Welcome to life in the Fossa lane: Ubuntu 20.04 let out of cage and Shuttleworth claims Canonical now 'commercially self sustaining'

Canonical has unleashed Ubuntu 20.04, the first LTS (Long term support) release since 18.04, Bionic Beaver, two years ago, and its CEO and Ubuntu desktop chief have spoken a bit about what's under the lid. Ubuntu 20.04 will be supported until April 2025, for the Desktop, Server and Ubuntu Core editions, and other flavours for …

[Anonymous Coward]

I still don't see the purpose of WSL

and I would really appreciate if someone could come up with a serious use case.

First to begin with, Windows shops are not interested in Linux. That's a fact. In all the places I've worked in the past 20 years, Linux was only used by few diehard fans, always looked upon with suspicion by the rest of the organization. If that army of Windows users would have had the slightest interest in Linux, a VM would have been a good start but speaking to any manager would trigger a reply varying from "no time for that" to "we're a Windows shop so we accept only Windows based solutions". I don't see how WSL would change this and what purpose could serve.

Then there is the development workstations. I might be wrong and I would appreciate to be corrected but even to this day there is no commercial software vendor for Linux desktop applications. Perhaps I'm not looking in the right direction but I can't find a market for Linux desktop applications. So all we're left with is server side applications that are developed for Linux which means no GUI needed since application will be accessed via the Internet browser running on Windows machines. The development of these applications has always been done and can still be done on a Windows/Mac machine, source pushed to a CVS repository/GitHub and pulled on the server with no difficulty.

So why is Microsoft insisting and Canonical/others happily obliging into this endeavor ? This is not going to increase the use of Linux. I don't see Windows regular users fiddling with their WSL to discover Linux and even if they would do it, Office will never run on Linux desktop and there will be no exclusive Linux desktop application so their interest will stop just right there. As it has been the situation for the past decades.

So who really benefits from this and what would be that benefit ?

[RockBurner]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

I don't particularly worry about all that - I'm just glad it's there tbh.

For me it means I only have to remember 1 set of command line behaviours.

[ragnar]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

My company is a mostly windows shop for its laptops, and we use various local docker images to provide various things for developers. Our server infrastructure is all Linux, so having WSL means instructions etc. can all be consistent and gives everyone access to a nice linux command line without having to get a mac.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

Same here. Corporate laptops are all windows, only official corporate laptops allowed to access company resources such as git. All development done on Linux which corporate doesn't know about.

Unfortunately windows laptops are too locked down to allow WSL so it's ssh from powershell..

[Anonymous Coward]

@ragnar - Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

For a long time I've been watching Windows sysadmins managing systems remotely through RDP sessions and they didn't seem bothered so why managing Linux servers should be different ? apart from launching PuTTY which is not far from opening a command prompt window, what is the difference between getting access to Linux command line with and without WSL ? The command has to run on the target server anyway. I don't think this was causing Microsoft to lose much sleep and make them start working hard to bring WSL to the world.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: @ragnar - I still don't see the purpose of WSL

>what is the difference between getting access to Linux command line with and without WSL ?

If you are using the Windows machine purely as an admin console = nothing

If you need to test and develop the server stuff locally then I have a Windows laptop (email/office/corporate stuff) a Linux desktop (development and test) and then cloud/remote server to deploy.

With WSL I could do a lot of the development on the laptop and then push directly to cloud rather than having to sneaker-net it to the laptop first. Which would be really handy in this current lockdown

The benefit to MSFT is that if I had any control over corporate IT would throw out the windows laptop and replace it with Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @ragnar - I still don't see the purpose of WSL

WSL is a just a baked in VM. Unfortunately an actual VM has more utility and you can have multiple GNU/Linux variants hosted.

WSL serves no real purpose other than locking-in Windows and entrenching MS even deeper.

That there are now Windows Docker Images makes me want to puke. Take a perfectly good idea an ruin it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @ragnar - I still don't see the purpose of WSL

Correction - since WSL 2 it's pretty much just a VM. WSL 1 was more efficient due to it actually using the NT kernel. But it filesystem drivers were really slow, and of course it wasn't possible to run docker this way. Still, I think WSL 1 is much more interesting as a concept.

[ErroneousGiant]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

First I want to say I'm a Microsoft Fan, so if I accidentally bash them here, it's not because "LiNuX iS tHe BeSt" - they both have a place in home and work environments.

As for WSL, well, it's certainly not for everyone, and I do get where you're coming from, but it does have a use case, and the more we embrace Linux into Microsoft and Microsoft into Linux the better things will be as only the things worth using will survive.

For me, WSL has a few use cases. I deal with a mix of Windows and Linux servers through work. So having bash in my Windows machine helps with that. Secondly, there are some tools, especially in the networking area of my job that are better and easier to use in a Linux terminal than their Windows counterpart. Nmap would be a good example of this.

I don't have to rely on Putty any more, because I can SSH into a switch or router straight from the desktop. From a development standpoint, yes, Visual Studio is still king as far as I'm concerned, but the offerings on Linux are still extremely strong, especially if you're dealing with things like Ansible/Puppet, LXC/Docker or K8's, and even something OS agnostic like Python.

I use Windows all day at work, so for me a Linux desktop is a nice change when I'm at home. I find it more stable, and spend a lot less time doing maintenance on my home desktop. It's much lighter on resources, so the desktop itself doesn't have to be as Power Hungry.

From using both environments constantly, the only things missing from the Linux desktop is Microsoft Office, which has become the defacto office suite, Visual Studio, though I get by with VS Code just fine, and game compatibility. This is just the desktop we're speaking of here, snubbing Linux in the server space is a massive mistake, there are some really impressive, useful and effective tools to help improve Windows environments out there and not using them "because you're a Windows Shop" is cutting your nose to spite your face. Take a look at projects like Grafana, Observium, OpenVAS, Ansible and ZFS (now it's mainstreaming Linux a bit more) just to name a few. Best of all, they're free to use. Zero licensing costs. And as someone who has had to pass Microsoft Licensing quals in the past it makes life soooooo much easier when you don't need to worry about that kind of thing.

The latter is improving massively, especially with Proton, but I don't think that it's worth game dev's time to make games for Linux yet. If MS Office went onto Linux, I think there would be a slow migration away from the Windows Desktop in small businesses and charities that would then make it more appealing to develop games and other software for. Until then, it's just not going to happen.

Is it the year of the Linux Desktop? No, totally not, and I say that as a Linux fan. It's not ready for your average end user at home, with no support other than google; It's so damned close though.

[Anonymous Coward]

@ErroneousGiant - Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

I retain from your reply two valid use cases for WSL: as a replacement for PuTTY and to run SDK and clients for various cloud platforms (except Azure of course) although Powershell is pretty good at that.

Oh, and a Microsoft fan you should be aware that nmap is very well supported on Windows.

My question still stands, what's in it for Microsoft ? It's not that they are afraid of disgruntled developers who might leave Windows.

[mmccul]

Re: @ErroneousGiant - I still don't see the purpose of WSL

It allows users like me who routinely need a POSIX *nix user environment for routine tasks, to use Windows instead of a mac. I know people who write Fortran code that they can run for testing inside WSL, but it's a lot more of a nuisance for them to run that in Windows.

[jilocasin]

Re: @ErroneousGiant - I still don't see the purpose of WSL

Actually you can ssh directly from the PowerShell prompt. Neither Putty nor WSL needed.

[AJ MacLeod]

Re: @ErroneousGiant - I still don't see the purpose of WSL

Even better, you can ssh directly from the CMD prompt...

[ErroneousGiant]

Re: @ErroneousGiant - I still don't see the purpose of WSL

Hi, thanks for the reply, and you're not wrong, but I think you're missing an angle to the reason it exists.

I agree nmap is available on Windows, and I've used it many times; But walk me through the process for installing an using it on Windows, because on WSL all i have to type is "apt install nmap" and then start using it. By doing that, I've pulled it from an approved, monitored and maintained repository. Security checks are done before it's installed, and I know it's going to work. Windows is a bit more.....separated. You have to hunt down the install from the Internet, do the security checks yourself, run through the install process..... it's a lot more manual.

Whats in it for Microsoft? Well, most of Azure is linux based. In fact, Microsoft now have more Linux servers than Windows servers. Can you use PowerShell to manage it? Sure, and I do, especially things like users in Office 365. However, when it comes to managing servers or desktops that are Linux, PowerShell (while wonderful that it is now available on Linux) is still very limited in the Linux space. So yes you could enter a PSSession onto a Linux box, but after that, you will inevitably be using PowerShell to then run other native commands like "zfs list -t snapshots" which PowerShell just doesn't have a module to manage, and the output of which can be more awkward to handle.

So it's possible to manage Linux machines from Windows, and cool that you can do it using PowerShell, but it's an extra layer to the process that doesn't need to be there. I guess the main benefit is removing the barriers to working on a mix of Operating Systems. The easier it is to work on Linux, Mac and Windows from just a Windows machine the better the experience for Windows users.

If I've missed something, or I'm just wrong, let me know and I'll take a seat.

[boldos]

Re: @ErroneousGiant - I still don't see the purpose of WSL

I would not be so sure about "It's not that they are afraid of ... developers who might leave Windows".

Contrary to that, e.g. StackOverflow Developer surveys show that exactly that is what's happening for several years already. Slow, but measurable (and now quite some) emmigration from Windows - as a primary dev platform - to Linux and Mac.

[ovation1357]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

I passionately loathe Microsoft and believe that their bullying tactics and abuse of monopolistic power over the years has set back various aspects of computing by many years. HOWEVER I'm inclined to agree with most of what you're staying except your final paragraph.

Ubuntu (and Mint) has become so good in recent years that I'd strongly argue that it *is* ready for your average end user....

I set my mother in law up with Mint plus Chrome and Libre office aroud 4 years ago after wasting a whole weekend trying to install Win7 due to major breakage of Windows Update - she happily uses it daily to do email and web browsing, scanning and printing. It just works. She's never had a serious problem with it and the only significant thing I've done in that time was to install a new £30 HP printer she bought which, thanks to HPLIP, also just worked.

When Win7 started scaring my own mother recently with its End-of-Life security warnings, she told me she didn't want Win10 so I installed Ubuntu 18.04 with MATE in 'Redmond' layout and she's been happily using it without a single problem for several months. She set up WiFI access and configured her printer without my help. She's happily importing and processing her camera photos from an SD card, and managing email, LibreOffice documents and Zoom conferences.

If you're a creative Pro and you *need* Adobe stuff, or you do a job where you need the advanced features of Excel then a Linux desktop may not be the answer unless you want to play with wine or VMs, but for your 'average user' Linux is a fabulous choice of desktop.

I have nothing but problems with my corporate Windows 10 laptop, I see many people in small businesses having a raft of irritating problems on Windows machines. An in many of those cases I just think to myself that 'insert problem here' just wouldn't have been an issue on a Linux desktop.

Ubuntu is not perfect by any means but it's miles faster and more stable than Windows, with (ironically) fewer general device driver issues.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

"Ubuntu (and Mint) has become so good in recent years that I'd strongly argue that it *is* ready for your average end user...."

My technologically illiterate, pensioner parents have been running a LINUX Mint desktop PC since 17.1 (2014?), with no issues ... :)

[Infi 1]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

I also upgraded Mum's PC from Windows 10 to Linux Mint a year or two ago, and I haven't heard a single complaint from her since. A far cry from the days when she used Windows and I got regular earache.

[ErroneousGiant]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

Wow, I'm really happy reading these success stories.

I tried something similar with my parents (Father in his 80's and 70's Mother), my Wife and Daughter and nothing but pushback and complaints. Interestingly, non of the complaints were "X doesn't work" or "Y is doing something stange", it was just this mental barrier they couldn't get past that it "Wasn't Windows" and they defaulted to assuming they didn't know how to do anything.

I may try again if Mint as that good. Although, I've had a lot of mileage from ElementaryOS, maybe that for the Mac loving Wife.

[Peter2]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

Personally, I think that the linux desktop has been suitable for use at home for probably something like five years if you exclude the fact that any programs the users buy will be for Windows and they'll want to run them.

I'd just like to refer to a comment of mine from six years ago as relates to business use. Note that this was posted in 2014.

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/6/2014/08/19/munich_dumping_linux_for_windows/#c_2275198

As a IT Professional, I have been saying for fucking YEARS that the only reason windows is still predominant is Outlook + Exchange because that's what the users need to do their jobs.

The open source fans have been replying with a spinal reflex for just as long that $favouritemailprogram is just as good without grasping the essential fact that the reason outlook on exchange is so good is collaboration and delegation within a team.

if $favouritemailprogram != outlook then it completely, totally and utterly lacks any ability whatsoever to be used as part of a team in any meaningful manner.

Tests:-

1) A boss should be able to delegate read only access for his PA to read (but not send from) the boss's email account.

2) The boss should be able to delegate full access to his calendar for his PA, who can book in appointments for him.

3) The process for all steps above should meet the following simple requirements:-

3A The entire process should take less than 30 seconds from the users account. IT should not need to be involved.

3B) It should not require the boss to divulge his password to his PA. (Giving your password to anybody else results in misconduct proceedings or dismissal at a lot of workplaces.)

3C) It should be extremely user friendly, and not require any IT knowledge or training beyond being told where it is on the menu. If the user has to know the server address etc, this is an immediate failure. IT should know this, the user should not have to care.

3D) It should be achievable without training or support for a user with an IQ in the low average range, because the average user is of average intelligence and we also have (a depressing number of) below average users, and utterly fucking hopeless users that we still have to support. We don't want to speak to them constantly because the software sucks.

When there is a stable open source program released that duplicates the core delegation and calendar functionality in outlook 1997 outlined above and passes the simple user acceptance shown above then Outlook and exchange will start slowly vanishing.

When exchange is gone then so are the windows servers running it, and at that point Libreoffice will take the place of the rest of the office suite. When that happens, windows is no longer required on the desktop or server and the following year will be the year of *nix on the desktop.

Nothing out there at the moment is good enough.

If I went to *nix at the moment, the users would have my severed head within a year and my successor would be reimplementing outlook/exchange.

There should be:-

1) Less blaming IT people for picking the only software that actually lets the users do their jobs.

2) Less blaming the users for demanding the only software that lets them do their job.

3) More activity towards about rectifying the lack of an outlook replacement.

4) Less bitching that "you should program one yourself if you want it". We don't have any particular desire (or reason) to develop a replacement. Outlook works, and is available now off the shelf. Any effort we spend on development will be on programs that nobody else has to develop a competitive advantage over the competition. Any of our competitors wasting their (near invaluable) developers time duplicating outlook 97's function set gain no commercial advantage and are likely to get wiped out by the competition who are more efficient since they spent their developer time on developing a competitive advantage.

You want windows gone? Then outlook/exchange has to go, and since your the ones that want it gone then your the ones that need to develop the replacement. We are quite happy buying outlook/exchange/windows off the shelf to get the users working immediately, and when there is an alternative available then we will be happy to consider that instead.

With experience since then i'd also add that most programs that are generating documents (letters, invoices etc) do so through MS Office API's, and these need to be duplicated too.

And open source enthusiasts still don't appear to grasp that most IT professionals despise Windows & Microsoft generally with an intensity that appear to wildly exceed the understanding or imagination of enthusiasts.

The joke is that Microsoft appears determined to kill Windows on the desktop themselves by pushing things like Exchange into the cloud at which point refer to this:-

When exchange is gone then so are the windows servers running it, and at that point Libreoffice will take the place of the rest of the office suite. When that happens, windows is no longer required on the desktop or server and the following year will be the year of *nix on the desktop.

So it's getting closer, but to be honest if it does happen then it's difficult to escape the feeling that it's likely to be more a self inflicted wound by Microsoft rather than an inflicted wound by anybody else.

[Boris the Cockroach]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

I'd upvote this 20 000 times if I could.

This is roughly the opinion I've had from software users at work, why bother changing the win7/win10 laptops into linux laptops if it means a lot of time wasted teaching the users a different comms package.

We dont have the money to take all the setters away from their jobs for 1/2 a day , then expect them to as good using a brand new software package when they've been using the old one on windows for years and years.

The fact the linux laptops are more stable and less likely to to go 'must update' does'nt matter, they'll put up with that crap because it runs the same software as ever......

(note: my personal laptop runs linux using the same comms software... even demostrated it... but can you get manglement to change???... hence icon)

[Peter2]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

Yup. The enthusiasts don't actually work in IT though and so don't see this side of things.

And now this is the que for a certain subset of enthusiasts to say "it's only half a day" forgetting to multiply this by the number of users.

ie, 200 users spending half a day to get to 80% of the work output is one hundred person days lost just in training time, and still leaves you with twenty person days worth of productivity lost per week to the software for being 20% less productive and that productivity loss continues at a slowly reducing rate until the productivity loss reaches 0%, assuming the software had 100% of the capability to start with.

Hence why business makes what enthusiasts see as a counter intuitive decision to buy commercial software instead of using free software. The cost of the software licenses is less than the cost of having to have extra users.

[Dave559]

Re: Exchange email and calendar

Email was running on unix systems before Microsoft even existed, and even though Exchange's non-standard approach to not-quite-like-email messaging (ugh, winmail.dat and drunken .pst files) is horrible, I will grant that the two features they had the sense to include in their system were indeed passwordless account sharing and a calendaring system. Neither of these ought to be insurmountable for a unix-based mail server setup, but sadly it looks as though either the developer itch or the financial support from wherever to combine the necessary components and apply the required polish to make these work well just hasn't happened.

My workplace moved from in-house email to Office 364 a while ago, and Thunderbird + Lightning was working fairly well for me for some time, although the hot potatoes of various Exchange plug-ins and Microsoft continually moving the goalposts (funny, that) meant that I eventually had to give up on the Exchange calendar working.

I then recalled that Evolution (which I had previously disliked for some reason, I think it may have been that for home use way back when it was either impossible for very difficult to use an alternative From address?) was supposed to have some sort of Exchange support. So I tried it, and I was most impressed that It Just Worked. I was expecting to have to do a little bit of fiddling, but, no, it just worked.

It is a bit frustrating that given that most/all of the parts exist (IMAP, LDAP, iCalendar, etc) there isn't an open-standard email server system that does all of the above, but maybe some folk will scratch that itch at some point…

[ovation1357]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

I would give almost anything to be able to ditch outlook. I'm forced to use 2013 and 2016 across a win8 desktop and a win10 laptop, and I even tried the the 365 web version which IMO is even worse.

Quite frankly it's a terrible email client and an even worse calendar. The search functionality is almost useless and the utter waste of screen space is appalling.

I do accept the point about delegation though - what's especially annoying is that some IMAP servers (e.g. dovecot) already support delegation in the form of ACLs yet few hosts seem to enable this feature and it's certainly not slick and integrated by default (see https://docs.iredmail.org/mailbox.sharing.html for some examples ). With a bit more effort this could become a more standardised feature.

I'm my previous job I was able to use Thunderbird with the "Exquilla" plugin which worked flawlessly for both mail and calendar. Sadly this isn't possibly where I am now so for me, email is a daily frustrating and somewhat sweary struggle....

I'm not a particularly organised person - in fact I'm one of those "3999 unread messages in the Inbox" kind of guys who causes the 0 unread messages folks to freak out as they glance at my email.

I've made many attempts at being more organised with email and it never works out. It's just how my brain works...

With Thunderbird and a standard IMAP account (as also with Gmail) this simply isn't a problem - the indexing and searching of email is so fast and so damn good that I can always quickly retrieve emails from years ago at a moment's notice.

For starters: Outlook fails for by being unable to display a useful amount of message preview below the message list. I've had to settle for putting the message preview to the right hand side but now the message sender, date and subject columns are too narrow to be useful.

But then the way it threads messages means that I often miss updates.

And when I use the search: well it spews out all sorts of irrelevant crap (slowly), and anything more than a few days old requires me to click a 'more...' link to search older messages on the server. It's hopeless! I can even search for a specific sender using their AD email address to try and find an email from a week or two back and it might not be returned at all even though I then find it by manually scrolling through the message list.

How anyone communicates effectively with this utter crock of shite is totally beyond me!

I'd dearly love to see the death of outlook but with the seemingly ever increasing number of companies buying into O365 I can't see any light at the end of this tunnel :-(

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

I'm kinda hoping that Outlook/Exchange will not need to be replicated because of a move away from E-mail.

E-mail as a system is hopelessly outdated, with many concerns such as spam, sender impersonation, lack of E2E encryption making it less and less useful these days. It's a prime reason why so many companies just send you an email saying "you have a new message in our portal", which is a pretty bad user experience. There's clumsy workarounds for all these issues but they're too optional and too difficult to use. Also, the really open retrieval protocols aren't working very well for today's mobile-oriented environment.

I don't think what we need is an open Outlook/Exchange. What we need is a new *but open* email protocol that takes the modern-day concerns into account. And that is a bit less like email but more like a collaboration program, with IM capabilities as well.

It's a shame the commercialisation of the internet has led to a decline in the IETF / RFC process. Good stuff came out of that but newer developments are proprietary and thus usually have a strong reason to exclude part of their userbase.

[coderguy]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

"Is it the year of the Linux Desktop? No, totally not, and I say that as a Linux fan. It's not ready for your average end user at home, with no support other than google; It's so damned close though."

I'm curious, what support does a Windows end-user have that's so different to those using a Linux Desktop?

Other than Google, the Microsoft Community Forums where every second response is "It's probably a bad driver or Virus, you need to reinstall.

Then there are paid support options obviously, but these are not unique to Windows.

[Gonzo_the_Geek]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

As a Support/Escalation Engineer who deals with large log files daily, but who has to use a Windows laptop due to corporate policy, being able to use tools like awk, grep, sed etc. allows me to parse large files much more quickly in WSL without having to rely on remote Linux servers.

Working through a 12GB logfile is simply not an option in any Windows text programme I've seen, but piping it through a few utilities in WSL allows me to filter out the useful stuff much more quickly.

[druck]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

I started out developing on commercial Unix, but every place since that I've worked on Windows development I'd be lost without GNU tools. I started off with cygwin, but when VMware came out started using a Linux VM. I currently use Virtualbox on Windows 7, but also have a Windows 10 machine and WSL does most of what I want to do - I'll still keep a full VM around though.

[hmv]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

a) There are definitely commercial software vendors for Linux applications - I've even bought one (Bibble; now Corel AfterShot).

b) Of course there is a market for commercial software applications for Linux - it's tiny in comparison to Windows, and Linux users do have the benefit of many free desktop applications. If Catpure One were to be released for Linux, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

c) I personally don't see any benefit to WSL - I run Linux on the desktop and keep Windows safely inside a VM where it can't do much damage. But in a Windows-based corporate environment, WSL does allow those who would prefer to work with Linux to do so without annoying their corporate masters overly ("It's part of Windows").

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I still don't see the purpose of WSL

"First to begin with, Windows shops are not interested in Linux."

We have Windows desktops and LINUX servers. .NET Core runs on LINUX ...

"I might be wrong and I would appreciate to be corrected but even to this day there is no commercial software vendor for Linux desktop applications."

JetBrains' suite of IDEs runs on LINUX (and are not free). There are other commercial applications for LINUX (e.g. CAD, IIRC), and even some games (see GOG, Steam).

[OpenSauce]

Are we there yet?

Not on Ubuntu download page or any mirrors as yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Are we there yet?

BitTorrent says my download finished 2 hours ago, after I read the article and started downloading.

[Dr_Bingley]

Re: Are we there yet?

It's on their FTP servers. Typing this on a machine running Kubuntu 20.04.

[CAPS LOCK]

"we're working with Microsoft"

Thanks. That's all I needed to know.

[KorndogDev]

Re: "we're working with Microsoft"

Yep, soon one will need a Microsoft email account to download Ubuntu packages. Sorry, snaps!

[listener1379]

Half-Baked Wireguard

Ubuntu's netplan, their new recommended approach for network configuration, does not yet support Wireguard. This is causing headaches in my Ubuntu LXC containers that make me want to revert to /etc/network/interfaces. Which is fine, but makes setting up Wireguard more work than I would expect from Ubuntu. There is a community pull request on GitHub that doesn't seem to have gotten canonical's attention. I have not tested its completeness, but nonetheless, kernel support for Wireguard is all we see, nothing more.

https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/netplan/pull/113

[sansva]

Go Ubuntu!

Go Ubuntu!

WSL is a waste. Last time I tried it it was nowhere close to Cygwin in terms of functionality. For example, you couldn't even run services on it. I don't use Windows anymore, but if I did I would use Cygwin and not mess with WSL at all since it can actually mess with Cygwin.

[Waseem Alkurdi]

Re: Go Ubuntu!

Don't want to be a spoilsport, but you can.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome has got a flat tyre

I upgraded my test box last night, and everything seems to be working smoothly.

Sadly, it looks as though Gnome has got a flat tyre: the new Yaru theme has been infected by the dreaded flatso bug, and it looks cheap and horrible, in my opinion.

Whereas before we had nicely polished bevelled 3D buttons on the windows, now we have a "close" button that looks like a cheap sticker, rather poorly affixed. And I'm not keen on the virtually invisible window borders and relative lack of contrast between the currently active window and the others, either.

Right, I guess I'm off to search for the old Gnome theme, or perhaps another alternative (if anyone would like to suggest one)? Sadly gnome-look seems to be overflowing with horrible flatso themes these days as well. What is wrong with everyone who calls themselves a designer, these days? Whatever it is, I do hope it wears off soon…

[Bronek Kozicki]

Re: Gnome has got a flat tyre

May I suggest a simple solution:

        
        
$ sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
        
        

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate snap. It was forced upon me when I upgraded to 20.04 and having played around with it for a couple of days I'm not very impressed. The applications take up far more space than the versions from the repositories, they insist on putting their configuration files in non-standard places, they seem to struggle accessing files outside of their snap container (And one wouldn't even detect some of my USB devices for reasons I can't comprehend)..

And for some reason, they've come to the opposite conclusion most people would regarding security. Yes, they're (kind of) self-contained which is more secure, but they're also auto-updating without any user intervention, and without the approval of the distro maintainers who would normally test the new releases and optionally apply distro-specific patches where appropriate (eg '0.0.23.1-4ubuntu3' instead of just '0.0.23.1-4') before letting them out into the wild.

The creators of snap seem to tout it as some kind of platform-agnostic distribution method, but (strangely) outside of Ubuntu it's getting very little support. I've read that Arch briefly had it, but it was quickly dropped for being a PITA.

I'm seeing very little benefit to them, so...yeah no thanks. There's no need to apply mobile development and distribution methods to a desktop system, just like there's no need to force a touchscreen interface on us.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes not only this, but you're dependent on the snap maintainer to update vulnerabilities in enclosed libraries. On a standard system you update the library and everything that uses it will be covered instantly.

Not to mention the huge efficiency gain by allowing the shared library idea to do its job, Linux is heavily optimised for this.

I can see the benefit for stuff like browsers that have a lot of remote interaction but I don't want everything on my system in containers. Besides, there's other options for sandboxing like AppArmor and SELinux (heavily used by Android)

I really hope Ubuntu will drop it like they did with Mir, Unity, Upstart etc, and move to something more common. And, stop using it for stuff where it doesn't make sense.

PS: It is still possible to fully remove snap from 20.04 according to this: https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-20-04/

[Anonymous Coward]

I managed to remove it myself this morning...apparently it used to get it's hooks in so deep it was very difficult to remove the daemon as it interconnected with ubuntu-desktop for....reasons. But that changed a few months ago.

The strangest "quirk" I had was that I couldn't get the web browser to save a file directly to an attached, encrypted drive. Permissions problem. So I had to save to an interim folder then move it across by hand. Utter pain.

Plus, have you seen how many loopback mounting points it creates? "df" becomes very hard to use as it buries your actual drives with it's own. One for the daemon, one for GTK, one for Gnome, one for each of the snaps you have installed....