It is more like Cinnamon in a sense that it's built on GNOME3 stuff but arguably simpler and suitable for new users. It's not as customizable like MATE.
Looks like it's Ubuntu with a bunch more apps pre-installed.
After a fresh install I usually start with removing the apps I don't use -- games, accessibility tools, print drivers, cd burner, document indexer, default email client etc. etc. etc. So I guess this flavor would be the opposite of what I want...
Not a Thunderbird fan? What's your preferred mail client? I'm looking for something else; I've got my eye on Claws and Evolution but haven't started to play around with anything yet.
I've been using evolution for the last few years. It has a EWS (exchange web services) client that works really well for me at $BigCorp. I think I've had one or two crashes total, compared to outlook which crashes almost daily.
Prior to that I used gmail. When I used thunderbird it often seemed to spend all of it's time indexing. It has some nice plugins though.
Not sure what it offers over just using SolusOS, to be honest (Solus is the main OS that develops the Budgie desktop). Existing Ubuntu packages, I guess?
That, indeed. If you want something lighter-weight than Unity or Gnome but based on the Gnome stack, running Budgie on top of your existing distro is a nice alternative.
One of these days I'm going to get it packaged in Fedora too...
Try out Antergos 17.4 in a VM. I think you'll really like it. I personally use Ubuntu 16.04/Unity 7, but I'm very impressed with the flat look and sleekness overall. Antergos is based off of Arch Linux. https://antergos.com
In my opinion, Arch currently has the nicest package management system with the straightforward if excessively terse pacman syntax and the wealth of packages in the AUR. Considering this is one of the most noticeable differences between distros, it has made me stick with Arch with no plans of switching to something else. I've heard great things about Antergos as well, as configuring an Arch install clearly doesn't make sense for many users.
The thing I hate about the AUR is that you (usually) have to compile everything on your machine. Sometimes I hit a package that takes an hour to build and then dies because I'm missing a dependency that isn't installed by the script. And then that dependency has missing dependencies.
aurget --noedit --deps might speed things up for you, I have it aliased. It pulls in missing dependencies and skips editing the build scripts (I also use --noconfirm, but that's probably not the best practice)
til: terminix (gnome terminal emulator with tiling). Pretty neat. Interesting compromise for those (like me) who might like some features of a tiling window-manager, but prefer Gnome.
“Ubuntu switches from swap partitions to using swap files by default. This means a simpler partition layouts during installation, disk space savings and easier adjustment of swap size” -- interesting, was always unclear about the performance difference between a partition and a swap file.
the LXD and Snap are fun to watch, Canonical always does things a bit different here and there.
IIUC the kernel bypasses all the filesystem code when swapping (except during swapon when getting the starting block address and size of the swap file).
I don't know but doesn't that mean that if a swap file had holes, the kernel will write to the holes hence corrupting any data present in the files stored at those holes?
If by a file with holes you mean a file that has unallocated blocks (a sparse file, which is quite rare) such a file cannot be used as a swap file, the kernel will refuse it.
If you mean a fragmented file, it works but it is slightly slower but not by a relevant amount. The kernel just remembers which blocks are in the file and uses these.
As the swap file typically is created during installation it is unlikely to be fragmented anyway.
No performance issue for non-holey files, and the meaning of swap gets really really weird when you have 32 or 64GB of RAM. Ever since 16GB+ servers I've had no swap partition, and a 1GB swap file, if the swap file ever gets touched I figure out what was screwing up and fix it (I consider it an error to swap in my systems).
It is perhaps not too surprising but if you ever swap to a non-SSD device you're effective computation rate is reduced by 3 orders of magnitude.
I've been using a small dedicated SSD drive for swap file and other temp file requirements for a few years now. One example of this is Photoshop temp file space. I don't want unnecessary I/O out of system or data drives.
That said, yes, we just got done upgrading all of our workstations to new self-built systems with 64 GB of RAM and I would definitely consider having to go to swap file to be an error.
All of our systems have 5 SSD drives: System, Data, Library, Development, Swap.
They are all 1 TB SSD's with the exception of the 256 GB Swap/Temp drive. The idea is to distribute read/writes and organize things so that no SSD, and, in particular, the system SSD, is abused. Running a large number of FEA thermal simulations or a bunch of FPGA compilation jobs can produce an amazing amount of files.
This approach seems to do a decent job of spreading that out and keeping it off the System drive. That, coupled with local (network) and remote backups has worked well so far.
I'm sure this is a good release, but Ubuntu itself is going through some serious turmoil at the moment. Seems to me like there's a good chance it's going to wither on the vine in the next five years. What's worse, there don't seem to be many alternatives if you're looking for a "just works" desktop experience.
How does openSUSE do compared against Fedora, FreeBSD and Debian (testing) for developers?
I'm currently running Ubuntu but the experience is not as smooth as I want: I've had several freezes and kernel panics, even though my laptop is well supported (from Ubuntu 14.04, at least).
I want something that's a bit stable with more recent packages.
FreeBSD seems to be semi-rolling release, comparing package versions in the 'current' release with that in the snapshot versions.
Debian testing has packages as recent as I can use, but I heard it's less stable than Ubuntu and bad things happen too.
I'm considering Fedora, but I prefer rolling release distros to fixed release ones (I don't want Rawhide for stability sake).
OpenSUSE has older packages in its repos: PHP < 7.0, gcc < 6, ...
First things first. Set up a VM with Arch Linux, Slackware, Gentoo or if you are feeling adventurous Linux From Scratch. It'll go a long way to help you learn how Linux systems work. (Don't install a graphical environment, plain X server is OK though).
Now to your original question:
If you want bleeding edge packages go with either Arch Linux, Gentoo, openSUSE or Solus. I haven't used openSUSE as extensively I'd like to but haven't had any issues with it yet. The package format is a bit too much if you want to create your own packages though. openSUSE ticks all the marks in your checklist too.
Other than that I will suggest to keep your local dev environment as close to production as SANELY possible. Fedora and openSUSE are good bets.
Personally for rolling releases I've found Arch Linux to be the best (not because they are rolling release but because they generally keep the packages without any modifications from upstream). There is a huge selection of packages. But it suffers with the problem that it's not used in production and hence some issues can't be caught on it.
I mentioned that stability is a concern for me. Don't you think Arch Linux feeding packages from upstream might not be ideal for me? That's the reason I highlighted Debian testing instead of Debian unstable.
I've used Slackware before, and it was an easy look into the system; except that package management is a bit stressful on Slackware, and its packages are not so up-to-date.
I'm running a VM with FreeBSD now; how suitable it can be for a laptop, I don't know yet. Battery life matters there too.
Fedora looks good; I already have a Fedora 24 disc, so I might go from there instead of Slackware. openSUSE tumbleweed looks great too. I'll probably try it.
I haven't used FreeBSD on laptops. openSUSE is the best best for you I'd say. It's stable enough, had very good package repositories and is used by quite a lot of people. Fedora has the same issues regarding up to date packages.
I can't vouch for the package breakages on any system other than Fedora. I've just had a single package breakage on Arch in over a year. It was fixed by simply moving a file and making a symlink.
> if you're looking for a "just works" desktop experience.
Pretty much every popular distro has this experience nowadays. Fedora(as a sibling poster mentioned) is indeed one of them and may I add, at least, twice as stable.
Only CentOS/RHEL, but it's probably not for you if you'd like a distro with cutting edge software packages.
On the other hand, although I understand your need, keeping the /home in a different partition and just installing the next Fedora release every 13 months does the job for the most part. And the installation(from a USB) is not more than 15-20 minutes.
Fedora's strong point is that packages are pretty new (not quite Arch). This is also its weak point. The idea that it's stable is just funny. It also doesn't even pretend to support upgrades. If you want stable, try CentOS or Debian Stable.
I use Fedora as my primary development OS in my various machines for ~8 years. Previously I was on various SuSE versions and even farther back I was on Slack.
Around 2011-2013, I used on my work(office) machines Ubuntu while I continued to have Fedora on my laptop.
Fedora not only did it have more recent packages, it was so much more stable than ubuntu that it was incomparable.
In general I find Ubuntu as the most unstable distro one could use :/
Also, dist upgrades are a bit unnecessary when you can have your /home in a separate partition and do a fresh install of the newer Fedora version in a couple of minutes.
It seems to be an unpopular opinion, but I completely agree. Personally I find Arch to suit my needs better than Fedora, but I do recommend Fedora to friends who aren't going to be setting up i3-wm and want access to the AUR. In the last five years, Ubuntu has been the only distro to cause me major problems that weren't easily resolved. That might partially be familiarity with Arch, but something tells me it's a little more to do with Canonical.
> It also doesn't even pretend to support upgrades
How so? I installed Fedora 21 a couple of years ago and I've been continuously upgrading it up to 25. I've never encountered a single problem with the operating system itself (only with the NVidia driver, which is a major source of pain for all Linux systems, I guess.)
> Ubuntu itself is going through some serious turmoil at the moment.
I suppose you mean the recent news about abandoning Unity and focusing on a gnome shell desktop for 18.04 LTS? Sure, it must suck for those who have invested a lot of their time and soul into Unity and are now losing their jobs.
Personally, having used fvwm, olvwm, afterstep, window maker, gnome 1, 2, 3, kde 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, fluxbox, unity, xmonad and a dozen more or less shorter acquaintances, my experience is that I can get work done on all of them. What the Linux desktop needs is not yet another reiteration of roughly the same concepts, but more elbow grease and polishing. Which happens when you have more users and developers. So with three of the major distros shipping with gnome 3 out of the box (ubuntu, fedora, debian) I think this will eventually be a net positive for the Linux desktop experience.
I tried using i3 for a while and loved it, but there were various, for lack of a better word, "desktop integration magic" things that I could only get to work reliably running in gnome or unity.
Thinks like hot plugging thunderbolt and having audio work perfectly, monitors readjust automatically, and variable dpi support. Actually so far ubuntu's been the only distro that makes it work well. This is the only reason I use unity.
Yup, I use lxsession and lxrandr. It can be a little strange on a laptop when connecting and disconnecting other displays, but it's only a slight inconvenience. For me the trade off is extremely worth it, because hotkeys flow through my veins.
I think you're taking a somewhat optimistic take on what's happening. Lord knows I've wished Ubuntu would ditch Unity and Mir, but I'm unconvinced that they're refocussing on Gnome/Wayland, they're just giving up on the desktop.
I guess time will tell if your optimism or my pessimism is correct.
If you're talking about gnome/wayland, I'd call that the opposite of 'turmoil.' Those were both huge requests in the HN thread, and while I personally liked Unity more, I'm really happy with the decision-making and I think it will result in a better distro.
I just had a random thought. If ubuntu really wanted to push the desktop forward they would focus on web developers and some first class tooling around react (preloaded extensions or editor support).
Being a web developer, I would love this. Not sure how it would look in practice, but web developers are the ones that use Ubuntu server a lot, so why not have a web developer flavour for the desktop. I you and I can just dream a little, as the chances of this happening are seriously slim.
Unfortunately (and this is more general for the Linux world) the filesystem in use is still ext4, which has been part of Linux since 2008 (almost 10 years now!). ZFS is more an more usable in Linux ( apt install -y zfs ) but it would be really good to have it by default and available for the root partition.
Just moments ago I set up fusecompress in a DigitalOcean droplet to compress an .rbenv/versions and node_modules directory. It would be better if the filesystem supported transparent compression by default (zfs does, and I think brtfs)
You probably know this but... you can use "ZFS-on-root" with Ubuntu although, as you mentioned, it's not available by default (or with the installer). I did it (w/ 16.04) on a laptop w/ a pair of SSDs a while back, mostly just being curious about ZFS on Linux in general. Now, both my workstation and primary laptop use ZFS (on Arch Linux) just like my FreeBSD servers do.
This release tells me that Ubuntu has completely given up on being a desktop Linux distribution. There's mention of only one thing: containers. Containers, containers, containers. No shell improvements, no application improvements, nothing else. So... I guess I'm glad I've moved over to Fedora.
She gives some good reasons why it can be a good thing; it sounds interesting - I've thought of trying it myself, and might with a new future system. It's downsides (though this may have changed since I last saw this and looked into it) would be difficulty setting it up, and that some applications might need some tweaking to get them to play nice (?). It still seems like something fun to play around with.
Container'd (?) apps would make for an easier system to admin overall, I think. Oh - yeah, SNAPS are kinda a refining of the idea of running individual apps in their own containers, from what I understand (plus making it easier to package apps so that they will run anywhere properly - at least, that's the way I understand it; I haven't done a lot of research on it).
Anyhow - I was a bit confused by this release, too - it does seem server focused, but the mention of SNAPS makes me wonder if they aren't trying to move in that direction, that is, a more unified system that isn't differentiated between desktop or server (or whatever), and is just a container ecosystem of apps for whatever you want to use the system for?
The mention of containers and Snaps in this release makes me wonder if Ubuntu isn't moving in the direction of general containerization of the system - server or desktop. It's certainly possible to run containers on the desktop, as this experiment shows:
Her system was an early experiment, though, and seems like it had a more than a bit of admin needs - in other words, it was meant for general users. But she made some good points on why containers on the desktop could be useful, and from what I understand, Snaps is a part of this kind of idea.
Maybe I'm wrong - but if I'm right, this could be a big deal, though hopefully it's so transparent as to be something you don't really notice.
Certainly. Snaps are contained and there are already a pile of desktop snaps available. You can install the applications, see what access they have and trust containment that they can't overstep their bounds, even if compromised. Same of course with the server, right down to IoT style devices where the entire system is composed of snaps and everything is running in containment.
Its all there and available right now. At some point soon I'm sure deb packages will start wrapping snaps and an 'apt full-upgrade' transitions people without them noticing.
96 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 91.3 ms ] threadI get that it is built on Gnome technologies but is it like gnome2/mate or like gnome3 or something completely different?
After a fresh install I usually start with removing the apps I don't use -- games, accessibility tools, print drivers, cd burner, document indexer, default email client etc. etc. etc. So I guess this flavor would be the opposite of what I want...
Prior to that I used gmail. When I used thunderbird it often seemed to spend all of it's time indexing. It has some nice plugins though.
One of these days I'm going to get it packaged in Fedora too...
And the trope that KDE is bloated hasn't been true for the past 6 or 7 years too.
Ever since moving to just a window manager (awesomeWM to i3wm) I've not felt the need for a full-fledged desktop environment.
https://neon.kde.org/
https://www.slant.co/topics/2087/~gnome-shell-themes
Took a screenshot for you also: http://i.imgur.com/bPyvCsN.png
Oh, and other really neat feature: "terminix --quake" (https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix/wiki/Quake-Mode)
https://ubuntugnome.org
the LXD and Snap are fun to watch, Canonical always does things a bit different here and there.
There's the convenience of being able to re purpose the storage as long as swap isn't being used.
http://www.faqs.org/docs/linux_admin/x1762.html
Riiight.
We need a kernel maintainer here.
> The swap file implementation in the kernel expects to be able to write to the file directly, without the assistance of the filesystem.
So apparently it can work with a file that has holes, but then it cannot entirely bypass the filesystem, I guess.
If you mean a fragmented file, it works but it is slightly slower but not by a relevant amount. The kernel just remembers which blocks are in the file and uses these.
As the swap file typically is created during installation it is unlikely to be fragmented anyway.
It is perhaps not too surprising but if you ever swap to a non-SSD device you're effective computation rate is reduced by 3 orders of magnitude.
That said, yes, we just got done upgrading all of our workstations to new self-built systems with 64 GB of RAM and I would definitely consider having to go to swap file to be an error.
All of our systems have 5 SSD drives: System, Data, Library, Development, Swap.
They are all 1 TB SSD's with the exception of the 256 GB Swap/Temp drive. The idea is to distribute read/writes and organize things so that no SSD, and, in particular, the system SSD, is abused. Running a large number of FEA thermal simulations or a bunch of FPGA compilation jobs can produce an amazing amount of files.
This approach seems to do a decent job of spreading that out and keeping it off the System drive. That, coupled with local (network) and remote backups has worked well so far.
DIY: Arch Linux > Slackware
Compile It Yourself: Gentoo > BSDs
Friendly: Fedora > Mint > Ubuntu > Solus > countless other Desktop Env specific distros
Developer Focused: openSUSE > NixOS > Fedora > Debian
I want something that's a bit stable with more recent packages. FreeBSD seems to be semi-rolling release, comparing package versions in the 'current' release with that in the snapshot versions. Debian testing has packages as recent as I can use, but I heard it's less stable than Ubuntu and bad things happen too. I'm considering Fedora, but I prefer rolling release distros to fixed release ones (I don't want Rawhide for stability sake). OpenSUSE has older packages in its repos: PHP < 7.0, gcc < 6, ...
Now to your original question:
If you want bleeding edge packages go with either Arch Linux, Gentoo, openSUSE or Solus. I haven't used openSUSE as extensively I'd like to but haven't had any issues with it yet. The package format is a bit too much if you want to create your own packages though. openSUSE ticks all the marks in your checklist too.
Other than that I will suggest to keep your local dev environment as close to production as SANELY possible. Fedora and openSUSE are good bets.
Personally for rolling releases I've found Arch Linux to be the best (not because they are rolling release but because they generally keep the packages without any modifications from upstream). There is a huge selection of packages. But it suffers with the problem that it's not used in production and hence some issues can't be caught on it.
I've used Slackware before, and it was an easy look into the system; except that package management is a bit stressful on Slackware, and its packages are not so up-to-date.
I'm running a VM with FreeBSD now; how suitable it can be for a laptop, I don't know yet. Battery life matters there too.
Fedora looks good; I already have a Fedora 24 disc, so I might go from there instead of Slackware. openSUSE tumbleweed looks great too. I'll probably try it.
I can't vouch for the package breakages on any system other than Fedora. I've just had a single package breakage on Arch in over a year. It was fixed by simply moving a file and making a symlink.
Pretty much every popular distro has this experience nowadays. Fedora(as a sibling poster mentioned) is indeed one of them and may I add, at least, twice as stable.
apt install ubuntu-restricted-extras, does it in Ubuntu.
On the other hand, although I understand your need, keeping the /home in a different partition and just installing the next Fedora release every 13 months does the job for the most part. And the installation(from a USB) is not more than 15-20 minutes.
Around 2011-2013, I used on my work(office) machines Ubuntu while I continued to have Fedora on my laptop.
Fedora not only did it have more recent packages, it was so much more stable than ubuntu that it was incomparable.
In general I find Ubuntu as the most unstable distro one could use :/
Also, dist upgrades are a bit unnecessary when you can have your /home in a separate partition and do a fresh install of the newer Fedora version in a couple of minutes.
This was certainly true in the past but hasn't really been the case for the last couple of years.
I suppose you mean the recent news about abandoning Unity and focusing on a gnome shell desktop for 18.04 LTS? Sure, it must suck for those who have invested a lot of their time and soul into Unity and are now losing their jobs.
Personally, having used fvwm, olvwm, afterstep, window maker, gnome 1, 2, 3, kde 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, fluxbox, unity, xmonad and a dozen more or less shorter acquaintances, my experience is that I can get work done on all of them. What the Linux desktop needs is not yet another reiteration of roughly the same concepts, but more elbow grease and polishing. Which happens when you have more users and developers. So with three of the major distros shipping with gnome 3 out of the box (ubuntu, fedora, debian) I think this will eventually be a net positive for the Linux desktop experience.
Thinks like hot plugging thunderbolt and having audio work perfectly, monitors readjust automatically, and variable dpi support. Actually so far ubuntu's been the only distro that makes it work well. This is the only reason I use unity.
I guess time will tell if your optimism or my pessimism is correct.
1: http://ubuntustudio.org/
Just moments ago I set up fusecompress in a DigitalOcean droplet to compress an .rbenv/versions and node_modules directory. It would be better if the filesystem supported transparent compression by default (zfs does, and I think brtfs)
https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...
She gives some good reasons why it can be a good thing; it sounds interesting - I've thought of trying it myself, and might with a new future system. It's downsides (though this may have changed since I last saw this and looked into it) would be difficulty setting it up, and that some applications might need some tweaking to get them to play nice (?). It still seems like something fun to play around with.
Container'd (?) apps would make for an easier system to admin overall, I think. Oh - yeah, SNAPS are kinda a refining of the idea of running individual apps in their own containers, from what I understand (plus making it easier to package apps so that they will run anywhere properly - at least, that's the way I understand it; I haven't done a lot of research on it).
Anyhow - I was a bit confused by this release, too - it does seem server focused, but the mention of SNAPS makes me wonder if they aren't trying to move in that direction, that is, a more unified system that isn't differentiated between desktop or server (or whatever), and is just a container ecosystem of apps for whatever you want to use the system for?
https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...
Her system was an early experiment, though, and seems like it had a more than a bit of admin needs - in other words, it was meant for general users. But she made some good points on why containers on the desktop could be useful, and from what I understand, Snaps is a part of this kind of idea.
Maybe I'm wrong - but if I'm right, this could be a big deal, though hopefully it's so transparent as to be something you don't really notice.
Its all there and available right now. At some point soon I'm sure deb packages will start wrapping snaps and an 'apt full-upgrade' transitions people without them noticing.
What comes next, three A's, or maybe something else?