6 ms·

Ubuntu Desktop: charting a course for the future

53 points by jandeboevrie 3y ago

symlinkk 3y ago
“ We are currently working on a highly experimental implementation of hardware-backed full disk encryption” Why does Canonical always reinvent the wheel. Just ship ZFS or BTRFS please.
- CameronNemo 3y ago
  I think this is referring to using an encryption key from the TPM so that you can get to a login screen without having to type in your encryption password. (And your login credentials would then unlock your encrypted home directory).
  - chronogram 3y ago
    Is that not already possible with systemd-cryptenroll? Would be nice if they can make that accessible to a standard distribution, it's been standard on Android, Apple and Windows for so long now.
    - CameronNemo 3y ago
      The top comment only quoted part of the sentence... This is what they snipped out: as an option in the Ubuntu installer So yeah they'll probably be using systemd-cryptenroll under the hood, but just make it more accessible for end users.
- nancyp 3y ago
  It took them years to move away from Unity and unitD. They always reinvent. Also Snap push is huge tun off for me. My next install will be Debian.
  - isanjay 3y ago
    I liked Unity though.
    - nancyp 3y ago
      What do you miss in Gnome that you had in unity?
      - trts 3y ago
        heads up display (HUD) was a good feature that I haven't seen re-implemented as a an option out of the box in another desktop environment.
      - pqb 3y ago
        The first two things that comes to my mind: - HUD/search via global-menu - You could find any option in menus by typing them (https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/01/hud-new-unity-feature https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/01/hud-new-unity-feature). - Menus in the top bar (like KDE/macOS), but also in the title bar of application (quite unique approach - https://ubunlog.com/en/ubuntu-14-04-menus-in-the-title-bar/ https://ubunlog.com/en/ubuntu-14-04-menus-in-the-title-bar/).
- petepete 3y ago
  I don't mind them doing stuff like this, hardware-backed disk encryption shouldn't take the massive amounts of time/effort that designing, building and maintaining a desktop environment or display server will. I guess they need to say something other than "we're the systemd/dpkg/GNOME distro that everyone's familiar with".
  - symlinkk 3y ago
    If they just shipped vanilla GNOME and vanilla ZFS that would literally be a perfect distro.
- dabber 3y ago
  > Just ship ZFS or BTRFS please. ZFS has been an installer option since 20.04 and it's been working great for me. https://ubuntu.com/blog/zfs-focus-on-ubuntu-20-04-lts-whats-new https://ubuntu.com/blog/zfs-focus-on-ubuntu-20-04-lts-whats-...
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  Do you mean LUKS? Those fs aren’t encrypted by default.
- speedgoose 3y ago
  I think BTRFS doesn’t support encryption yet. If it does, I should edit the Wikipedia page. Maybe they will improve the LUKS user experience.
CameronNemo 3y ago
Every user I know who has left Ubuntu has cited snaps as a push factor. And their only mention of snap in this post is to say that they are fixing a regression from native Chromium? Tone deaf.
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  But what is the goal of the distro? If the goal is appeal to every user, then they should remove Snaps. But what if the goal is to appeal to casual users only?
  - wmf 3y ago
    Flatpak is probably less buggy than Snaps for casual users.
    - phendrenad2 3y ago
      Really? Can you provide citations for that? I went looking around the web to understand why people dislike Snap in the first place. The top reasons cited on Reddit are: (1) "Controlled by Canonical, not an open format" (This seems to be a mis-explanation of the complaint that the Snap server itself, which Canonical runs, is closed-source. As though a Snap server would be hard to create, it's a simple CRUD webapp) Anyway, this in no way causes problems for the "casual users" I mentioned, so irrelevant (unless the people who claim that closed-source software is invariably hopelessly buggy compared to open-source are right, that is). (2) "Ubuntu reinvented the wheel, Flatpak was fine" But does that affect the "casual user" in any way? People are still going to package software for Snap. The casual user isn't going to miss a minute of sleep over their packages coming from a store that existed after a perfectly-good store already existed. It's just not top of mind at all. (3) "Ubuntu did a bad job designing the system. You have to close Snap apps to update them, but the updater doesn't have a friendly UI for killing apps so they can be updated, which just confuses the average user" (This seems valid. Flatpak updates the app in the background and the new container isn't launched until you quit the app and reopen it normally). (4) "Forced updates" (This is actually a positive for most casual users, who don't want to think about updates, they just want it to happen).
what-no-tests 3y ago
Going through the necessary steps to outline a course toward a stated goal, and focus efforts to achieve it just make sense. I'm glad to see the Ubuntu Desktop project move in this direction - it strikes me as a mark of maturity. Congrats!
pqb 3y ago
What is a moat of Ubuntu (Desktop) today? Don't say snap, please :)
- lolinder 3y ago
  Being the Debian-based distro that's willing to bundle proprietary drivers. For someone like me who doesn't want to deal with driver issues, Ubuntu generally* just works out of the box. * Looking at you, Nvidia
  - pqb 3y ago
    Isn't there any PPA for Debian with proprietary drivers, for example for aforementioned Nvidia graphic cards?
    - lolinder 3y ago
      Probably, but that's exactly the kind of research and juggling that I'm trying to avoid. The Ubuntu installer has just has a checkbox that says "please give me proprietary drivers". Also, to be clear, my asterisk is that Nvidia drivers seem to be no easier on Ubuntu than on Debian (you have to seek them out), and for me they've often caused problems once installed.
      - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
        The most stable solution to Nvidia drivers on Linux has always been "download the deb when you set it up, hope it was a "good" release, and forget about it for a year until something requires a newer driver. It always felt like going through the distro's included stuff was a waste of time.
  - doubled112 3y ago
    Debian relaxed their policy here for the latest release. There is firmware in the main ISO, which means your WiFi might work. The Nvidia driver is an `apt install` away. Either way, Nvidia needs to be installed by you on Debian or Ubuntu, and GUI vs CLI is no different to me.
marcodiego 3y ago
Not related to the post, but related to the feeling: I miss the dreams of two decades ago. It was like a cause to fight for, a bunch of hackers against a billion dollar industry. Actually, we already had support from part of that "billion dollar industry" but there was still a fight against antagonists. Every contribution was a small step, every new version, new improvements, a new program covering a feature we missed from some evil proprietary software... The points where we were ahead like security, stability and performance made every enthusiast user feel like part of great opus, a soldier in a somewhat silent war. Fast forward 20 years, linux is now "the kernel that powers billions of end-users devices". We're still way behind on the desktop, but the "war for the end-user" has a clear leader. Many other markets were also taken entirely or partially: HPC, embedded, auto, entertainment, routers, servers, cloud... The thing matured. If you want to get a contribution in the kernel, you'll have to convince the "billion dollar industry" we seemed to be fighting against in another era. You could say they are on our side now, but I really don't know what difference it makes. Those teens of two decades ago should be proud of what was achieved and, I'm sure, many are. The situation is good, stable, mature. Always a bit better. But the feeling, the enthusiasm, the hope... all that seems gone, and I sorely miss that. I'd love to have that feeling again. The feeling that heavy investments will be made, the feeling that the desktop is a good cause to fight for, that a small circle of hackers are willing to make something BIG. Yes, I miss that.
- wmf 3y ago
  a bunch of hackers against a billion dollar industry What if this framing was holding us back the whole time?
  - marcodiego 3y ago
    That was definitely not holding us back. Rejection was not the weapon. The effort was to write the best software, not to kick the other side on the butt. The "other side" did indeed act in probably unethical ways that hold us back. Legal threats, defamation campaigns, lobby... All that was used by "the other side" and that really did hold us back. The SCO scandal and Halloween documents are just very good examples. With reagard to the "bunch of hackers"... well, those were just trying to write awesome software. And they did.
politelemon 3y ago
So much negativity for this. I would like to say I appreciate the efforts they put in towards making an excellent developer environment. I've not found anything as fast and snappy (pardon) for development as well as light gaming. It's true they do have frayed edges, but all OSes do. As they said, their intention is to put their intentions on paper to hold themselves to it, and that is commendable.
wiseowise 3y ago
> Ubuntu Desktop is the most used desktop Linux distribution for gaming (when you include older LTS and interim releases grouped inside the ‘Other category’ on the Steam hardware survey) Where do they see that? Opening the link they reference gives the following table: "SteamOS Holo" 64 bit 42.07% +2.74% "Arch Linux" 64 bit 7.94% -0.39% Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS 64 bit 7.38% -0.49% Freedesktop.org SDK 22.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 5.99% -0.03% "Manjaro Linux" 64 bit 4.29% -0.08% Linux Mint 21.1 64 bit 3.84% -0.71% Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 2.97% +2.97% Other 25.52% -4.02%
- lolinder 3y ago
  They're probably excluding SteamOS as not a desktop distro (very debatable), and it's not hard to see how including other Ubuntu releases from Other would push Ubuntu up at least another 0.6% to move above Arch.
kkfx 3y ago
Ubuntu with it's push toward snap have finally let down ALL real users, the first move was unity. So Ubuntu now is just a "goto" for newbies not anymore "something good for both expert and newcomer" so have a fate already depicted. Sorry. NisOS probably will be the future Ubuntu in 4-6 years.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I agree that Ubuntu has problems, but I can't see NixOS ever replacing it; Ubuntu's whole thing has traditionally been that it's user-friendly, and especially beginner-friendly. NixOS is beautiful, but it's not an easy learning curve.
akkartik 3y ago
A week ago I switched to Manjaro after spending the last 12 years pretty significantly on Ubuntu. While I did it for unrelated reasons, it's amazing how many minor niggles that I'd gotten used to on my Thinkpad laptop have completely disappeared: * My wifi used to slow down multiple times a day, and speed up again after I turned it off and on. * Right-click context menu in Firefox often failed to copy links to the clipboard. * The file dialogs in Firefox became weird after an upgrade a year or so ago. I could no longer hit Esc to dismiss them. 50% of the time, pressing ctrl+o to bring up the file open dialog and continue spamming o's into it until I killed Firefox. Or it would spam ctrl+o's spawning ever more file open dialogs until I killed Firefox. I blamed Firefox for many of these. But now I'm not so sure. Manjaro has been great. I didn't realize the extent to which software can vary at all levels between distributions. Now I think of distributions like different places with different weather. If you don't like the climate in one, try another one (maybe just off a USB stick). It might be very different.
jacknews 3y ago
What did he actually say? What is the desktop going to be? Seems like just a list of empty feelgood to me.

53 points by jandeboevrie 3y ago

“ We are currently working on a highly experimental implementation of hardware-backed full disk encryption” Why does Canonical always reinvent the wheel. Just ship ZFS or BTRFS please.

CameronNemo 3y ago
I think this is referring to using an encryption key from the TPM so that you can get to a login screen without having to type in your encryption password. (And your login credentials would then unlock your encrypted home directory).
- chronogram 3y ago
  Is that not already possible with systemd-cryptenroll? Would be nice if they can make that accessible to a standard distribution, it's been standard on Android, Apple and Windows for so long now.
  - CameronNemo 3y ago
    The top comment only quoted part of the sentence... This is what they snipped out: as an option in the Ubuntu installer So yeah they'll probably be using systemd-cryptenroll under the hood, but just make it more accessible for end users.
nancyp 3y ago
It took them years to move away from Unity and unitD. They always reinvent. Also Snap push is huge tun off for me. My next install will be Debian.
- isanjay 3y ago
  I liked Unity though.
  - nancyp 3y ago
    What do you miss in Gnome that you had in unity?
    - trts 3y ago
      heads up display (HUD) was a good feature that I haven't seen re-implemented as a an option out of the box in another desktop environment.
    - pqb 3y ago
      The first two things that comes to my mind: - HUD/search via global-menu - You could find any option in menus by typing them (https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/01/hud-new-unity-feature https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/01/hud-new-unity-feature). - Menus in the top bar (like KDE/macOS), but also in the title bar of application (quite unique approach - https://ubunlog.com/en/ubuntu-14-04-menus-in-the-title-bar/ https://ubunlog.com/en/ubuntu-14-04-menus-in-the-title-bar/).
petepete 3y ago
I don't mind them doing stuff like this, hardware-backed disk encryption shouldn't take the massive amounts of time/effort that designing, building and maintaining a desktop environment or display server will. I guess they need to say something other than "we're the systemd/dpkg/GNOME distro that everyone's familiar with".
- symlinkk 3y ago
  If they just shipped vanilla GNOME and vanilla ZFS that would literally be a perfect distro.
dabber 3y ago
> Just ship ZFS or BTRFS please. ZFS has been an installer option since 20.04 and it's been working great for me. https://ubuntu.com/blog/zfs-focus-on-ubuntu-20-04-lts-whats-new https://ubuntu.com/blog/zfs-focus-on-ubuntu-20-04-lts-whats-...
mixmastamyk 3y ago
Do you mean LUKS? Those fs aren’t encrypted by default.
speedgoose 3y ago
I think BTRFS doesn’t support encryption yet. If it does, I should edit the Wikipedia page. Maybe they will improve the LUKS user experience.

CameronNemo 3y ago

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

phendrenad2 3y ago
But what is the goal of the distro? If the goal is appeal to every user, then they should remove Snaps. But what if the goal is to appeal to casual users only?
- wmf 3y ago
  Flatpak is probably less buggy than Snaps for casual users.
  - phendrenad2 3y ago
    Really? Can you provide citations for that? I went looking around the web to understand why people dislike Snap in the first place. The top reasons cited on Reddit are: (1) "Controlled by Canonical, not an open format" (This seems to be a mis-explanation of the complaint that the Snap server itself, which Canonical runs, is closed-source. As though a Snap server would be hard to create, it's a simple CRUD webapp) Anyway, this in no way causes problems for the "casual users" I mentioned, so irrelevant (unless the people who claim that closed-source software is invariably hopelessly buggy compared to open-source are right, that is). (2) "Ubuntu reinvented the wheel, Flatpak was fine" But does that affect the "casual user" in any way? People are still going to package software for Snap. The casual user isn't going to miss a minute of sleep over their packages coming from a store that existed after a perfectly-good store already existed. It's just not top of mind at all. (3) "Ubuntu did a bad job designing the system. You have to close Snap apps to update them, but the updater doesn't have a friendly UI for killing apps so they can be updated, which just confuses the average user" (This seems valid. Flatpak updates the app in the background and the new container isn't launched until you quit the app and reopen it normally). (4) "Forced updates" (This is actually a positive for most casual users, who don't want to think about updates, they just want it to happen).

what-no-tests 3y ago

Going through the necessary steps to outline a course toward a stated goal, and focus efforts to achieve it just make sense. I'm glad to see the Ubuntu Desktop project move in this direction - it strikes me as a mark of maturity. Congrats!

pqb 3y ago

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

lolinder 3y ago
Being the Debian-based distro that's willing to bundle proprietary drivers. For someone like me who doesn't want to deal with driver issues, Ubuntu generally* just works out of the box. * Looking at you, Nvidia
- pqb 3y ago
  Isn't there any PPA for Debian with proprietary drivers, for example for aforementioned Nvidia graphic cards?
  - lolinder 3y ago
    Probably, but that's exactly the kind of research and juggling that I'm trying to avoid. The Ubuntu installer has just has a checkbox that says "please give me proprietary drivers". Also, to be clear, my asterisk is that Nvidia drivers seem to be no easier on Ubuntu than on Debian (you have to seek them out), and for me they've often caused problems once installed.
    - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
      The most stable solution to Nvidia drivers on Linux has always been "download the deb when you set it up, hope it was a "good" release, and forget about it for a year until something requires a newer driver. It always felt like going through the distro's included stuff was a waste of time.
- doubled112 3y ago
  Debian relaxed their policy here for the latest release. There is firmware in the main ISO, which means your WiFi might work. The Nvidia driver is an `apt install` away. Either way, Nvidia needs to be installed by you on Debian or Ubuntu, and GUI vs CLI is no different to me.

marcodiego 3y ago

Not related to the post, but related to the feeling: I miss the dreams of two decades ago. It was like a cause to fight for, a bunch of hackers against a billion dollar industry. Actually, we already had support from part of that "billion dollar industry" but there was still a fight against antagonists. Every contribution was a small step, every new version, new improvements, a new program covering a feature we missed from some evil proprietary software... The points where we were ahead like security, stability and performance made every enthusiast user feel like part of great opus, a soldier in a somewhat silent war. Fast forward 20 years, linux is now "the kernel that powers billions of end-users devices". We're still way behind on the desktop, but the "war for the end-user" has a clear leader. Many other markets were also taken entirely or partially: HPC, embedded, auto, entertainment, routers, servers, cloud... The thing matured. If you want to get a contribution in the kernel, you'll have to convince the "billion dollar industry" we seemed to be fighting against in another era. You could say they are on our side now, but I really don't know what difference it makes. Those teens of two decades ago should be proud of what was achieved and, I'm sure, many are. The situation is good, stable, mature. Always a bit better. But the feeling, the enthusiasm, the hope... all that seems gone, and I sorely miss that. I'd love to have that feeling again. The feeling that heavy investments will be made, the feeling that the desktop is a good cause to fight for, that a small circle of hackers are willing to make something BIG. Yes, I miss that.

wmf 3y ago
a bunch of hackers against a billion dollar industry What if this framing was holding us back the whole time?
- marcodiego 3y ago
  That was definitely not holding us back. Rejection was not the weapon. The effort was to write the best software, not to kick the other side on the butt. The "other side" did indeed act in probably unethical ways that hold us back. Legal threats, defamation campaigns, lobby... All that was used by "the other side" and that really did hold us back. The SCO scandal and Halloween documents are just very good examples. With reagard to the "bunch of hackers"... well, those were just trying to write awesome software. And they did.

politelemon 3y ago

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

wiseowise 3y ago

> Ubuntu Desktop is the most used desktop Linux distribution for gaming (when you include older LTS and interim releases grouped inside the ‘Other category’ on the Steam hardware survey) Where do they see that? Opening the link they reference gives the following table: "SteamOS Holo" 64 bit 42.07% +2.74% "Arch Linux" 64 bit 7.94% -0.39% Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS 64 bit 7.38% -0.49% Freedesktop.org SDK 22.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 5.99% -0.03% "Manjaro Linux" 64 bit 4.29% -0.08% Linux Mint 21.1 64 bit 3.84% -0.71% Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 2.97% +2.97% Other 25.52% -4.02%

lolinder 3y ago
They're probably excluding SteamOS as not a desktop distro (very debatable), and it's not hard to see how including other Ubuntu releases from Other would push Ubuntu up at least another 0.6% to move above Arch.

kkfx 3y ago

Ubuntu with it's push toward snap have finally let down ALL real users, the first move was unity. So Ubuntu now is just a "goto" for newbies not anymore "something good for both expert and newcomer" so have a fate already depicted. Sorry. NisOS probably will be the future Ubuntu in 4-6 years.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
I agree that Ubuntu has problems, but I can't see NixOS ever replacing it; Ubuntu's whole thing has traditionally been that it's user-friendly, and especially beginner-friendly. NixOS is beautiful, but it's not an easy learning curve.

akkartik 3y ago

A week ago I switched to Manjaro after spending the last 12 years pretty significantly on Ubuntu. While I did it for unrelated reasons, it's amazing how many minor niggles that I'd gotten used to on my Thinkpad laptop have completely disappeared: * My wifi used to slow down multiple times a day, and speed up again after I turned it off and on. * Right-click context menu in Firefox often failed to copy links to the clipboard. * The file dialogs in Firefox became weird after an upgrade a year or so ago. I could no longer hit Esc to dismiss them. 50% of the time, pressing ctrl+o to bring up the file open dialog and continue spamming o's into it until I killed Firefox. Or it would spam ctrl+o's spawning ever more file open dialogs until I killed Firefox. I blamed Firefox for many of these. But now I'm not so sure. Manjaro has been great. I didn't realize the extent to which software can vary at all levels between distributions. Now I think of distributions like different places with different weather. If you don't like the climate in one, try another one (maybe just off a USB stick). It might be very different.

jacknews 3y ago

What did he actually say? What is the desktop going to be? Seems like just a list of empty feelgood to me.