Canonical Releases Ubuntu 24.10 Oracular Oriole | Hacker News Reader

Canonical Releases Ubuntu 24.10 Oracular Oriole

ubuntu.com

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I’m not a purist but I’ve installed Ubuntu on some of my older machines and its built-in driver coverage across weird hardware has been superior to other distros I test-cycled through. And though I’ve been using Linux for over 20 years, I find it easier to dip in and out of Ubuntu, and less so with Fedora.

My son is partial to Debian and KDE, which is a strong choice. My next platform test is a DaVinci Resolve Linux workstation but I don’t honestly expect it to beat a new MacBook. But if it’s close enough I may elect to go with open source over Big Tech lock-in.

People give Ubuntu a lot of shit, but for a homelab, I find that Ubuntu server really does "just work". And I use Ubuntu-based distros on my laptop and desktop as well (Pop!_OS).

Pretty cool. Fedora ain't even on kernel 6.11 or GNOME 47 yet.

That's purely an artifact of their release cadence though, right? The next Fedora relase in a few weeks will have the latest kernels etc.

Fedora will have them in about two weeks, with 41 release; it will also get python 3.13.

Ah, that no longer relevant distro filled with dark patterns, spyware^W telemetry, barely working snaps, and “updates” you can’t install unless you pay for enterprise support…

Thanks but no thanks! Fedora is still sane, at least.

Imagine my surprise when Hetzner Cloud recommended I use Ubuntu for my server (prior to the enterprise upgrade shenanigans) and then, suddenly, it tells me I don't get upgrades until I pay. On Linux.

Ubuntu has a lifetime ban from me. No thanks. Whenever I setup my server again (I can't face the prospect, as it'll take me weeks) it'll probably just be Debian.

I have Ubuntu on Hetzner cloud and recently updated with no issues.

What error did it give you exactly?

Only updates in main repository are part of the free ubuntu. Updates for packages in universe repository require Ubuntu Pro subscription.

For gui apps I consider flatpaks superior. I use opensuse Aeon desktop, which is an immutable distro where the main distro is minimal and all applications are either flatpaks or installed through distrobox (not unlike silverblue)

It has worked surprisingly well.

They really lost they way...

  The addition of kdump-tools to relevant Ubuntu desktop and server images enables kernel crash dumps by default. This proactive approach streamlines troubleshooting by automatically capturing critical data after a crash, allowing faster and effective diagnostics, without requiring users to manually adjust settings beforehand.

99.9% of desktop users will not care about the crash dump. So should a crash happen for whatever reason, it will slow down even more the recovery, clutter the storage of the user that will not even do that there is something he can cleanup.

And for a new version of their desktop, all they have to announce is that you will be able to find old color themes and improvement in the apt "command line" UX.

I'm not seeing how this decision is an indicator of how they've lost their way...

One could talk about the horrible thing called snaps and the fact the OS prefers installing them over debs, or the Ubuntu Pro upsell attempts, etc. kdump isn't an issue compared to the real issues imo

I mean that it is totally not something going in the way to do a general public desktop environment.

I love snaps, but I'm getting a bit worried now that I'm seeing more and more Flatpak only apps not in the snap store. Snaps were way ahead at first, now it's becoming a real fragmentation issue.

Snaps were never ahead; it was a quick-and-dirty solution thrown together, during the time when flatpak was being designed. It was lets-do-quick-something, so we can claim first prize, never mind the consequences.

It is just another case of Cannonical being Cannonical, now with the flavor lets-try-to-monetize-here (you cannot have your private snap repos, like you can have with apt, dnf or flatpak. You can use only single global one run by Cannonical, and to get a private part of it, it is pay for play).

So yes, it is becoming fragmentation issue and thing will get much worse (for Ubuntu users), until Cannonical reverses.

It's really annoying, Canonical pretty much has no true competitors aside from Red Hat, and they seem to have only recently started becoming a mainstream desktop choice.

But than Canonical reinvents wheels, which is like, the one thing you should almost never do, if you're trying to be the one size fits all choice for those of us who hate heavily customized systems.

Whatever Red Hat does seems to always win in the end, and it's generally great once it's established, but Debian is the standard on a lot of of things, and it's nice to have everything in one family, so everything works the same on the server as on your dev machine.

All the distros besides Red Hat stuff and Ubuntu seem to be either unpopular, or trying to stick to a Unixy kind of experience to some degree, or they have their own uncommon incompatible stuff added on, like Mint with Cinnamon that's not quite as nice as GNOME now that GNOME has kind of got their crap together again.

Maybe just vanilla Debian with Gnome will be the way to go now that Flatpak seems to be winning...

Are there any measurements on how much it will slow things down by? Perhaps they plan to add an easy GUI tool to look at crashes, or even add automated reporting to the existing telemetry.

I'm all for it, if only because I don't want them wasting time maintaining two different configurations, if they can unify them, they have more time to improve the important stuff.

Anyone unfortunate enough to need a FIPS certified kernel is still stuck on Ubuntu 20.04 with no sign of progress on newer options in sight.

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