Quoting: chr

Quoting: Rooster

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: Rooster

Our installer aims to make the complicated process of installing Fedora to replace another operating system as easy as possible, but it’s still a barrier even for tech-literate people

Wait what?

Maybe in the sense of "tech-literate people, too, are lazy".
Just because I could deal with a complicated installation process, doesn't mean I want to.

What I fail to see is, what is complicated about installing Fedora 32? It's about as easy as you can get.

Another hypothesis: maybe they mean tech-literate people who have never installed an OS? Or Windows-users who would need to research what is swap and how many GiB you need and what file-system is best on SSD. Then again that just sounds like over-optimizing rather than not managing to do it.

It is just marketing speak, they are trained to sound good while not making much sense.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This is good news, even if you do not use Fedora. Having one distribution available preinstalled means that if you install another that everything should work (which was announced as available)

If you buy one to put another distribution on I suggest you make an image of the existing installation, in case you have to return it to service.

There could be some features only available under windows, but they should not be listed when buying it with Linux.

Check if any extra kernel parameters are used in grub with

cat /proc/cmdline

and if any special repositories are used, before nuking the preinstalled one.

I bought a Dell G5 15 5587 1.5 years ago with Ubuntu 16.04 installed. I put a modern Linux on it and it just works except for the fingerprint reader from Goodix, which was not listed in the specifications when buying it as a Linux laptop, so I knew and that was ok then.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: The_Aquabat

Quoting: CatKillerI read it but their reasoning was that chromium usage isn't that high (so the test wouldn't inconvenience too many people) and that a browser is exactly the kind of thing that you'd want to be run in a sandbox. That decision doesn't affect me, personally, since I use chromium from a PPA anyway for the hardware video decoding.

I also use chromium pa, some little annoying thing is that every time I launch it , I get a message of chromium missing Google API dev keys. Do you know a way of getting rid of those messages?

Quoting: scratchi

Quoting: eldakingIt actually looks like a meaningful improvement in most aspects; there were many important updates to hardware support and big applications since 18.04, which I mostly had to backport or install in some way (newer mesa fixed several games, newer KDE had some nice features and look for those of us that use Kubuntu, newer libre office had a few important features, and I expect the version of wine in their repositories will be less awful). Plus generally looking nice and bugfixes, as always.

But the way they keep trying to push snaps almost makes me want to not update at all, or switch distros permanently. I used to assume that snaps weren't that bad, but after actually having more contact with them I was shocked by how horrible it is. First, snaps had ridiculously bad performance problems; so it was not even a "non-technical users wouldn't even notice" - people did notice, for example how ridiculously slow chromium was. Second, as a system it is way too closed and centralized, which is particularly bad for something that is intended to work across distros (other distros can't just host their own snap repositories, the backend isn't FOSS, and it is entirely developed by Canonical without any cooperation with other distros). And third, Canonical are actively pushing for it to replace other alternatives, which means we can't even ignore it if we don't like it.

I'll wait a bit anyway and probably will update to 20.04 if it isn't too obnoxious to avoid snaps for most things, or if at least it works well. But frankly, I'm already looking to jump boat from Kubuntu, and particularly for something better to recommend for newbies.

Yea, I agree, snaps suck. I have a use case where I run Ubuntu vdis in Docker container (full UI in docker, it's sick! :D ), and as of 19.10, they no longer have a chromium deb package. If you apt-get install chromium, you get the snapd migration package (it's called something along those lines, i don't remember anymore) and there is no official deb.

The thing is, because snap is basically a container, you can't install it in a Docker container...the snapd service doesn't even work in docker. There are some hacky ways to get it working, but chromium still does not launch. So this was a big problem for me.

To work around this, I have a separate pipeline that builds chromium from source and spits out a deb that I host in a different location (should probably use aptly to host a local repo, haven't got there yet) and then my docker image pipeline fetches the deb from there and installs it. Basically a shitload of work needed to be done to get chromium working in Docker. I haven't tested 20.04 yet, but if they start doing the same for other applications I use in the VDI, I'll probably move to debian or something.

You could either use a PPA for chromium, or maintain your own.

As far as I know there is the PPA from the chromium developers which just has the latest development version, and then the latest released from popos, but that is not in a ppa of its own but together with a lot of other popos packages. (I have not checked popos 20.04, but that is the case for popos 19.10)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: eldakingI'll wait a bit anyway and probably will update to 20.04 if it isn't too obnoxious to avoid snaps for most things, or if at least it works well.

sudo apt purge snapd will get rid of snaps entirely. Easy enough.

Sure, but will any default programs be removed by that - like say, the calculator? (I legit don't know what would happen to installed snaps)

And will the Ubuntu repositories contain non-snap alternatives for stuff? If they stop maintaining stuff in the repos because they now use snaps, it becomes impractical to use the distro without it. (While, presumably, other distros could still have those normally... at least for now)

The calculator will be switched back to the .deb on upgrade, or installed on a new install, same as the other packages that where used to test snaps as the system monitor.

Only the software store will be installed as a snap as default now. And chromium is only as a snap in Ubuntu now, but available in PPAs as a deb, but that is not a default package.

The software store is also available as a deb, so all default programs can be installed without snap, but its possible one wants to use other programs only available as a snap.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: toivopI have read that prime-select doesn't work properly so if you have Nvidia hybrid graphics it would be a good idea to hold off upgrading

Do you have any links to bug reports or forum posts regarding that?
prime-select via command line or via the mate-optimus seems to work without problems for me.

It could be some problems for only certain hardware, or the users had something broken before or its widespread problem, a link to a report would be nice.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: KorsGood news this one. Hope its valid for other flavours as well.

The flavours all use the same repositories so the have the package available. If they also install it as default is up to them.

To check without installing you can look at the flavour meta package and search for gamemode.

https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/ubuntu-desktop [External Link] and https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/ubuntu-mate-desktop [External Link] include gamemode

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Gamemode has been in Ubuntu since 19.04 in the community supported universe. The new thing is that it is now in main and the last change that it is installed automatically in a full desktop install.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I do not know how your clock got wrong, but I had it happen a few days ago running an idle 20.04 VM in virtualbox on my desktop which got suspended for quite some hours. After waking it up I tried a apt update in the VM soon after and then I got the same message. The clock was over 6 hours wrong in the VM. After correcting it apt update worked again.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Tuxee

Quoting: slaapliedjeI think I can fairly bash them, I just installed the beta that I downloaded yesterday, and I can't even 'apt update' because it says the repos aren't valid for another 5 hours... wtf?

Cool story, bro.

I literally never got a response which told me that "repos are not valid until..". Occassionally regional repos can be lagging slightly behind the main repo (this goes unnoticed unless you switch to the main repo and an apt update reveals it). Last but not least you would be on a beta branch where certain problems might be expected.

Yeah, I have been using Debian and derivatives for going on 20+ years now and have never seen that error.

Did you maybe not configure the VM to use the correct time and you got "InRelease is not valid yet"? See https://ahelpme.com/linux/ubuntu/ubuntu-apt-inrelease-is-not-valid-yet-invalid-for-another-151d-18h-5min-59s/ [External Link]

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Tuxee

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Tuxee

Quoting: slaapliedjeWait, what? They switched back to Gnome because they don't have the man power to work on Unity, which is just a gnome hack.

No its not. Unless we have quite different ideas what a "hack" is.

As far as everything I saw of it, they basically took gtk3 / gnome-shell and tweaked some things on it, made compoz sort of work with it and called it Unity.

What did you "see"? Did you dig into the code? I honestly didn't. But from the timeline alone that's already hard to accept: Unity was rolled out with 11.04 (the precursor came already with 10.10's netbook edition), pretty much exactly the same time as Gnome Shell 3.0 was presented. A cursory glance at the Wikipedia pages show that Gnome Shell is developed in C/JS, whereas Unity is written in C/C++/Python and Vala. Gnome Shell requires GDM, Unity requires LightDM, Nux instead of Clutter, Compiz instead of Mutter. If you wanted to use Gnome Shell on 11.04 you had to completely remove Unity beforehand.

They used the software stack of Gnome. But calling Unity a Gnome Shell hack is pretty far-fetched.

Quoting: slaapliedjeI never used it much because I hate having the dock take desktop space.

But you know it's a hack. This smells more like Canonical bashing.

I think I can fairly bash them, I just installed the beta that I downloaded yesterday, and I can't even 'apt update' because it says the repos aren't valid for another 5 hours... wtf?

Maybe the local mirror you use is under maintenance, but I dont remember to ever saw a message like that in over 20 years of using ubuntu and debian before there was Ubuntu. Can you post the exact message?

I just updated and upgraded 2 20.04 systems in the last hours.

You can switch to a different mirror in the Software & Updates program.

View this comment - View article - View full comments