Invent two thirds of a new alphabet and then get distracted by the idea of creating new numbers and promise to complete the alphabet "real soon now"? ;)
Yeah, it's really a shame. I thought the open source movement had a lot going for it, but they should have thought this part out better.
It's okay though, I honestly feel we can take most of what we learned and apply it to the Commodore 64, which, while closed source, most "black hat" hackers can patch the kernel of to include execution of the Binaries Formerly Known As Ubuntu.
The process will be different, though: After powering on the system and reaching the READY string signaling the BASIC interpreter, you'll POKE the unicode name-string of the package you want to update to the user space at $C000, then execute an SYS command to set the CPU's program counter to the vector of the package installation.
I love the part about simplifying packaging via 'snap'.
Now, I would love to know, if I'm a maintainer of Foo (and you can get it today via `apt-get install foo`), how will I be able to start packaging using snap rather than relying on deb packages that come from debian? I'd love any feedback, cheers!
Oddly apt's `search` output is terrible compared to apt-cache's. If they want me to switch to the new command they should at least make it the same or better, not a couple steps backward.
About time-- I always thought it was absurd for them to keep apt-get and apt-cache separate "for historic reasons." I used to have the hardest time explaining that the occasional new ubuntu users (to say nothing of all the people who were convinced that they needed to type "apt get [packagename]" then "apt install [packagename]".
Last time I tried to use just apt, its help pages warned that it was experimental, and there was still basic functionality which was either not implemented, or implemented differently from the regular apt-* tools.
I'd very much prefer to standardize on plain apt, but it doesn't seem ready yet.
One thing I've noticed is that xdg-app seems to be only for desktop GUI apps, while snappy works for server software and command-line apps too. To me, that makes it more interesting.
> I love the part about simplifying packaging via 'snap'.
Bleargh. More container bullshit, now with even less control over it by end users. Now each tiny library update (think OpenSSL security fixes) will pull hundreds of "snaps" instead of a single package… assuming the developers even realize they have to rebuild their snaps.
ABI breaks from security patches for stable releases, especially of Linux distributions, happen how often?
In comparison, outdated npm/gem/pip/hipster-package-manager-of-the-week or docker installations happen how often?
With the former, the burden of updating and testing lies with a small handful of distribution maintainers. With the latter, every single developer has to worry about deployment and maintenance.
Distros shouldn't waste time and effort on supporting and packaging language-specific, high-churn code packages except in very limited circumstances. Let the language specific-tools do those. Upstream is best, local fragmentation is wasteful.
While that potential was always there (and people were paranoid about it), in real life it was extremely rare. ABIs don't tend to change much between minor versions on sane libraries. I can't remember it ever happening to me.
False dichotomy fallacy. Linux distributions need to engineer for side-by-side installation of multiple versions and not get tied up to those common locations. nix is just one example as an interesting idea, while Homebrew and stow are better ideas.
A hundred times this. When some library upgrade happened to break stuff on my system, I could roll it back selectively, while still getting the updates for everything else (as long as it does not strictly depend on this new library version). That's gone now.
What did you switch to? Fedora is switching to xdg-app, which basically does the same thing. Now that those two are using such an approach, I imagine that app developers are increasingly going to drop support for distros that don't use snap, xdg-app or docker. Snap/xdg-app/docker are a lot more convenient for those app developers.
Edit: forgot appc. Thank goodness they're all planning on supporting the Open Container Initiative.
Something as core as OpenSSL should be provided by the system and updated by the system maintainers. That's what happens in Windows and OS X land, where the system provides a broad base of functionality that every application can count on (e.g. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff8...). Thus third party programs only need to bundle the elements not already provided by the system. When goto fail was discovered in the OS X crypto libraries, Apple simply issued a system update and that was the end of the story.
While I see your point, the idea that I as an end user have any real control now is absurd. All I can do is hope the people who package stuff for their distribution know what they are doing.
If I want to install software that's outside the stuff that the packagers have prepared, like Firefox with correct KDE integration on Kubuntu, I am relying on a number of hard to track things working correctly together. Which tehy have regularly failed to do for me in the past.
Contrast to the OSX install experience: An application is a folder which contains everything related to the application that the base system does not provide. It's brilliant. Installing is copying. Uninstalling is deleting. As a user I feel more in control of the process than with apt.
Depending on the software stack you're looking at, dependency isolation might or might not make sense. I think OSX and Windows both are good case stuides that show that some level of isolation is sensible.
> If I want to install software that's outside the stuff that the packagers have prepared, like Firefox with correct KDE integration on Kubuntu, I am relying on a number of hard to track things working correctly together. Which tehy have regularly failed to do for me in the past.
Firefox isn't that hard, all considered. KDE is necessarily hard because of how invasive that is – but no container fuckery will save you from that, because it has to be invasive to work in the first place! Either every container has to ship a full KDE, or you do it like OSX does it, and only have One Desktop To Rule Them All. (That's why Canonical and Gnome are both interested in app containers, presumably, to get rid of that filthy freedom of choice.)
> Contrast to the OSX install experience: An application is a folder which contains everything related to the application that the base system does not provide.
The difference is that OSX (and Windows) provides a lot, and you only have applications building on top of that huge, stable code base that's diligently updated by Apple (/Microsoft). OSX/Windows apps only have to keep their few third party dependencies updated.
Linux app containers have to literally ship everything outside the kernel to work, because the kernel ABI is the only stable interface in the Linux ecosystem. Everything else, up to and including the libc, varies between distributions, and versions of the same distribution, and will be incompatible. An openssl update would trigger a repackaging of every single app container. And where it doesn't, users are at risk. In contrast, without containers, I upgrade one package and the whole system is secured.
(On servers, it's a bit more nuanced, because here operations is in charge or repackaging docker/lxd/nspawn containers, and can start that process whenever they want.)
> As a user I feel more in control of the process than with apt.
That's more because apt is bullshit, even by Linux standards. pacman and other package managers not made in the 1990s are much nicer to deal with.
If you have the source of the package you might be able to use ubuntu's snapcraft[1] tool to create snap packages. There is a project on github called deb2snap[2] that might help creating snaps from deb packages which is something that might help. I haven't used it so can't provide any feedback on how well it works. The README is pretty detailed though.
I knew deb2snap thanks, what I'm wondering is the bureaucracy steps to switch Foo to use my snap (instead of debian's deb) by default when being installed in Ubuntu v.NEXT. Thanks again
I've been on 16.04 for a few days now, and while I did have to work through some bugs (such as sddm and lightdm fighting each other) I've been impressed so far with the improvements.
Inused to hate on Ubuntu, but on my 2014 Macbook Pro, it was the one distro that "just worked", and since I mostly run debian servers, I figure Sticking to the similar ecosystem reduces mental load of switching.
I still have my issues with Shuttleworth and Canonical, but hey, it's linux, so I can remove the crap I dont like (unlike some things, staring at you windows 10).
Curious what you want to remove in Windows 10. Not an evangelist, just set it up on a dual-boot refurb for a friend and thought the initial experience wasn't bad.
I like more than one way to do things, the issue is the two control panels do different things and its impossible to remember which does what.
For example, I can configure a VPN adapter in one Control Panel (Legacy) but I have to go to the other Control Panel (New) to connect or disconnect it or anything like that.
My experience of Windows 10 is limited to having a look at it in local computer shops (I've been trying to find a decent cheap laptop to stick Linux on for a friend).
I clicked the Start Menu. Fully half of it was made up of flashing animated crap - things moving about, very colourful adverts, the actual things I wanted to do were obscured by it.
I tried a few machines. They did the same thing. Maybe it's a manufacturer default.
Hey, maybe it's customizable. I don't know. It just struck me as being so far from what I think of a computer as being - not a tool to be used, but a flashy, childish entertainment box, like a children's rainbow cake.
My ego betrays me at this point, I suppose. I don't understand how the engineers at Microsoft got to this point.
It reminds me a lot of the Xbox 360 dashboard. That was the point I left 'mainstream' video gaming - it felt like my hackery, fun world had turned into a world of consuming advertising, of subscribing, of being someone else's plaything. Perhaps it was always like that, and I was too young to see?
Right click, turn live tile off. I don't know why you even bother with Linux if you didn't even try the first logical graphical gesture that one can reasonably expect to lead to fixing this problem. You can even remove most/all default tiles, like any sane poweruser would do. The same as in Windows 8. On live tiles - Apple has dashboard that has seen more success than widgets on Vista+, Microsoft decided to push some of this functionality on live tiles, so that you can have an app launcher that doubles as a widget when you want to display information on it, but that functionality is optional. If it was off on all default tiles then nobody would know about it, so it'd be a bad default.
What I'd want to know about Windows 10 though, and Google seems not to deliver anything beyond bullshit articles on how to disable it or useless scaremongering blogspam - clearly enumerated and sourced list of information telemetry subsystem captures and sends back to mothership and what parts can be reliably disabled without resorting to shady third-party apps.
I think you missed the part of my comment that mentioned me being in a computer store - I just played with it for ten seconds to check out the keyboard and touchpad of the machines, I have no plans to use Windows 10 thus no need to try to disable it. Useful to hear that it is possible though! :)
WRT disabling telemetry - probably the best way to go about it would be to set up a firewall or similar and try to kill all outgoing to microsoft.com. Turn it back on for updates and hope that they don't just send everything then, I guess. Disabling individual parts sounds like a losing game - you're running an MS kernel, if they want to do it they'll just do it.
> I think you missed the part of my comment that mentioned me being in a computer store
Not really. You mentioned Linux, you should be able to right click.
> probably the best way to go about it would be to set up a firewall or similar and try to kill all outgoing to microsoft.com
It wouldn't be.
1. I don't want to kill updates.
2. I'm more interested in whether I should trust Microsoft. If the telemetry sends how many times I opened built-in whether app and such then I suppose I'm fine with that. I'm also fine with online searches in start menu if they can be turned off, as well as services related to Cortana if they can be turned off. I wouldn't be okay with Windows scanning my computer and sending telemetry on what third-party software I use or documents I view. There were articles on the internet that were later debunked, but I can't seem to find something well sourced on what exactly is going on beyond tutorials on how to turn various knobs.
If I was an average user, cortana would definitely be one thing I might want to disable but probably couldn't do so easily. I'll admit I had to use my powershell script for getting rid of GWX on win7 as a base to completely get rid of Cortana without feeling like some update was going to magically re-enable her.
This is pretty much the only reason I've been waiting for 16.04 – to get rid of upstart scripts and standardize on systemd. Still going to wait for a couple months while people iron out initial bugs but definitely excited about this release.
I wonder how big the installation of Amazon Linux is? They are still not on systemd. Also, CentOS 6 still has support for 4 more years so probably can't throw away all the bash yet.
Friends don't let friends write shell scripts targeting bash.
For context: Bash is not available|installed everywhere, and has some inter-version weirdness.
Write clean, posix-compliant shell scripts (i.e. target /bin/sh commonly referred to as bourne shell) and you're in a much better position.
On Debian your script will be run by Dash, on OS X it will be run by Bash, on Ubuntu or RedHat it could be different again, but the point is, they are specifically running in POSIX mode, so that you get reliable, reproducible results across systems and even across Bash versions.
You're getting downvoted to oblivion, but I'm old enough to remember not being able to take bash for granted. The default shell on some modern systems (OpenBSD for example) comes to mind as well. I feel this battle has mostly been lost, however.
> HN coolkids downvoting advice that makes software more portable and reliable. What a fucking shock.
A little more verbosity on the advice might have helped. I wouldn't have properly understood you were saying without @peatmoss's reply. So without the context, your original comment just seemed like knee-jerk bash-bashing.
Unless you've actually tested it with a shell other than bash, you should be marking it as bash. Otherwise it's likely it will not actually be portable between shells, and you will have made your software less reliable.
I've encountered many scripts written by developers on Fedora that totally fail over when run on Ubuntu specifically due to using #!/bin/sh when they really required #!/bin/bash.
But bash is installed by default if I'm not terribly mistaken, and it's classified as an essential package. If you put in a bash shebang, it should work.
There's like five comments from you in this thread and you seem very adamant about people not writing bash scripts. Have you considered that not everyone has the same requirements? Maybe they don't care about targeting systems that don't have bash installed. In that case, they can use the myriad of enhancements that bash offers to improve their productivity and happiness.
And, this page being news about Ubuntu, one should note that this has been true for Ubuntu for fast approaching a decade, now; Debian having followed in the footsteps of Ubuntu, in this regard.
Everything old is new again - distros targeted at running inside docker containers (like Alpine) are shipping without bash. Not taking bash for granted is still a good plan.
And test them on a shell that isn't bash. Even with the --posix option bash accepts non-standard bashisms, particularly the execrable 'extension' of '>&'.
That's why I always put "#!/usr/bin/env bash" at the top of my scripts. Most were written to be portable, but unless it's been well tested, it's best to consider it not portable. Fail early and predictably rather than in strange ways.
Depends on the use case. There are cases where I don't know how I'd live without arrays/associative arrays. Performant regex matching is also quite nice.
I think your last point is important. I don't think shell script writers should be concerned about Solaris/BSD if they are confident that they will use their scripts only in environments where bash is available.
Sorry, I meant "no one who replied to you knows what you're talking about". Still, that list don't tell much about potential breakages. Are you actually complaining about bash having too many features or are there actual breakages? Please illustrate with examples, not links to tedious changelogs and ad-hominems.
Which of course still leaves OS X, *bsd, Solaris AFAIK. But it should cut down on the internal Linux incompatibilities a bit. I'm not a fan of systemd, but having one broken standard is much better than having four broken standards :-)
> Which of course still leaves OS X, bsd, Solaris AFAIK.
AFAIUI OS X has launchd, and Solaris has OMF[1]?
... so basically the BSDs are the ones left behind?
[1] I think that is the acronym for Solaris' XML-based standardized system service files? (I don't care that they're XML. It care that they're standardized.)
Thinking that the BSDs have been left behind is to erroneously presume that the BSDs ran System 5 rc in the first place. They did not. Most of them use Mewburn rc (or their own reinvented version thereof), which was invented almost a decade after van Smoorenburg rc, which itself was invented about half a decade after System 5 rc.
Here's a "portable" script for van Smoorenburg rc that ports to 4 Linux families, complete with the sort of case statements that I described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10357589 :
Except upstart actually allowed shell code in its configuration files[1]. Now, it did have the "exec" stanza which was far cleaner, but if you look through what Ubuntu actually did in practice, I think you'll find quite a lot of "script" stanzas in there.
That was always an option. It's the same for systemd - you can always configure: `ExecStart=/etc/init.d/something start`. But the context of the comment was - you as a developer writing the config. And you can do it the modern/proper way instead with both upstart and systemd.
> It's the same for systemd - you can always configure: `ExecStart=/etc/init.d/something start`.
Yes, but you cannot embed shell script directly in the job/service definition... thus making the "good path" simpler and more natural, which is a Big Deal(TM) in software usability. (As evidenced by the fact that many many upstart jobs on Ubuntu at least used "script" sections.)
Small warning: Ubuntu's "do you want to upgrade" popup window defaults to "yes". Had to find that out the hard way when a user hit Enter the wrong moment and was suddenly sitting in front of a bricked system.
I had a similar experience upgrading my laptop(though I initiated the upgrade on purpose). Just crapped out, but an apt install -f followed by a dist-upgrade fixed it all and it seems to have worked.
Usually you press Enter to accept things and ESC to cancel. Also, it first downloads all packages before upgrading, so you should've had time to cancel it.
I've been running 16.04 beta for the past month on a Thinkpad P70 with a 4k display, and scaling has been great. The OS UI elements (like menu bars) can be scaled to any size.
Most applications seem to work out of the box. The ones that have given me the most problems are a handful of desktop apps implemented in an embedded browser (like Spotify) where I have to set an extra command flag to properly scale.
Been using 16.04 on my XPS 13 for a week or so now, it finally supports nearly everything (bluetooth is a couple of extra commands) out of the box, and I've not had any issues so far.
I've been using an XPS 13 for 8 months as my main development machine and battery life hasn't been an issue. I regularly go out for a (e.g. coffee shop) working day and I don't have to charge.
There were some issues with earlier Ubuntu/Linux/BIOS versions, but most have disappeared with new releases. The last one is a palm detection issue with the touchpad, but it should to be fixed in 16.04. And if you can't wait, at least you can fix things yourself if you want.
> The last one is a palm detection issue with the touchpad, but it should to be fixed in 16.04. And if you can't wait, at least you can fix things yourself if you want.
I'm not sure if I could fix palm detection. I am certain that I could spend a lot of time trying to fix it and for me, that time would probably be better spent elsewhere.
I was just about to ask what wifi card you had working there. It took me quite a while to get my xps13's broadcom card working with 15.10 and I'm not sure I even remember how I did it. It's putting me off upgrading.
My laptops at least for the past 5 years have been fine with Ubuntu - much the same battery life as windows, and with a little tweaking quite a lot longer. I'm currently getting 7 hours out a commodity Asus with a couple of dev environments and a VM running. It drops to 5 if I'm running the fairly intensive service I'm developing, 4 if I do anything foolish like run the service from within eclipse, and 3 if I leave the chat sidebar visible in Facebook
> I'm currently getting 7 hours out a commodity Asus with a couple of dev environments and a VM running
Wow, that's very good. I've always found running a VW absolutely destroys battery life.
For laptops, I've only ever managed to get 9+ hours on a Macbook and that's pretty much the threshold that I'm comfortable with to leave with a laptop as my work machine for the day. If you're getting 7+ on your Asus running a VM, you have to be over 9 without the VM running, right?
I'm going to load 16.04 on my ThinkPad and see how it does.
I'm actually not sure the VM is making that much difference, which is surprising, although it's pretty much only running nginx, and having all the bare-metal virtualization stuff enabled has helped a lot with performance.
This is with core-M, so in many ways the things to watch out for are screen brightness and anything which makes the processors ramp over 800mhz - that actually seems more damaging than processes that just wake a lot
how's the audio jack working, I got my XPS 15 last week, and planning to install ubuntu LTS once released. I read that audio jack is tricky to get working
I have an XPS 15 and can confirm the audio jack only works once with 15.10—once you unplug, audio is borked. I haven't tried 16.04 yet. Webcam and audio in also doesn't work, but everything else does (!). I initially tried linux mint, but the kernel was ancient, so latest ubuntu with `apt-get install cinnamon` is roughly the mint desktop experience with more recent packages.
Which model do you have? My new 9350 seemed to hang a few times and become unresponsive when I tried beta 2, I'm hoping that release isn't going to do that.
1) If you use the nvidia drivers from the graphics-drivers PPA, starting the default non-root X server will hang with no graphics output. Installing xserver-xorg-legacy fixes this.
Yeah, we've seen similar issues with runC on point 2. I don't think it's an upstream kernel issue as it didn't happen on openSUSE Tumbleweed when we had 4.4 (we're on 4.5 now). So presumably it's some patch Ubuntu applies.
no new ubuntu release would be complete without graphics issues from Nvidia and AMD.
I say AMD too because FGLRX is out of 16.04.
After all the Issues i had with intel/amd/nvidia stiwching gpus in the ivy bridge days i just gave up buying nvidia and AMD, and boy has it made linux easier.
There was an issue in the beta where the installer would not recognize ZFS volumes for the boot installer. Will be verifying if still an issue as soon as I can.
Is an update from 14.04 painless or would you recommend reinstalling? I'd like some newer packages but don't really feel like setting up the whole system again with a reinstall.
Pretty painless - I've just ran this on two servers (not in production):
sudo do-release-upgrade
or if you're on a server
sudo do-release-upgrade -d
although they don't recommend doing that on a production server because the .1 release usually has a lot of bugfixes.
It took about half an hour followed by a reboot. Occasionally had to intervene to tell it to overwrite config files I hadn't touched or to let me do a merge if I had.
If you don't feel a particular urge to upgrade right now, it's probably not a bad idea to wait for the first service pack (16.04.1), which usually comes a few months later. Most kinks should be ironed out by then.
I always wait a month before upgrading/reinstalling. I have done upgrades in the past through multiple versions and they generally go smoothly but there might a minor glitch or two that requires manual intervention to fix (usually solved though search google for advice.)
Another thing I've done is keep /home on a separate partition so I can nuke everything else for a clean install if needed. In such cases, I backup the /etc directory beforehand to recover configuration details as needed.
What is the significance of this? Doesn't Canonical already update the package (lagging a day or two behind the official release) for the lifetime of the Ubuntu version?
I'd guess that Firefox is a fairly good candidate for this kind of packaging just because it has relatively few external dependencies, and lots of Mozilla-specific dependencies which are rarely used by other software
Using binaries provided by Mozilla is not a good idea (unless they do things differently with the snaps). They are not hardened in any way; ie. no PIE (rendering ASLR pretty much useless), no stack canaries, no relro, ..., making it a lot easier to exploit any given sec-related bug.
$ hardening-check ./firefox
./firefox:
Position Independent Executable: no, normal executable!
Stack protected: no, not found!
Fortify Source functions: no, only unprotected functions found!
Read-only relocations: no, not found!
Immediate binding: no, not found!
Absolutely ridiculous given the amount of vulns likely to linger in its codebase.
It should also be noted that Firefox is one of the few packages that Canonical keeps aligned with Mozilla releases (even 12.04 LTS has the latest firefox), and:
More "innovations" which "justify" their own existence with novelty, but eliminate useful properties, backward compatibility, interoperability and standards with blissful ignorance. Standardization is a Good Thing(TM)... many formats creates a confusing dependency hell across multiple systems. Deb/apt works well. This will be deprecated in 6 months after a major security incident. Canonical is mismanaged and capricious, and this is just another in a long line of examples.
Say what you will about Canonical, their whimsical naming scheme has helped expand my vocabulary of both obscure African mammals and little-used adjectives.
If someone some day decides to commit a pedantocide, the first thing he'll do will be to compile a list of stack exchange mods.
Silly joke aside, this sort of release scheme is really confusing to me, lts and stable branches with normal version numbers are way more simple. Besides, these uncommon words are easily forgotten.
but it seems even Ubuntus Server are not speedy today (Atlas server are also slow)
(Update) it seems I'm getting an error with it :/
The guest machine entered an invalid state while waiting for it
to boot. Valid states are 'starting, running'. The machine is in the
'gurumeditation' state. Please verify everything is configured
properly and try again.
If the provider you're using has a GUI that comes with it,
it is often helpful to open that and watch the machine, since the
GUI often has more helpful error messages than Vagrant can retrieve.
For example, if you're using VirtualBox, run `vagrant up` while the
VirtualBox GUI is open.
The primary issue for this error is that the provider you're using
is not properly configured. This is very rarely a Vagrant issue.
Someone else in this thread posted something rather nonsensical about switching to Commodore 64. I was just about to make a guru meditation joke when I saw that someone apparently beat me to it.
I'm running 16.04 with the Vagrant/Virtualbox image from atlas. I've tried getting it to work in the google cloud but had no luck there so far (it's possibly just the ssh key injection that failed, haven't had time to investigate).
For anyone like myself who isn't a big fan of the Unity interface, check out Ubuntu MATE[0]. The MATE desktop environment is very similar to pre-Unity Ubuntu. It seems like the final 16.04 release hasn't landed yet but I'm sure it will later today. Ubuntu MATE is also one of the derivative distros that has been granted LTS status by Canonical.
Ubuntu Mate is also great on the Raspberry Pi. all the GPIO stuff just works as in Raspbian but you get a more modern desktop (using the classical gnome2 layout) and Ubuntu as the base (which to mee means easier setup of things like a mail server.)
I like some of the features of their window managers but I don't think Xubuntu and MATE have much support for HiDPI yet and, in general, seem to lag behind stock Ubuntu.
I'm a small breed of people that actually really like Unity. I used to use Awesome WM and tiling WMs for pretty much my whole Linux 'career' but now I quite like how my desktop looks like with Unity. It's my favorite DE at the moment.
I really don't know why people hate Unity so much. If you don't want to be stuck in the last decade, regarding desktop workflow (Mate, XFCE, etc.), and if you want to actually use a mouse, your options are basically Unity, KDE, Gnome 3, and Cinnamon.
At the moment, I think Unity is the only one that is not a horrendous misdesign (Gnome 3) or consists of a shoddy and insecure plugin framework that is a moving target stability wise (Gnome 3 and Cinnamon). I never liked the fussiness and the looks of KDE. So far, Unity has been the most stable, configurable (Compiz) and, most importantly, productive experience for me.
> Online searches in the dash are now disabled by default [1]
A welcome and saner default. I'm thinking of moving back to Ubuntu from LinuxMint (I was thinking of Arch as well but not too confident of being on the bleeding edge).
As someone who has used Arch for 4 years, the bleeding edge got boring. I haven't had a major breakage in at least a year, probably longer, unless you count KDE 4 -> 5 being a breakage - one any 14.04 to 16.04 upgrader will also have to contend with.
The last major show stopper I can recall was when Arch dropped security hooks from the kernel and I had to get rid of my MAC.
I never moved to mint, but I did recommend trying it to some people who really didn't like unity. I pretty much stopped doing that when they had the security issues last year. Is that what is prompting you to look at switching back, or are you just more reconciled to unity in general now?
That is one and I read online (can't find the source now) that Mint development doesn't respect compatibility/play well with other open source developers. I don't know how much of it is true but for me, compatibility is important. For almost 5-6 years, I have never formatted my home directory. So if my distribution is, for example, creating config in a non-compatible fashion, I won't be able to move to another distro. I know that typically distros don't modify individual program's dotfile/config etc but I guess I'm a bit paranoid about it.
All my experiences running mint have amounted to a broken and out of date distribution which has poor hardware support. I hope it has become better wince those days (i believe it was the initial release of MATE) but I see no reason to use mint when you know enough about a Debian based distro to pick and choose what you really want.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] threadAlways worth a read before you fire up the installer...
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DevelopmentCodeNames
It's okay though, I honestly feel we can take most of what we learned and apply it to the Commodore 64, which, while closed source, most "black hat" hackers can patch the kernel of to include execution of the Binaries Formerly Known As Ubuntu.
The process will be different, though: After powering on the system and reaching the READY string signaling the BASIC interpreter, you'll POKE the unicode name-string of the package you want to update to the user space at $C000, then execute an SYS command to set the CPU's program counter to the vector of the package installation.
Now, I would love to know, if I'm a maintainer of Foo (and you can get it today via `apt-get install foo`), how will I be able to start packaging using snap rather than relying on deb packages that come from debian? I'd love any feedback, cheers!
https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/snappy/build-apps/
The ubuntu developer page has a good description of snaps and how to create them.
In short its a package that contains all its dependencies.
`apt-get` is depreciated, they've moved to just plain `apt`
`apt install foo`
I'd very much prefer to standardize on plain apt, but it doesn't seem ready yet.
https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps
Bleargh. More container bullshit, now with even less control over it by end users. Now each tiny library update (think OpenSSL security fixes) will pull hundreds of "snaps" instead of a single package… assuming the developers even realize they have to rebuild their snaps.
Do you think that's worse than the alternative where each tiny (shared) library update potentially breaks hundreds of programs?
In comparison, outdated npm/gem/pip/hipster-package-manager-of-the-week or docker installations happen how often?
With the former, the burden of updating and testing lies with a small handful of distribution maintainers. With the latter, every single developer has to worry about deployment and maintenance.
Good thing I abandoned Ubuntu a long time ago.
Edit: forgot appc. Thank goodness they're all planning on supporting the Open Container Initiative.
* https://plus.google.com/+FlorianHaas/posts/4xjQP1q6DEN
* https://www.hastexo.com/blogs/florian/2016/02/21/containers-...
If I want to install software that's outside the stuff that the packagers have prepared, like Firefox with correct KDE integration on Kubuntu, I am relying on a number of hard to track things working correctly together. Which tehy have regularly failed to do for me in the past.
Contrast to the OSX install experience: An application is a folder which contains everything related to the application that the base system does not provide. It's brilliant. Installing is copying. Uninstalling is deleting. As a user I feel more in control of the process than with apt.
Depending on the software stack you're looking at, dependency isolation might or might not make sense. I think OSX and Windows both are good case stuides that show that some level of isolation is sensible.
Firefox isn't that hard, all considered. KDE is necessarily hard because of how invasive that is – but no container fuckery will save you from that, because it has to be invasive to work in the first place! Either every container has to ship a full KDE, or you do it like OSX does it, and only have One Desktop To Rule Them All. (That's why Canonical and Gnome are both interested in app containers, presumably, to get rid of that filthy freedom of choice.)
> Contrast to the OSX install experience: An application is a folder which contains everything related to the application that the base system does not provide.
The difference is that OSX (and Windows) provides a lot, and you only have applications building on top of that huge, stable code base that's diligently updated by Apple (/Microsoft). OSX/Windows apps only have to keep their few third party dependencies updated.
Linux app containers have to literally ship everything outside the kernel to work, because the kernel ABI is the only stable interface in the Linux ecosystem. Everything else, up to and including the libc, varies between distributions, and versions of the same distribution, and will be incompatible. An openssl update would trigger a repackaging of every single app container. And where it doesn't, users are at risk. In contrast, without containers, I upgrade one package and the whole system is secured.
(On servers, it's a bit more nuanced, because here operations is in charge or repackaging docker/lxd/nspawn containers, and can start that process whenever they want.)
> As a user I feel more in control of the process than with apt.
That's more because apt is bullshit, even by Linux standards. pacman and other package managers not made in the 1990s are much nicer to deal with.
[1] https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/snappy/build-apps/
[2] https://github.com/mikix/deb2snap
https://paste.sh/zaodLcyn#uLrtH-WS00hxtIJTYVEgE9zS #horrible hn text editor
I had better luck with https://atlas.hashicorp.com/gbarbieru/boxes/xenial which just got updated a few hours ago.
You can downgrade VirtualBox, dropping to 5.0.16 worked for me: http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/5.0.16/
> sudo: unable to resolve host ubuntu-xenial
> mesg: ttyname failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
I hope this PR (https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/pull/7241) gets merged because the private_network issue has been around since 15.04
Inused to hate on Ubuntu, but on my 2014 Macbook Pro, it was the one distro that "just worked", and since I mostly run debian servers, I figure Sticking to the similar ecosystem reduces mental load of switching.
I still have my issues with Shuttleworth and Canonical, but hey, it's linux, so I can remove the crap I dont like (unlike some things, staring at you windows 10).
https://fix10.isleaked.com/
For example, I can configure a VPN adapter in one Control Panel (Legacy) but I have to go to the other Control Panel (New) to connect or disconnect it or anything like that.
I clicked the Start Menu. Fully half of it was made up of flashing animated crap - things moving about, very colourful adverts, the actual things I wanted to do were obscured by it.
I tried a few machines. They did the same thing. Maybe it's a manufacturer default.
Hey, maybe it's customizable. I don't know. It just struck me as being so far from what I think of a computer as being - not a tool to be used, but a flashy, childish entertainment box, like a children's rainbow cake.
My ego betrays me at this point, I suppose. I don't understand how the engineers at Microsoft got to this point.
It reminds me a lot of the Xbox 360 dashboard. That was the point I left 'mainstream' video gaming - it felt like my hackery, fun world had turned into a world of consuming advertising, of subscribing, of being someone else's plaything. Perhaps it was always like that, and I was too young to see?
> I don't understand how the engineers at Microsoft got to this point.
It was likely the marketeers driving the engineers.
What I'd want to know about Windows 10 though, and Google seems not to deliver anything beyond bullshit articles on how to disable it or useless scaremongering blogspam - clearly enumerated and sourced list of information telemetry subsystem captures and sends back to mothership and what parts can be reliably disabled without resorting to shady third-party apps.
WRT disabling telemetry - probably the best way to go about it would be to set up a firewall or similar and try to kill all outgoing to microsoft.com. Turn it back on for updates and hope that they don't just send everything then, I guess. Disabling individual parts sounds like a losing game - you're running an MS kernel, if they want to do it they'll just do it.
Not really. You mentioned Linux, you should be able to right click.
> probably the best way to go about it would be to set up a firewall or similar and try to kill all outgoing to microsoft.com
It wouldn't be.
1. I don't want to kill updates. 2. I'm more interested in whether I should trust Microsoft. If the telemetry sends how many times I opened built-in whether app and such then I suppose I'm fine with that. I'm also fine with online searches in start menu if they can be turned off, as well as services related to Cortana if they can be turned off. I wouldn't be okay with Windows scanning my computer and sending telemetry on what third-party software I use or documents I view. There were articles on the internet that were later debunked, but I can't seem to find something well sourced on what exactly is going on beyond tutorials on how to turn various knobs.
Also, see: https://github.com/dfkt/win10-unfuck
No need for bash scripts, custom watchdog and daemonise tools, etc.
There's going to be a 16.04.1 release just 3 months away from the initial LTS release; I believe it is just for that.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TrustyTahr/ReleaseSchedule - this schedule is for 14.04, but I believe it's been the same for quite a few years already.
For that matter, Ubuntu 14.04 is still supported for another two years, and that's still upstart.
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.ser...
* http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/wily/en/man5/systemd.ser...
* http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/wily/en/man5/systemd.uni...
* https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SystemdForUpstartUsers
* http://askubuntu.com/questions/636899/
* http://askubuntu.com/a/613814/43344
Friends don't let friends write shell scripts targeting bash.
For context: Bash is not available|installed everywhere, and has some inter-version weirdness.
Write clean, posix-compliant shell scripts (i.e. target /bin/sh commonly referred to as bourne shell) and you're in a much better position.
On Debian your script will be run by Dash, on OS X it will be run by Bash, on Ubuntu or RedHat it could be different again, but the point is, they are specifically running in POSIX mode, so that you get reliable, reproducible results across systems and even across Bash versions.
A little more verbosity on the advice might have helped. I wouldn't have properly understood you were saying without @peatmoss's reply. So without the context, your original comment just seemed like knee-jerk bash-bashing.
I've encountered many scripts written by developers on Fedora that totally fail over when run on Ubuntu specifically due to using #!/bin/sh when they really required #!/bin/bash.
I specifically said "Write clean, posix-compliant shell scripts"
Do the same developers write Java code in a .cpp file and wonder why it doesn't work? Or put <?php tags in a .erb template?
Yes, you need to test to make sure that you wrote the correct things.
If more people used #!/usr/bin/env bash, it wouldn't be that big of a deal.
If they wrote posix compatible shell scripts it wouldn't be any big deal because they'd just work.
* https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh
* https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh/Spec
* https://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2007/07/msg00027.htm...
Can you cite some sources here? No one knows what you're talking about.
Many people, especially Solaris and BSD folk, don't like bash scripts, and want you to write shell scripts in Bourne shell instead.
Many other people, who code on OS X and deploy on Linux, enjoy the extras bash adds, and only deploy on platforms that include bash.
Also, just because you may not know what I'm talking about, don't assume no-one else does.
The big deal now is that all the major distributions support the same mechanism.
AFAIUI OS X has launchd, and Solaris has OMF[1]?
... so basically the BSDs are the ones left behind?
[1] I think that is the acronym for Solaris' XML-based standardized system service files? (I don't care that they're XML. It care that they're standardized.)
Here's a "portable" script for van Smoorenburg rc that ports to 4 Linux families, complete with the sort of case statements that I described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10357589 :
* http://conman.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/etc/conman.init.in
Here's a Mewburn rc script:
* http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/etc/rc.d/...
[1] http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#script
Yes, but you cannot embed shell script directly in the job/service definition... thus making the "good path" simpler and more natural, which is a Big Deal(TM) in software usability. (As evidenced by the fact that many many upstart jobs on Ubuntu at least used "script" sections.)
(We only have Ubuntu on two machines, everything else is Arch or Debian.)
So 4k resolution support is becoming recognized here?
Most applications seem to work out of the box. The ones that have given me the most problems are a handful of desktop apps implemented in an embedded browser (like Spotify) where I have to set an extra command flag to properly scale.
There were some issues with earlier Ubuntu/Linux/BIOS versions, but most have disappeared with new releases. The last one is a palm detection issue with the touchpad, but it should to be fixed in 16.04. And if you can't wait, at least you can fix things yourself if you want.
I'm not sure if I could fix palm detection. I am certain that I could spend a lot of time trying to fix it and for me, that time would probably be better spent elsewhere.
The original one was definitely working though.
(Apart from that and the HiDPI, the latter of which is the DE devs' fault, the laptop is awesome.)
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Dell+XPS+13+Teardown/36157#s...
Wow, that's very good. I've always found running a VW absolutely destroys battery life.
For laptops, I've only ever managed to get 9+ hours on a Macbook and that's pretty much the threshold that I'm comfortable with to leave with a laptop as my work machine for the day. If you're getting 7+ on your Asus running a VM, you have to be over 9 without the VM running, right?
I'm going to load 16.04 on my ThinkPad and see how it does.
This is with core-M, so in many ways the things to watch out for are screen brightness and anything which makes the processors ramp over 800mhz - that actually seems more damaging than processes that just wake a lot
BTW, my VM was running Windows and that's probably why it drained my batter so quickly.
1) If you use the nvidia drivers from the graphics-drivers PPA, starting the default non-root X server will hang with no graphics output. Installing xserver-xorg-legacy fixes this.
2) LXC+Linux 4.4 seems to be very broken: https://github.com/lxc/lxd/issues/1666#issuecomment-21290311...
3) Pulseaudio now uses shared memory and playing audio inside a firejail will break the pulseaudio server: https://github.com/netblue30/firejail/issues/69#issuecomment...
Seeing as my main use for my current 14.04 install is LXC containers, I think I will hold off a little then.
Thanks for the warning :)
After all the Issues i had with intel/amd/nvidia stiwching gpus in the ivy bridge days i just gave up buying nvidia and AMD, and boy has it made linux easier.
http://dark-net.net/?p=125
https://github.com/zfsonlinux/pkg-zfs/issues/188
[1] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/kde/2015-October/0...
It took about half an hour followed by a reboot. Occasionally had to intervene to tell it to overwrite config files I hadn't touched or to let me do a merge if I had.
Obviously make sure you have backups first.
[0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/ReleaseNotes
Another thing I've done is keep /home on a separate partition so I can nuke everything else for a clean install if needed. In such cases, I backup the /etc directory beforehand to recover configuration details as needed.
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/04/21/firefox-d...
It should also be noted that Firefox is one of the few packages that Canonical keeps aligned with Mozilla releases (even 12.04 LTS has the latest firefox), and:
[0]: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2015/08/17/ibm-and-canonical-pla...
[1]: https://help.ubuntu.com/16.04/installation-guide/s390x/
Afflicted Ass?
Silly joke aside, this sort of release scheme is really confusing to me, lts and stable branches with normal version numbers are way more simple. Besides, these uncommon words are easily forgotten.
but it seems even Ubuntus Server are not speedy today (Atlas server are also slow)
(Update) it seems I'm getting an error with it :/
I'm running 16.04 with the Vagrant/Virtualbox image from atlas. I've tried getting it to work in the google cloud but had no luck there so far (it's possibly just the ssh key injection that failed, haven't had time to investigate).
[0] https://ubuntu-mate.org/
I can also recommend Cinnamon.
It's nice to have good choices that use the old paradigms.
XFCE 4.12 pretty much feels exactly like Gnome 2 towards the end.
I'm hoping Owncloud starts to use Snaps.
1: http://ubuntugnome.org/
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/nvsf24E
At the moment, I think Unity is the only one that is not a horrendous misdesign (Gnome 3) or consists of a shoddy and insecure plugin framework that is a moving target stability wise (Gnome 3 and Cinnamon). I never liked the fussiness and the looks of KDE. So far, Unity has been the most stable, configurable (Compiz) and, most importantly, productive experience for me.
A welcome and saner default. I'm thinking of moving back to Ubuntu from LinuxMint (I was thinking of Arch as well but not too confident of being on the bleeding edge).
[1]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/ReleaseNotes
The last major show stopper I can recall was when Arch dropped security hooks from the kernel and I had to get rid of my MAC.
https://ubuntugnome.org/