Definitely the best flavour.
You guys help me resuscitate tons of old laptops for frustrated ex Windows users, which are very happy with now with their new OS.
Great work!
Here, here! I love Xubuntu. Of all the lighter flavors like Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Mint/xfce, Xubuntu has been the one I had the best experience setting up for others on old thinkpads. And lately my go-to distro.
> This only happens when the secondary external display is operating at a different pixel width to the internal.
Isn't this a fairly common usecase? My whole company works on high-density laptop displays connected to cheaper 1080p displays. It surprised me to see this kind of bug in a final Xubuntu release, although the bug report says the issue is in the AMD driver.
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I love Xubuntu, I´ve always appreciated its stability, simplicity and flexibility. It has gotten a bit behind in features, when I use it now I miss a good Exposé-like feature, but it´s not that big of a deal.
The thing that keeps me on Mac or Windows most of the time is solid support for high density displays. I can´t get Linux to look quite as good as Windows, and nowhere as good as MacOS, on a 4k display or retina display, without having to go very deep into experimental features and patches... and I don´t want to do that.
Have you noticed that experience improving lately?
Text rendering used to be a mess on Linux in general, even on the same browser and website. It's gotten better lately and focal looks pretty good out of the box.
Gripes:
Even on Ubuntu 20.04 I find that display resolutions jump around after initial setting which is very bizarre. I started testing in a VMware workstation vm and it never respects the resolution I set - always reverts back to 800x600 after a restart.
Also on a bare metal 20.04 install with two gtx1080 and two screens it was a real mess getting even the welcome screen to display on the right monitor. Admittedly there's a lot of display connectors on that system but windows gets it right off the bat even with inbox drivers.
Setting up remote desktop access using built-in screen sharing feature is not possible using the default install without having access to the ui... This makes it hard/impossible to do a remote install and get desktop without kvm/ipmi.
Last gripe is if you want to use X/gdm instead of whatever Ubuntu has for x window compatability reasons, its a pretty big rabbit hole and stuff doesn't work well (login to a blank screen, hacking configs, UI breaks), understanding this is an unsupported setup, it's still an issues I ran into when trying to use window capture feature on ffmpeg for example.
On a single display, I think I prefer HiDPI X to Windows. But the moment there's two displays with significantly different dpi, Windows runs rings around anything on Linux. Windows is surely buggy - I have serious problems with its multi-monitor support - but it seems that its multi hi dpi only occasionally crashes Firefox and it's otherwise reasonable.
With Xorg, there's no effective support for different dpi. So if you can tolerate the variation in pixel size then it's tolerable, but if they're too much it all breaks. Moreover, many apps completely ignore the dpi. For instance, Spotify which is is almost unreadably low contrast doubles down and it's unreadably small too.
With Wayland, it's unusable since any seriously productive app will be shown at at least quadruple size the moment you require pixel doubling, X apps will be pixel doubled twice and Wayland native apps all seem to be toys. This seems to have been a bug that was first report years ago so I suppose they're waiting until someone rights a Wayland version of Firefox and Jetbrains and so forth.
Fortunately, this motivated me to by a 4k screen which I'm happy with. It's only tolerably different than my hidpi laptop screen so I don't need to worry about X's mono-dpi-ism. But it's still incredibly frustrating.
Yes it's a super common use case, and it's my single biggest complaint about desktop Linux. Pop!_OS with Wayland handles it well, probably better than any other setup I've tried, but I have to switch back to X for games to work well (Proton tends to crash under Wayland). This was with a 4k vertical and 2560x1080 (21:9) horizontal monitor, which I also use with Windows and macOS. I'd say it works about as well as Windows.
I used the 20.04 Xub test DE on an AMG Picasso desktop machine for over a week without this problem - although it had failed to detect the usual display setting I use, which I'd had to fix with xrandr. (I'd had to xrandr Mint 19 too, but it stayed fixed.)
However, on the day I tried switching to the XFCE DE, then switched back to the Xub DE, I was greeted by the block staircase display. Later I found that by replacing the 'home' folder with the installed original, it was gone. But only one (the wrong) display setting worked.
Glad to see this is getting attention. For that first week, 20.04 was a rock.
I don't think mac has any hidpi support at all. They just decrease the resolution.
Last time I used it, KDE had _proper_ fractional scaling and rendered fonts at full resolution compared to mac, which by default runs at lower than native resolution of my retina MacBook pro.
What is Xubu's position on snap? It seems to be at odds with other design goals of this lovely distro.
(I've used it for a while, but recently switch back to KDE as resource consumption of KDE dropped a lot and is now ballpark on par with Xubu's[1] yet gives me a lot more features an configurability)
Isn’t snap entirely optional? I don’t understand why all of a sudden this is being brought up with each of these releases, as far as I know it was in Ubuntu for years already?
Its installed by default and removing it leaves you with some apps (notably Chrome) missing. I found a way to remove snap[1] and get Chromium from Debian[2]. But I'm close to leaving the buntus over this drama (see [1] for my reasons to hate it).
Even without the specific downsides of snap that you've noted, having two parallel package managers that each have zero visibility into each other feels like such an antipattern and UX failure to me. Needing to use two different tools to figure out what's actually installed on my system annoys me to no end, and, like you, it's pretty much caused me to abandon the *buntus at this point.
To have pretty much all my 3rd party software installed through one system was really great! I remember installing a Linux in 30mins and a Windows in 5hours.
I ended up heading off to Arch. I've always enjoyed messing around with nonstandard desktop setups, and it was really appealing for that because of the lean default system that Arch provides, along with the availability of so much software through the AUR.
One perk of the AUR (although it does come with some security concerns, etc.) is that you can use one of several package managers to handle both it and the standard repositories under one framework, dealing with exactly the issue I had with snap without needing PPAs and the like.
It is being brought up because with the Ubuntu 20.04 release snap is now the default method for package installation. The software store is now the Snap Store and apt packages can no longer be installed through it. Also for some packages trying to install the apt package will just result in the snap version being installed anyways.
I don't see anything mentioned on Xubuntu's wiki release notes [1], but they do mention "The main Ubuntu Release Notes" and section on that page describes snap packages status [2]. We can assume that Xubuntu team don't have much choice in this matter and can only follow the main Ubuntu distro decisions and directions. On the other hand, Xubuntu doesn't come with telemetry/statistics feature during installation and as I was told on IRC channel team doesn't plant to include it - but that's completely different thing, I guess.
You forgot "all the changes from the new Ubuntu 20.04 release," which is a lot. What Xubuntu does is provides an improved user experience on top of Ubuntu so their specific change log will always be rather slim.
If Xubuntu is a separate distribution, it's safe to assume I'm not independently following Ubuntu and XFCE development -- sell me on the latest features I'll get to see when I upgrade from Xubuntu 18.04, no matter where they're coming from.
The current approach makes it sound like Xubuntu is not worth the separate identity. It's just Ubuntu + upstream XFCE + six new wallpapers.
So, what about the 32 bit libraries needed to run my Steam-Proton games ? I heard it was going to be removed from 20.04, is it real ? If I upgrade my 18.04 installation, will it keep it ?
I just wonder how much time has to pass before XFCE stops picks up with the modern (Win7/8/10/Unity/KDE) task panel behaviour. There is DockBarX but this really is a thing which should be bundled by default nowadays. Windows 95 is not where any of the new users come from anymore.
They don't have a 32-bit version anymore. That's sad. I know that Ubuntu has dropped 32-bit support but I was hoping that Xubuntu would still provide it.
Will the same happen for Lubuntu? Currently, there's a 32-bit version for 19.10, but they haven't released 20.04, yet.
I have several 32-bit computers, so I need a 32-bit OS for them. Are there any good lightweight 32-bit distros left with long term support?
ikurei reports here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22966663) that it still uses Xorg? I thought that Wayland is standard since a while now? I haven't really followed up on that. Is that not the case?
50 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 1307 ms ] threadI'm not sure whether that means encrypted ZFS or not though.
All created pools have lz4 compression enabled, however.
https://releases.ubuntu.com/20.04/
Then, in the bug (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video...):
> This only happens when the secondary external display is operating at a different pixel width to the internal.
Isn't this a fairly common usecase? My whole company works on high-density laptop displays connected to cheaper 1080p displays. It surprised me to see this kind of bug in a final Xubuntu release, although the bug report says the issue is in the AMD driver.
*
I love Xubuntu, I´ve always appreciated its stability, simplicity and flexibility. It has gotten a bit behind in features, when I use it now I miss a good Exposé-like feature, but it´s not that big of a deal.
The thing that keeps me on Mac or Windows most of the time is solid support for high density displays. I can´t get Linux to look quite as good as Windows, and nowhere as good as MacOS, on a 4k display or retina display, without having to go very deep into experimental features and patches... and I don´t want to do that.
Have you noticed that experience improving lately?
Gripes: Even on Ubuntu 20.04 I find that display resolutions jump around after initial setting which is very bizarre. I started testing in a VMware workstation vm and it never respects the resolution I set - always reverts back to 800x600 after a restart.
Also on a bare metal 20.04 install with two gtx1080 and two screens it was a real mess getting even the welcome screen to display on the right monitor. Admittedly there's a lot of display connectors on that system but windows gets it right off the bat even with inbox drivers.
Setting up remote desktop access using built-in screen sharing feature is not possible using the default install without having access to the ui... This makes it hard/impossible to do a remote install and get desktop without kvm/ipmi.
Last gripe is if you want to use X/gdm instead of whatever Ubuntu has for x window compatability reasons, its a pretty big rabbit hole and stuff doesn't work well (login to a blank screen, hacking configs, UI breaks), understanding this is an unsupported setup, it's still an issues I ran into when trying to use window capture feature on ffmpeg for example.
With Xorg, there's no effective support for different dpi. So if you can tolerate the variation in pixel size then it's tolerable, but if they're too much it all breaks. Moreover, many apps completely ignore the dpi. For instance, Spotify which is is almost unreadably low contrast doubles down and it's unreadably small too.
With Wayland, it's unusable since any seriously productive app will be shown at at least quadruple size the moment you require pixel doubling, X apps will be pixel doubled twice and Wayland native apps all seem to be toys. This seems to have been a bug that was first report years ago so I suppose they're waiting until someone rights a Wayland version of Firefox and Jetbrains and so forth.
Fortunately, this motivated me to by a 4k screen which I'm happy with. It's only tolerably different than my hidpi laptop screen so I don't need to worry about X's mono-dpi-ism. But it's still incredibly frustrating.
However, on the day I tried switching to the XFCE DE, then switched back to the Xub DE, I was greeted by the block staircase display. Later I found that by replacing the 'home' folder with the installed original, it was gone. But only one (the wrong) display setting worked.
Glad to see this is getting attention. For that first week, 20.04 was a rock.
Last time I used it, KDE had _proper_ fractional scaling and rendered fonts at full resolution compared to mac, which by default runs at lower than native resolution of my retina MacBook pro.
(I've used it for a while, but recently switch back to KDE as resource consumption of KDE dropped a lot and is now ballpark on par with Xubu's[1] yet gives me a lot more features an configurability)
[1]: https://youtu.be/fo45bo1jvZI?t=78
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22954442
[1] https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup#remove-snap
[2] https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup/tree/master/chromium
Also agree KDE has now finally got back to feature parity and the usability of KDE 2 in 2005.
What distro did you run to?
One perk of the AUR (although it does come with some security concerns, etc.) is that you can use one of several package managers to handle both it and the standard repositories under one framework, dealing with exactly the issue I had with snap without needing PPAs and the like.
[1] - https://wiki.xubuntu.org/releases/20.04/release-notes
[2] - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FocalFossa/ReleaseNotes#Snap_Store
Is this LTS release supported for 3 years, or until April 2024 (4 years)?
my guess is the xubuntu team will stop supporting it in 3-4 but the base ubuntu will be the standard 5/10 from upstream
Straight from the release note:
# Highlights
> A brand new dark theme was added
> Six community wallpapers are bundled
> We no longer ship Python 2 by default
Amazing! So there is nothing else more interesting, worth highlighting in the current release?
That's probably why you're being down voted.
The current approach makes it sound like Xubuntu is not worth the separate identity. It's just Ubuntu + upstream XFCE + six new wallpapers.
90s Desktop OS user would laugh at such a thing being considered a feature worth mentioning.
This also applies to (and is required by) Wine.
Will the same happen for Lubuntu? Currently, there's a 32-bit version for 19.10, but they haven't released 20.04, yet.
I have several 32-bit computers, so I need a 32-bit OS for them. Are there any good lightweight 32-bit distros left with long term support?
Currently Debian offers installers for amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, i386, mips, mips64el, mipsel, ppc64el and s390x.
https://xubuntu.org/screenshots/
Why bother trying this distro, when developers even don't bother to update screenshots.
Open source people tend to appreciate things like that?
Fwiw xubuntu was my default Dev OS for years it's great and what I'd go back to if I didn't have cinnamon/fedora.