16 ms·

Most reviews are very positive. Faster, better, Amazon removed, maybe the best Ubuntu release until now. The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. It loo

by thdrdt 6y ago

Most reviews are very positive. Faster, better, Amazon removed, maybe the best Ubuntu release until now. The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal. Ubuntu is also researching if they can get Adobe on board. I doubt this would ever happen, but that would be huge. Most people stick on Windows and MacOS because Adobe software is not available on Linux. Personally I switched back from Xubuntu to Ubuntu. And I must say: Ubuntu is back on track!

iforgotpassword 6y ago
I use Ubuntu at work. Chromium is now snap only, and snap crapped itself with some error messages that didn't immediately lead to a solution when thrown into Google. Firefox was my main browser anyways so not too a great loss but oh man...
- aritmo 6y ago
  They ramped up the security in Chromium and it is not identical to the old package. It is too much security that hurts ease of use.
- cies 6y ago
  There is a way, which I documented here: https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup/tree/master/chrome https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup/tree/master/chrome I also use FF primarily, but sometimes I need Chrome (chromium actually, I should fix that).
  - iforgotpassword 6y ago
    Thanks for that. A little hacky but worst thing that can happen is it just doesn't run I guess... URL is now https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup/blob/master/chromium https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup/blob/master/chromium for the curious.
gerdesj 6y ago
"It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal." There's another way?
- capableweb 6y ago
  Oh yeah, used to be at least two more ways. Not sure which one of these are not possible but anymore, but you used to be able to do: 1) Synaptic package manager which is a GUI for searching and installing .debs. My first exposure to a package manager when I first installed Ubuntu some 12 years ago. 2) Simply double-clicking on the file, opening the Gdebi (I think?) UI for installing that specific .deb file.
  - jakear 6y ago
    In my experience, simply double clicking on the file never actually worked for installing debs. The UI would pop up, give me a nice pleasant "Install" button, but clicking it would either no-op, crash the UI, show a progress bar that stalled out, or act like everything worked perfectly but not actually install it. Command line install works flawlessly every time.
    - capableweb 6y ago
      Judging by your other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22954061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22954061) you were using Software Center for the installing. Gdebi was working fine back before Software Center.
      - jakear 6y ago
        I was using whatever popped up in a default Ubuntu VM when I double clicked a .deb file. If they've chosen to make that not the best software for installing .deb's... lets just say I can see why people say Linux distributions tend to be user-unfreindly.
        capableweb 6y ago
Iolaum 6y ago
Snap packages are the reason I moved from Ubuntu Mate to Fedora Mate. I use free software to own my computer, if it decides on its own when to update like snaps do that defeats the purpose.
- cies 6y ago
  Does that distro use flatpacks? I also hate snap with a passion, but I dont think flatpack will be better, what are your thoughts on this?
  - Iolaum 6y ago
    No, fedora Mate has no flatpaks by default. I do use them on my machine though. They are not as integrated to the system as snaps on Ubuntu but they update only when I tell them to and I like the additional security benefits of the flatpak project overall.
    - cies 6y ago
      I think security wise it got worse. With traditional package repos someone still does some due diligence. Also it's not clear what's going on, and that is a huge prerequisite for security.
Legogris 6y ago
This, for me, marks the release when (somewhat unfortunately, 18.04 LTS has been good) I will not use Ubuntu for any new installations - desktop or server. I can see how snaps are beneficial for novice desktop users who want an AppStore-like experience, but how do they see people adopting this for Ubuntu Server?
- iameli 6y ago
  Apt isn't going anywhere. What changed for you on the server side?
  - Legogris 6y ago
    A couple of packages (specifically which slip my mind) that either were only available as snaps and not in the main apt repos, or had way older versions in the apt repos. At that point, there's no reason to not run debian instead.
    - Kudos 6y ago
      I'd like to understand which packages, I've had no packages I need disappear. I'm skeptical that the packages are actually missing to favour snaps, and not simply renamed or replaced.
      - Legogris 6y ago
        My guess is more attention and focus on snaps and increasing neglect maintaining the deb repo.
  - oefrha 6y ago
    Just upgraded on my non-essential home server, and apparently lxd is only available via snap now, for whatever reason. https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=lxd&searchon=names&suite=all&section=all https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=lxd&searchon=nam...
    - 6y ago
Jonnax 6y ago
I've not used Snap, Flatpack, Appimage and all the other types of app packaging tools before. What are the benefits? Are they effectively like bundling an application with all its dependencies? Is it a way of running "native" apps instead of in a docker container? What should I and shouldn't be using it for?
- bjoli 6y ago
  They claim that it does sandboxing, which to my knowledge was never actually activated in any meaningful way. I have used flatpaks on fedora which was nice, and I also built some which was quite painless. I hate that I can't launch them from the terminal like usual though.
  - brtln 6y ago
    It is possible, flatpak exports shell wrappers for binaries at /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin and ~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/bin. It uses application ID for security reasons though.
  - jamieweb 6y ago
    You're right regarding the sandboxing. Snaps use 'plugs' to add sandbox exceptions that can be configured by the package author and enabled at install time, e.g. to allow access to your home area or the network. Even if the sandboxing may technically prevent the package escalating to root or whatever, this is a fairly moot point on a personal computer as everything valuable is probably in your home area.
- readwind 6y ago
  The negatives, of snap, at least, was that most apps became 'un-skinned,' and looked like unthemed things you'd launch directly in an X11-session so they look like their base-worst, and so on, in my experience. - The first Ubuntu LTS I tried that had snap even had problems with the [snap-packed] calculator, which for some dumb reason was a snap-app instead of a .deb, I'm talking the main included/internal calc-app, and the VLC snap-package I tried was totally unskinned, due to being snap'ped I suppose, as the ppa and etc .deb versions of VLC certainly was and looked better. Now I am on EndeavourOS, an arch-based distro, easy to use and set up, and this is due to snap being introduced in Ubuntu directly, plus not wanting the ppa chase-game, and et cetera. It's just an/my opinion(s), and certainly not a pointer. Just being objective from my own perspectives, here. Got nothing against Ubuntu or anything, it's a free world, thankfully, still.
bragh 6y ago
I hope the HiDPI support is improved now. Right now, when I use fractional scaling on 19.10, none of the display settings get saved and so after a restart, I have to readjust all of the layout, orientation and scaling for displays. Pretty annoying for a dual-boot triple display system. edit: Nevermind, seems that it got even worse for my case: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1870736 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1... https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mutter/+bug/1873403 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mutter/+bug/187340...
- encom 6y ago
  Try using mixed DPI displays. My main display is 27 inch 4K display, and on the sides I have old 19 inch 1280x1024 displays, used for IRC, music player, process monitor, email etc. Stuff I glance at from time to time. _NOTHING_ supports this setup properly. Even Windows has bugs galore as soon as you mix high and low DPI displays. I don't believe anyone ever tests this scenario. I've learned to tolerate and work around the Windows bugs, but I've never gotten it to work at all in any Linux desktop environment I've tried.
  - Aeolos 6y ago
    I am using a 1200p, a 1800p and a 2160p monitor side-by-side on MacOS and it works fine. The 2160p monitor is rotated to portrait mode for reading/writing text documents. I can hotplug a monitor and it will automatically switch to the right layout, remembering the correct location for all open windows. I am using a 1080p and a 2160p on ArchLinux/Wayland/Gnome3. It's not perfect, but it's not unusable either (compared to X11, which was completely broken).
  - jrockway 6y ago
    I use a 1440p display at 100% and a 4k display at 175% on Windows and it works fine. The only bug that I see is that if a window is spanned across two monitors, it picks the scaling based on which monitor contains more of the window. I'm not even sure that's a bug, it's just how it has to be done. (My first mixed DPI setup was actually on ChromeOS. That got around the issue by not letting a window span monitors. Actually a somewhat elegant workaround, since it didn't let you do that before HiDPI support ;) Windows and the applications I use even handle the different refresh rates of my monitors pretty well. I have a 165Hz main monitor and a normal 60Hz monitor. Apps are aware of the framerate differences when I move them around. It wasn't always good, but as time goes forward applications and Windows itself handles HiDPI better and better. (FWIW, I haven't had any problems on Ubuntu... except that letting the monitors go into power saving mode resets the display scaling override. That was with 18.10, though. I use an Ubuntu VM under Hyper-V now... begrudgingly.) Having said that, I am not a GUI power user by any means. On Linux, all I ever use are a browser, terminal, and Emacs. On Windows, I use CAD software and games (and a browser, terminal, and Emacs). It all works well enough for me.
safgasCVS 6y ago
Sorry I’m not adding anything to the conversation here, but have they removed that strange ‘swipe-up to login’ gesture at the start screen?
- renewiltord 6y ago
  I don't believe my 19.04 login manager does that. I do recall that being annoying because my first keystroke would actually just move that up. Now it starts up to the user list by default.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    I'm still on 18.04, and it doesn't do it. I remember it in an older version though.
- Joeboy 6y ago
  I don't know if they've removed the ability to do it. I don't think you've ever had to do it. You can just hit space, or just start typing your password from the lock screen.
  - readwind 6y ago
    Yeah you can just start typing your password, last time I tried Ubuntu, at least. Or press any key, and the prompt should appear. Even pressing ctrl could work. But any character-key should be the key, in my experience.
- bmaupin 6y ago
  Yes: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/ubuntu-20-04-release-features https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/ubuntu-20-04-release-fea...
curt15 6y ago
>Ubuntu is also researching if they can get Adobe on board. Where did you hear about this?
- Vinnl 6y ago
  They mention it here, but it's pretty non-committal: https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-20-04-survey-results https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-20-04-survey-results > Adobe Photoshop (Illustrator®, Acrobat and Creative Cloud®) were asked for over a hundred times. (...) bringing these kinds of tools and applications to Linux is an ongoing effort.
Jean-Philipe 6y ago
> The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. I don't get why they're doing that. Snaps have mostly created problems for me, like they don't scale when other apps do, or the styling is off, or they don't show up properly in the software manager. The snap daemon on one of my laptops always blocks the shutdown by 30 seconds. Generally a rather confusing experience.
- turbinerneiter 6y ago
  I'm on Fedora where the equivalent is called Flathub/Flatpaks. There are definitely some rough edges still, but the possible upsides are amazing for me. It makes it way easier for a developer to release for different Linux-flavors. The applications get sandboxed and there is much less risk to mess up your system. Stuff like permission, similar to Android/iOS becomes possible. There for sure is problems to: it makes it way easier for a lazy developer to ship ancient libraries without security fixes, the "packages", now images, are much larger and the quality check of the packager gets sidestepped. And, as always when you try something new, it gets worse before it gets better. But I think the idea is good and I hope for the best.
  - mcny 6y ago
    My understanding is snap and flatpak are not equivalent at all because snap is more permissive whereas flatpak is sandboxed. Specifically, it is not possible to do gpg signed commits from flatpak (e.g., jetbrains idea) without tweaks upstream. I agree with the overarching idea though: it gets worse before it gets better. See wayland and how we still can’t capture display in obs. I am a little torn on this. Should the onus to “fix” be on jetbrains and obs? I personally think no where possible. Replacements should be drop in without effort or at least with clear guidance and not too much effort on behalf of individual applications.
    - stubish 6y ago
      Snaps are sandboxed. They can be granted extra privileges, such as access to $HOME, camera, bluetooth etc. Some of these interfaces such as $HOME can be gained automatically by any snap. Others need to be granted by Canonical (to automatically grant access on install), or manually granted by the user post install. There is also a 'classic' mode where the app is unsandboxed, which again needs to be granted by Canonical and in addition requires explicit acceptance by the user when being installed.
davb 6y ago
So far, I'm very impressed with 20.04 on my personal laptop (a Thinkpad L390). HiDPI works better out-of-the-box (I didn't actually need to enable scaling manually, but did have to add a Chrome and Teams .desktop file with --force-device-scale-factor=1.2). Power management is much better out-of-the-box too (I've gone from 2-3h battery to 4-8h depending on workload, rivalling what I see under Windows). But you're right about Snaps. I love the concept (easier distribution, fewer dependency issues especially if you're a few years into the lifecycle of an LTS release) but they're not, in my opinion, production-ready yet so it's frustrating to see them pushed by Ubuntu. The main issues we have are the slow startups compared to non-snap apps (which is felt more acutely on old hardware with spinning disks) and the fact that they don't work if /home lives on an NFS server. That rules out their use for many academic and enterprise deployments.
- usr1106 6y ago
  oh, I am suprised you praise HiDPI support. I could not make emacs work resonably. It does not react on the widely documented Xft and GDK_DPI_SCALE settings as in other distros. I am on Xubuntu though if that makes a difference. And I have not tried for a couple of weeks. There have been many package updates since I tried last.
  - davb 6y ago
    I actually tried installing xubuntu-desktop first (and then plain old xfce) as I fancied switching back to them after a few years using Gnome. But you're definitely right that out-of-the-box, XFCE HiDPI support was lacking. Widgets (panels, icons, etc) and fonts all scaled fairly independently, and I gave us after manually resizing a few elements. On Ubuntu 20.04 (with Gnome), it just worked (with the exception of Chromium/CEF/Blink based applications like Chrome and Teams, which needed the aforementioned command line argument to scale them). I actually had to undo most of the scaling changes that came across with my restored home folder. The one other thing I had to change was the Terminal font as the default was a little too small to use comfortably on my laptop screen - I opted for Liberation Mono Regular, 12pt (px?) with 1.10x height. As a former long-time XFCE proponent, I recommend you give Ubuntu + Gnome a try. It's the best it's been since the Gnome 2 days, and is no-where near as power hungry as it has been in recent years. The most power-hungry application I'm running is Evolution, where the webkit process that renders HTML email frequently gets out of control and burns 40% CPU until I restart it (I'd use Thunderbird but the Lightning plugin https://github.com/ExchangeCalendar/exchangecalendar https://github.com/ExchangeCalendar/exchangecalendar to handle Exchange calendar stopped working with recent versions of Thunderbird some months ago).
coinerone 6y ago
The only thing that holds back my Employer to switch to Linux for 6500+ Desktops is Microsoft Office and full MS Exchange compatibility. The Collegues who need Adobe Products just have to work with Apple Machines anyway.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  Just switch to LibreOffice. The dependency on .docx/.xlsx is an overblown propaganda. I personally had a business in 2007..2011 that replaced windows for Linux. All that time I heard that same old song again: "But but MS Office is so essential!". Turned out, not so much, on over 5000 PCs in several dozen companies. Update: business eventually failed, for one simple reason - Ubuntu Linux is too freaking stable. The idea was transferring customers to Ubuntu, and have them pay a monthly service fee to do maintenance and fixes. And we have soon discovered that a properly configured GNU/Linux desktop PC can run for YEARS without maintenance at all. Customers had it figured out too and opted to do one-time fees when something goes wrong, and it just wasn't sustainable.
  - Kipters 6y ago
    You'd lose the realtime collaboration features though.
  - sparkling 6y ago
    Ignoring format issues, LibreOffice just feels extremly slugish for me. I get little freezes all the time, the UI is laggy and startup time is pretty bad too. I came to dislike it so much that i prefer to edit things in Google Docs over LibreOffice .
    - readwind 6y ago
      I haven't tried it but some people say 'OnlyOffice' is a better branch than libreoffice, it seems to support MS-Office standards better, but, as I said I've never tried it. Only trouble these people had was with certain fonts, but I guess the remedy would be to choose embed all fonts upon saving and sharing, if that helps, then perhaps OnlyOffice, desktop version, is an option, for some. I plan to try it, although I use my old office-versions, in a vm, for now.
curt15 6y ago
>The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. The graphical "gnome software" software installer was replaced in the default install by a snap-only fork named "Snap Store" with no support for Flatpak (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/snap-store/+bug/1871944 https://bugs.launchpad.net/snap-store/+bug/1871944). Were there some technical reasons for this move or was it a business decision to kneecap the other package format?
- zyga 6y ago
  IIRC GNOME removed support for snaps from gnome-software so this was the only way forward.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    No. Canonical absolutely has the resources to make an appstore that supports all three package formats (dpkg, flatpak, snap).
  - brtln 6y ago
    It's not true. GNOME Software still ships Snap plugin. It's Canonical that decided to fork gnome-software and provide it under different name without competition plugins enabled.
  - curt15 6y ago
    According to git, gnome-software snap support still seems to be actively developed: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/commits/master/plugins https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/commits/mast...
cies 6y ago
I hate snap. It makes my system less predictable, increases load times, makes UI stuff look ugly, obfuscates process monitoring, hogs memory, cannot deal with files in /tmp (and I happen to use /tmp a lot), makes if hard to do audio (like connecting a mic to Chromium)... I can go on. But in 2019 versions of buntu it could still be removed: https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup#remove-snap https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup#remove-snap I found a way to use Debian packages reliably on buntus with a trick that is shown here for Chromium: https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup/tree/master/chrome https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup/tree/master/chrome If this snap thing continues to invade the *buntus I will move away from them. For now I still like the combination of stable + up-to-date + familiar (Debian based), but --as others have said-- the snap thing goes against why I choose to use open source.
- suby 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, do you feel the same way about Flatpak?
  - cies 6y ago
    Have not tried that. Maybe I should, but im on Debian-style distros for so long (and use 'm on servers and such) that I dont really want to learn the basics again. Also, from my RPM days I remember essential (pgk mgmt) tools changing way too often for my taste. Also I'm a KDE/Qt kinda person, and the RPM ecosystem was mostly GTK based.
    - r3ll 6y ago
      You can install flatpaks on many distros, including Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Kubuntu, et cetera. I have some flatpaks on a Kubuntu laptop I maintain for a family member and installation was about as smooth as it is on my own fedora machine. I use cli exclusively though so ymmv if you prefer gui(Edit: Exclusively use CLI for sysadmin).
  - imglorp 6y ago
    On that note, what requirements pushed Ubuntu to select snap over flatpack?
markosaric 6y ago
Nice release! The latest Gnome included (3.36) is so much smoother and faster!
timClicks 6y ago
Snaps are significantly safer for users and easier for publishers to produce. The styling issues and so forth occur because of a security-first mindset. [Disclaimer: work for Canonical, but not on the Snapcraft team]
- FpUser 6y ago
  As a user I do not care about publisher's convenience. They should solve their own problems without making users the victims of said convenience. As for "safer" - I'll buy this argument when you get rid of slow startup, bloat and other problems associated with snap.
- enriquto 6y ago
  > because of a security-first mindset. I would believe you here if snap was not an auto-updating system. This is about the least security-first mindset that it can be; it has a single, gaping, point of failure, after which an attacker may get hold of millions of user's computers without action by their part.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
Idk, since 10.04 I've appreciated that Ubuntu is as far as a mainstream Linux desktop distro as it gets and just works (I used to run various distros including RH/CentOS, Debian, Suse, Gentoo, and also FreeBSD). But I'm on the brink to leave (maybe towards Void Linux, Debian/Devuan, or back-to-Slackware) because the things I care about have atrophied (lightweight DE, real Unix environment) while crap (snap, systemd, gnome-shell, invasive command-line suggestions) has taken over. On 19.10 gnome-shell really gets in the way for me. And Unix command line utilities I'm using all the time stopped working for me (for example, even vim on Ubuntu 19.04 comes with broken syntax highlighting OOTB, and annoingly and incompetently inserts tabs and spaces where there must be none, something I haven't seen any vi implementation doing for over 30 years; also, awk rejects complex regexpes all of a sudden on 19.04). I know there are other 'buntus shipping with alternatives for gnome-shell but for me the point is/was that there is a large installed base eliminating glitches, which however isn't the case for alternate 'buntus any more than it is for non-'buntus. I also don't see the benefit of yet another packaging format; the point of a desktop distro should be to deliver a consolidated set of shared libs rather than going nuclear and ship everything in fscking containers, especially when there are exactly zero new desktop apps coming out these days (with the exception of Chrome which I'd rather install containerized, and which I only use for website testing, my main browser being FF anyway).
- bmaupin 6y ago
  > On 19.10 gnome-shell really gets in the way for me. Xfce is a nice alternative to GNOME 3 that reminds me a lot of GNOME 2.
usr1106 6y ago
> It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal. Oh, I did not even notice that during 4+ weeks on the unreleased Xubuntu Focal because I never use anything else but the command line to install software. But the target audience Ubuntu is wider, so I think that is a very bad change. One might think they have learned from https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 , but obviously not. Well, formally they declared bug #1 solved, but few would agree that the Linux desktop has won. How does the snap "repo" compare to the Ubuntu repos in terms of count? I would have guessed it's orders of magnitude. Even if many of the packages might not be useful for those requiring an installation GUI.
- readwind 6y ago
  One can dpkg -i , but, how about dependencies? I always had a problem with that. Whenever the app-store didn't work, which usually pulled-in all deps, I just naively used dpkg -i pkg.deb, and chased all the deps manually, through google. I have done that at least. Thank god for arch. No politics/"religion(s/*)" intended.
  - usr1106 6y ago
    apt is your friend. Or apt-get if you prefer old school. Or aptitude if you are willing to learn something pretty powerful.
    - readwind 6y ago
      huh how well does that work with individual downloaded *.deb packages? You're probably right, but, the included repos are usually full of outdated versions, if you get a too-new deb, from some experimental site, in terms of Ubuntu freshness, and then no pkgs in the repo will have a new enough version. (In terms of dependencies for the local exteriorally-gotten base pkg.deb and it's deps,) I guess ppa's are a thing, but, yeah, good to be off this train, no disrespects to Ubuntu, if it picks up I will surely be glad, and even, chances are slim, ever use it again. We're all friends, let's say yes to progress, in general, in the right directions.
flavor8 6y ago
> The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal. Another solution to this (aside from synaptic, command line, other clients) is to use Kubuntu (which has an apt based package manager called Discover, much improved in this release over prior versions). KDE still doesn't work great on tablets, but in all other respects it's a lot nicer than Gnome. Spend 30 minutes tweaking it to your preferences after install (apt install kubuntu-desktop) and you'll have a desktop that does exactly what you need it to. (You could also install KDE Neon, which packages latest stable KDE with a LTS Ubuntu core.)
BiteCode_dev 6y ago
I understand the hate for snap (and flatpak) and I personally use deb as much as I can, but they are the right move. Yes, right now it's a subpar experience. But you need to deploy it now to be able to improve on it and have it as the default in the future. And I believe it's a better future, because: - packaging a deb is difficult. I've done it, and it's a lot of complicated hard work you get to repeat for every release for anything that is not a simple program. Snap and flatpak are very easy to build and support accross releases. This will increase the number of software that will be provided to Linux. In fact, it already has. - the permissions model we have on our phones is very hard to replicate on Linux, yet something like this proves more and more necessary. SELinux and Apparmor are too low level. Snap and flatpak make it easy to make sandboxed app and request permissions by abstracting those. What's more, they make it ovious for the user to know that the apps it uses are sandboxed and the permissions they use. It will take a few years before we get a streamlined experience with snap and flatpak, and it will be at the cost of a bit of performance and disk space. For now they feel bloated, are not necessarily more secure, and are less well integrated. But in the end, it will make the Linux ecosystem more user friendly.
- readwind 6y ago
  I agree with almost everything you say, and, yes, people used IIS, windows, as webservers, only not-long ago, so, let's hope for progress. Totally agreed.
  - breakingcups 6y ago
    I don't see what that has to do with the post you replied to.
    - readwind 6y ago
      I'll enlighten you. About twenty years ago people used IIS for web-servers, encumbered in costly licenses, for everything, and progress goes on. That's the point man. Time goes on, and things gets better. Hope you see now. That was the point, anyways. I really hope it helps. Progress goes on is just the general point. Nothing else intended. Should be clear enough.
jamieweb 6y ago
> The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal. My main concern with Snap is security. Using the default Ubuntu Apt repositories, I can `apt install` pretty much anything I want and it's almost guaranteed to not be malicious/dangerous, as only trusted/well-established developers can get their package into the Apt repos. However, with Snap, everybody in the world can publish any old rubbish in the Snap Store, including packages that typosquat the names of others. Snap's current 'protections' for this are mainly reactionary rather than preventative, which is far from satisfactory [1]. For me, the absolute key selling point of Linux over Windows/Mac is the secure-by-default and natively integrated package management. Pushing Snaps as the main package management method goes too close to the Windows way of just downloading random EXEs from the internet. I personally would like to see Apt remain as the default system package manager for all common/well-known software, with Snap existing purely as a 'community' repository for software that is known to be untrusted/unknown. [1] https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/is-there-any-protection-against-typosquatting-on-the-snap-store/10815 https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/is-there-any-protection-against...
- ric2b 6y ago
  This could be fixed by separating the store into an "official" repo that only includes trusted apps and an opt-in "community" repo with the rest. It's not really an issue with snap itself.
  - O_H_E 6y ago
    It kinda is. Canonical explictly doesn't want to do that. The cli doesn't support any other server except canonical's.[1] Flatpack on the other hand, does support that structure out of the box, and a few projects are already using there own repos.[2] [1] https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/external-repositories/176 https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/external-repositories/176 [2] https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/repositories.html https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/repositories.html
- modzu 6y ago
  there's debian!
miiiiiike 6y ago
I've been using 20.04 since the early betas and Ubuntu since the first release. I haven't been this impressed with an Ubuntu release since that first install.
jki275 6y ago
Most people stick with Mac and Windows because of MS Office, not Adobe.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Microsoft Office has fairly reasonable and popular browser-based alternatives. Adobe’s suite doesn’t.
  - jki275 6y ago
    Sort of, and only really starting in the last year or so, and still limited from the real version, but the market for adobe products among anyone who wants to use Linux is pretty much zero.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      (I'm talking about Google Docs.)
      - jki275 6y ago
        Oh, well. Google Docs is simply not capable of business level work. Sorry. I thought you were talking about Office 365, which is significantly better, but still not up to par with the native applications.
sfifs 6y ago
> It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal. That's a good thing! I can't wait for Deb installers to stop mucking about dumping random files all over my system. I also can't wait for the whole ppa nightmare which is the only way to get cutting edge versions of software by giving the right to muck about with the system to random packages on the internet to end.
maelito 6y ago
What's keeping Adobe from releasing Photoshop for Ubuntu ? Convincing ? Or real technical difficulties ? Like recoding the interface ?
- ric2b 6y ago
  They're probably just not willing to absorb the support costs for such a small market.
- llcoolv 6y ago
  Colour profiles, display calibration.
peq 6y ago
Some problems I had with Snaps: * Installed VScode. The terminal in VScode was in a different environment from the system terminal, so used different Python environments. Took me a while to figure out why installing a package was not working. * Installed Slack. When I click a link in Slack it opens a new Firefox process that does not have access to my normal profile, saved logins, etc. and is not shown as a Firefox window in the sidebar. In both cases I uninstalled the Slack version and installed the "real" version.
- sojournerc 6y ago
  The new firefox on link click in slack can be guided by going to `about::profiles` or something like that, and making sure there's only one profile, and that it's default.
brnt 6y ago
Does the snap store mean that much software was moved out of the apt repositories or is it also still available there as well?
foresto 6y ago
> The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. I am disappointed that snap still forcibly clutters everyone's $HOME with an extra directory[1] that cannot be moved or renamed. It was reported four years ago, and nearly a thousand people have joined the bug report. The glacial pace at which they're addressing this problem makes me hesitant to embrace snap. [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053

by thdrdt 6y ago

iforgotpassword 6y ago

I use Ubuntu at work. Chromium is now snap only, and snap crapped itself with some error messages that didn't immediately lead to a solution when thrown into Google. Firefox was my main browser anyways so not too a great loss but oh man...

aritmo 6y ago
They ramped up the security in Chromium and it is not identical to the old package. It is too much security that hurts ease of use.
cies 6y ago
There is a way, which I documented here: https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup/tree/master/chrome https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup/tree/master/chrome I also use FF primarily, but sometimes I need Chrome (chromium actually, I should fix that).
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  Thanks for that. A little hacky but worst thing that can happen is it just doesn't run I guess... URL is now https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup/blob/master/chromium https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup/blob/master/chromium for the curious.

gerdesj 6y ago

"It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal." There's another way?

capableweb 6y ago
Oh yeah, used to be at least two more ways. Not sure which one of these are not possible but anymore, but you used to be able to do: 1) Synaptic package manager which is a GUI for searching and installing .debs. My first exposure to a package manager when I first installed Ubuntu some 12 years ago. 2) Simply double-clicking on the file, opening the Gdebi (I think?) UI for installing that specific .deb file.
- jakear 6y ago
  In my experience, simply double clicking on the file never actually worked for installing debs. The UI would pop up, give me a nice pleasant "Install" button, but clicking it would either no-op, crash the UI, show a progress bar that stalled out, or act like everything worked perfectly but not actually install it. Command line install works flawlessly every time.
  - capableweb 6y ago
    Judging by your other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22954061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22954061) you were using Software Center for the installing. Gdebi was working fine back before Software Center.
    - jakear 6y ago
      I was using whatever popped up in a default Ubuntu VM when I double clicked a .deb file. If they've chosen to make that not the best software for installing .deb's... lets just say I can see why people say Linux distributions tend to be user-unfreindly.
      - capableweb 6y ago

Iolaum 6y ago

Snap packages are the reason I moved from Ubuntu Mate to Fedora Mate. I use free software to own my computer, if it decides on its own when to update like snaps do that defeats the purpose.

cies 6y ago
Does that distro use flatpacks? I also hate snap with a passion, but I dont think flatpack will be better, what are your thoughts on this?
- Iolaum 6y ago
  No, fedora Mate has no flatpaks by default. I do use them on my machine though. They are not as integrated to the system as snaps on Ubuntu but they update only when I tell them to and I like the additional security benefits of the flatpak project overall.
  - cies 6y ago
    I think security wise it got worse. With traditional package repos someone still does some due diligence. Also it's not clear what's going on, and that is a huge prerequisite for security.

Legogris 6y ago

This, for me, marks the release when (somewhat unfortunately, 18.04 LTS has been good) I will not use Ubuntu for any new installations - desktop or server. I can see how snaps are beneficial for novice desktop users who want an AppStore-like experience, but how do they see people adopting this for Ubuntu Server?

iameli 6y ago
Apt isn't going anywhere. What changed for you on the server side?
- Legogris 6y ago
  A couple of packages (specifically which slip my mind) that either were only available as snaps and not in the main apt repos, or had way older versions in the apt repos. At that point, there's no reason to not run debian instead.
  - Kudos 6y ago
    I'd like to understand which packages, I've had no packages I need disappear. I'm skeptical that the packages are actually missing to favour snaps, and not simply renamed or replaced.
    - Legogris 6y ago
      My guess is more attention and focus on snaps and increasing neglect maintaining the deb repo.
- oefrha 6y ago
  Just upgraded on my non-essential home server, and apparently lxd is only available via snap now, for whatever reason. https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=lxd&searchon=names&suite=all&section=all https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=lxd&searchon=nam...
  - 6y ago

Jonnax 6y ago

I've not used Snap, Flatpack, Appimage and all the other types of app packaging tools before. What are the benefits? Are they effectively like bundling an application with all its dependencies? Is it a way of running "native" apps instead of in a docker container? What should I and shouldn't be using it for?

bjoli 6y ago
They claim that it does sandboxing, which to my knowledge was never actually activated in any meaningful way. I have used flatpaks on fedora which was nice, and I also built some which was quite painless. I hate that I can't launch them from the terminal like usual though.
- brtln 6y ago
  It is possible, flatpak exports shell wrappers for binaries at /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin and ~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/bin. It uses application ID for security reasons though.
- jamieweb 6y ago
  You're right regarding the sandboxing. Snaps use 'plugs' to add sandbox exceptions that can be configured by the package author and enabled at install time, e.g. to allow access to your home area or the network. Even if the sandboxing may technically prevent the package escalating to root or whatever, this is a fairly moot point on a personal computer as everything valuable is probably in your home area.
readwind 6y ago
The negatives, of snap, at least, was that most apps became 'un-skinned,' and looked like unthemed things you'd launch directly in an X11-session so they look like their base-worst, and so on, in my experience. - The first Ubuntu LTS I tried that had snap even had problems with the [snap-packed] calculator, which for some dumb reason was a snap-app instead of a .deb, I'm talking the main included/internal calc-app, and the VLC snap-package I tried was totally unskinned, due to being snap'ped I suppose, as the ppa and etc .deb versions of VLC certainly was and looked better. Now I am on EndeavourOS, an arch-based distro, easy to use and set up, and this is due to snap being introduced in Ubuntu directly, plus not wanting the ppa chase-game, and et cetera. It's just an/my opinion(s), and certainly not a pointer. Just being objective from my own perspectives, here. Got nothing against Ubuntu or anything, it's a free world, thankfully, still.

bragh 6y ago

I hope the HiDPI support is improved now. Right now, when I use fractional scaling on 19.10, none of the display settings get saved and so after a restart, I have to readjust all of the layout, orientation and scaling for displays. Pretty annoying for a dual-boot triple display system. edit: Nevermind, seems that it got even worse for my case: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1870736 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1... https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mutter/+bug/1873403 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mutter/+bug/187340...

encom 6y ago
Try using mixed DPI displays. My main display is 27 inch 4K display, and on the sides I have old 19 inch 1280x1024 displays, used for IRC, music player, process monitor, email etc. Stuff I glance at from time to time. _NOTHING_ supports this setup properly. Even Windows has bugs galore as soon as you mix high and low DPI displays. I don't believe anyone ever tests this scenario. I've learned to tolerate and work around the Windows bugs, but I've never gotten it to work at all in any Linux desktop environment I've tried.
- Aeolos 6y ago
  I am using a 1200p, a 1800p and a 2160p monitor side-by-side on MacOS and it works fine. The 2160p monitor is rotated to portrait mode for reading/writing text documents. I can hotplug a monitor and it will automatically switch to the right layout, remembering the correct location for all open windows. I am using a 1080p and a 2160p on ArchLinux/Wayland/Gnome3. It's not perfect, but it's not unusable either (compared to X11, which was completely broken).
- jrockway 6y ago
  I use a 1440p display at 100% and a 4k display at 175% on Windows and it works fine. The only bug that I see is that if a window is spanned across two monitors, it picks the scaling based on which monitor contains more of the window. I'm not even sure that's a bug, it's just how it has to be done. (My first mixed DPI setup was actually on ChromeOS. That got around the issue by not letting a window span monitors. Actually a somewhat elegant workaround, since it didn't let you do that before HiDPI support ;) Windows and the applications I use even handle the different refresh rates of my monitors pretty well. I have a 165Hz main monitor and a normal 60Hz monitor. Apps are aware of the framerate differences when I move them around. It wasn't always good, but as time goes forward applications and Windows itself handles HiDPI better and better. (FWIW, I haven't had any problems on Ubuntu... except that letting the monitors go into power saving mode resets the display scaling override. That was with 18.10, though. I use an Ubuntu VM under Hyper-V now... begrudgingly.) Having said that, I am not a GUI power user by any means. On Linux, all I ever use are a browser, terminal, and Emacs. On Windows, I use CAD software and games (and a browser, terminal, and Emacs). It all works well enough for me.

safgasCVS 6y ago

Sorry I’m not adding anything to the conversation here, but have they removed that strange ‘swipe-up to login’ gesture at the start screen?

renewiltord 6y ago
I don't believe my 19.04 login manager does that. I do recall that being annoying because my first keystroke would actually just move that up. Now it starts up to the user list by default.
- Izkata 6y ago
  I'm still on 18.04, and it doesn't do it. I remember it in an older version though.
Joeboy 6y ago
I don't know if they've removed the ability to do it. I don't think you've ever had to do it. You can just hit space, or just start typing your password from the lock screen.
- readwind 6y ago
  Yeah you can just start typing your password, last time I tried Ubuntu, at least. Or press any key, and the prompt should appear. Even pressing ctrl could work. But any character-key should be the key, in my experience.
bmaupin 6y ago
Yes: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/ubuntu-20-04-release-features https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/ubuntu-20-04-release-fea...

curt15 6y ago

>Ubuntu is also researching if they can get Adobe on board. Where did you hear about this?

Vinnl 6y ago
They mention it here, but it's pretty non-committal: https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-20-04-survey-results https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-20-04-survey-results > Adobe Photoshop (Illustrator®, Acrobat and Creative Cloud®) were asked for over a hundred times. (...) bringing these kinds of tools and applications to Linux is an ongoing effort.

Jean-Philipe 6y ago

> The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. I don't get why they're doing that. Snaps have mostly created problems for me, like they don't scale when other apps do, or the styling is off, or they don't show up properly in the software manager. The snap daemon on one of my laptops always blocks the shutdown by 30 seconds. Generally a rather confusing experience.

turbinerneiter 6y ago
I'm on Fedora where the equivalent is called Flathub/Flatpaks. There are definitely some rough edges still, but the possible upsides are amazing for me. It makes it way easier for a developer to release for different Linux-flavors. The applications get sandboxed and there is much less risk to mess up your system. Stuff like permission, similar to Android/iOS becomes possible. There for sure is problems to: it makes it way easier for a lazy developer to ship ancient libraries without security fixes, the "packages", now images, are much larger and the quality check of the packager gets sidestepped. And, as always when you try something new, it gets worse before it gets better. But I think the idea is good and I hope for the best.
- mcny 6y ago
  My understanding is snap and flatpak are not equivalent at all because snap is more permissive whereas flatpak is sandboxed. Specifically, it is not possible to do gpg signed commits from flatpak (e.g., jetbrains idea) without tweaks upstream. I agree with the overarching idea though: it gets worse before it gets better. See wayland and how we still can’t capture display in obs. I am a little torn on this. Should the onus to “fix” be on jetbrains and obs? I personally think no where possible. Replacements should be drop in without effort or at least with clear guidance and not too much effort on behalf of individual applications.
  - stubish 6y ago
    Snaps are sandboxed. They can be granted extra privileges, such as access to $HOME, camera, bluetooth etc. Some of these interfaces such as $HOME can be gained automatically by any snap. Others need to be granted by Canonical (to automatically grant access on install), or manually granted by the user post install. There is also a 'classic' mode where the app is unsandboxed, which again needs to be granted by Canonical and in addition requires explicit acceptance by the user when being installed.

davb 6y ago

So far, I'm very impressed with 20.04 on my personal laptop (a Thinkpad L390). HiDPI works better out-of-the-box (I didn't actually need to enable scaling manually, but did have to add a Chrome and Teams .desktop file with --force-device-scale-factor=1.2). Power management is much better out-of-the-box too (I've gone from 2-3h battery to 4-8h depending on workload, rivalling what I see under Windows). But you're right about Snaps. I love the concept (easier distribution, fewer dependency issues especially if you're a few years into the lifecycle of an LTS release) but they're not, in my opinion, production-ready yet so it's frustrating to see them pushed by Ubuntu. The main issues we have are the slow startups compared to non-snap apps (which is felt more acutely on old hardware with spinning disks) and the fact that they don't work if /home lives on an NFS server. That rules out their use for many academic and enterprise deployments.

usr1106 6y ago
oh, I am suprised you praise HiDPI support. I could not make emacs work resonably. It does not react on the widely documented Xft and GDK_DPI_SCALE settings as in other distros. I am on Xubuntu though if that makes a difference. And I have not tried for a couple of weeks. There have been many package updates since I tried last.
- davb 6y ago
  I actually tried installing xubuntu-desktop first (and then plain old xfce) as I fancied switching back to them after a few years using Gnome. But you're definitely right that out-of-the-box, XFCE HiDPI support was lacking. Widgets (panels, icons, etc) and fonts all scaled fairly independently, and I gave us after manually resizing a few elements. On Ubuntu 20.04 (with Gnome), it just worked (with the exception of Chromium/CEF/Blink based applications like Chrome and Teams, which needed the aforementioned command line argument to scale them). I actually had to undo most of the scaling changes that came across with my restored home folder. The one other thing I had to change was the Terminal font as the default was a little too small to use comfortably on my laptop screen - I opted for Liberation Mono Regular, 12pt (px?) with 1.10x height. As a former long-time XFCE proponent, I recommend you give Ubuntu + Gnome a try. It's the best it's been since the Gnome 2 days, and is no-where near as power hungry as it has been in recent years. The most power-hungry application I'm running is Evolution, where the webkit process that renders HTML email frequently gets out of control and burns 40% CPU until I restart it (I'd use Thunderbird but the Lightning plugin https://github.com/ExchangeCalendar/exchangecalendar https://github.com/ExchangeCalendar/exchangecalendar to handle Exchange calendar stopped working with recent versions of Thunderbird some months ago).

coinerone 6y ago

The only thing that holds back my Employer to switch to Linux for 6500+ Desktops is Microsoft Office and full MS Exchange compatibility. The Collegues who need Adobe Products just have to work with Apple Machines anyway.

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
Just switch to LibreOffice. The dependency on .docx/.xlsx is an overblown propaganda. I personally had a business in 2007..2011 that replaced windows for Linux. All that time I heard that same old song again: "But but MS Office is so essential!". Turned out, not so much, on over 5000 PCs in several dozen companies. Update: business eventually failed, for one simple reason - Ubuntu Linux is too freaking stable. The idea was transferring customers to Ubuntu, and have them pay a monthly service fee to do maintenance and fixes. And we have soon discovered that a properly configured GNU/Linux desktop PC can run for YEARS without maintenance at all. Customers had it figured out too and opted to do one-time fees when something goes wrong, and it just wasn't sustainable.
- Kipters 6y ago
  You'd lose the realtime collaboration features though.
- sparkling 6y ago
  Ignoring format issues, LibreOffice just feels extremly slugish for me. I get little freezes all the time, the UI is laggy and startup time is pretty bad too. I came to dislike it so much that i prefer to edit things in Google Docs over LibreOffice .
  - readwind 6y ago
    I haven't tried it but some people say 'OnlyOffice' is a better branch than libreoffice, it seems to support MS-Office standards better, but, as I said I've never tried it. Only trouble these people had was with certain fonts, but I guess the remedy would be to choose embed all fonts upon saving and sharing, if that helps, then perhaps OnlyOffice, desktop version, is an option, for some. I plan to try it, although I use my old office-versions, in a vm, for now.

curt15 6y ago

>The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. The graphical "gnome software" software installer was replaced in the default install by a snap-only fork named "Snap Store" with no support for Flatpak (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/snap-store/+bug/1871944 https://bugs.launchpad.net/snap-store/+bug/1871944). Were there some technical reasons for this move or was it a business decision to kneecap the other package format?

zyga 6y ago
IIRC GNOME removed support for snaps from gnome-software so this was the only way forward.
- majewsky 6y ago
  No. Canonical absolutely has the resources to make an appstore that supports all three package formats (dpkg, flatpak, snap).
- brtln 6y ago
  It's not true. GNOME Software still ships Snap plugin. It's Canonical that decided to fork gnome-software and provide it under different name without competition plugins enabled.
- curt15 6y ago
  According to git, gnome-software snap support still seems to be actively developed: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/commits/master/plugins https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/commits/mast...

cies 6y ago

I hate snap. It makes my system less predictable, increases load times, makes UI stuff look ugly, obfuscates process monitoring, hogs memory, cannot deal with files in /tmp (and I happen to use /tmp a lot), makes if hard to do audio (like connecting a mic to Chromium)... I can go on. But in 2019 versions of buntu it could still be removed: https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup#remove-snap https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup#remove-snap I found a way to use Debian packages reliably on buntus with a trick that is shown here for Chromium: https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup/tree/master/chrome https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup/tree/master/chrome If this snap thing continues to invade the *buntus I will move away from them. For now I still like the combination of stable + up-to-date + familiar (Debian based), but --as others have said-- the snap thing goes against why I choose to use open source.

suby 6y ago
Out of curiosity, do you feel the same way about Flatpak?
- cies 6y ago
  Have not tried that. Maybe I should, but im on Debian-style distros for so long (and use 'm on servers and such) that I dont really want to learn the basics again. Also, from my RPM days I remember essential (pgk mgmt) tools changing way too often for my taste. Also I'm a KDE/Qt kinda person, and the RPM ecosystem was mostly GTK based.
  - r3ll 6y ago
    You can install flatpaks on many distros, including Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Kubuntu, et cetera. I have some flatpaks on a Kubuntu laptop I maintain for a family member and installation was about as smooth as it is on my own fedora machine. I use cli exclusively though so ymmv if you prefer gui(Edit: Exclusively use CLI for sysadmin).
- imglorp 6y ago
  On that note, what requirements pushed Ubuntu to select snap over flatpack?

markosaric 6y ago

Nice release! The latest Gnome included (3.36) is so much smoother and faster!

timClicks 6y ago

Snaps are significantly safer for users and easier for publishers to produce. The styling issues and so forth occur because of a security-first mindset. [Disclaimer: work for Canonical, but not on the Snapcraft team]

FpUser 6y ago
As a user I do not care about publisher's convenience. They should solve their own problems without making users the victims of said convenience. As for "safer" - I'll buy this argument when you get rid of slow startup, bloat and other problems associated with snap.
enriquto 6y ago
> because of a security-first mindset. I would believe you here if snap was not an auto-updating system. This is about the least security-first mindset that it can be; it has a single, gaping, point of failure, after which an attacker may get hold of millions of user's computers without action by their part.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

Idk, since 10.04 I've appreciated that Ubuntu is as far as a mainstream Linux desktop distro as it gets and just works (I used to run various distros including RH/CentOS, Debian, Suse, Gentoo, and also FreeBSD). But I'm on the brink to leave (maybe towards Void Linux, Debian/Devuan, or back-to-Slackware) because the things I care about have atrophied (lightweight DE, real Unix environment) while crap (snap, systemd, gnome-shell, invasive command-line suggestions) has taken over. On 19.10 gnome-shell really gets in the way for me. And Unix command line utilities I'm using all the time stopped working for me (for example, even vim on Ubuntu 19.04 comes with broken syntax highlighting OOTB, and annoingly and incompetently inserts tabs and spaces where there must be none, something I haven't seen any vi implementation doing for over 30 years; also, awk rejects complex regexpes all of a sudden on 19.04). I know there are other 'buntus shipping with alternatives for gnome-shell but for me the point is/was that there is a large installed base eliminating glitches, which however isn't the case for alternate 'buntus any more than it is for non-'buntus. I also don't see the benefit of yet another packaging format; the point of a desktop distro should be to deliver a consolidated set of shared libs rather than going nuclear and ship everything in fscking containers, especially when there are exactly zero new desktop apps coming out these days (with the exception of Chrome which I'd rather install containerized, and which I only use for website testing, my main browser being FF anyway).

bmaupin 6y ago
> On 19.10 gnome-shell really gets in the way for me. Xfce is a nice alternative to GNOME 3 that reminds me a lot of GNOME 2.

usr1106 6y ago

> It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal. Oh, I did not even notice that during 4+ weeks on the unreleased Xubuntu Focal because I never use anything else but the command line to install software. But the target audience Ubuntu is wider, so I think that is a very bad change. One might think they have learned from https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 , but obviously not. Well, formally they declared bug #1 solved, but few would agree that the Linux desktop has won. How does the snap "repo" compare to the Ubuntu repos in terms of count? I would have guessed it's orders of magnitude. Even if many of the packages might not be useful for those requiring an installation GUI.

readwind 6y ago
One can dpkg -i , but, how about dependencies? I always had a problem with that. Whenever the app-store didn't work, which usually pulled-in all deps, I just naively used dpkg -i pkg.deb, and chased all the deps manually, through google. I have done that at least. Thank god for arch. No politics/"religion(s/*)" intended.
- usr1106 6y ago
  apt is your friend. Or apt-get if you prefer old school. Or aptitude if you are willing to learn something pretty powerful.
  - readwind 6y ago
    huh how well does that work with individual downloaded *.deb packages? You're probably right, but, the included repos are usually full of outdated versions, if you get a too-new deb, from some experimental site, in terms of Ubuntu freshness, and then no pkgs in the repo will have a new enough version. (In terms of dependencies for the local exteriorally-gotten base pkg.deb and it's deps,) I guess ppa's are a thing, but, yeah, good to be off this train, no disrespects to Ubuntu, if it picks up I will surely be glad, and even, chances are slim, ever use it again. We're all friends, let's say yes to progress, in general, in the right directions.

flavor8 6y ago

> The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal. Another solution to this (aside from synaptic, command line, other clients) is to use Kubuntu (which has an apt based package manager called Discover, much improved in this release over prior versions). KDE still doesn't work great on tablets, but in all other respects it's a lot nicer than Gnome. Spend 30 minutes tweaking it to your preferences after install (apt install kubuntu-desktop) and you'll have a desktop that does exactly what you need it to. (You could also install KDE Neon, which packages latest stable KDE with a LTS Ubuntu core.)

BiteCode_dev 6y ago

I understand the hate for snap (and flatpak) and I personally use deb as much as I can, but they are the right move. Yes, right now it's a subpar experience. But you need to deploy it now to be able to improve on it and have it as the default in the future. And I believe it's a better future, because: - packaging a deb is difficult. I've done it, and it's a lot of complicated hard work you get to repeat for every release for anything that is not a simple program. Snap and flatpak are very easy to build and support accross releases. This will increase the number of software that will be provided to Linux. In fact, it already has. - the permissions model we have on our phones is very hard to replicate on Linux, yet something like this proves more and more necessary. SELinux and Apparmor are too low level. Snap and flatpak make it easy to make sandboxed app and request permissions by abstracting those. What's more, they make it ovious for the user to know that the apps it uses are sandboxed and the permissions they use. It will take a few years before we get a streamlined experience with snap and flatpak, and it will be at the cost of a bit of performance and disk space. For now they feel bloated, are not necessarily more secure, and are less well integrated. But in the end, it will make the Linux ecosystem more user friendly.

readwind 6y ago
I agree with almost everything you say, and, yes, people used IIS, windows, as webservers, only not-long ago, so, let's hope for progress. Totally agreed.
- breakingcups 6y ago
  I don't see what that has to do with the post you replied to.
  - readwind 6y ago
    I'll enlighten you. About twenty years ago people used IIS for web-servers, encumbered in costly licenses, for everything, and progress goes on. That's the point man. Time goes on, and things gets better. Hope you see now. That was the point, anyways. I really hope it helps. Progress goes on is just the general point. Nothing else intended. Should be clear enough.

jamieweb 6y ago

> The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal. My main concern with Snap is security. Using the default Ubuntu Apt repositories, I can `apt install` pretty much anything I want and it's almost guaranteed to not be malicious/dangerous, as only trusted/well-established developers can get their package into the Apt repos. However, with Snap, everybody in the world can publish any old rubbish in the Snap Store, including packages that typosquat the names of others. Snap's current 'protections' for this are mainly reactionary rather than preventative, which is far from satisfactory [1]. For me, the absolute key selling point of Linux over Windows/Mac is the secure-by-default and natively integrated package management. Pushing Snaps as the main package management method goes too close to the Windows way of just downloading random EXEs from the internet. I personally would like to see Apt remain as the default system package manager for all common/well-known software, with Snap existing purely as a 'community' repository for software that is known to be untrusted/unknown. [1] https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/is-there-any-protection-against-typosquatting-on-the-snap-store/10815 https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/is-there-any-protection-against...

ric2b 6y ago
This could be fixed by separating the store into an "official" repo that only includes trusted apps and an opt-in "community" repo with the rest. It's not really an issue with snap itself.
- O_H_E 6y ago
  It kinda is. Canonical explictly doesn't want to do that. The cli doesn't support any other server except canonical's.[1] Flatpack on the other hand, does support that structure out of the box, and a few projects are already using there own repos.[2] [1] https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/external-repositories/176 https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/external-repositories/176 [2] https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/repositories.html https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/repositories.html
modzu 6y ago
there's debian!

miiiiiike 6y ago

I've been using 20.04 since the early betas and Ubuntu since the first release. I haven't been this impressed with an Ubuntu release since that first install.

jki275 6y ago

Most people stick with Mac and Windows because of MS Office, not Adobe.

saagarjha 6y ago
Microsoft Office has fairly reasonable and popular browser-based alternatives. Adobe’s suite doesn’t.
- jki275 6y ago
  Sort of, and only really starting in the last year or so, and still limited from the real version, but the market for adobe products among anyone who wants to use Linux is pretty much zero.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    (I'm talking about Google Docs.)
    - jki275 6y ago
      Oh, well. Google Docs is simply not capable of business level work. Sorry. I thought you were talking about Office 365, which is significantly better, but still not up to par with the native applications.

sfifs 6y ago

> It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal. That's a good thing! I can't wait for Deb installers to stop mucking about dumping random files all over my system. I also can't wait for the whole ppa nightmare which is the only way to get cutting edge versions of software by giving the right to muck about with the system to random packages on the internet to end.

maelito 6y ago

What's keeping Adobe from releasing Photoshop for Ubuntu ? Convincing ? Or real technical difficulties ? Like recoding the interface ?

ric2b 6y ago
They're probably just not willing to absorb the support costs for such a small market.
llcoolv 6y ago
Colour profiles, display calibration.

peq 6y ago

Some problems I had with Snaps: * Installed VScode. The terminal in VScode was in a different environment from the system terminal, so used different Python environments. Took me a while to figure out why installing a package was not working. * Installed Slack. When I click a link in Slack it opens a new Firefox process that does not have access to my normal profile, saved logins, etc. and is not shown as a Firefox window in the sidebar. In both cases I uninstalled the Slack version and installed the "real" version.

sojournerc 6y ago
The new firefox on link click in slack can be guided by going to `about::profiles` or something like that, and making sure there's only one profile, and that it's default.

brnt 6y ago

Does the snap store mean that much software was moved out of the apt repositories or is it also still available there as well?

foresto 6y ago

> The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. I am disappointed that snap still forcibly clutters everyone's $HOME with an extra directory[1] that cannot be moved or renamed. It was reported four years ago, and nearly a thousand people have joined the bug report. The glacial pace at which they're addressing this problem makes me hesitant to embrace snap. [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053