas pacman is constant suffering, for me.) Check out the `dnf history` command, how neat is that?

Tho, I love Gnome and having the newest developments available is a huge factor for me personally.

Also, Ubuntu and Debian tend to do come with configuration decisions, which are somewhat unique. Eg. Arch-Wiki (best Linux documentation of any distro IMO) seems to be more often applicable with Fedora for me, since its more conforming to overall Linux developments and vanilla systemd. But that's mostly a feeling.

However, the whole licensing limitations and RPMFusion repo shitshow, are why I don't recommend Fedora to absolute beginners. Some common needs are not addressed in a friendly GUI way, yet, and require understanding of Linux internals. Fedora is a bit too raw for beginners, but perfect for programmers and sysadmins. Oh, and if you do updates through Gnome Software, it asks you to reboot, more often than Windows. Not a good first Linux impression.

Edit: I used "for me" too much, guess I wanted to indicate, I absolutely see how it's not for everyone and your objections are totally valid.

I went to Mint (and Fedora on a machine that needed newer packages).

Now that the LTS has been updated, probably all machines can use Mint again.

Mint always has a bit of a delay before their version of the LTS system comes out.

That's fine. I wouldn't install the source Ubuntu the first month either, as others have mentioned issues in other threads.

True. I was also surprised to read that the Ubuntu upgrade route from 22.04 to 24.04 won't be supported until the 24.04.1 release in august, which goes to show that the initial release is perhaps not the most stable..

I also moved from Ubuntu to Mint, and from GNOME to MATE. Been very happy.

The only time I got annoyed at Mint was when they recently changed the default mouse pointer into something that looks like a deformed marshmallow. So instead of a pixel at the end of the pointer, we get a fat finger. I don't understand the UX mentality that thought that this was a good idea.

It's easy enough to change, but every now and then, something clobbers my UI settings and I have to remember how to change it back to the mouse pointer that actually works as a pointer.

I totally agree, used to use Ubuntu Mate, presumably because I didn’t want to deal with constant regressions. But it kept deteriorating.

I personally use the DMZ White cursor theme which used to be a common choice, but is surprisingly hard to find these days. Not even packaged in Debian*. CADT strikes again.

Why not try PopOs? They don't ship with snap.

The major downside (for me) was Debian not supporting ZFS on root out of the box. :(

Now toying with the idea of using Proxmox on my main development system (R5950x desktop), as Proxmox is based upon Debian 12 and supports ZFS on root mirrored (and RAIDZ* too if desired) across multiple devices.

Would need to figure out PCI pass through for my Nvidia graphics card though. Probably do-able, but it's an unknown factor presently.

As someone that loves the cozy feeling of application sandboxing, I embrace snaps.

Firejail gives more control over the boundaries of the sandbox. So deb + firejail seems superior to snaps to me from a security perspective.

I felt the same way with Ubuntu. It was so frustrating. I was also considering moving to Debian or Fedora but a few years ago I ended up cracking the shits with Ubuntu and installed Mint for my daily driver just to finally move on and I've loved Mint and never felt that friction that makes me want to try other distros. I was originally intending to use Mint as a stop gap until I could be bothered with Fedora oops lol

It's got sane defaults with great configurability, and the familiarity (and popularity) that comes worth being Ubuntu based helps, of course. It has been great for me and all the people IRL who I have encouraged to install it.

I moved to Fedora (Xfce spin) for that exact reason and I've been incredibly happy for the last ~2 years.

The last straw for me was the calculator app being a snap. I was frenetically working on a thing, and suddenly opening the calculator app took ~15 seconds. Looked deeper into that, it (suddenly) was a fucking snap. Ubuntu developers had decided it was a good idea to mount a 500+ megabytes layer full of gtk shit in order to run the calculator. A fucking 600kb binary. And I was running a gtk based desktop environment anyway (xfce).

Nowadays I run Fedora on laptops (or systems where I prefer software abundance to stability) and Rocky Linux (basically RHEL without logos) on my home server.

I've kept myself far from Ubuntu and GNOME and stuff works and I'm happy.

Nice, just hope that canonical will lay off with the snap push. Otherwise looks really nice, will roll it out on my home machine today.

> Cloud images no longer preseed any snaps by default

Yes! Small improvement, but still.

They'll shutter Snap and adopt Flatpak in ~3 years.

No, unless flatpak will be able to do what snap does for Canonical for years.

Drive users away?

What's driving users away is not snap but rather Canonical's heavy-handed way of foisting snap on users that would make Microsoft proud.

... which on its own is one of the better reasons to ditch a distro.

Yeah this is exactly it. I don't really give a damn about snaps. But when I use apt to install something, and the OS silently installs a snap version instead, that's not acceptable to me. I'm not going to ever use Ubuntu again where I have a choice, personally.

>But when I use apt to install something, and the OS silently installs a snap version instead

Does `apt remove` remove the snap?

And then 'apt install firefox' or 'apt install thunderbird' installs it back.

Just like they wasted time and effort on Unity and shuttered it in favor of Gnome, and they wasted time and effort on Mir and shuttered it in favor of Wayland, and they wasted time and effort on Upstart and shuttered it in favor of systemd.

Canonical will fail once again, but only after jerking the community around for multiple years.

They didn't invest much into Upstart at all, and quickly announced a switch after Debian adopted systemd.

They still maintain Mir, as a Wayland display server.

Unity was one of the most popular desktop environments and brought Ubuntu users a lot of value over the years. It even influenced the design of GNOME 3.

Yeah I'm generally critical of Canonical for these moves, but Upstart is one I actually think was good and well done, as was their decision to move to systemd. Upstart was more pre-systemd anyway. IIRC Red Hat also used Upstart for a major release as well before moving all the way to systemd.

I didn't understand much of the unity hate, especially compared to things like gnome 3. Really wish I could have HUD, combined titlebar/top panel, and typo-resilient search back. The latter two are possible with gnome extensions but don't work quite as well.

It's not so much hating what they do but the manner in which they do it. CLAs and not contributing upstream from the get-go means Canonical's special stuff cannot go further than Canonical.

Community forks of e.g. Unity have cropped up that ditch the CLA. Open source is open source, after all.

That said I do agree that the CLA has doomed most of their projects from gaining considerable adoption in the wider Linux community. At least while Canonical is still running the project.

> Just like they wasted time and effort on Unity and shuttered it in favor of Gnome

Unity served well for years, it would have needed a rewrite anyway for the post x11 era, so indeed there have been wasted resources, but experiments are also important in technology, and many still love what was (is) the unity user experience.

> and they wasted time and effort on Mir and shuttered it in favor of Wayland

Mir is still there and it's used. It's now a Wayland compositor but it maintains its API, the different communication protocol doesn't change its purposes.

> and they wasted time and effort on Upstart and shuttered it in favor of systemd.

When Upstart started and was used no systemd existed or was designed, so it served many well for years. Not a waste.

> able to do what snap does for Canonical for years.

Exclusive control over the only available apps store?

Not going to happen.

Considering the fact that Snap and Flatpak are both crap interesting to sell commercial crap on GNU/Linux and not anything else...

Are we still doing “GNU/Linux”? I thought that dog whistle was dead.

Dog whistle?

Here's what they are referring to:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy

Snaps are crap.

Flatpaks are a cross distro sandboxable package format. That's why it won the cross distro package war. How is that crap?

Snap taking a dump into the output of "mount" alone is reason enough for me to hate it. I want to see my drives, not that three bundles of libraries are separately mounted into "firefox snap dir" and three others into "snap base package dir" or whatever. There are other offenders, but Snap is the worst. I resort to "df" these days, but it doesn't show filesystem type and mount flags.

this is a pretty weird complaint, the beauty of mount output shouldn't be in the developers' priorities

It's not the beauty, it's the usefulness. If the information that you want is buried in irrelevant information, it's effectively harder to get.

Workaround: mount | grep -v snap

which you can record in an alias for easy access.

Not great, but you implement it once and are done with it.

Replace snap with flatpak and the same definition still stands for both.

No way. Flatpaks are clearly represented in the software shops of their adopted distros (I use Fedora and Pop!_OS, both of which use Flatpak).

From the software shop GUI, I can choose flatpak or dnf/apt from the dropdown. From the command-line, flatpak has its own commands (vs. apt silent under-the-hood behavior).

Flatpak is better than Snap. I use Flatpak for commercial software (Discord, Steam, etc.), but it remains my choice as a user.

The point is totally different: the purpose of both is upstream-managed distribution, consider individual distro like a container ship to be loaded, something not to care about, a commodity.

We know the arguments: often distro packagers are late to update, some projects are very complex to be packaged and demand gazillion of resources to be built, upstream devs on contrary will surely keep they project package up-to-date, sandboxing is good for safety etc. BUT we also know the outcome: 99% of such packages are full of outdated and vulnerable deps, they are themselves mostly outdated, since they are not packaged by the upstream devs who just publish the code as usual, and they have many holes punched here and there because a browser that allow to download some files but you can't open them in other apps is useless, as a pdf reader who can't read a file because it's outside the right place. Beside that you get a 30+Gb desktop deploy instead of a 10Gb, dab performances, polluted home directory, very scarce ability to automate AND all of them still need a classic package manager since they can't handle the base system.

So why them? Because SOME upstream do not want to allow third party distribute their binaries, they are commercial vendor. They NEED such system to sell they products ensuring they can work as a cancer in an open ecosystem, not designed to be a ship for something but a unique individual desktop anyone tune as he/she want.

That's why they are crap.

The next step to classic package management is the declarative/IaC one, like NixOS or Guix System. Those who want Snap, Flatpack, Appimage, ... just want Windows, with all the bloats and issues of Windows.

You can just use both in any distro. Really no difference.

Unless that snap allows lower level usage (services, kernel...)

Flatpak don't allow what snap doesn at lower levels than apps (kernel, system daemons...). So it's not possible.

It might be better to link directly to the release notes for more context:

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/noble-numbat-release-notes/39...

So far, an update from 22.04 LTS to 24.04 LTS on an Intel based Dell Lattitude laptop without any weird hardware produced a failure that was a white screen that just said to contact a system administrator. Could be a fluke. Trying to rescue this produced a non-bootable system. Could be user error.

After that a clean install of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on the same machine worked, but after installing the latest Chrome on top of this, it won't start. After installing the latest Slack, that won't start either. BitWarden from the snap store will start, but after logging in, I get a endless spinner instead my vault contents. It is hard to believe that the Chrome/Slack/BitWarden issues are user error.

I'm not sure I've ever seen such a rough LTS release. I still wonder if this is just somehow me since surely they wouldn't release it without Chrome and Slack working, but I can't see what I could have done wrong just following the directions here.

For Chrome, some apparmor policy relaxation would likely be needed: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/noble-numbat-release-notes/39...

Having no snaps able to use DNS after upgrading thanks to AppArmor sure was a fun surprise

I wonder if that explains the BitWarden problem that I saw then.

22.04 LTS users are advised to wait until August for 24.04.1: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/noble-numbat-release-notes/39...

I understand that 24.04 isn't really LTS until the 24.04.1 update comes out, but I like to start trying it on a secondary computer earlier, and I'm hoping not to wait that long since I really want the podman updates.

Subscribe on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/glib2.0/+bug/20632... once that's fixed upgrade should work properly

I also had a slightly rough experience. I started my upgrade from 22.04 -> 24.04 and walked away. I came back to my system frozen on the Plymouth screen. After trying and failing to get into a TTY a few times, I booted into recovery mode, re-ran the upgrade, and it actually worked.

That was a lot rougher than my experience upgrading from 20.04 -> 22.04, which went off without a hitch.

Ubuntu Desktop upgrade breakage is listed as a known issue: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/noble-numbat-release-notes/39...

Which indeed makes it a quite rushed release.

Ah, that's one annoying thing I had forgotten about ubuntu, thank you for reminding me!

So i've been using ubuntu for many years (my first release was 6.06). Updating to a new release never worked. Around 12.04 times (when I started to seriously feel the need for stability) i started to only to LTS-to-LTS update, which basically meant a full reinstall, but once every two years was a more manageable.

Nowadays I run fedora, so far the upgrade experience has been incredibly great. I already did three versions jumps (36 to 37, 37 to 38, 38 to 39) and it didn't break.

Believe the kernel is 6.8.0, which is surprising. Fedora is a faster moving distro and the bugfix digits incremented quickly every few days to 6.8.7 today. I wouldn't run a .0 kernel and didn't allow 6.8 to install/run on my machine until it hit .5.

I'm sure they have added a few patches, but seems like they could have shipped fewer basing off .5+ ?

Ubuntu uses a different kernel versioning scheme. The current version is 6.8.0-31.31

For the entire lifecycle (bar HWE kernel), it will remain at 6.8.0 and the number after - will be incremented with upstream and their own patches.

Sounds like they don't have enough patches in.

Well, for one thing, Ubuntu 24.04 got to be the first big Debian-based release after 64-bit time_t migration, and they got rid of backwards-compatible package names early. I suppose removing hundreds of libraries, including heavily dependent on, to install them from new packages (with `t64`) in proper order can cause a lot of problems on non-trivial configurations.

Existing binary code should work (unless it interfaces with 32-bit code in some affected way), but external packages need to include new dependencies.

I haven't been able to complete a fresh install on an empty drive yet. Either the installer crashes (most common), the installer throws an error, or the live USB freezes during booting.

That sounds a lot like a corrupted ISO/install media! I suggest verifying the checksums and trying a different USB drive.

Chrome 124 processing ozone flags is broken.

If you set up ozone platform using chrome://flags, it will affect you. You can start with manually specifying --ozone-platform and then in chrome://flags, set ozone platform back to default.

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/329678163

> In combination with the apparmor package, the Ubuntu kernel now restricts the use of unprivileged user namespaces. This affects all programs on the system that are unprivileged and unconfined. A default AppArmor profile is provided that allows the use of user namespaces for unprivileged and unconfined applications but will deny the subsequent use of any capabilities within the user namespace.

Welp, that kills any chance of namespaces being widely used by anyone outside the likes of Docker and systemd. I'd been using unprivileged mount namespaces as a way to create anonymous temporary directories, but I guess they just weren't so long for this world after all.

How is it not on the front page? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40154395 with 36 points over 10 hours is but this submission with 89 points over 4 hours isn't. The submitter seems to have plenty of karma too.

I know that Canonical keep making some questionable decisions that (legitimately) upset people, but I'm still happy for all that Ubuntu has brought to the table.

As an aside, I think that has to be the best Linux intro I've seen - very slick.

Looks pretty good! This is interesting from the release notes:

> Starting in Ubuntu 24.04, Canonical no longer produces Vagrant images. This is due upstream Debian questions of maintainership and Canonical dropping vagrant from the Ubuntu archives.

Certainly will impact my workload.

I am still sad that vagrant never took off. Sure it had some rough edges that could have been smoothed over with more eyes, but it really feels like a better development path.

Containers are mostly better no?

Containers still need to run on some kind of VM. If you're a small shop and the VM is managed for you by the cloud provider - fair enough. But a lot of larger enterprises still run servers managed in-house that are based off a golden image that is pre-configured to include observability agents, security agents, stuff that reports to centralized inventory management, in-house certificate authorities, etc. If you're a developer who ships a container, and it's only exposed to the stuff in the in-house server once it gets to a staging/pre-production environment - then you're missing a big part of the actual production environment in your dev environment. Vagrant can be a good choice here, depending on how customized the production servers are.

Then there are plenty of cases where cloud servers are insufficient and your actual production environment includes on-prem hardware with more specialized setups, then the VM vs. container argument gets more murky.

I use vagrant quite a lot at work. This will impact me a lot :-/

I know it’s a small thing, but does it put that ~/snap dir in my home directory still?

Yes

I dunno, still do not get the value of LTS Ubuntu, when Debian is almost exactly same in terms of user experience.

For me, its seems it's both newer packages and easier to add third party apt repos for even newer packages. Also, I like running newer kernels with HWE.

No not really. Nowadays debian has pretty fresh packages. At least Debian 12 had most of it packages newer than 22.04.

Because it's not the same. Just look at the docker package for Debian for example. It's like 3 years out of date and has an unsupported version of docker compose.

I use the docker.io and docker-compose packages in the stock Debian repository, and they seem to work perfectly fine? (Notably better than the Docker snap package that I tried to use, for that matter.)

That's okay, but it's still 4 years old. And it uses docker compose v1, which isn't supported by upstream and receives no security updates since 2021.

Docker has gotten a lot better imo since version 20.xx. buildx and buildkit are really nice now, and there's very little downside to having an up to date version (no important breaking changes, and improved rootless mode). Afaik the issue is related to some go packaging troubles or something.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1040417

Fwiw, I have never had any issues with docker on Ubuntu. Even on azureml, where VMs are by default provisioned only with Ubuntu+docker, it just really works.

> And it uses docker compose v1, which isn't supported by upstream and receives no security updates since 2021.

Is there any actual security concern here? As far as I can tell, docker compose v1 has no outstanding CVEs, and has, in fact, never had any CVEs or needed/received any security updates.

Plus the Debian version has received some patches as recently as 2023: https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/d/do...

I don't disagree and I usually don't like the security argument for tools like docker compose, that's why I highlighted the features and improvements to docker more than security itself :) .

It's just nice to have actual upstream bug fixes to an actually recent version instead of random backports and patches especially for a tool like docker. It's also nice to have the much improved tools of docker 20+.

Plus, you literally get everything that's nice from Debian too. It's like Debian but with a different package "profile". Debian is perfect for some use cases but Ubuntu is great for others.

FWIW docker.io in Debian is currently at 20.10.24.

This is a bit of a digression though, I don't actually have a problem with Ubuntu overall, I just found Debian to be better for my particular Docker-hosting needs.

I use docker from the docker PPA:

https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/debian/#install-using...

It has the same base but definitely not the same support nor immediately neither in the long term

What do you use Linux for?

Predictable release cycle is already worth it for server use and also for those who need commercial support.

And zfs is too good to miss and Ubuntu has supported it for very easy use for quite a while.

And it feels comfortable to use a distro who has corporate customers as they may lose substantial money if they're not careful.

Debian release cycle is almost exactly 2 years, much like Ubuntu with some deviation. You can install Debian, on ZFS if you want.

Now speaking of corporate customers, well that is not a great argument, as even more users use Red Hat, which is IMO an inferior distro.

What is good about Debian, however there is a very little chance of it disappearing one day, or dramatically switching to snap-only or some other nonsense deviation. In a way, it is even safer for corporate use than Ubuntu. This is why it is used in Google (the used to run Ubuntu before on their workstations).

I'm a Huge fan of Netplan, glad to see even more upstream improvements.

What benefit does it offer over systemd-networkd?

It's a way to use systemd-networkd without having to write network and netdev unit files. You write YAML instead and it gets rendered to the aforementioned unit files. Some people will prefer that, and some people will hate that. :)

I don’t hate it, but I don’t see that much use in the extra layer of abstraction. The docs aren’t that great either

It is an abstraction layer over systemd-networkd (server) and NetworkManager (desktop).

It is a self-inflicted problem where a solution is another layer of abstraction. Red Hat ships NetworkManager on server too, so they have unified configuration without another layer.

Love the security improvements, including turning on bounds checking.

https://canonical.com/blog/whats-new-in-security-for-ubuntu-...

Does it work with ipu6 webcams yet?

Joke: Did you know a ton of Ubuntu folks work at Home Depot? They like replacing windows.

love this

Does Canonical push their changes upstream to Debian?

Some of their changes are pushed upstream. Some are put upstream first and then trickle down to Ubuntu. Some remain Ubuntu only.

We do for good parts.

For example, in the gnome team we do the uploads first to debian then we merge them with the Ubuntu changes if any, but we try as much as possible to use the same sources for both.

Check debian salsa to see the differences.

Is it immutable, as Fedora?

The new installer looks nice!

No, this release is not immutable like Fedora Silverblue.

Ubuntu Core Desktop is planned to be, and was planned to be launched with this, but it was pushed back: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/02/ubuntu-core-desktop-dela...

So it will be similar to ChromeOS and Fedora. Full sandboxing, secure boot rooted in hardware, immutable.

Frankly, it’s a good transition (even though it seems snaps aren’t much liked in HN. Looks like they are here to stay).

step 1 - remove snapd

sudo apt install snapd- flatpak

Gonna be 6 months before mongodb catches up

Sorry but... At the Unity (WM) time Ubuntu was the distro able to satisfy both end users and techies, adopting Gnome SHell they already say "we are like others", than pushing CRAP like snap have completed the game. Back than Ubuntu have ceased to be interested for anyone with a bit of competence and have started to be annoying for generic users.

NixOS today is not in an excellent shape, but is the go-to distro of any tech savvy, Arch have intercepted old-schools users locked in a far past, Guix System try to thrive, Ubuntu now is on par of classic RH in crappiness and commercial conduct.

Cripes. What bubble are you living in? Why are we still at a place where choosing a Linux distribution is like picking your lunch table at school?

It's not a distro war. It's a paradigm. Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, OpenSuse, ... are all classic distros meant to be manually handled, some are rolling, some are not, but they share the same '80s style way of work.

Declarative distros offer:

- stability

- easy replication

- easy upgrades

- easy rollback

Ubuntu in the past was interesting because Unity was a nice desktop environment for both a newcomer and a seasoned user, it does not interfere narcissistically with the user actions like Gnome SHell that to it's best to be at the center of anything or modern KDE. Unity was as minimal a Fluxbox while as nice and dice for users like a modern desktop environment. And was an Ubuntu only show.

After that Ubuntu is just another classic distro, good for a distro war between the Debianist the RH-ist etc. It's another SuSe back than. With NOTHING special to offer, except that it annoy it's users with snap.

the amount of users of snaps likely exceeds total NixOS deployments

Seeing Repology stat on how many projects are in nixpkgs, how fresh they are, you are very largely wrong... Snaps/Flatpack have very few and mostly outdated packages. They are behind ANY other package system. NixOS is the largest set of packages and the most fresh. Arch and Guix follow short. The others are behind.

Not only, try to see how many "default.nix" or "shell.nix" you'll find in FLOSS projects, like in the past the "debian" dir. and you'll surely have an Idea.

I understand in part what you mean, but ubuntu is also a disto that many users relay on for its stability and reliability, not just for being an hacker toy.

I still use like that and anyone can, but normal users are the main target.

Ubuntu is a classic distro, meaning hard-to-automate for deployments with invitation to buy services for that purpose, so offer no advantage in stability and reliability compared to modern declarative distros like NixOS or Guix System with their essentially read-only system, easy custom deploy and replication, easy rebuild, as a fresh install every time, easily poor man IllumOS Boot Environments with their linked generations.

"Normal users", meaning non tech-savvy ones are Windows or OSX targets, because with Ubuntu they still need to use a terminal a bit more than Microsoft/Apple stuff, and they still have to deploy their own systems. For a bit more "power users" having to manually deploy an official ISO than customize it or keep it up polluted, an update at a time, is a NIGHTMARE. Try to upgrade a normal Ubuntu for few releases and you'll see things breaking, you fix the manually augmented the entropy. With a declarative distro any updated inter-release and cross-release is a fresh install out of your config, no forgotten fixes/hacks no leftovers.

Those who claim Ubuntu as stable are stuck in a far past, before declarative distros exists.

Are you telling me that to me who installed his current production system using lucid lynx (e.g. 10.04 - you can do the math)?!?

> TPM-backed full-disk encryption (FDE) is introduced as an experimental feature, building on years of experience with Ubuntu Core. On supported platforms, you no longer need to enter passphrases at boot manually. Instead, the TPM securely manages the decryption key, providing enhanced security against physical attacks.

Shameful to see Ubuntu fall into the trap that Microsoft created, where you don't own your computer anymore and it actively prevents you from accessing your own data with DRM.

Preventing access to data is the whole point of encryption. TPM stores the key to the drives attached to the machine, effectively tying the keys to the device + drive combination. (Doesn't Apple do the same?) And if you're afraid of being locked out, you have backups elsewhere, right?

And you didn't lose the notebook you keep your critical passwords in?

You've misunderstood. Ubuntu's TPM-backed full-disk encryption isn't DRM like the type used to prevent you from copying movies. It's meant to assist your own privacy and security, by prevent other people from accessing your own data.

For example if your laptop is lost, stolen, left in a shop, seized by bailiffs, sent in for a repair, etc., or if it's a server in a data center, making it more difficult for someone to read the server's data without authorization.

Ugh. I suppose there’s always going to be a contingent that gets all up in arms as soon as computers at all depart from how they worked in 2004.

You’re really trying to shoehorn some notion of user-hostility into what’s clearly and unambiguously a security feature.

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