* Select - Middle-click paste does not seem to work
* When something requires a password (ie just tried a bitlocker volume) the whole screen is blocked, so no password manager for you (unless you copy it before, or cancel - unplug drive-copy password - replug drive - paste.)
* The default tiling does not jive with me, sometimes I don't even know what it wants (it always tries to force you to also set a left windows if you tile right and vice versa) so I disabled it `gnome-extensions disable tiling-assistant@ubuntu.com`. Default Gnome tiling is ok (but missing quarter tiling (and 1/8th would be nice on my ultra-wide) imho so I use [0]
* I've been trying to use Nix home-manager for packages but I have GPU errors, need workarounds, icons that just remain generic. But I guess that is not Ubuntu's fault.
Ubuntu remains my nr. 2 choice, after NixOS (but I didn't get the latter to install on this Nuc, perhaps a bios update will help).
The installer offered (under experimental) to run root on zfs, I didn't end up selecting it because only on the forth try (and by that time you're clicking at a fast rate just taking defaults) I understood that it would only download packages via wifi, not the cable (same for NixOS installer, so must be my network).
I think power users are not the main target of Ubuntu.
I have put my parents on Ubuntu (gnome) in 2013 to replace windows XP. My mother is 88 now. I think it is the perfect fit for her (dad is dead years ago).
I use ubuntu gnome because tweaking my computer is not where I want to spend my time. YOLO. Using a "mainstream" desktop that can be explained to "non specialist" has its benefits. I accept to suffer some annoyances and there is always a way to fix the most annoying ones by sacrificing time.
>I think power users are not the main target of Ubuntu.
Then who is? Normies buy iPads and casuals stay on Windows. Is this why Linux can't gain any market share?
IMHO, Ubuntu is trying to gain market share by targeting non-experts — making Linux simple enough for normies and casual users. Casual users are generally less likely to mess things up on Ubuntu than on Windows.
Every time I run Ubuntu on a computer it always ends up in a state where it does not boot after a few months. This has happened on multiple computers, none with nVidia GPUs, over a period of a bit over 15 years. I don't do anything funny with my computers. No custom kernel, no weird kernel modules, no trying to shoehorn in 3rd party repos intended for Debian, etc. The last time I tried was last year, when I got a new job and my work laptop came with Ubuntu 24.04. Sure enough, after a few months an update made it unable to boot. I have not had this problem with any other distro. I switched the laptop to Fedora and it's worked perfectly fine. This makes me question the logic of trying to give Ubuntu to novice computer users.
This isn't true any more, and hasn't been for some years, you know.
It was true but times change.
Microsoft chose to kill off Windows 10, which it once promised would be the last desktop Windows ever. Its replacement is bigger, slower, stuffed with adverts and upselling attempts, and has an artificial demand for TPM 2.
That's driven thousands of people to check out Linux, and if you don't know anything about Linux, then Ubuntu is the number one best-known distro. Many techies dislike Snap (to the extent of spreading lies like "it's not FOSS"), but it makes version upgrades safer, which matters more to non-techies.
(I say thousands so the pedants don't shout at me, but I suspect the reality is at least hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.)
Linux Mint is friendlier, yes, and so is Zorin OS, but both are based on Ubuntu.
Valve has sold millions of Steam Decks, which demonstrate that it's now possible to run premier new Windows games on Linux with performance at least as good as on Windows. All Linux users know their hardware runs faster and cooler with Linux than Windows anyway.
Chromebooks (which are as cheap as laptops get) outsold Macs (which are expensive) by revenue in 2017 in the USA and within 3 years in the rest of the world. ChromeOS is a desktop Linux, based on Gentoo. It has hundreds of millions of users who have never heard the word "Linux".
Companies with cloud-based IT are deploying ChromeOS Flex as a response to ransomware attach. (E.g. Nordic Choice hotels.)
Many of us see Ubuntu's characteristic desktop in shops, bars, travel stations and things regularly now. I hear its startup sound on trains. I have totally non-techie friends running Ubuntu at home. I've given Mint to lots of mildly technophobic friends and they get on just fine.
It's not over, but the year of Linux on the Desktop came about a decade ago, and the penguin taleban were too busy in-fighting to notice.
>That's driven thousands of people to check out Linux, and if you don't know anything about Linux, then Ubuntu is the number one best-known distro.
Not really. Most normies seem to choose meme gaming distros based off Fedora like CachyOS or Bazzite. Many are waiting for official SteamOS release which is based on Arch.
Snap is TERRIBLE for non-technical people. Imagine installing an image editor via Snap, and then the default sandboxing making it unable to access the images on your media drive. No errors, it just silently fails.
This has been a problem I’ve dealt with on nearly every single Snap I’ve installed. If you’re a file editor, you must let me edit my damn files!
I often hear things like this, but I never encounter them myself.
I've run every single version of Ubuntu ever released. Work machines stay on LTSes, testbeds run interim versions.
After the 22.04 release, I carefully de-snapped my work laptop, using `deb-get` to install native packages of everything. Worked a treat, took less disk space, things started a tiny bit faster.
Then I enabled Ubuntu Pro and it force-reinstalled snapd. It's fair enough to have it as a dependency: it's a standard component. I was very annoyed, though.
But when I upgraded to 24.04, a lot of things broke. I had to spend ages re-enabling repositories, getting new keys, changing version strings in stuff under `/etc/apt/sources.list.d` and so on. It's a PITA.
So I have performed a volte face. I removed all my `deb-get` packages, and reinstalled the snap versions. All my comms and messaging apps, music and media players, and so on.
It's much easier. No extra repos. I experimentally took one laptop from 24.04 to 24.10 to 25.04 to 25.10 and yesterday to 26.04. All my apps stay in place. Nothing broke. No custom repos. No changes needed to any config file. It just works.
I've been using Linux for 30 years, starting on Slackware and moving to Red Hat and Caldera and SUSE via lots of others. But I'm old and grumpy and I want stuff to work without fiddling. I want low maintenance. Snap is low maintenance. My messaging apps can download stuff into my Downloads folder, open attachments from Documents, and so on.
I run native packages of my own browsers (Waterfox and Chrome) and AppImages of Panwriter and Logseq, and I have none of these difficulties.
Life is easier if you don't fight the OS and the vendor.
And Ubuntu is still easier and less hassle than Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, or any of the other big names.
I find it hilarious how much religion is put into Gnome vs. KDE in this case. I did use both. I honestly have no strong favourite. After that many years of Linux desktop environment DE hopping I came to the conslusion that the DE should get out of your way and allow you to focus on your work.
Both Gnome and KDE support that. Actually Gnome a tad better as it gives you less knobs to turn an waste your time. Accept the defaults and if defaults are bad move somewhere else.
I pick the software best for my uses and then look at which desktop supports that software and workflows around them the best.
Not always clear/clean selections possible in my situation - I've a jumble of GUI designs and frameworks used, so I favour a more agnostic desktop.
Preferences don't form in a vacuum though. There's a perception that GNOME is the "good environment" which means its decisions get treated as more important than other DEs' when things change: and that's somewhat self-reinforcing.
Distro: "The most used DE needs first class support, we should probably bend to it" → Distro: "We should probably make this DE the default since it's so widely used and supported" → User: "I choose the default" → Distro: "The most used DE…"
So yes, people have different preferences; but if your preference is GNOME today, it might not be GNOME tomorrow, and "I picked the default" isn't quite the neutral signal it looks like.
where exactly did I say anything contrary to what you said.
Are you implying that GNOME is the only thing that should be considered graphical? That everything else has to be an alternative? That GNOME, by virtue of existing has infinite reprieve to change the definition of user interfaces at their leisure; even if it means breaking muscle memory hundreds of thousands of times over decades.
Since GNOME is the default Ubuntu DE, they have a certain responsibily to listen to the users/devs and leave the system open (to an extent). But their direction is the opposite:
They've been doing massive reduction in functionalities, really insane like limiting copy/past of terminals just to the current screen (which hurts any sysadmin), generally without any way to enable them back.
I haven't heard of any other OSS organization trying so hard to limit freedom of their users/devs, and this is an explicit goal - they don't want to weaken their brand.
GNOME is nothing short of the Oracle of open source.
I fundamentally agree with you. I don't think responsibility is quite the right word. But if they don't seem to care about a massive portion of their users, why are they building gnome at all?
I agree that responsibility is the wrong word, but I've also noticed there's certainly some form of expectation, social responsibility, or care that other projects have and gnome has always lacked. When I started using Linux it was the desktop I liked the most, but some of the choices seem almost hostile or intentionally designed to drive current users away, and unlike most other projects I've used, I've never seen them listen or make improvements based on any feedback from users.
Part of why I've been pretty happy with COSMIC, even if a bit experimental in ways. The File Manager is probably the most quirky part for me... mostly it works fine though. Most of my other issues seem to be more about the wayland switch than anything specific to COSMIC.
Yes, I've migrated to Kubuntu first and now I'm enjoying Linux Mint. The Cinnamon environment gives me old-school GNOME vibes. And Mint doesn't have Snap, which is also a big plus.
UI designers got it right with a taskbar on the bottom and widgets to let you know what you have open at a glance without having to move the mouse across the screen or press buttons. For a multi-application PC desktop thats the right model. Not for phones ofc, they need a different model. Trying to force the phone model on the desktop PC model just doesnt make sense, not now, not then, not ever.
edit: grammar, also Cinnamon fixes these issues thankfully.
It is a preference - and not everyones. I always hated middle click paste, middle click is amongst the first thing I remap on my systems to do the macOS "exposé"-style of window rearrangements. Other people will have other preferences.
I suppose you use Super+Middle Click? Not a bad idea, I dislike hot corners, and the "exposé" feature of niri is quite good. I might actually remap it to Super+Middle Click.
(I use Super+side mouse buttons to move between workspaces, I hate the keyboard-centric workflow when one hand is always on the mouse)
I don't use Super. Middle click (Button 3) = expose, Button 4 = workspace to the left, Button 5 = workspace to the right. Requires a good mouse with accessible button 4/5 of course. No key modifier.
No software I use, uses these buttons for anything integral by default, neither on Linux nor Mac. And if they do, the OS has precedence. On macOS I use BetterTouchTool for those mapping, you can define exceptions for individual apps.
That's what some people love about it. Gives them 2 clipboards. Personally I think copying into a shared space without an explicit action to do so is terrible from a security perspective, so getting rid of middle click paste by default is good to me.
To you it is, plenty of people -including myself- don’t find it so. And considering the ratio of MacOS+Windows desktop users to those of ‘nix (an increasing number of which are new converts), middle clickers are a minority here.
But hey! At least they are only flipping defaults, not removing the feature outright, like they did type-ahead search. [Insert angry rant here]
That is gnome's standard play: move a feature to a preference (“you can just turn it back on”), remove the preference from the control panel (“you can still turn it back on using ‹whatever conf backend they're using this year›”), and then finally remove the feature (“you could only turn it on by using an unsupported mechanism, and ‹conf backend they used last year› is deprecated anyway”).
I agree with the point about this being configurable.
About your first point, however, keep in mind that "middle click insert" has been the default behavior in X since the 1980s, long before Windows or current generation MacOS's were around. To me, this is such a basic functionality, I would compare it something as fundamental as CTRL-X/C/V for cut/copy/paste on Windows.
As a trackpoint user, I am glad it's off by default.
Because of scrolling on Thinkpad keyboards (using the middle click), I had to turn that feature of every time, especially while working on longer documents I would otherwise accidentally paste stuff at random places.
From where I sit I have 5 Thinkpads set up within reach, and I have a few more in other rooms. They are by far my preferred laptop.
Most run Ubuntu as their default OS, most have the trackpad disabled because I usually use the trackpoint for everything, and on all of them I use middle-click to paste extensively.
I'm guessing you have touchpad corners enabled. Usually by default lower-right is 2nd mouse button and upper-right is 3rd mouse button (middle click).
I only use the touchpad, but knowing where it is I can avoid it and almost never trigger it accidentally. It can also be disabled without affecting two-finger and three-finger tap, which I do use.
> only made because the same feature does not exist in MacOS.
Or in anything that's not X?
Speaking personally for me only, I don't think it's a great thing. The <however many> clipboards on Linux is... not really a great thing. I for one never know which of the buffers contain what. And this is compounded by the fact that selection may or may not overwrite what's in one of the buffers, and middle click may or may not paste whatever was in that buffer. Additionally compounded by how inconsistent the behavior is across apps.
I, for one, use the different clipboards concurrently all the time, with "highlight & middle-click" probably being the one I use most often. It's the most convenient for me most of the time:
- only two interactions (one drag & one click)
- completely mouse-based (no keyboard interaction necessary)
I was never a fan of it. I always turned it off. And now it also freed up middle click for auto scrolling which is actually great, especially when the scrollwheel is somewhat broken.
As someone that habitually highlights what they are reading it was generally beyond useless for me. It was actively making me mad when I accidenatally pasted some non-sense because I just highlighted a paragraph before and accidentally inserted it into something.
THANX! I don't know how people live on platforms that don't have this :)
As for the negative Gnome feedback (not from you but others) I do like Gnome, it's just enough window manager for me, I like the defaults and I like the touchpad gestures etc. Generally looks and works well for all I do. I always feel swamped by KDE.
Neither Windows nor macOS have it, so it's surprising to new users. If your target market (as in support contracts) is EU public servants, it's sort of understandable.
I just use KDE on arch, though for a little while it was glitching out on me frequently, idk if I've been too busy to notice it recently or if they finally patched it up.
I miss KDE 3.5 it felt drastically more stable than KDE today.
I've tried other DE's but they get weird if your Distro is not built for them.
Note that the way this works is that after you activate your home manager generation it outputs a script path that you need to run manually as root which installs a Systemd service which ensures that the drivers are linked correctly.
I've been using the Kubuntu 26.04 prereleases for a few weeks. No surprises from KDE, but Wayland has broken a few things. Autotype in Keepass does not work, keynav and even the Wayland keynav forks don't work, and Wayland does not support priority keyboard layouts for switching between two specific layouts.
It seems that KDE is fairly consistent in calling this “Plasma” and specifically, “Plasma Desktop”, but English Wikipedia insists on prefixing the names of their products with “KDE”. Especially Plasma 4, 5, and 6.
"KDE Plasma" can be interpreted as "The KDE organization's Plasma" and probably saves on some article title consistency while avoiding the need to disambiguate the main Plasma article title with (Desktop Environment) or the like. Likely more trouble to try to change than it helps anything as a result.
It's really only calling it "KDE" in isolation that is a bit off. On the GNOME side, such a reference makes sense because the desktop environment is named GNOME and it's run by the GNOME Project/GNOME Foundation. I.e. a bit reversed which word in the order refers to the org's vs DE's name.
Most of the time people will probably figure it out at the end of the day via context either way though.
Unix workstations had mice with 3 buttons. The Mac had only one. Windows, Amiga, Atari had two. The Unix developers had choice that others didn't have. They came up with a use that existed forever. Now someone decided to remove the default for no apparent reason. It's like the Android product managers continuing to change the color, size and gesture to answer a phone call: every release, the first call is an exercise in managing frustration.
> I'd rather use something written in a crappier language that has been battle-tested for decades, personally.
I don't think this is a universal rule. Something can be old but still suck (see: openssl). On the flip side, though, I'd like to see literally any evidence that coreutils has a security problem before we go jumping off onto the shiny new replacement.
I see this accusation and characterization in basically every thread about Rust, but I really don't think it's true. On the contrary, I strongly believe it's less that these people didn't consider that, and more that they willfully chose to ignore it.
If you always keep praying to the same old bit of code to "reliably" chug along (which people clearly cannot actually ascertain, otherwise these reimplementations wouldn't be struggling), you're forever just rolling the dice that some Pandora's box will simply never open (which it absolutely does and keeps opening), while also giving up on modern capabilities. What you see as old reliable, I see as a buried lede. I'd imagine these folks see the same. [0]
It's frustrating to see the software world contend with the same pushback and counter-arguments the infra/ops world (my neck of the woods) has already figured out and went past long ago during the advent of IaC. Cattle > pets, easily, every time.
[0] It's also not a cost-benefit thing, but clearly a principled decision, so arguments that aim to contend the ROI of it all are off-base from the get-go. If ROI is the key thing for you, then all this philosophical nonsense shouldn't even be on the table. Calculate.
That is a bad take, because that imply "crappier language will be used for MORE decades".
Rust is an absolute improvement over C/C++ in major ways. Once there, for ALL THAT DECADES all the developers and all the code written will be spared the problems of "crappier languages.
In the short term there are adaptation issues? fine. But that will be erased (way faster than is possible with C) and suddenly, never again worry about things.
“battle tested for decades” just lost a lot of its value with Mythos and the likes unfortunately. Rewriting in a different language became much faster with Coding agents at the same time.
I do agree that the second system effect is real, it’s just that the balance of benefits and drawbacks significantly shifted when it comes to “rewrite in Rust” (not limited to Rust though).
> “battle tested for decades” just lost a lot of its value with Mythos and the likes unfortunately
Isn't it a bit early to make predictions on the future of computer security and how we create good software based on something that's been out for 2 weeks?
Meanwhile the C version of coreutils has been in development for 36 years. There's no rush.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-35341 - `mkfifo` accidentally resets the permissions of files that already exist, so if you manage to do `sudo mkfifo /etc/shadow` then it becomes world readable.
Tbh I doubt if any of these would ever result in a real hack, unless your system is doing really mental things like running shell scripts with untrusted input.
I could only find a couple of CVEs that looked actually serious for GNU Coreutils too though. IMO if you're using these tools with untrusted input your system is janky enough that there are going to be serious flaws in it anyway. Probably though quoting mistakes.
Quote from the CVE description: "The dd utility in uutils coreutils suppresses errors during file truncation [...] This can lead to silent data corruption in backup or migration scripts, as the utility may report a successful operation even when the destination file contains old or garbage data."
That's terrifying. There's more to bugs than security bugs. You'd expect coreutils to be as bug-free as possible.
Well the TOCTOU issues do not require you to run untrusted scripts to be exploited. Another user on your system can use a legitimate command that you may run to make changes to files they shouldn’t be able to, or further escalate privileges.
Fair point. Though tbh I still think the user-isolation security for Linux is only really suited for the University/company threat model, where you generally trust users not to actually use exploits because they would get expelled/fired.
If you allow a completely untrusted user onto your system I think your chances of staying secure are low.
Then why rewrite coreutils in rust? TOCTOU isn't exact some new concept. Neither are https://owasp.org/Top10/2025/ (most of which a good web framework will prevent or migrate), and switching to rust (which as far as I know) won't bring you a safer web framework like django or rails.
1. Rust is a much more pleasant language to work with.
2. You can improve the tools, adding new features, fixing UX paper cuts etc.
You're probably thinking "you can improve the GNU versions!" and in theory sure. But in practice these sorts of tools are controlled by naysayers who want everything to stay as it was in the 80s. The sorts of people that only accept patches via git send-email to a mailing list.
Hahaha I just looked up GNU Coreutils and not only do they blame poor UX on the user ("Often these perceived bugs are simply due to wrong program usage.") but they even maintain a list of rejected feature requests:
Have you used busybox? The BSDs? I'm not sure adding more features to coreutils is a major help, and given rust-coreutils/uutils has:
1) more CVEs between two latest Ubuntu releases than coreutils has had over the last 30+ year
2) managed to break security updates
3) is neither fully compatible with POSIX nor coreutils
I'm not sure why I'd ever use it? Sadly, projects like uutils have made me suspicious of rust projects, so unless I know that the project is well maintained (for which there are numerous examples, ripgrep being the obvious example, but newsboat, the various tools from proxmox, servo/firefox, and the pgrx ecosystem are ones I use regularly), it's a negative marker against that project.
Another maintainer and I follow issues and pull requests on a GitHub mirror. But email works fine for us and many other projects.
Regarding poor UX, it is difficult to dispute with that claim without a specific example. Note that a lot of the features we support are standardized by POSIX. Even if we dislike the behavior, it is better to comply with the standards so the programs don't behave differently than users expect. The sentence you quote isn't meant to put down users. These programs are often much more complex than meets the eye, and there are lots of common gotchas that people have run into (and will continue to do so) [1].
Of course we would love for these programs to be useful for everyone. However, feature requests are often incompatible with existing behavior, incompatible with other feature requests, or have existing functionality elsewhere. For those reasons we cannot accept every feature request.
What should I use if I like Ubuntu but not snap, just Debian? Or are there alternatives around? Seems like Ubuntu has the best hardware and driver support so just curious what's new in Linux land.
I switched to Debian and have been happy with it. The release cycle is less frequent than Ubuntu Desktop, which means fewer disruptions, and Debian Backports make it easy to pick new versions of the important stuff. Flatpak is also available on Debian.
Linux Mint is widely praised for being basically Ubuntu without the worst Canonicalisms (such as Snap). They maintain a Debian edition in parallel to their main one, as an exit strategy in case Ubuntu ever becomes unsuitable for their base. Some people already use that as their daily driver.
Just in case you're not aware, the default desktop environment on whatever distro you pick doesn't have to be what you use. I switched to KDE Plasma when Gtk-based desktops became intolerable, and haven't looked back.
MX Linux also looks interesting. Like Ubuntu, it's a Debian derivative. It offers a supported path for avoiding systemd and has an official KDE Plasma edition, both of which appeal to me. I haven't had a chance to try it yet.
Do the Mint team treat fixing the other half of the problem, the GNOMEisms, as out-of-scope?
Asking because I maintain my own pile of gsettings and .gtkrc tweaks as mitigations yet pain points remain, apparently unfixable outside the source code.
Their approach to GNOMEisms is to officially support three desktop editions: Cinnamon (based on GNOME 3), MATE (based on GNOME 2), and Xfce (based on more recent Gtk). I don't think they try to tame modern GNOME, and I wouldn't expect them to, since that would be an endlessly difficult moving target.
If you want more detail, you should ask someone who still uses Gtk-based desktops, or try them yourself. I gave up on Gtk a couple years ago.
Now Debian is packaging non-free drivers in the iso images directly. I would suggest to try Debian first, if it works well for you just keep it.
If you feel the need for newer packages, try other alternatives (or Debian unstable). I’ve set down on Fedora with XFCE, it’s really stable yet packages feel new.
Dunno about the this release, but till 24.4 it was simply a matter of removing some packages then holding/masking the primary snapd one, followed by manually adding the official PPAs for Mozilla’s stuff (or just use the Flatpak).
Of course, there’s still the philosophical and long term issues with staying on a distro that’s promoting and continuosuly expanding the thing you dislike…
This is a bad strategy, I fell victim for. I configured so it would use apt instead of snap package, but canonical silently stopped shipping packages and I was running some packages that were not updated for a long time and debugging weird bugs, because I didn't assume that this was a problem. If one wants Ubuntu, one must accept snap. If you use apt with disallowed transition to snap, you might be stuck with old packages that were transitioned to snap.
My choice for now is Debian, didn't finish transition yet, very annoying to plan this in my schedule. I'll churn from Ubuntu after more than 15 years of daily driving... I also don't like ubuntu user with uid:gid 1000 in their Docker images. It's a cancer.
+1. I recently picked up a secondhand Framework, and, after almost 15 years of holding out with Mint + MATE, berated myself for resisting change and put in an unreasonable amount of effort trying to modernize and reacclimate to Ubuntu + GNOME 3.
It was painful, with an endless laundry list of things to troubleshoot, tinker with, and add to my digital notebook in attempt to get anything resembling a personally ergonomic workflow.
I implore anyone to just go with Mint or anything else that takes care of ripping out snaps for you if you don't want snaps (but otherwise still like or are used to most things about Ubuntu). There were too many downstream and other issues, related and unrelated, for my sanity.
This is what I do, because on my work computer IT imposed Ubuntu.
I initially tried to just use snaps but firefox was crashing quite often so I had to go with adding the mozilla's repository and of course configure the fake "firefox" package that actually installs the snap to be low priority for apt.
Like someone else said, if I have to dig through settings to do that then I might as well use Windows. It's better to use something that doesn't even have snap in the first place via another distro than play cat and mouse with Canonical.
I have a year ago switched from Ubuntu to Fedora and I like it. Clean and stable. Uses Flatpak. I'm using Fedora Workstation which is the default, but Fedora KDE Plasma seems to be nice as well if you want to have more configuration options available directly in the GUI. And the layout is more Windows like with start button menu etc for people coming from the Windows side.
If you want something desktop oriented and Ubuntu based without the focus on snaps, take a look at Linux Mint: https://www.linuxmint.com/ (there's Cinnamon, Xfce and MATE versions; personally I think Cinnamon is pretty good nowadays)
I distro hopped for a while and settled on Linux mint. Uses flat packs. Hits the spot for easy to use and easy to maintain without needing to use terminal scripts to get things my way. Just my opinion.
I’m curious about proprietary Nvidia drivers. Ubuntu normally comes with fairly outdated, if not obsolete ones, but there’s a semi-official PPA with more recent versions. How does Debian handle this?
Debian has their own nvidia driver packages (it's nvidia's drivers repackaged in a nice way that integrates with the system well). I can't say if they're "outdated" or how different they are from what ubuntu ships, but they've always worked very well for me.
Debian offers Nvidia drivers as well although they tend to be outdated. Thankfully you can use Nvidia's official .deb repos to get the latest drivers on both Debian and Ubuntu.
Awesome, this must be a recent thing, when I last checked about a year ago the latest drivers from restricted were a couple versions behind. Many people always complained about it on reddit, AskUbuntu etc, which is where I found out about the PPA.
We deployed 570 and 580 in the April-June 2025 time frame, so I'm not sure what you were looking at, but they've tried to keep up with the latest for a while.
I have used Pop OS for years and for me it was the most smooth desktop environment I've ever used.
They have been working on a custom Desktop Environment which sadly still isn't very stable yet. Promising development, but putting me off of using Pop for a while.
I just put the new popos on my laptop and am still running the old version on my primary desktop. Agreed that Cosmic is not quite ready for prime time yet, but it is pretty impressive the state it's in for how new it is. Haven't had any show stopping bugs on the laptop, just a few small quirks.
Anyway, the main issue with Debian, Ubuntu, and Nvidia is about licensing. GNU/Linux is free software, and Nvidia drivers are not. Loading a non-free driver is known as “Tainting the Kernel”.
Both are great. I'm currently using the Debian Editon, that at least for me works out of the box. The transition from the Ubuntu-based traditional edition was seamless. I used Mint MATE before.
The issue is them adding it back, sometimes even on apt upgrade, or silently installing it as a dependency for certain apps without mentioning it unless you look closely. That gets tiring after a while and I gave up on Ubuntu as even after having removed snap multiple times it always returned.
I've not used Linux on the desktop for some years⁰ but as I move back this sort of thing is why I'm not considering Ubuntu². If I want to dig into settings like that to keep my preferences I might as well stick with Windows.
Yes, the control to be able to tweak the system to my liking is one of the attractions or Linux, but not when I have to in order to avoid behaviours that I don't want being reasserted.
[not that I expect nor particularly want Ubuntu to change, I just accept that I'm not part of its target audience and I'll be better served elsewhere - choice is a great thing!]
----
[0] heading back there now as Windows11 is not happening on my home machines¹, I feel that I shouldn't have let Windows10 happen, looking back.
[1] aside from the laptop that came with it that I'll keep there for Office and DayJob compatibility for a while.
[2] Currently running Debian³ on the other laptop, main desktop will likely go that way if it isn't decommissioned completely, and I use a dock with the laptops instead.
[3] As that is what I use server-side more often than not.
Or, for a more server-appropriate example, 'frr'. The BGP daemon. It's not just desktop things like 'firefox' before someone tries that angle.
I haven't tried it in a few LTS releases and I'm away from a computer. Still, I'd bet this release continues the pattern. Fat chance Canonical decided to go back to more build targets/backporting/testing.
Not listening to users is what drove me away from windows. Not a fan of snaps either (or forced windows updates). Recently re-tried linux going to debian instead, which i really like. Reminds me of the old dos days. Gnome was a no-go, kde was nice but too buggy, cinnamon turned out to be perfect. So here i am, on linux finally, enjoying having my computer back and playing around like its 1992 again.
I was using Ubuntu and installed the apt version of Firefox as the snap version would not open html files in locations like /var/tmp and would not work with USB devices. Every time I ran `do-release-upgrade`, all of that work would need to be redone. It was very annoying.
Ubuntu is the Windows 11 of Linux. You have to do brain surgery on it post install, to remove unwanted crap. At least there's the option of using a different distro.
Debian is fine but their kernels are so old if you have any new hardware it can be clunky and you have to fiddle with backports of the bleeding edge version
Gaming-oriented distros like CachyOS and Bazzite might be what you want. I'm on Cachy and can recommend it. Because they try to "just work" without jumping through hoops.
Even though I very much intenseley dislike the completely unintuitive idiosyncratic package management that Arch has. Which is further not helped by the fact that Cachy's default GUI for it isn't even integrated properly.
> What should I use if I like Ubuntu but not snap […]
Because of business needs, if you're stuck with using Ubuntu (at least in some situations), an `apt(-get) purge snapd` helps. It's in all of our auto/post-install stuff.
I was in the same spot recently, and my friends recommend Linux Mint. It is built on top of Ubuntu LTS, and no snap. I've been using it for the past few weeks in my old desktop computer. Definitely Good. Perfect fit for your needs
Easier said than done, surprise: apt, who we know and love, is redirected to Snap for an ever-increasing number of packages.
"Don't use Snap", you say? I'll do you one better! Skip Ubuntu. 'Just' use anything else more suitable. Debian is an excellent replacement being upstream, but I hold no illusions over undeclared requirements.
> With 24.04 at least, doing an 'apt purge snapd' seems to be quite useful. Is that not sufficient?
For the moment, later pulling a package that is redirected would undo that effort. As the peer points out, too, that would likely rip out stuff you're using without having already configured preference.
One could maintain a boundless list of configs pinning repository preferences... or they could use a distribution that doesn't have a predisposition towards Snap.
Some server stuff is hit too! I learned about this pattern through the BGP daemon 'frr'. No idea how many server packages are/may be captured by Snap, but it's worth being aware of. Imagine my surprise. Remove it and bam, no networking.
Doing a quick test on 24.04: on a system without snapd installed, `apt install frr` installs packages and not any Snap stuff. Will have to see about 26.04 when I get a moment.
Thanks for digging in, as I mentioned earlier in this thread/another [lost track], I haven't messed with this in at least two LTS releases. Good to see it's aware at install time; this wasn't always the case.
How about the inverse, purging? At one point, removing Snap would lose BGP announcements [through the loss of the 'frr' software/service it was managing].
Anyway, I'm willing to believe most of my install/dependency-resolution pain was inspired by [and limited to] 18.04 or whatever was immediately after. We had a fleet of systems inadvertently moved to Snap, only learned through a loss of announcements on removal.
edit: Tested on a 24.04 box I had laying around; removing Snap does indeed still rip out things one might want:
Likely fine in your case, where if memory serves, you're removing Snap in the image/provisioning stage. Cooks in busy kitchens may still be surprised, however. The real problem appears solved: 'you' get the software 'you' asked for.
I can't believe people like Snap when in the name of security it breaks basic things such as accessing a folder on a different mount point that the user normally can access perfectly fine.
A packaging system should not break the basic abstractions of an OS.
Yeah, this was the frustrating bit to me. I use Firefox to look at stuff that lives in /tmp/, Snap Firefox can't do this. I'd remove Snap Firefox, pin the priorities and it would still silently crawl it's way back in after a week or two no matter what I tried. I gave up Ubuntu. Earlier versions used to respect the priorities but something changed.
“Urban myth” kind of suggests that it was never true, which isn't the case, though it is one of those out-dated truths that doesn't go away quickly.
At one time Ubuntu as the easiest distro to get certain hardware running with because of the inclusion of proprietary drivers & codecs (unlike its Debian parent, amongst others, at least at the time) and making them easy, near-automatic, to configure compared to others that did include them. The distinction is long gone, and Ubuntu is simply one of several (many) good ones in that regard, but the perception that others have not long since caught up persists.
It used to be true. I've never had problems using the proprietary Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu. You used to have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get them installed on Debian. Now Ubuntu lags behind on kernel versions leaving new hardware less usable.
Snap is preinstalled on all official Ubuntu graphical editions.
However, Xubuntu's _Minimal_ install does not include any snap packages at all, not even a browser. This means it's trivial to remove snapd:
sudo apt purge snapd
Then you can install the `extrepo` command, and use it to install Firefox ESR direct from Mozilla's repos, or Chrome from Google's repos.
Once it's online you can copy and paste a couple of commands to "pin" snapd and prevent it from being reinstalled. Then you can switch to current Firefox or anything else without snapd sneaking back in.
Xubuntu Minimal is also available as a separate ISO file, which is not true of any of the other flavours.
This looks like it might be the best solution, no snap, maintained by an actual system integrator and laptop maker, and I also like the new Rust-based desktop environment. I wonder how well it runs on Framework laptops or MacBooks as well.
Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Linux Lite, Pop OS, and several less famous distros are all based on Ubuntu. New versions of all of them will follow this new LTS release in time.
Mint forked GNOME 3 to make something more Windows-like.
Zorin customised upstream GNOME with a lot of extensions.
Pop removed it and replaced it with their own homegrown desktop, written in Rust. It's actually pretty good and works well.
PopOS started as Ubuntu with better hardware enablment but it has evolved far beyond that. They have been removing all the snap stuff. The have done tons of work on DE (Cosmic) and in general don't go along with Gnome or Ubuntu strangness. But yes its Ubuntu and Debian derived.
After using Ubuntu for many years both on the desktop and server, recent decisions have got me thinking that Canonical has lost a lot of its community spirit. That got me switching over machines to Debian which, to me, still feels like a community project. It's a shame.
I am pragmatic about it though so I still run Ubuntu for some things but it's no longer my first recommendation.
> recent decisions have got me thinking that Canonical has lost a lot of its community spirit
The rot set in when #ubuntu on Freenode (now Libera) became rigidly enforced as on-topic discussions of Ubuntu support only.
The channel is absolutely dead now. Maybe one person will say something in any given 12-hour period and no-one replies, just page after page of joins and parts.
Ubuntu LTS is still the choice for many production environments and education and learning. As someone with Ubuntu from 2010 CDs, I find it refreshing that modern Ubuntu distros work OOB on most computers these days with excellent driver support.
Is this even true? I mean, Windows is the main focus for all hardware vendors, and everybody who has owned a PC knows that malfunctions are unavoidable. If that is the case for Windows, then Linux cant be better.
20 years ago your Linux installation might not include wifi drivers, bluetooth support, decent GPU drivers, fat32/ntfs drivers, or the widely used video/audio codecs of the era. And you had to be careful when shopping for things like wifi cards, as only certain chipsets could be made to work.
Much of which was kinda fair enough, because if you're a volunteer making an open source OS because of a strong belief on the open source ideal, you don't want to distribute closed-source driver blobs or patent-encumbered codecs. But it meant mean the initial installation process was not always easy. One of the things that contributed to the success of Ubuntu was a particularly easy initial setup process.
Today, things are a lot better - you'll still get unsupported hardware from time to time, but it'll be much less severe. If your laptop has a non-USB integrated camera you might have to download and install a kernel module. Your corporate laptop's built in fingerprint scanner might not work, but who cares?
> 20 years ago your Linux installation might not include wifi drivers, bluetooth support, decent GPU drivers, fat32/ntfs drivers, or the widely used video/audio codecs of the era.
To be quite fair, this is pretty much the only reason Ubuntu exists. It started off as "Debian for people who just want stuff to work", but these days Debian even ships non-free wifi drivers on the install media. I've personally used both extensively and apart from the "enterprise support" argument and the minor convenience of having ZFS pre-compiled, I see no reason to use Ubuntu.
When I was shopping Lenovo.com for my ThinkPad in 2018, there was a table with ThinkPads certified for Ubuntu Linux in one column, and certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in another column.
I chose the T580 as a RHEL-certified notebook, and it was fantastic. Lenovo.com let me configure each individual component exactly according to my needs and tastes, and it was custom-assembled and shipped from Shenzhen.
It did arrive with Windows 10 pre-installed (this was the least hassle and most popular OS option). I initially installed CentOS, but quickly realized that Fedora would be the sweet spot, and so it was a Fedora system for most of its lifetime. Near the end, I did revert to Windows 10, which also worked flawlessly.
The ThinkPad T580 literally never malfunctioned. It was still 100% working when I turned it in for recycling in 2025.
I've also run Ubuntu on my "daily driver" desktop system, which ran from 2006-2022. Yes, that's 16 years' worth of Ubuntu installs and upgrades. It was mostly a KDE Plasma (Kubuntu) system. I enjoyed every bit of that.
In 1999, I was avidly using OpenBSD on really old hardware (such as HP Apollo 425t workstations.) OpenBSD simply couldn't deal with the special graphics subsystem on those machines. I tried and tried to get something working, but there were obstacles, not only with the hardware and drivers, but also the monitor connection needed a particular type of cabling and a proprietary monitor, too.
However, OpenBSD did great for networking, security, Squid cache, proxies, all kinds of things. And even in 1999, though it was early, I ran Linux on a 386DX-40, because Linux supported the "ftape" floppy tape driver at that time, and I had some kind of QIC tape backup from Eagle that wouldn't be recognized by OpenBSD or NetBSD.
Meanwhile, in that same year, my "daily driver" desktop machine was a 486 with VLB, dual-booting Windows 98 and OpenBSD. The Windows 98 was set up with a Cygwin system and X11 server, so that I could run X11 clients on the OpenBSD machines, or the Linux machine, or whatever else was on the LAN.
Ubuntu 26 + KDE Plasma 6.6 perfectly handles high-DPI scaling for me. I was originally planning to buy a Mac, but luckily I saw the news about Ubuntu 26 being released a few days ago.
I've just moved to a Mac for the first time, after using Windows for work for decades and Linux as my primary desktop for about 3 or 4 years. It certainly takes some getting use to:
- Keyboard shortcuts are all different
- Doesn't seem to like my Microsoft ergonomic keyboard (lots of keys do nothing)
- I really hate the dock
- Limited customisation on the menu bar
- I also hate the universal menu thing / menu bar in general ... I run a really wide monitor and having to go all the way to the left hand side to access the menu when working on an app that is on the far right is crazy
- Fonts look fat or washed out
I am sure a lot of this is fixable and will jsut take time to get used to, but honestly, at this point, I think I prefer ubuntu/linux to both Mac & Windows at this point.
I do love the hardware on the Mac and would probably try Asahi out if it wasn't a work machine.
Also worth pointing out that macOS is still better than Windows 11 at this point - MS should be ashamed at what they did to that OS.
3. I have the dock on the left hand side, not bottom and I have a 2 monitor (iMac 5K 27"+ Dell 4K 27") setup with the iMac flat in front of me and the curve/2nd to the right. Menu bar is then close to the main windows.
6. Use Macports to add all the Linux/Unix utilities, works with MacOS properly (eg Python/Java frameworks). Ports can have variants, plus you can have multiple versions installed side-by-side with `port select`. https://www.macports.org/
Not sure about fonts, on a 5K iMac they're fine and the 4K Dell works too. You need to use a resolution that fits with Mac's ideas of resolution, so I've got the 5K and 4K both at 2560x1440, which is Mac's idea of 2x resolution.
Hey thanks for those tips. I just installed Ice and Thaw is a fork that is maintained, so I'll try that out. I have my dock on the left already, and have heard about Rectangle, but haven't tried it yet.
One option for the menus maybe is keyboard searching. Command-shift-/ aka Command-?then type the name and arrow navigate. (Key sequence might be wrong, it’s muscle memory at this point)
I wonder if Thaw could be modded to repeat the menu bar?
Dock can be hidden/revealed with a key sequence but I like the auto-hide with long delay to pop up idea, suggested elsewhere.
Another point, if you enable Settings > Desktop & Dock > Mission Control > Displays have separate Spaces, then you get a menu bar for each display, which helps with the menubar / window being far apart.
Ah I can resonate with your feelings! I've been using a MacBook Pro as my daily driver since 2013 and I initially liked it a lot, but things have not improved over time. MacOS got more buggy, bloated and less and less customisable. I never fully got used to the way window switching works, and to the fact that I always see all the apps from all work spaces. I still regularly switch to the wrong work space when I switch apps. So confusing. So now I'm in a process of switching back to Linux - it's just so much more fun! I have an M1 MacBook Pro now and Asahi linux is really nice on this one.
I do like the energy consumption of MacOS and that sleep just works so well. Also the laptops feel really nice. I got a few things to make life easier (sketchybar, rectangle.app, see other posts here) but overall these days Linux is just a more polished experience. Never thought I'd say that. At least it's the least glitchy experience nowadays.
I'm sad about that too. I have been running MATE with XMonad for a very long time and has been very happy with it, primarily because the experience has remained entirely unchanged except for a few bugs which have crept in and have never been fixed, probably due to the maintainers not really being active. A particularly hilarious one is that every time the update notifier wants to restart the computer it tries to show an icon in the status bar which begins with `un-<...>.png`. The real icon file is actually missing, but some helpful fallback logic defaults to the closest match which happens to be a 512 pixel wide logo for the United Nations which gets vertically cropped and placed in the status bar.
I just got a new laptop this month and saw that Ubuntu MATE was probably going to be unsupported, so I switched to Manjaro Sway.
Cool. I'm pretty excited for the new login manager. Maybe now KDE will be able to fit all customization options (wallpaper, lockscreen, login screen) on a single Settings page.
For now, that is. I am afraid that they will stop providing coreutils and sudo for some of the future releases (like they did with upstart) because obviously they know better what's good for the users.
The comments there note there is no official Ubuntu MATE release for the first time since Ubuntu 15 (and before 14.04 gnome2 was an option). That's a shame but probably most people who chose MATE (or gnome2) no longer chose Ubuntu due to the conflicting ideologies inherent in the two. MATE users generally don't like change for change's sake.
not sure if this confirms the impression you have there... I wasn't like this until a couple of headless VPS'es (on Arm8) got through the upgrade from 18.x -> 20.x -> 22.x and then crashed out over -> 24.x for a still unknown reason. now I'm just afraid .. or I should say reluctant ..to repeat that whole fiasco.
There were some issues with how the menu icon manager handled the new security policy defaults. This means the editor will break, and the displayed menu may be missing any item that didn't follow the naming convention syntax. Its a lot of packages to bring into compliance, for that one silly feature the devs had to put in before it was ready...
Maybe they fixed it since the rc release, but there were some rough edges in Feb... the kernel USB support cooked the thumb drive partition structure.
In 22.04 to 24.04 the kernel Nvidia GPU driver EOL abandonment began... In 26.04 people will discover most EOL hardware support prior to RTX series will be difficult to bring up.
Probably wise to wait a few weeks for the bug reports to clear out a bit. =3
I know that the interim releases had issues with zfs and trying to update gave the message "Sorry, cannot upgrade this system to 25.04 right now System freezes have been observed on upgrades to 25.04 with ZFS
enabled. Please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PluckyPuffin/ReleaseNotes for more
information. "
The release notes don't seem to mention zfs. I hope these issues have been fixed?
Just tried installing the server variant on a dell precision.
The installer let me connect to my WiFi, but then spun indefinitely trying to get an ipv4 address.
If I skip connecting to WiFi, and just let the installer do its thing, I get no network on the fresh install either (all the tutorials say to use nmcli, which I don't have).
Keeping the key in the same room as the padlock only protects against casual drive theft and secure disposal.
Personally I'm more worried about someone stealing the entire server or a local threat actor.
Sure, keep TPM to help with boot integrity, maybe even a factor for unlock, but things like Clevis+Tang (or Bitlock Network Unlock for our windows brethren) is essential in my opinion.
TPM locking is for ensuring the disk isn't removed from your machine. It's technically possible that someone could tap the hardware while the disk is still in your machine, but otherwise they're stuck contending with whatever other security setup you have on your machine.
The TPM locked disk encryption is more like embedding your safe in concrete with deep foundations. It doesn't affect the thickness or quality of your safe.
The beta installer was completely unsuccessful in setting the TPM-backed disk encryption on both a ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Intel 258V) and a ThinkPad P14s (AMD 300-something). Hopefully they ironed that part out in the release, but it seems still early for this feature (at least for my comfort level).
The constructed policy is quite strict and expects certain UEFI things to be set up correctly. For example both this https://github.com/canonical/secboot/blob/7434bac27844362ff8... and https://github.com/canonical/secboot/blob/7434bac27844362ff8... are enabled in the policy. The policy choices and various early checks, even as trivial as confirming that the TCG log content is correct after booting into installation system, are enough to rule out a lot of potentially problematic EFI deployments. Effectively making it more strict helps avoid a lot of funny issues where the firmware is clearly buggy and things would fall apart sooner or later.
Strict is probably good. My company started to enable bitlocker this year on win11, and a non trivial amount of initial encryptions seem to be failing, destroying the user data and requiring a full reformat.
In what way is TPM protecting your data if someone steals the entire server? TPM only ensures that the boot environment has not been modified. Whatever key is being used to automatically decrypt the disk would be in the clear.
Unless I'm misunderstanding your situation, I think you should look up the "Evil Maid Attack" to better understand how to mitigate risk for your threat model.
assuming there are no bugs in linux and you enable full memory encryption in BIOS, it protects you in the same way the FBI cant get into a locked iphone they physically posess
but linux is not as secure as an iphone, and linux users typically dont know how to set this up, so in practice you are right, it doesnt protect you
My threat model is a junkie breaks in to my house and flips my server on facebook marketplace. Then the buyer curiously pokes through my hard drives. Of course if protecting against government agencies is the threat model then TPM alone isn't enough.
For me, a zero friction way to have decent security is worlds better than the normal state where homeservers are not encrypted at all.
I just don't understand where the protection comes from if you have automatic password entry. If the thief boots up the server it is just as convenient for them as it is for you.
Your threat model is the same as my use of a laptop: regular LUKS with a password is enough on its own. Add TPM if you want to know that you're entering your password in a secure boot environment (ie. protect against a fake LUKS screen that steals your password).
Because you'll boot up in to a password prompt. So you'd need a password bypass exploit to get in. If you attempt to change the boot device or kernel the TPM won't release the key.
Yes, but not by automating the password process. You could probably do some sort of remote authentication with a custom iniramfs that will "phone home" for a key but that initramfs, even if signed and protected from tampering, is still exposing the authentication end point.
The attacker would just need to spoof the request to gain the key.
What happened to the Ubuntu Core Desktop? Snap only immutable variant (like Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite). It was delayed in 2024 and haven’t seen anything about it ever since
I think it basically died for general consumers because of the Canonical-only licensed software lock in, and consequent limited software support.
Snaps are hard coded to only be able to get snaps from the official Canonical-licensed store URL. Especially on Ubuntu Core, where everything can only be a snap. Even the commercial licensed version for embedding in products requires private companies to use a private space on the Canonical Snap store to distribute thier custom/proprietary software.
Absolutely no one is willing to let Canonical become the Apple Store of thier devices, especially given thier even shittier track record.
Has the MacPro5,1 community already booted this new version?
...interested to know since I couldn't ever get v25 to work — never tried using OCLP, but v24 is absolutely stable (for some reason not directly; had to USB install v22 then internet update to v24 (i.e. v24 USB wouldn't finish install).
It's nice as always, but I have some issues.
* Select - Middle-click paste does not seem to work
* When something requires a password (ie just tried a bitlocker volume) the whole screen is blocked, so no password manager for you (unless you copy it before, or cancel - unplug drive-copy password - replug drive - paste.)
* The default tiling does not jive with me, sometimes I don't even know what it wants (it always tries to force you to also set a left windows if you tile right and vice versa) so I disabled it `gnome-extensions disable tiling-assistant@ubuntu.com`. Default Gnome tiling is ok (but missing quarter tiling (and 1/8th would be nice on my ultra-wide) imho so I use [0]
* I've been trying to use Nix home-manager for packages but I have GPU errors, need workarounds, icons that just remain generic. But I guess that is not Ubuntu's fault.
Ubuntu remains my nr. 2 choice, after NixOS (but I didn't get the latter to install on this Nuc, perhaps a bios update will help).
The installer offered (under experimental) to run root on zfs, I didn't end up selecting it because only on the forth try (and by that time you're clicking at a fast rate just taking defaults) I understood that it would only download packages via wifi, not the cable (same for NixOS installer, so must be my network).
[0] https://github.com/troyready/quarterwindows
Select middle click not working is a stupid decision from GNOME to disable in 50. You can turn it back on with the tweak tool.
Why do we still put up with GNOME?
I've spent the last 10 years off and on from Linux. Had I used something other than GNOME, I believe my experience would have been better.
I've been on KDE for the last 3-4 years and things work so well I could never imagine going back to GNOME.
I think power users are not the main target of Ubuntu.
I have put my parents on Ubuntu (gnome) in 2013 to replace windows XP. My mother is 88 now. I think it is the perfect fit for her (dad is dead years ago).
I use ubuntu gnome because tweaking my computer is not where I want to spend my time. YOLO. Using a "mainstream" desktop that can be explained to "non specialist" has its benefits. I accept to suffer some annoyances and there is always a way to fix the most annoying ones by sacrificing time.
>I think power users are not the main target of Ubuntu. Then who is? Normies buy iPads and casuals stay on Windows. Is this why Linux can't gain any market share?
IMHO, Ubuntu is trying to gain market share by targeting non-experts — making Linux simple enough for normies and casual users. Casual users are generally less likely to mess things up on Ubuntu than on Windows.
Every time I run Ubuntu on a computer it always ends up in a state where it does not boot after a few months. This has happened on multiple computers, none with nVidia GPUs, over a period of a bit over 15 years. I don't do anything funny with my computers. No custom kernel, no weird kernel modules, no trying to shoehorn in 3rd party repos intended for Debian, etc. The last time I tried was last year, when I got a new job and my work laptop came with Ubuntu 24.04. Sure enough, after a few months an update made it unable to boot. I have not had this problem with any other distro. I switched the laptop to Fedora and it's worked perfectly fine. This makes me question the logic of trying to give Ubuntu to novice computer users.
Yup. And this is no bad thing.
Learned absolutely nothing from the Firefox add-on ecosystem disaster and subsequent decline.
This isn't true any more, and hasn't been for some years, you know.
It was true but times change.
Microsoft chose to kill off Windows 10, which it once promised would be the last desktop Windows ever. Its replacement is bigger, slower, stuffed with adverts and upselling attempts, and has an artificial demand for TPM 2.
That's driven thousands of people to check out Linux, and if you don't know anything about Linux, then Ubuntu is the number one best-known distro. Many techies dislike Snap (to the extent of spreading lies like "it's not FOSS"), but it makes version upgrades safer, which matters more to non-techies.
(I say thousands so the pedants don't shout at me, but I suspect the reality is at least hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.)
Linux Mint is friendlier, yes, and so is Zorin OS, but both are based on Ubuntu.
Valve has sold millions of Steam Decks, which demonstrate that it's now possible to run premier new Windows games on Linux with performance at least as good as on Windows. All Linux users know their hardware runs faster and cooler with Linux than Windows anyway.
Chromebooks (which are as cheap as laptops get) outsold Macs (which are expensive) by revenue in 2017 in the USA and within 3 years in the rest of the world. ChromeOS is a desktop Linux, based on Gentoo. It has hundreds of millions of users who have never heard the word "Linux".
Companies with cloud-based IT are deploying ChromeOS Flex as a response to ransomware attach. (E.g. Nordic Choice hotels.)
Many of us see Ubuntu's characteristic desktop in shops, bars, travel stations and things regularly now. I hear its startup sound on trains. I have totally non-techie friends running Ubuntu at home. I've given Mint to lots of mildly technophobic friends and they get on just fine.
It's not over, but the year of Linux on the Desktop came about a decade ago, and the penguin taleban were too busy in-fighting to notice.
>That's driven thousands of people to check out Linux, and if you don't know anything about Linux, then Ubuntu is the number one best-known distro.
Not really. Most normies seem to choose meme gaming distros based off Fedora like CachyOS or Bazzite. Many are waiting for official SteamOS release which is based on Arch.
Snap is TERRIBLE for non-technical people. Imagine installing an image editor via Snap, and then the default sandboxing making it unable to access the images on your media drive. No errors, it just silently fails.
This has been a problem I’ve dealt with on nearly every single Snap I’ve installed. If you’re a file editor, you must let me edit my damn files!
I often hear things like this, but I never encounter them myself.
I've run every single version of Ubuntu ever released. Work machines stay on LTSes, testbeds run interim versions.
After the 22.04 release, I carefully de-snapped my work laptop, using `deb-get` to install native packages of everything. Worked a treat, took less disk space, things started a tiny bit faster.
Then I enabled Ubuntu Pro and it force-reinstalled snapd. It's fair enough to have it as a dependency: it's a standard component. I was very annoyed, though.
But when I upgraded to 24.04, a lot of things broke. I had to spend ages re-enabling repositories, getting new keys, changing version strings in stuff under `/etc/apt/sources.list.d` and so on. It's a PITA.
So I have performed a volte face. I removed all my `deb-get` packages, and reinstalled the snap versions. All my comms and messaging apps, music and media players, and so on.
It's much easier. No extra repos. I experimentally took one laptop from 24.04 to 24.10 to 25.04 to 25.10 and yesterday to 26.04. All my apps stay in place. Nothing broke. No custom repos. No changes needed to any config file. It just works.
I've been using Linux for 30 years, starting on Slackware and moving to Red Hat and Caldera and SUSE via lots of others. But I'm old and grumpy and I want stuff to work without fiddling. I want low maintenance. Snap is low maintenance. My messaging apps can download stuff into my Downloads folder, open attachments from Documents, and so on.
I run native packages of my own browsers (Waterfox and Chrome) and AppImages of Panwriter and Logseq, and I have none of these difficulties.
Life is easier if you don't fight the OS and the vendor.
And Ubuntu is still easier and less hassle than Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, or any of the other big names.
I find it hilarious how much religion is put into Gnome vs. KDE in this case. I did use both. I honestly have no strong favourite. After that many years of Linux desktop environment DE hopping I came to the conslusion that the DE should get out of your way and allow you to focus on your work.
Both Gnome and KDE support that. Actually Gnome a tad better as it gives you less knobs to turn an waste your time. Accept the defaults and if defaults are bad move somewhere else.
I pick the software best for my uses and then look at which desktop supports that software and workflows around them the best. Not always clear/clean selections possible in my situation - I've a jumble of GUI designs and frameworks used, so I favour a more agnostic desktop.
> Why do we still put up with GNOME?
Because maybe not all people have the same preferences as you?
Preferences don't form in a vacuum though. There's a perception that GNOME is the "good environment" which means its decisions get treated as more important than other DEs' when things change: and that's somewhat self-reinforcing.
Distro: "The most used DE needs first class support, we should probably bend to it" → Distro: "We should probably make this DE the default since it's so widely used and supported" → User: "I choose the default" → Distro: "The most used DE…"
So yes, people have different preferences; but if your preference is GNOME today, it might not be GNOME tomorrow, and "I picked the default" isn't quite the neutral signal it looks like.
I'm not sure about this. In general I see more criticism of GNOME than praise, so if anything the perception would be that GNOME is not a good DE.
A desktop/workstation/whatever should have a graphical user interface. If you want another GUI you can choose another distro (like Kubuntu etc).
where exactly did I say anything contrary to what you said.
Are you implying that GNOME is the only thing that should be considered graphical? That everything else has to be an alternative? That GNOME, by virtue of existing has infinite reprieve to change the definition of user interfaces at their leisure; even if it means breaking muscle memory hundreds of thousands of times over decades.
I don’t follow the point of what you said.
Ubuntu can have one GUI and Kubuntu can have another. Every distro can't be everything for every person.
Lets put KDE as the default for Ubuntu and have GNOME available on Gnubuntu instead. :)
If you run Ubuntu you are free to do what you want with it.
There's much more to the story. GNOME is a sort of authoritarian organization known for their antisocial behavior: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti... (and there's much, much more).
Since GNOME is the default Ubuntu DE, they have a certain responsibily to listen to the users/devs and leave the system open (to an extent). But their direction is the opposite:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210901171117/https://twitter.c...
They've been doing massive reduction in functionalities, really insane like limiting copy/past of terminals just to the current screen (which hurts any sysadmin), generally without any way to enable them back.
I haven't heard of any other OSS organization trying so hard to limit freedom of their users/devs, and this is an explicit goal - they don't want to weaken their brand.
GNOME is nothing short of the Oracle of open source.
A distro making your project the default doesn't give you any responsibility.
I fundamentally agree with you. I don't think responsibility is quite the right word. But if they don't seem to care about a massive portion of their users, why are they building gnome at all?
I agree that responsibility is the wrong word, but I've also noticed there's certainly some form of expectation, social responsibility, or care that other projects have and gnome has always lacked. When I started using Linux it was the desktop I liked the most, but some of the choices seem almost hostile or intentionally designed to drive current users away, and unlike most other projects I've used, I've never seen them listen or make improvements based on any feedback from users.
Who is "we"? I find GNOME great.
On the other hand, I'm not a fan of people disparaging free open source software that they've never contributed anything to, either money or code.
Part of why I've been pretty happy with COSMIC, even if a bit experimental in ways. The File Manager is probably the most quirky part for me... mostly it works fine though. Most of my other issues seem to be more about the wayland switch than anything specific to COSMIC.
I agree. GNOME used to be perfect, now it looks and feels like it's been designed by someone who's never used a computer.
I wish Ubuntu would just give up with GNOME and switch to something more sensible.
You can use something else. Kubuntu might be nice for you.
Yes, I've migrated to Kubuntu first and now I'm enjoying Linux Mint. The Cinnamon environment gives me old-school GNOME vibes. And Mint doesn't have Snap, which is also a big plus.
Been a long time i3 user. Usually works well if you put in the initial time. But of late been very happy with Xubuntu (xfce)
Why not both? XFCE + i3 make a great pair.
I use XFCE too, simple and doesn’t get in the way.
I had to migrate away from Xubuntu (xfce) due to the poor HiDPI support. Kubuntu (KDE/Plasma) is now my current desktop of choice.
You don't have to "put up" with Gnome. Use whatever you want.
UI designers got it right with a taskbar on the bottom and widgets to let you know what you have open at a glance without having to move the mouse across the screen or press buttons. For a multi-application PC desktop thats the right model. Not for phones ofc, they need a different model. Trying to force the phone model on the desktop PC model just doesnt make sense, not now, not then, not ever.
edit: grammar, also Cinnamon fixes these issues thankfully.
Because Cinnamon exists and has a delightful commitment to functional minimalism.
Glad you like yours. I like (Vanilla) Gnome + PaperWM.
But seriously why would they disabled the middle mouse copy paste buffer by default? Anyways, gnome tweaks to the rescue I guess
[dead]
It is a preference - and not everyones. I always hated middle click paste, middle click is amongst the first thing I remap on my systems to do the macOS "exposé"-style of window rearrangements. Other people will have other preferences.
I suppose you use Super+Middle Click? Not a bad idea, I dislike hot corners, and the "exposé" feature of niri is quite good. I might actually remap it to Super+Middle Click.
(I use Super+side mouse buttons to move between workspaces, I hate the keyboard-centric workflow when one hand is always on the mouse)
I don't use Super. Middle click (Button 3) = expose, Button 4 = workspace to the left, Button 5 = workspace to the right. Requires a good mouse with accessible button 4/5 of course. No key modifier.
What about software that uses those buttons? I.e. web browser? (middle click = open link in a tab, side buttons = forward/back history)
No software I use, uses these buttons for anything integral by default, neither on Linux nor Mac. And if they do, the OS has precedence. On macOS I use BetterTouchTool for those mapping, you can define exceptions for individual apps.
I hate that its somehow different from ctrl v paste, that's what makes me angry more.
That's what some people love about it. Gives them 2 clipboards. Personally I think copying into a shared space without an explicit action to do so is terrible from a security perspective, so getting rid of middle click paste by default is good to me.
Probably changed to work the same as macos. Not sure if windows does middle click paste.
> Not sure if windows does middle click paste.
It doesn't. X was the only place I know of where that was a thing.
...and it's a great thing. Turning it off is another one of those GNOME decisions that are only made because the same feature does not exist in MacOS.
To you it is, plenty of people -including myself- don’t find it so. And considering the ratio of MacOS+Windows desktop users to those of ‘nix (an increasing number of which are new converts), middle clickers are a minority here.
But hey! At least they are only flipping defaults, not removing the feature outright, like they did type-ahead search. [Insert angry rant here]
That is gnome's standard play: move a feature to a preference (“you can just turn it back on”), remove the preference from the control panel (“you can still turn it back on using ‹whatever conf backend they're using this year›”), and then finally remove the feature (“you could only turn it on by using an unsupported mechanism, and ‹conf backend they used last year› is deprecated anyway”).
I agree with the point about this being configurable.
About your first point, however, keep in mind that "middle click insert" has been the default behavior in X since the 1980s, long before Windows or current generation MacOS's were around. To me, this is such a basic functionality, I would compare it something as fundamental as CTRL-X/C/V for cut/copy/paste on Windows.
As a trackpoint user, I am glad it's off by default.
Because of scrolling on Thinkpad keyboards (using the middle click), I had to turn that feature of every time, especially while working on longer documents I would otherwise accidentally paste stuff at random places.
(It's not just macOS.)
No way, José.
From where I sit I have 5 Thinkpads set up within reach, and I have a few more in other rooms. They are by far my preferred laptop.
Most run Ubuntu as their default OS, most have the trackpad disabled because I usually use the trackpoint for everything, and on all of them I use middle-click to paste extensively.
Glad you're less clumsy than I am. :-)
The accidental pasting definitely kept happening to me, likely due to my bad habit of highlighting sections while to focus on them.
I'm guessing you have touchpad corners enabled. Usually by default lower-right is 2nd mouse button and upper-right is 3rd mouse button (middle click).
I only use the touchpad, but knowing where it is I can avoid it and almost never trigger it accidentally. It can also be disabled without affecting two-finger and three-finger tap, which I do use.
(This applies to all laptops, not just Thinkpads)
I’ve used a thinkpad for 26 years, 18 with Ubuntu. I’ve always had middle click enabled.
I like middle click copy/paste but I really don't mind the change as long as I can still configure it with gnome-tweaks.
> only made because the same feature does not exist in MacOS.
Or in anything that's not X?
Speaking personally for me only, I don't think it's a great thing. The <however many> clipboards on Linux is... not really a great thing. I for one never know which of the buffers contain what. And this is compounded by the fact that selection may or may not overwrite what's in one of the buffers, and middle click may or may not paste whatever was in that buffer. Additionally compounded by how inconsistent the behavior is across apps.
Sure, de gustibus non est disputandum.
I, for one, use the different clipboards concurrently all the time, with "highlight & middle-click" probably being the one I use most often. It's the most convenient for me most of the time:
- only two interactions (one drag & one click)
- completely mouse-based (no keyboard interaction necessary)
- hence only requires one hand (look, ma!)
> Sure, de gustibus non est disputandum.
Bo! Let's fight! And both get banned from HN :)
I was never a fan of it. I always turned it off. And now it also freed up middle click for auto scrolling which is actually great, especially when the scrollwheel is somewhat broken.
As someone that habitually highlights what they are reading it was generally beyond useless for me. It was actively making me mad when I accidenatally pasted some non-sense because I just highlighted a paragraph before and accidentally inserted it into something.
THANX! I don't know how people live on platforms that don't have this :)
As for the negative Gnome feedback (not from you but others) I do like Gnome, it's just enough window manager for me, I like the defaults and I like the touchpad gestures etc. Generally looks and works well for all I do. I always feel swamped by KDE.
Did they publish some rationale somewhere? It’s a useful feature.
Neither Windows nor macOS have it, so it's surprising to new users. If your target market (as in support contracts) is EU public servants, it's sort of understandable.
it's surprising to new users (in a good way, i was happy when i found it) let's remove it.
I just use KDE on arch, though for a little while it was glitching out on me frequently, idk if I've been too busy to notice it recently or if they finally patched it up.
I miss KDE 3.5 it felt drastically more stable than KDE today.
I've tried other DE's but they get weird if your Distro is not built for them.
Jesus, do the people who work on GNOME even like Linux?
Maybe they all use some BSD distro?
In Icaza's case I think he just always wanted to work for Microsoft. I don't know about the less famous developers though.
Well he did, in the end until he quit Microsoft (and Linux) and moved to macOS/iOS and Swift development.
icaza hasn't dev or used gnome for like decades.... and i am not sure why you assume the intent of miguel like that.
For Nix Home-Manager on non-nixos you need to fix the driver integration. https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/index.xhtml#sec...
Nowadays it is quite easy https://github.com/AntonFriberg/dotfiles/blob/master/modules...
Note that the way this works is that after you activate your home manager generation it outputs a script path that you need to run manually as root which installs a Systemd service which ensures that the drivers are linked correctly.
> * Select - Middle-click paste does not seem to work
They did it on purpose for some reason. If I were you I'd give Plasma a try.
Plasma, meaning KDE.
I've been using the Kubuntu 26.04 prereleases for a few weeks. No surprises from KDE, but Wayland has broken a few things. Autotype in Keepass does not work, keynav and even the Wayland keynav forks don't work, and Wayland does not support priority keyboard layouts for switching between two specific layouts.
It's called plasma now :) KDE is the association, the desktop is plasma.
I still mostly use Xorg though, I only have wayland on a tablet.
It seems that KDE is fairly consistent in calling this “Plasma” and specifically, “Plasma Desktop”, but English Wikipedia insists on prefixing the names of their products with “KDE”. Especially Plasma 4, 5, and 6.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Plasma
https://kde.org/plasma-desktop/
Is this, like, a “GNU/Linux controversy” thing?
"KDE Plasma" can be interpreted as "The KDE organization's Plasma" and probably saves on some article title consistency while avoiding the need to disambiguate the main Plasma article title with (Desktop Environment) or the like. Likely more trouble to try to change than it helps anything as a result.
It's really only calling it "KDE" in isolation that is a bit off. On the GNOME side, such a reference makes sense because the desktop environment is named GNOME and it's run by the GNOME Project/GNOME Foundation. I.e. a bit reversed which word in the order refers to the org's vs DE's name.
Most of the time people will probably figure it out at the end of the day via context either way though.
If you want an experience that's similar to GNOME-when-it-was-good, I'd suggest Cinnamon, the desktop environment of Linux Mint.
What's the state of Cinnamon maintenance? Keeping up with underlying platform changes being the perpetual challenge...
Cinnamon is an independent project, it's not based on GNOME. Or what else are you referring to?
Gtk-3
> Select - Middle-click paste does not seem to work
Good. It shouldn't be on by default. It's surprising behavior, too easy to fat-finger, and too disruptive when it accidentally triggers.
What???? That's the most expected feature of any *nix user since the dawn of X Window!
The X Window developers were mostly just making it up as they went along. Practically no one expects mouse buttons to work like that.
Unix workstations had mice with 3 buttons. The Mac had only one. Windows, Amiga, Atari had two. The Unix developers had choice that others didn't have. They came up with a use that existed forever. Now someone decided to remove the default for no apparent reason. It's like the Android product managers continuing to change the color, size and gesture to answer a phone call: every release, the first call is an exercise in managing frustration.
Fine print on coreutils rewrite:
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/an-update-on-rust-coreutils/8...
That was a lot of CVEs
Goes to show that not all security bugs are memory related bugs
Not aimed at you but... no sh*t. The "Rewrite it in Rust" community never heard of the second-system effect.
I'd rather use something written in a crappier language that has been battle-tested for decades, personally.
> I'd rather use something written in a crappier language that has been battle-tested for decades, personally.
I don't think this is a universal rule. Something can be old but still suck (see: openssl). On the flip side, though, I'd like to see literally any evidence that coreutils has a security problem before we go jumping off onto the shiny new replacement.
I see this accusation and characterization in basically every thread about Rust, but I really don't think it's true. On the contrary, I strongly believe it's less that these people didn't consider that, and more that they willfully chose to ignore it.
If you always keep praying to the same old bit of code to "reliably" chug along (which people clearly cannot actually ascertain, otherwise these reimplementations wouldn't be struggling), you're forever just rolling the dice that some Pandora's box will simply never open (which it absolutely does and keeps opening), while also giving up on modern capabilities. What you see as old reliable, I see as a buried lede. I'd imagine these folks see the same. [0]
It's frustrating to see the software world contend with the same pushback and counter-arguments the infra/ops world (my neck of the woods) has already figured out and went past long ago during the advent of IaC. Cattle > pets, easily, every time.
[0] It's also not a cost-benefit thing, but clearly a principled decision, so arguments that aim to contend the ROI of it all are off-base from the get-go. If ROI is the key thing for you, then all this philosophical nonsense shouldn't even be on the table. Calculate.
That is a bad take, because that imply "crappier language will be used for MORE decades".
Rust is an absolute improvement over C/C++ in major ways. Once there, for ALL THAT DECADES all the developers and all the code written will be spared the problems of "crappier languages.
In the short term there are adaptation issues? fine. But that will be erased (way faster than is possible with C) and suddenly, never again worry about things.
“battle tested for decades” just lost a lot of its value with Mythos and the likes unfortunately. Rewriting in a different language became much faster with Coding agents at the same time.
I do agree that the second system effect is real, it’s just that the balance of benefits and drawbacks significantly shifted when it comes to “rewrite in Rust” (not limited to Rust though).
> “battle tested for decades” just lost a lot of its value with Mythos and the likes unfortunately
Isn't it a bit early to make predictions on the future of computer security and how we create good software based on something that's been out for 2 weeks?
Meanwhile the C version of coreutils has been in development for 36 years. There's no rush.
Yay we can create new CVEs faster!
I wish they'd put the severity. There are 4 highs, the rest are medium or low. Here are the high ones:
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-35338 - `chmod --preserve-root` can be bypassed. That doesn't seem that bad tbh.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-35341 - `mkfifo` accidentally resets the permissions of files that already exist, so if you manage to do `sudo mkfifo /etc/shadow` then it becomes world readable.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-35352 - TOCTOU in `mkfifo` lets you do the symlink trick to get it to change permissions on an unrelated file.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-35368 - You might be able to get chroot to execute arbitrary code.
Tbh I doubt if any of these would ever result in a real hack, unless your system is doing really mental things like running shell scripts with untrusted input.
I could only find a couple of CVEs that looked actually serious for GNU Coreutils too though. IMO if you're using these tools with untrusted input your system is janky enough that there are going to be serious flaws in it anyway. Probably though quoting mistakes.
I clicked a random one: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-35344
Quote from the CVE description: "The dd utility in uutils coreutils suppresses errors during file truncation [...] This can lead to silent data corruption in backup or migration scripts, as the utility may report a successful operation even when the destination file contains old or garbage data."
That's terrifying. There's more to bugs than security bugs. You'd expect coreutils to be as bug-free as possible.
Well the TOCTOU issues do not require you to run untrusted scripts to be exploited. Another user on your system can use a legitimate command that you may run to make changes to files they shouldn’t be able to, or further escalate privileges.
Fair point. Though tbh I still think the user-isolation security for Linux is only really suited for the University/company threat model, where you generally trust users not to actually use exploits because they would get expelled/fired.
If you allow a completely untrusted user onto your system I think your chances of staying secure are low.
Then why rewrite coreutils in rust? TOCTOU isn't exact some new concept. Neither are https://owasp.org/Top10/2025/ (most of which a good web framework will prevent or migrate), and switching to rust (which as far as I know) won't bring you a safer web framework like django or rails.
I don't know their motivations but mine would be:
1. Rust is a much more pleasant language to work with.
2. You can improve the tools, adding new features, fixing UX paper cuts etc.
You're probably thinking "you can improve the GNU versions!" and in theory sure. But in practice these sorts of tools are controlled by naysayers who want everything to stay as it was in the 80s. The sorts of people that only accept patches via git send-email to a mailing list.
Hahaha I just looked up GNU Coreutils and not only do they blame poor UX on the user ("Often these perceived bugs are simply due to wrong program usage.") but they even maintain a list of rejected feature requests:
https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/rejected_requests.htm...
And to nobody's surprise, to contribute it is git send-email to a mailing list.
Have you used busybox? The BSDs? I'm not sure adding more features to coreutils is a major help, and given rust-coreutils/uutils has:
1) more CVEs between two latest Ubuntu releases than coreutils has had over the last 30+ year
2) managed to break security updates
3) is neither fully compatible with POSIX nor coreutils
I'm not sure why I'd ever use it? Sadly, projects like uutils have made me suspicious of rust projects, so unless I know that the project is well maintained (for which there are numerous examples, ripgrep being the obvious example, but newsboat, the various tools from proxmox, servo/firefox, and the pgrx ecosystem are ones I use regularly), it's a negative marker against that project.
Another maintainer and I follow issues and pull requests on a GitHub mirror. But email works fine for us and many other projects.
Regarding poor UX, it is difficult to dispute with that claim without a specific example. Note that a lot of the features we support are standardized by POSIX. Even if we dislike the behavior, it is better to comply with the standards so the programs don't behave differently than users expect. The sentence you quote isn't meant to put down users. These programs are often much more complex than meets the eye, and there are lots of common gotchas that people have run into (and will continue to do so) [1].
Of course we would love for these programs to be useful for everyone. However, feature requests are often incompatible with existing behavior, incompatible with other feature requests, or have existing functionality elsewhere. For those reasons we cannot accept every feature request.
[1] https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/coreutils-gotchas.html
Indeed, many bugs are API usage bugs, something that no language can verify. (The API is implemented in C anyway.)
No, but some languages make designing difficult-to-misuse APIs a lot easier than others.
It's Linux, it's a C API, so there's little hope.
I wonder if Redox has a much better API; at least I hope it does.
Not to mention sudo-rs.
I think this should be the real news.
What should I use if I like Ubuntu but not snap, just Debian? Or are there alternatives around? Seems like Ubuntu has the best hardware and driver support so just curious what's new in Linux land.
I switched to Debian and have been happy with it. The release cycle is less frequent than Ubuntu Desktop, which means fewer disruptions, and Debian Backports make it easy to pick new versions of the important stuff. Flatpak is also available on Debian.
Linux Mint is widely praised for being basically Ubuntu without the worst Canonicalisms (such as Snap). They maintain a Debian edition in parallel to their main one, as an exit strategy in case Ubuntu ever becomes unsuitable for their base. Some people already use that as their daily driver.
Just in case you're not aware, the default desktop environment on whatever distro you pick doesn't have to be what you use. I switched to KDE Plasma when Gtk-based desktops became intolerable, and haven't looked back.
P.S.
MX Linux also looks interesting. Like Ubuntu, it's a Debian derivative. It offers a supported path for avoiding systemd and has an official KDE Plasma edition, both of which appeal to me. I haven't had a chance to try it yet.
> worst Canonicalisms
Do the Mint team treat fixing the other half of the problem, the GNOMEisms, as out-of-scope?
Asking because I maintain my own pile of gsettings and .gtkrc tweaks as mitigations yet pain points remain, apparently unfixable outside the source code.
Their approach to GNOMEisms is to officially support three desktop editions: Cinnamon (based on GNOME 3), MATE (based on GNOME 2), and Xfce (based on more recent Gtk). I don't think they try to tame modern GNOME, and I wouldn't expect them to, since that would be an endlessly difficult moving target.
If you want more detail, you should ask someone who still uses Gtk-based desktops, or try them yourself. I gave up on Gtk a couple years ago.
Now Debian is packaging non-free drivers in the iso images directly. I would suggest to try Debian first, if it works well for you just keep it.
If you feel the need for newer packages, try other alternatives (or Debian unstable). I’ve set down on Fedora with XFCE, it’s really stable yet packages feel new.
You can de-snap Ubuntu itself.
Dunno about the this release, but till 24.4 it was simply a matter of removing some packages then holding/masking the primary snapd one, followed by manually adding the official PPAs for Mozilla’s stuff (or just use the Flatpak).
Of course, there’s still the philosophical and long term issues with staying on a distro that’s promoting and continuosuly expanding the thing you dislike…
This is a bad strategy, I fell victim for. I configured so it would use apt instead of snap package, but canonical silently stopped shipping packages and I was running some packages that were not updated for a long time and debugging weird bugs, because I didn't assume that this was a problem. If one wants Ubuntu, one must accept snap. If you use apt with disallowed transition to snap, you might be stuck with old packages that were transitioned to snap.
My choice for now is Debian, didn't finish transition yet, very annoying to plan this in my schedule. I'll churn from Ubuntu after more than 15 years of daily driving... I also don't like ubuntu user with uid:gid 1000 in their Docker images. It's a cancer.
+1. I recently picked up a secondhand Framework, and, after almost 15 years of holding out with Mint + MATE, berated myself for resisting change and put in an unreasonable amount of effort trying to modernize and reacclimate to Ubuntu + GNOME 3.
It was painful, with an endless laundry list of things to troubleshoot, tinker with, and add to my digital notebook in attempt to get anything resembling a personally ergonomic workflow.
I implore anyone to just go with Mint or anything else that takes care of ripping out snaps for you if you don't want snaps (but otherwise still like or are used to most things about Ubuntu). There were too many downstream and other issues, related and unrelated, for my sanity.
This is what I do, because on my work computer IT imposed Ubuntu.
I initially tried to just use snaps but firefox was crashing quite often so I had to go with adding the mozilla's repository and of course configure the fake "firefox" package that actually installs the snap to be low priority for apt.
Ubuntu keeps adding snap back again and again so I got tired of removing it each time. Someone said to try Pop!_OS so maybe I'll try that.
You can disable that too and it won't be installed.
Like someone else said, if I have to dig through settings to do that then I might as well use Windows. It's better to use something that doesn't even have snap in the first place via another distro than play cat and mouse with Canonical.
I agree with you, that's why I don't like Ubuntu anymore. It's a system you have to fight against, just like Windows.
I was merely saying that you a couple commands you can uninstall snap and disable it from appearing ever again.
I have a year ago switched from Ubuntu to Fedora and I like it. Clean and stable. Uses Flatpak. I'm using Fedora Workstation which is the default, but Fedora KDE Plasma seems to be nice as well if you want to have more configuration options available directly in the GUI. And the layout is more Windows like with start button menu etc for people coming from the Windows side.
Debian is good!
If you want something desktop oriented and Ubuntu based without the focus on snaps, take a look at Linux Mint: https://www.linuxmint.com/ (there's Cinnamon, Xfce and MATE versions; personally I think Cinnamon is pretty good nowadays)
I distro hopped for a while and settled on Linux mint. Uses flat packs. Hits the spot for easy to use and easy to maintain without needing to use terminal scripts to get things my way. Just my opinion.
Debian is great, and is where the distro development actually happens. What doesn't it do that you want?
Hasn't there been reporting recently that Debian development is struggling with a lack of maintainers?
I’m curious about proprietary Nvidia drivers. Ubuntu normally comes with fairly outdated, if not obsolete ones, but there’s a semi-official PPA with more recent versions. How does Debian handle this?
Debian has their own nvidia driver packages (it's nvidia's drivers repackaged in a nice way that integrates with the system well). I can't say if they're "outdated" or how different they are from what ubuntu ships, but they've always worked very well for me.
Debian offers Nvidia drivers as well although they tend to be outdated. Thankfully you can use Nvidia's official .deb repos to get the latest drivers on both Debian and Ubuntu.
> I’m curious about proprietary Nvidia drivers. Ubuntu normally comes with fairly outdated, if not obsolete ones […]
I see the latest—580, 590, 595—available (scroll to bottom):
* https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=nvidia-dkms
Am I missing something?
Awesome, this must be a recent thing, when I last checked about a year ago the latest drivers from restricted were a couple versions behind. Many people always complained about it on reddit, AskUbuntu etc, which is where I found out about the PPA.
We deployed 570 and 580 in the April-June 2025 time frame, so I'm not sure what you were looking at, but they've tried to keep up with the latest for a while.
You can get an overview of that status by looking at the "version" box on https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nvidia-graphics-drivers
I think Pop does Nvidia well, but have no real experience with that.
I have used Pop OS for years and for me it was the most smooth desktop environment I've ever used.
They have been working on a custom Desktop Environment which sadly still isn't very stable yet. Promising development, but putting me off of using Pop for a while.
I just put the new popos on my laptop and am still running the old version on my primary desktop. Agreed that Cosmic is not quite ready for prime time yet, but it is pretty impressive the state it's in for how new it is. Haven't had any show stopping bugs on the laptop, just a few small quirks.
> Ubuntu normally comes with fairly outdated, if not obsolete ones
Ubuntu 24.04 currently comes with 590, which is the most recent working driver.
Checking out username: FAILED...
Anyway, the main issue with Debian, Ubuntu, and Nvidia is about licensing. GNU/Linux is free software, and Nvidia drivers are not. Loading a non-free driver is known as “Tainting the Kernel”.
https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers
The information on their wiki may be a year out of date. But the principles still apply.
LMDE: https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
LMDE is Debian-based, I believe you meant Linux Mint itself, which also doesn't use snaps.
You get all the driver support and tools from the Ubuntu base, with some nice additons. However, not all desktop environment are supported.
Both are great. I'm currently using the Debian Editon, that at least for me works out of the box. The transition from the Ubuntu-based traditional edition was seamless. I used Mint MATE before.
Just install Ubuntu and remove snap. We are doing this for our University pool etc and encountered no issues.
Make a list of all ppa before proceeding.
What is your use case?
The issue is them adding it back, sometimes even on apt upgrade, or silently installing it as a dependency for certain apps without mentioning it unless you look closely. That gets tiring after a while and I gave up on Ubuntu as even after having removed snap multiple times it always returned.
This is my experience, too, and my solution has been to run Debian.
Did you pin the package's priority or just apt removed it?
I've not used Linux on the desktop for some years⁰ but as I move back this sort of thing is why I'm not considering Ubuntu². If I want to dig into settings like that to keep my preferences I might as well stick with Windows.
Yes, the control to be able to tweak the system to my liking is one of the attractions or Linux, but not when I have to in order to avoid behaviours that I don't want being reasserted.
[not that I expect nor particularly want Ubuntu to change, I just accept that I'm not part of its target audience and I'll be better served elsewhere - choice is a great thing!]
----
[0] heading back there now as Windows11 is not happening on my home machines¹, I feel that I shouldn't have let Windows10 happen, looking back.
[1] aside from the laptop that came with it that I'll keep there for Office and DayJob compatibility for a while.
[2] Currently running Debian³ on the other laptop, main desktop will likely go that way if it isn't decommissioned completely, and I use a dock with the laptops instead.
[3] As that is what I use server-side more often than not.
Never happened in the last several years.
run "apt install firefox" and you'll end up with having snaps again.
Or, for a more server-appropriate example, 'frr'. The BGP daemon. It's not just desktop things like 'firefox' before someone tries that angle.
I haven't tried it in a few LTS releases and I'm away from a computer. Still, I'd bet this release continues the pattern. Fat chance Canonical decided to go back to more build targets/backporting/testing.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w...
Do you mean you just don't follow instructions?
Why are you linking mozilla.org if we're talking about ubuntu?
Not listening to users is what drove me away from windows. Not a fan of snaps either (or forced windows updates). Recently re-tried linux going to debian instead, which i really like. Reminds me of the old dos days. Gnome was a no-go, kde was nice but too buggy, cinnamon turned out to be perfect. So here i am, on linux finally, enjoying having my computer back and playing around like its 1992 again.
Doesn't snap come back on the next OS upgrade?
I was using Ubuntu and installed the apt version of Firefox as the snap version would not open html files in locations like /var/tmp and would not work with USB devices. Every time I ran `do-release-upgrade`, all of that work would need to be redone. It was very annoying.
Ubuntu is the Windows 11 of Linux. You have to do brain surgery on it post install, to remove unwanted crap. At least there's the option of using a different distro.
Best of luck avoiding all of the system level packages that just shim a snap.
Use Fedora if you dislike snap. Canonical has made their stance clear and are hostile to users for a long time now on this matter.
Debian is fine but their kernels are so old if you have any new hardware it can be clunky and you have to fiddle with backports of the bleeding edge version
1. Enable Backports.
2. Install the kernel from Backports.
I don't think of such a simple process as "fiddling", but to each his own I guess.
I'd usually say Pop_OS!
But my recent upgrade to Pop version 24.04 has been a bit of a step back in terms of desktop experience.
I suspect it's growing pains from (switching to Wayland) + (non-System76 hardware) + (laptop with nVidia dGPU + external monitor).
So with different hardware, and/or some more time to mature, this Pop release will probably be a very solid choice.
Gaming-oriented distros like CachyOS and Bazzite might be what you want. I'm on Cachy and can recommend it. Because they try to "just work" without jumping through hoops.
Even though I very much intenseley dislike the completely unintuitive idiosyncratic package management that Arch has. Which is further not helped by the fact that Cachy's default GUI for it isn't even integrated properly.
> What should I use if I like Ubuntu but not snap […]
Because of business needs, if you're stuck with using Ubuntu (at least in some situations), an `apt(-get) purge snapd` helps. It's in all of our auto/post-install stuff.
I was in the same spot recently, and my friends recommend Linux Mint. It is built on top of Ubuntu LTS, and no snap. I've been using it for the past few weeks in my old desktop computer. Definitely Good. Perfect fit for your needs
If you're using Ubuntu on Jetson then you're out of luck. That platform is tied to Ubuntu.
That statement may have been true in 2014, but
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Jetson#Software
Linux for Tegra (L4T) is an Ubuntu based OS.
The other things mentioned in that Wikipedia page are not open source.
(as far as I can tell)
Just don't use snap. No need to throw out the baby woth the bathwater.
Easier said than done, surprise: apt, who we know and love, is redirected to Snap for an ever-increasing number of packages.
"Don't use Snap", you say? I'll do you one better! Skip Ubuntu. 'Just' use anything else more suitable. Debian is an excellent replacement being upstream, but I hold no illusions over undeclared requirements.
> Easier said than done, surprise: apt, who we know and love, is redirected to Snap for an ever-increasing number of packages.
With 24.04 at least, doing an 'apt purge snapd' seems to be quite useful. Is that not sufficient?
> With 24.04 at least, doing an 'apt purge snapd' seems to be quite useful. Is that not sufficient?
For the moment, later pulling a package that is redirected would undo that effort. As the peer points out, too, that would likely rip out stuff you're using without having already configured preference.
One could maintain a boundless list of configs pinning repository preferences... or they could use a distribution that doesn't have a predisposition towards Snap.
On 25.10, removing snap gets rid of firefox, chromium, cups and many more packages.
> On 25.10, removing snap gets rid of firefox, chromium, cups and many more packages.
For servers, this may not be a problem for us. Currently on 24.04, so will have to see how things are ≥25.10.
Some server stuff is hit too! I learned about this pattern through the BGP daemon 'frr'. No idea how many server packages are/may be captured by Snap, but it's worth being aware of. Imagine my surprise. Remove it and bam, no networking.
Seems to also be available as a Debian package:
* https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=frr
in addition to a Snap:
* https://snapcraft.io/install/frr/ubuntu
Doing a quick test on 24.04: on a system without snapd installed, `apt install frr` installs packages and not any Snap stuff. Will have to see about 26.04 when I get a moment.
Thanks for digging in, as I mentioned earlier in this thread/another [lost track], I haven't messed with this in at least two LTS releases. Good to see it's aware at install time; this wasn't always the case.
How about the inverse, purging? At one point, removing Snap would lose BGP announcements [through the loss of the 'frr' software/service it was managing].
Anyway, I'm willing to believe most of my install/dependency-resolution pain was inspired by [and limited to] 18.04 or whatever was immediately after. We had a fleet of systems inadvertently moved to Snap, only learned through a loss of announcements on removal.
edit: Tested on a 24.04 box I had laying around; removing Snap does indeed still rip out things one might want:
Likely fine in your case, where if memory serves, you're removing Snap in the image/provisioning stage. Cooks in busy kitchens may still be surprised, however. The real problem appears solved: 'you' get the software 'you' asked for.Problem is most things are only snap. You can get them ocherwise but not by default
I can't believe people like Snap when in the name of security it breaks basic things such as accessing a folder on a different mount point that the user normally can access perfectly fine.
A packaging system should not break the basic abstractions of an OS.
Yeah, this was the frustrating bit to me. I use Firefox to look at stuff that lives in /tmp/, Snap Firefox can't do this. I'd remove Snap Firefox, pin the priorities and it would still silently crawl it's way back in after a week or two no matter what I tried. I gave up Ubuntu. Earlier versions used to respect the priorities but something changed.
> Seems like Ubuntu has the best hardware and driver support
It is an urban myth
“Urban myth” kind of suggests that it was never true, which isn't the case, though it is one of those out-dated truths that doesn't go away quickly.
At one time Ubuntu as the easiest distro to get certain hardware running with because of the inclusion of proprietary drivers & codecs (unlike its Debian parent, amongst others, at least at the time) and making them easy, near-automatic, to configure compared to others that did include them. The distinction is long gone, and Ubuntu is simply one of several (many) good ones in that regard, but the perception that others have not long since caught up persists.
It used to be true. I've never had problems using the proprietary Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu. You used to have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get them installed on Debian. Now Ubuntu lags behind on kernel versions leaving new hardware less usable.
I think snap is not preinstalled in Kubuntu.
This is not correct.
Snap is preinstalled on all official Ubuntu graphical editions.
However, Xubuntu's _Minimal_ install does not include any snap packages at all, not even a browser. This means it's trivial to remove snapd:
sudo apt purge snapd
Then you can install the `extrepo` command, and use it to install Firefox ESR direct from Mozilla's repos, or Chrome from Google's repos.
Once it's online you can copy and paste a couple of commands to "pin" snapd and prevent it from being reinstalled. Then you can switch to current Firefox or anything else without snapd sneaking back in.
Xubuntu Minimal is also available as a separate ISO file, which is not true of any of the other flavours.
Linux Mint.
PopOS
This looks like it might be the best solution, no snap, maintained by an actual system integrator and laptop maker, and I also like the new Rust-based desktop environment. I wonder how well it runs on Framework laptops or MacBooks as well.
Runs great on framework. Not sure about COSMIC on asahi.
Isn't that essentially a release of Ubuntu with a different kernel, DE and maybe some userspace utilities?
Yes.
Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Linux Lite, Pop OS, and several less famous distros are all based on Ubuntu. New versions of all of them will follow this new LTS release in time.
Mint forked GNOME 3 to make something more Windows-like.
Zorin customised upstream GNOME with a lot of extensions.
Pop removed it and replaced it with their own homegrown desktop, written in Rust. It's actually pretty good and works well.
PopOS started as Ubuntu with better hardware enablment but it has evolved far beyond that. They have been removing all the snap stuff. The have done tons of work on DE (Cosmic) and in general don't go along with Gnome or Ubuntu strangness. But yes its Ubuntu and Debian derived.
Try Arch linux.
I hate snap as well. Use flatpak and KDE on Ubuntu. Never have been happier.
Linux Mint was my go-to but I have shifted to MX Linux, its KDE edition is a decisive upgrade in every way.
After using Ubuntu for many years both on the desktop and server, recent decisions have got me thinking that Canonical has lost a lot of its community spirit. That got me switching over machines to Debian which, to me, still feels like a community project. It's a shame.
I am pragmatic about it though so I still run Ubuntu for some things but it's no longer my first recommendation.
> recent decisions have got me thinking that Canonical has lost a lot of its community spirit
The rot set in when #ubuntu on Freenode (now Libera) became rigidly enforced as on-topic discussions of Ubuntu support only.
The channel is absolutely dead now. Maybe one person will say something in any given 12-hour period and no-one replies, just page after page of joins and parts.
Ubuntu LTS is still the choice for many production environments and education and learning. As someone with Ubuntu from 2010 CDs, I find it refreshing that modern Ubuntu distros work OOB on most computers these days with excellent driver support.
Is this even true? I mean, Windows is the main focus for all hardware vendors, and everybody who has owned a PC knows that malfunctions are unavoidable. If that is the case for Windows, then Linux cant be better.
There's working, and there's working.
20 years ago your Linux installation might not include wifi drivers, bluetooth support, decent GPU drivers, fat32/ntfs drivers, or the widely used video/audio codecs of the era. And you had to be careful when shopping for things like wifi cards, as only certain chipsets could be made to work.
Much of which was kinda fair enough, because if you're a volunteer making an open source OS because of a strong belief on the open source ideal, you don't want to distribute closed-source driver blobs or patent-encumbered codecs. But it meant mean the initial installation process was not always easy. One of the things that contributed to the success of Ubuntu was a particularly easy initial setup process.
Today, things are a lot better - you'll still get unsupported hardware from time to time, but it'll be much less severe. If your laptop has a non-USB integrated camera you might have to download and install a kernel module. Your corporate laptop's built in fingerprint scanner might not work, but who cares?
> 20 years ago your Linux installation might not include wifi drivers, bluetooth support, decent GPU drivers, fat32/ntfs drivers, or the widely used video/audio codecs of the era.
To be quite fair, this is pretty much the only reason Ubuntu exists. It started off as "Debian for people who just want stuff to work", but these days Debian even ships non-free wifi drivers on the install media. I've personally used both extensively and apart from the "enterprise support" argument and the minor convenience of having ZFS pre-compiled, I see no reason to use Ubuntu.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/glossary/linux-standard-base/
When I was shopping Lenovo.com for my ThinkPad in 2018, there was a table with ThinkPads certified for Ubuntu Linux in one column, and certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in another column.
I chose the T580 as a RHEL-certified notebook, and it was fantastic. Lenovo.com let me configure each individual component exactly according to my needs and tastes, and it was custom-assembled and shipped from Shenzhen.
It did arrive with Windows 10 pre-installed (this was the least hassle and most popular OS option). I initially installed CentOS, but quickly realized that Fedora would be the sweet spot, and so it was a Fedora system for most of its lifetime. Near the end, I did revert to Windows 10, which also worked flawlessly.
The ThinkPad T580 literally never malfunctioned. It was still 100% working when I turned it in for recycling in 2025.
I've also run Ubuntu on my "daily driver" desktop system, which ran from 2006-2022. Yes, that's 16 years' worth of Ubuntu installs and upgrades. It was mostly a KDE Plasma (Kubuntu) system. I enjoyed every bit of that.
In 1999, I was avidly using OpenBSD on really old hardware (such as HP Apollo 425t workstations.) OpenBSD simply couldn't deal with the special graphics subsystem on those machines. I tried and tried to get something working, but there were obstacles, not only with the hardware and drivers, but also the monitor connection needed a particular type of cabling and a proprietary monitor, too.
However, OpenBSD did great for networking, security, Squid cache, proxies, all kinds of things. And even in 1999, though it was early, I ran Linux on a 386DX-40, because Linux supported the "ftape" floppy tape driver at that time, and I had some kind of QIC tape backup from Eagle that wouldn't be recognized by OpenBSD or NetBSD.
Meanwhile, in that same year, my "daily driver" desktop machine was a 486 with VLB, dual-booting Windows 98 and OpenBSD. The Windows 98 was set up with a Cygwin system and X11 server, so that I could run X11 clients on the OpenBSD machines, or the Linux machine, or whatever else was on the LAN.
Windows 11 set a low bar to clear... Most popular hardware will work on linux, but like always its better to check before your buy.
Distro like Ubuntu are a fair compromise to get amd/nvidia GPU drivers, wifi, and brother laser printer/scanner networking installed. =3
edit: seriously, why down vote the guys karma if its a honest question. Try to be kind people.
Linux has been better for old hardware since early 00s. Just don't expect hw acceleration to work for older GPUs.
Windows is a dumpster fire at this point. Just unusable
Ubuntu 26 + KDE Plasma 6.6 perfectly handles high-DPI scaling for me. I was originally planning to buy a Mac, but luckily I saw the news about Ubuntu 26 being released a few days ago.
I've just moved to a Mac for the first time, after using Windows for work for decades and Linux as my primary desktop for about 3 or 4 years. It certainly takes some getting use to: - Keyboard shortcuts are all different - Doesn't seem to like my Microsoft ergonomic keyboard (lots of keys do nothing) - I really hate the dock - Limited customisation on the menu bar - I also hate the universal menu thing / menu bar in general ... I run a really wide monitor and having to go all the way to the left hand side to access the menu when working on an app that is on the far right is crazy - Fonts look fat or washed out
I am sure a lot of this is fixable and will jsut take time to get used to, but honestly, at this point, I think I prefer ubuntu/linux to both Mac & Windows at this point.
I do love the hardware on the Mac and would probably try Asahi out if it wasn't a work machine.
Also worth pointing out that macOS is still better than Windows 11 at this point - MS should be ashamed at what they did to that OS.
As a both old Linux and now decade user of MacOS, after I got used to no middle-click paste and no focus-follows-mouse:
1. Keyboard shortcuts are Emacs, Ctrl-A: start of line, E: end of line, K: kill selected or to end of line, Y to paste, etc. https://support.apple.com/en-au/102650#text
2. Karabiner elements (FOSS) fixes keyboard mappings outside of the Settings: https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/
3. I have the dock on the left hand side, not bottom and I have a 2 monitor (iMac 5K 27"+ Dell 4K 27") setup with the iMac flat in front of me and the curve/2nd to the right. Menu bar is then close to the main windows.
4. Menu bar widgets etc are fixable with thaw https://github.com/stonerl/Thaw
5. Window management via keyboard is fixable with rectangle https://rectangleapp.com/
6. Use Macports to add all the Linux/Unix utilities, works with MacOS properly (eg Python/Java frameworks). Ports can have variants, plus you can have multiple versions installed side-by-side with `port select`. https://www.macports.org/
Not sure about fonts, on a 5K iMac they're fine and the 4K Dell works too. You need to use a resolution that fits with Mac's ideas of resolution, so I've got the 5K and 4K both at 2560x1440, which is Mac's idea of 2x resolution.
Hey thanks for those tips. I just installed Ice and Thaw is a fork that is maintained, so I'll try that out. I have my dock on the left already, and have heard about Rectangle, but haven't tried it yet.
Good list.
One option for the menus maybe is keyboard searching. Command-shift-/ aka Command-?then type the name and arrow navigate. (Key sequence might be wrong, it’s muscle memory at this point)
I wonder if Thaw could be modded to repeat the menu bar?
Dock can be hidden/revealed with a key sequence but I like the auto-hide with long delay to pop up idea, suggested elsewhere.
Another point, if you enable Settings > Desktop & Dock > Mission Control > Displays have separate Spaces, then you get a menu bar for each display, which helps with the menubar / window being far apart.
That doesn't work with a single monitor though.
Ah I can resonate with your feelings! I've been using a MacBook Pro as my daily driver since 2013 and I initially liked it a lot, but things have not improved over time. MacOS got more buggy, bloated and less and less customisable. I never fully got used to the way window switching works, and to the fact that I always see all the apps from all work spaces. I still regularly switch to the wrong work space when I switch apps. So confusing. So now I'm in a process of switching back to Linux - it's just so much more fun! I have an M1 MacBook Pro now and Asahi linux is really nice on this one.
I do like the energy consumption of MacOS and that sleep just works so well. Also the laptops feel really nice. I got a few things to make life easier (sketchybar, rectangle.app, see other posts here) but overall these days Linux is just a more polished experience. Never thought I'd say that. At least it's the least glitchy experience nowadays.
> Fonts look fat or washed out
Disable font smoothing and restart/relogin.
I have the dock on auto-hide with a fairly slow timer for it to pop up, as I never actually use it. May be useful to you as well
> I am sure a lot of this is fixable
It is - sucks that you have to though. For keyboard shortcuts use Karabiner Elements.
Unfortunately my favourite flavor, Ubuntu MATE, will sit out this release cycle: https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=showheadli...
I'm sad about that too. I have been running MATE with XMonad for a very long time and has been very happy with it, primarily because the experience has remained entirely unchanged except for a few bugs which have crept in and have never been fixed, probably due to the maintainers not really being active. A particularly hilarious one is that every time the update notifier wants to restart the computer it tries to show an icon in the status bar which begins with `un-<...>.png`. The real icon file is actually missing, but some helpful fallback logic defaults to the closest match which happens to be a 512 pixel wide logo for the United Nations which gets vertically cropped and placed in the status bar.
I just got a new laptop this month and saw that Ubuntu MATE was probably going to be unsupported, so I switched to Manjaro Sway.
From Ubuntu MATE I went to Mint MATE, then LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition).
As this is an LTS, that means another 2 years with the old version, and having to support the old version of MATE until 2036? That's... A long time.
That doesn't bode well for the future of MATE if they skip the 26.04 LTS releases.
Also green light for Fedora 44 release on 28 April
https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/meeting_matrix_fedoraproje...
Cool. I'm pretty excited for the new login manager. Maybe now KDE will be able to fit all customization options (wallpaper, lockscreen, login screen) on a single Settings page.
Is there a CLI way to dump/restore those settings?
I'm not certain about CLI, but Plasma 6.6 does allow preferences / settings to be exported & restored / shared.
https://youtu.be/RuxNnfllxco?t=3894 - Neal Gompa on the Fedora 44 Release party stream,
Unfortunately they forgot to remove Rust coreutils and sudo-rs from Ubuntu prior to releasing 26.04.
I am starting to suspect this even might be intentional.
Those packages can simply be reverted like dracut, at least for a few months of testing.
And yes, using a user-base as Beta testers is fairly cheeky. =3
> Those packages can simply be reverted
For now, that is. I am afraid that they will stop providing coreutils and sudo for some of the future releases (like they did with upstart) because obviously they know better what's good for the users.
The comments there note there is no official Ubuntu MATE release for the first time since Ubuntu 15 (and before 14.04 gnome2 was an option). That's a shame but probably most people who chose MATE (or gnome2) no longer chose Ubuntu due to the conflicting ideologies inherent in the two. MATE users generally don't like change for change's sake.
its in the daily builds. I haven't tried it yet.
not sure if this confirms the impression you have there... I wasn't like this until a couple of headless VPS'es (on Arm8) got through the upgrade from 18.x -> 20.x -> 22.x and then crashed out over -> 24.x for a still unknown reason. now I'm just afraid .. or I should say reluctant ..to repeat that whole fiasco.
https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/daily-live/current/
There were some issues with how the menu icon manager handled the new security policy defaults. This means the editor will break, and the displayed menu may be missing any item that didn't follow the naming convention syntax. Its a lot of packages to bring into compliance, for that one silly feature the devs had to put in before it was ready...
Maybe they fixed it since the rc release, but there were some rough edges in Feb... the kernel USB support cooked the thumb drive partition structure.
In 22.04 to 24.04 the kernel Nvidia GPU driver EOL abandonment began... In 26.04 people will discover most EOL hardware support prior to RTX series will be difficult to bring up.
Probably wise to wait a few weeks for the bug reports to clear out a bit. =3
I am thinking of testing one of those AMD Ryzen AI laptops for development and local LLM. These come with win11 copilot+.
How well does 26.04 with the 7.0 kernel support these? Can it, say, use their GPU and NPU for compute out of the box?
Kindly keep us updated with your findings. Please also let me know where you publish it. Thanks
Not very good: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-26.04-With-ROCm
Earlier official blog: https://ubuntu.com/blog/canonical-releases-ubuntu-26-04-lts-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47878560)
I know that the interim releases had issues with zfs and trying to update gave the message "Sorry, cannot upgrade this system to 25.04 right now System freezes have been observed on upgrades to 25.04 with ZFS enabled. Please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PluckyPuffin/ReleaseNotes for more information. "
The release notes don't seem to mention zfs. I hope these issues have been fixed?
Just FYI - That defect only impacted systems which boot from ZFS - mine did not.
The installer would stop an upgrade if it found a mounted volume - it apparently checks for zfs volumes as follows: sudo zpool list -H
I could get around the installer's ZFS check by unmounting the drive: sudo zpool export poolname
I upgraded.
Then remounted the volume: sudo zpool import poolname
Then I was up and running...
Just tried installing the server variant on a dell precision.
The installer let me connect to my WiFi, but then spun indefinitely trying to get an ipv4 address.
If I skip connecting to WiFi, and just let the installer do its thing, I get no network on the fresh install either (all the tutorials say to use nmcli, which I don't have).
I might have experienced the same. It spun and spun after connecting to the WiFi on an Intel NUC 13.
> TPM-backed full-disk encryption
This is going to be very useful for servers hosted in third party DCs.
Keeping the key in the same room as the padlock only protects against casual drive theft and secure disposal.
Personally I'm more worried about someone stealing the entire server or a local threat actor.
Sure, keep TPM to help with boot integrity, maybe even a factor for unlock, but things like Clevis+Tang (or Bitlock Network Unlock for our windows brethren) is essential in my opinion.
TPM locking is for ensuring the disk isn't removed from your machine. It's technically possible that someone could tap the hardware while the disk is still in your machine, but otherwise they're stuck contending with whatever other security setup you have on your machine.
The TPM locked disk encryption is more like embedding your safe in concrete with deep foundations. It doesn't affect the thickness or quality of your safe.
The beta installer was completely unsuccessful in setting the TPM-backed disk encryption on both a ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Intel 258V) and a ThinkPad P14s (AMD 300-something). Hopefully they ironed that part out in the release, but it seems still early for this feature (at least for my comfort level).
Same on my Framework Desktop. Looks like it works only with a limited number of TPM chips for now.
The constructed policy is quite strict and expects certain UEFI things to be set up correctly. For example both this https://github.com/canonical/secboot/blob/7434bac27844362ff8... and https://github.com/canonical/secboot/blob/7434bac27844362ff8... are enabled in the policy. The policy choices and various early checks, even as trivial as confirming that the TCG log content is correct after booting into installation system, are enough to rule out a lot of potentially problematic EFI deployments. Effectively making it more strict helps avoid a lot of funny issues where the firmware is clearly buggy and things would fall apart sooner or later.
Strict is probably good. My company started to enable bitlocker this year on win11, and a non trivial amount of initial encryptions seem to be failing, destroying the user data and requiring a full reformat.
I want this on my own homeserver. Protection against someone stealing the server without requiring me to type a password every boot.
In what way is TPM protecting your data if someone steals the entire server? TPM only ensures that the boot environment has not been modified. Whatever key is being used to automatically decrypt the disk would be in the clear.
Unless I'm misunderstanding your situation, I think you should look up the "Evil Maid Attack" to better understand how to mitigate risk for your threat model.
assuming there are no bugs in linux and you enable full memory encryption in BIOS, it protects you in the same way the FBI cant get into a locked iphone they physically posess
but linux is not as secure as an iphone, and linux users typically dont know how to set this up, so in practice you are right, it doesnt protect you
My threat model is a junkie breaks in to my house and flips my server on facebook marketplace. Then the buyer curiously pokes through my hard drives. Of course if protecting against government agencies is the threat model then TPM alone isn't enough.
For me, a zero friction way to have decent security is worlds better than the normal state where homeservers are not encrypted at all.
I just don't understand where the protection comes from if you have automatic password entry. If the thief boots up the server it is just as convenient for them as it is for you.
Your threat model is the same as my use of a laptop: regular LUKS with a password is enough on its own. Add TPM if you want to know that you're entering your password in a secure boot environment (ie. protect against a fake LUKS screen that steals your password).
Because you'll boot up in to a password prompt. So you'd need a password bypass exploit to get in. If you attempt to change the boot device or kernel the TPM won't release the key.
Yes, but not by automating the password process. You could probably do some sort of remote authentication with a custom iniramfs that will "phone home" for a key but that initramfs, even if signed and protected from tampering, is still exposing the authentication end point.
The attacker would just need to spoof the request to gain the key.
oh man i hope this works on dell laptops
Kubuntu has way easier integration for windows people migrating and expecting similar mouse and touchpad interactive and intertia
Something gnome could do well to learn
I installed 26.04 on one of my laptops last night.
The latest version of PrivateInternetAccess doesn't seem to run (the window never opens).
I also could not get my wifi connection to use my local DNS server.
Not a fan of the new boot animation, the old one was way better.
Why must everyone feel the need to change things for change's sake?
What happened to the Ubuntu Core Desktop? Snap only immutable variant (like Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite). It was delayed in 2024 and haven’t seen anything about it ever since
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/02/ubuntu-core-desktop-dela...
I think it basically died for general consumers because of the Canonical-only licensed software lock in, and consequent limited software support.
Snaps are hard coded to only be able to get snaps from the official Canonical-licensed store URL. Especially on Ubuntu Core, where everything can only be a snap. Even the commercial licensed version for embedding in products requires private companies to use a private space on the Canonical Snap store to distribute thier custom/proprietary software. Absolutely no one is willing to let Canonical become the Apple Store of thier devices, especially given thier even shittier track record.
Does it respect your choice to not connect to internet during install now ?
Has the MacPro5,1 community already booted this new version?
...interested to know since I couldn't ever get v25 to work — never tried using OCLP, but v24 is absolutely stable (for some reason not directly; had to USB install v22 then internet update to v24 (i.e. v24 USB wouldn't finish install).
Hard to get some spotlight for this with all these new models around, I feel bad for Canonical.