Ubuntu turns 20: 'Oracular Oriole' shows this old bird's still got plenty of flight

The first interim release of Ubuntu since the somewhat troubled Noble Numbat is a smooth upgrade - but not all of the new hotness is here yet. Ubuntu 24.10 is out, with several acknowledgments that this release marks 20 years of the Ubuntu project. For a glimpse of what's new, we looked at the beta of the flagship desktop …

[nematoad]

Apt good, rpm so-so

I'm with you when you say that apt and apt-get are far better than rpm was and probably still are.

Simple and clear and apt just makes sense to me, unlike the arcane world of rpm.

There were several easier-to-use distros that simplified things,

True but you missed out Mandrake.

One of the best for a newcomer it was also free, as in beer, although you could buy it. I did on several occasions to give the distro support. The ease of use of their admin tools was, and still is, unmatched. Can you think of a better partitioning tool that Diskdrake? I can't. Luckily Texstar forked Mandrake and inherited all the lovely .drake tools with the added bonus of adapting apt to run with rpms.

So now any user of PCLinuxOS has all the ease of the Mandrake suite of tools plus the convenience of being able to use apt or a gui version like Synaptic for all those updating jobs that come along.

[DoContra]

Re: Apt good, rpm so-so

IIRC, apt-rpm was originally developed by Conectiva Linux (Brazilian distro which was eventually bought by Red Hat and became their Brazilian offices).

Mandrake was the first GNU/Linux distro I installed in "my" (family) PC[1], and to this day I have extremely fond memories of it. It did come with one of the first apt-get equivalents for the RPM world (urpmi, still used by Mageia AFAIK), although by the time I was getting proper proficient at CLI I was jumping into (K)ubuntu. I still miss the Big List of Software in the installer, as the last step before installation...

[1]: As a dual boot with Windows XP in ~2002-2003; I gradually started using GNU/Linux more and more, until by Windows 7 I was only booting Windows for some games, and by the time Windows 8 rolled around I was 100% GNU/Linux on my home.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Apt good, rpm so-so

> (Brazilian distro which was eventually bought by Red Hat and became their Brazilian offices).

Nope. Conectiva was bought by Mandrake and is why the combined company was renamed Mandriva.

El Reg covered it at the time:

https://www.theregister.com/2005/02/24/mandrakesoft_connectiva/

I linked to it when I tried the modern descendants a couple of years ago:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/15/comparing_the_descendants_of_mandrake/

[nematoad]

Re: Apt good, rpm so-so

" Conectiva was bought by Mandrake and is why the combined company was renamed Mandriva."

True, but wasn't there some silliness over the name "Mandrake"?

The Hearst Corporation owned a comic strip called Mandrake the Magician and without any connection to Linux or Unix objected and more or less strong-armed Mandrake in to changing their name.

[Gene Cash]

Re: Apt good, rpm so-so

Yeah, "rpm dependency hell" was why I moved from RedHat 1.0 (I think) to Debian 2.2 "Potato" (I think) in 2001ish...

Having apt figure out what it needed and automatically download it was just an incredible improvement over "ok this needs x, y, and z to install? what does x need and what is the actual RPM named? and what does THAT need to install??"

Remember when Mandrake was Slashdot's favorite distro? (Hell, remember Slashdot? I remember when articles might get a thousand comments. Now they're lucky to break double digits)

[LBJsPNS]

Re: Apt good, rpm so-so

Slashdot turned into a right wing toilet.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Apt good, rpm so-so

[Author here]

> True but you missed out Mandrake.

I did, you're right.

It was _much_ easier, to the extent that circa 2003, my lodger borrowed what she thought was a blank CD from the spindle in my office while I was at work and _accidentally_ installed Mandrake on her PC.

But I was never a big fan.

The early versions were just Red Hat Linux with KDE, with all the nastiness of original RPM.

The GUI tools weren't all that. The first time I tried a full install on a testbed PC, DiskDrake nuked 9 partitions and erased about half a dozen other OSes on my PC. (I think it was for a group test of Linux distros I wrote for PCW in about 2000.) I was _livid._

APT-RPM was promising but the trouble is that on distros not designed with it in mind, while it made _installing a new package_ easier, it became unreliable _upgrading_ existing packages.

If you tried to upgrade something present on your computer that APT-RPM did not install itself, the chances were high you'd nuke your PC. There were 3 likely outcomes:

* At best, that app stopped working and you had an even more painful session of dependency-chasing.

* More often, multiple other apps stopped working because their dependencies suddenly didn't match. (No overall dependency tree, no testing for overlaps etc.) Not only that but there was a fair chance your desired app _also_ stopped working.

* Worst case: your PC no longer boots, or it does but there's no desktop or something.

Ask me how I know. Go on.

I was experimenting with APT-RPM on SUSE Pro when Ubuntu arrived, and that is one reason I switched so fast. I'd had to reinstall SUSE multiple times because of APT-RPM-inflicted damage already.

So, yes, true, not all end-user-targeting distros were paid-for, but the free options, while better than, say, Debian or Slackware, were -- shall I be diplomatic and say "flawed"?

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: Apt good, rpm so-so

I can't remember the last time I used the 'rpm' command.

yum and dnf make 'rpm-hell' a thing of the past for 99.99999999% of users.

Perhaps it is time to move on from the rpm vs apt wars?

Personally, I used both (RedHat and Ubuntu). These days I won't touch Ubuntu. SNAP was a step too far. To me package managers should do their job and then get out of the way until needed again. Having SNAP Consume resources all the time is just wrong.

YMMV naturally.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Apt good, rpm so-so

> Perhaps it is time to move on from the rpm vs apt wars?

I think you are not considering the context here. I was trying to explain why Ubuntu did so well, and what the key weak point of its biggest commercial rivals (the 2 big players in the RPM camp: Red Hat and SUSE) _at the time_ -- that being 20Y ago.

Bare `dpkg` wasn't much better.

But the point here is that when SUSE and Red Hat Linux (_not_ RHEL or Fedora, their forerunner) were pre-eminent, the companies didn't offer any wrappers or higher-level tools. RPM was all you got.

It was a disaster, but it was the norm and they and their corporate sponsors did not consider it a problem.

Today, tools like Btrfs and Flatpak and GNOME and Wayland, and arguably systemd, have comparably severe issues, but again, the companies still retain the same attitude: flat, adamant denial.

When someone reminds the world of how bad it was before, look: "isn't it time to let that lie? Why dig up the past?"

Because the companies refused to admit there were problems then, and their fans supported them.

Then something better came along and showed it wasn't an inherent problem.

They _had_ to catch up, and they did.

Now, they are pushing new flawed tools and the fans still angrily defend them.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Apt good, rpm so-so

i remember the dying days of Red Hat Linux (just after the switch to RHEL and Fedora), which was the distro I was running on my laptop at the time, and using some of the non-Red Hat rpm repo's (I think that FreshMeat was the main one) to try to keep it running after RH stopped providing updates.

It was a real pain, until I discovered YUM, which took all the repetitive work out of identifying what's missing, downloading the rpms and rinse and repeat until a package would finally install.

It must have been around the same time that Ubuntu first came out. IIRC. But I read about Ubuntu, and I think it was 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog (although I have vague memories of the Warty Warthog name possibly being the first one I tried) that I first put onto my laptop while still keeping RH as my main OS, but by the time 6.06 Dapper Drake came along, I switched to that as my main driver on most of my systems, and have kept to LTS releases ever since. The longer time between major upheavals is the main reason I switched. I did not like the relentless cadence of updates that Fedora foisted upon you on a working system.

Whilst I'm still using Ubuntu on my main laptop, I am now looking at others, including Slackware, Devuan and even back to FreeBSD UNIX on my other systems as possible replacements, as I'm not in the Systemd/Snap appreciation club, but making the final switch feels so hard.

Somewhat as a throwback, I am still using RPMs on my AIX systems, as IBM is not packaging any modern software for AIX as LPPs, but has various initiatives to package some of them as RPMs. But at least they have DNF sort of working as a semi-official project, probably being run from the side of a couple of IBMer's desks , although surprisingly, it still does have dependency problems, and does not work at all if you are trying to manage air-gapped systems.

[O'Reg Inalsin]

Time to move along

The support for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will end on April 23, 2025.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Time to move along

With free (for up to five machines) support extended to April 2030.

So no rush...

See https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

[45RPM]

So when can I update my 20.04 release to Numbat seamlessly? I prefer to stick to LTS releases. Equally, I prefer my upgrades to be smooth - and my experience with Linux is that they haven’t quite nailed this yet. Great OS - not yet ready “for the rest of us”

[DoContra]

That would be never...

...as (officially) you need to step through 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish) first :).

Joking aside, despite the extremely convoluted and messy development cycle (64-bit time_t migration on Debian's side running late, XZ kerfuffle, some last minute issues in LTS-to-LTS upgrades pushing that milestone back a month, some iffyness on the first stable Ubuntu 24.04 ISO when netbooting), the upgrading experience has been mostly smooth (had only one server where the upgrade misbehaved, and even then it wasn't too bad to finish the upgrade before rebooting).

That said, in my experience with *buntu, the only truly hairy upgrade was from 14.04 to 16.04 (AKA the systemd one), as you really needed to reboot/power-cycle your device the moment it finished or you were looking towards a dirty shutdown. Although I will admit the upgrade process on both Ubuntu and Debian leave a trail of unsupported packages that need manual intervention to remove which, on Ubuntu at least, should be handled better.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: That would be never...

I am probably a bit unusual, but I've been doing dist-upgrades from about 12.04 on my main laptop (I'm pretty certain 8.04-12.04 was done as a dual-boot fresh install), and probably because of the longevity of my system (the disk gets moved or cloned as I upgrade the actual hardware), I have been tripped up by several things during the dist-upgrade process over the years, some of which may be because of the number of dist-upgrades that I've done.

Most of the problems have been as a result of systemd subsuming more and more systems. From 16.04 I've had trouble with sound (I thought that had been fixed long ago), display problems, name resolution, wireless key management, and suspend-resume, just to name the major problems. And this is on well supported IBM/Lenovo T series laptops.

I am still a little behind, as I'm only on 22.04, but I'm still looking at alternatives, as the major reason I was using Ubuntu was the ease of management (I'm a UNIX and Linux professional admin, but what I want on my own daily driver is reliability and stability, the last thing I want is to be fixing problems on the tool I use to try to fix things in my real work).

[Chris Gray 1]

LTS forever!

Same here on the LTS only.

By chance, my ancient laptop is currently unpacking/installing 24.04 right now.

I upgraded my internet, supposedly to 1G/200M. Testing shows flat 100Mbs both ways. Hmm. Even worse, they are now blocking SMTP and HTTP, so my domain is now pretty-much gone. Sniff. Ping works, so the new IP has propagated.

[collinsl]

Re: LTS forever!

Sounds like a physical cable fault to me limiting you to 100Mb/s connections. Check your ethernet.

[O'Reg Inalsin]

After a load of hurt upgrading from 16 to 18, I only use links from home directory to things which are not installed by the system, so I can do a clean upgrade each time.

[45RPM]

Oops! Firstly, that should have been 22.04 - and secondly, it seems that Canonical have fixed the problems that prevented me from updating seamlessly. So I posted (and, it must be admitted, somewhat drunkenly) in error. Tried again today - and it will come as no surprise to anyone - the upgrade completed easily and successfully (if not entirely quickly!)

So my apologies Canonical. And thank you.

[DoContra]

At that time, the Reg FOSS desk was reveling in the raw speed of a 512 kbps ADSL connection through an Alcatel Speed Touch modem.

My first Broadband (for the time) connection was a blazing 256kbps downlink with a successor to that line of modems (Alcatel SpeedTouch 330) in ~2003-2004; the telco in my neighbourhood had a relatively cheap as chips plan where you could browse at night (from 20:00 onwards) and throughout the weekend, or pay a surcharge when browsing outside that time. One of the first things I did was search how to make it work on GNU/Linux, which I managed to do and felt like an absolute hacker (IIRC, the only tricky/fiddly parts were getting GNU/Linux to load the device firmware, and getting the ISP ATM parameters; luckily my ISP had pretty standard parameters so that bit was a cinch).

[mark l 2]

I had the top package of NTL cable broadband back in the early 2000s so that would have been 1Mb or 2Mb at the time. And this was faster than what we had in the office which was a 128Kb ISDN line connected to a proxy server and shared between around 40 staff.

I distinctly remember trying to download a large file of several hundred Mb in the office and the estimated download time was about 4 hours, so i decided to drive home at lunch, download the file on my own broadband, burn it onto a CD and then drive back to the office as that was the quicker option than waiting for the download to finish in the office.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

It's a pity cars (and traffic) haven't sped up at the same rate as broadband

[collinsl]

Is it? Just think of how many more people would be killed in car accidents due to the higher speed involved being beyond human reaction times.

[EvaQ]

"the formidably hard-to-install Debian"

... oh, oh, I expect Debian lovers to comment!

[Gene Cash]

Re: "the formidably hard-to-install Debian"

Ubuntu: Swahili for "I failed to install Debian"

[Dostoevsky]

Re: "the formidably hard-to-install Debian"

I'm filing the serial numbers off this one!

[Tim99]

Re: "the formidably hard-to-install Debian"

"Ubuntu: Swahili for "I failed to install Debian Devuan" - FTFY (I'm old, but I hope that I might still be helpful).

Mine's the one with K&R in the pocket >>============>

[Liam Proven]

Re: "the formidably hard-to-install Debian"

> Ubuntu: Swahili for "I failed to install Debian"

Excu-hu-se me.

The word "ùbúntù" is from isiXhosa and isiZulu, many thousands of kilometres away from East Africa where kiSwahili hails from. *Way* more different than English and Czech, say.

I take pride in my ability to pronounce the word "isiXhosa". :-P

And I quoted that gag over 2 years ago:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/31/the_cynics_guide_to_linux/

«

2. Ubuntu

"Ubuntu is an ancient African word that means *I can't configure Debian.*"

Ubuntu started out as an effort to displace Windows from the number one consumer OS spot by making a Linux that was easier to install and run. It worked. So Microsoft threatened to sue because it looked a bit like Windows if you squinted, and the whole thing fell apart. Ubuntu decided that if it was dodgy to look Windows-like, it would look like Mac OS X instead. Then it went back to GNOME again.

»

And I discussed the real meaning in a bootnote, because respect is due.

So there. :-P

[jake]

Re: "the formidably hard-to-install Debian"

The original was from a Usenet .sig:

Ubuntu: An ancient African word meaning "Slackware is HARD!".

It was a joke combining 1992's controversial Teen Talk Barbie phrase "Math class is tough" (which had mutated in the collective psyche into "Math is HARD!") with the perception that the kiddies flocking to Ubuntu in 2004 were somewhat wet behind the ears.

At the time, it was both clever and funny, at least to the folks who had already been running Linux for a decade or so.

_{Maybe you had to be there ...}

[CustomCruiser]

Re: "the formidably hard-to-install Debian"

"At the time, it was both clever and funny, at least to the folks who had already been running Linux for a decade or so."

Was it clever and funny, or was it elitist sneering? It's occasionally been difficult to tell with the hardcore Linux community ;-)

[jake]

Re: "the formidably hard-to-install Debian"

At the time Ubuntu was made available, the only elitist sneering was in the minds of kiddies new to *nix getting upset to find out that they were newbies in a 30+ year old world. Five(ish) years later, those self-same newbies were doing the elitist sneering, when they started feeling like they were now veterans and so allowed to do the very thing that they dreamed up in the first place.

Seems it was a self-fulfilling prophecy combined with a bit of tragedy of the commons.

[LionelB]

Re: "the formidably hard-to-install Debian"

> The word "ùbúntù" is from isiXhosa and isiZulu, many thousands of kilometres away from East Africa where kiSwahili hails from.

True, though in fact the word has close equivalents in many Bantu languages - including, e.g., the Luganda (Great Lakes region) "obuuntu", and indeed the Swahili "utu".

> I take pride in my ability to pronounce the word "isiXhosa". :-P

Aye... the tricky part is aspirating but not voicing the "X". This is your ultimate resource (okay, it's Zulu rather than Xhosa, but the clicks are the same): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBW2eDx3h8w

When you've mastered that, you may practice with the rather wonderful "Qongqothwane": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-4U2hfMpnk

Or the equally wonderful but far less well-known "!Nubu !Gubus" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GypzCjEOlu8 (that's from Namibia - not sure which language, but many of the Khoisan languages have dozens of distinct clicks. Okay, I only included that because it's a great tune.).

> *Way* more different than English and Czech, say.

Speaking of which, one sound I have utterly failed to get anywhere near is the Czech "ř". I suspect that if you didn't get it by the time you were 3 years old, you've no chance. At best (or possibly worst) you'll end up sounding embarrassingly like that thing Roy Orbison does on "Pretty Woman".

[Liam Proven]

Re: "the formidably hard-to-install Debian"

> ... oh, oh, I expect Debian lovers to comment!

Oh, I so hope so. :-D

There was a wonderful editorial in one of the early UK Linux mags about the giant-brained Debianisti who were so horribly patronising because they'd been through the baptism of fire of getting the damned thing working.

They're not that much better now, mind you.

[Steve Graham]

Re: "the formidably hard-to-install Debian"

I began using Debian when it was still in the 0.9x releases (30 years ago!) and I honestly don't remember it being difficult. (Of course, my memory of things 30 years ago...)

But I wasn't a Linux neophyte. The first distro I remember trying was Yggdrasil, which was a "live" CD. I played with early Slackware too.

The last version of Windows dual-booting on my home PC was Windows 2000, so I've been Linux-only since the early 2000s.

When the Debian project announced that they were surrendering to assimilation by the systemd, I migrated to Devuan gradually, by changing the repositories, so that every time I updated a package, it replaced the old Debian version with the new Devuan one. I think it took about 18 months before all packages had been updated. Though I've had a couple of new PCs since then and installed Devuan from scratch with their installer. And it wasn't difficult!

[EvaQ]

On Ubuntu since 6.06

I'm on Ubuntu since 6.06. Before that Kubuntu ... but that didn't work on my Athlon64, so I switched to Ubuntu.

And before Kubuntu, I think I used Mandrake / Mandriva Linux, which was great too.

[MrMerrymaker]

Re: On Ubuntu since 6.06

So what

[Gene Cash]

SUSE's selling point was that it came with several thick paper manuals in the box

Um, I think that was rather expected back then. RedHat came in a 3" thick box to accommodate the documentation. Even Slackware came with a good sized pamphlet.

And SuSE came with a chameleon sticker pack too!

I did buy a RedHat red hat and still have it. It has the old lowercase "redhat" and shadowman logo on the inner band, and was made in the USA of 100% wool by the "Lite Felt Hat Co"

(edit: it was probably one of the first things I bought online... I actually bought the distro and had it shipped to me, instead of downloading it at 2400 baud, and the hat was one of the branded tchotchkes available on the website, and I clicked it on a whim.)

[keithpeter]

ISOs

"The result fitted onto a single CD with so much room to spare that the rest of the space was filled up with Windows installers for all the main applications, so that you could get familiar with them on your existing OS before switching to Linux."

TBF I recollect that the earlier Ubuntu isos (I came in around 5.04 and decided to stay after 5.10) came as either an installer OR a different live image. So if that was true of the Warty release, the CD would not have all the live session stuff.

Still tells you something about software sizes...

[Liam Proven]

Re: ISOs

> the CD would not have all the live session stuff.

Yup. Text only boot, text only installer.

Then, a version or two later, came a separate live CD.

IIRC, then came a graphical installer, and finally that moved onto the Live CD and the text installer went away.

[Steve Graham]

Bar/Panel on the left?

I'm right-handed, and it seems more natural to have my xfce4 panel on the right edge. Otherwise, I feel I'd be having my virtual hands crossed.

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Re: Bar/Panel on the left?

Right hander here, too.

But I've put my XFCE4 "panel" on the top of the screen. I do have all the frequently used appliations on the right and things like the CPU, disk, and network usage graphs on the left.

I probably set it up this way when I migrated from KDE ten years or so ago and I was used to it that way. I forget why I migrated -- maybe something to do with the "cashew."

[Nematode]

Re: Bar/Panel on the left?

Either way, at least they've recognised that with the current wide-aspect screens limiting top-to-bottom real estate, having the toolbar at the side is more sensible than W11's Apple lookalike

[Liam Proven]

Re: Bar/Panel on the left?

> it seems more natural to have my xfce4 panel on the right edge.

The trouble is that's where most GUIs place scrollbars.

(However unfashionable scrollbars are now.)

NeXTstep put scrollbars on the left. So did some other tools in the xterm era, I think.

Functional separation is good. Having a mouse movement in one direction for one function, and a different one for another unrelated one, works for me. YMMV.

[IGnatius T Foobar !]

Dash to Dork

I'll switch back to GNOME when they make one SIMPLE change: provide an easy, non-crashy way to put the Dash and the Dock in a SINGLE PANEL at the bottom of the screen. KDE can do this, GNOME cannot. There are extensions, but I found all of them make my Ubuntu desktop fail in one way or another. Come on guys, it's simple. We want our computer to look like a computer, not like a phone or a Mac.

[TheFifth]

I remember Warty fondly

I think I followed a similar Linux journey to the author. I remember around 2002 I was becoming more and more fed up with Windows XP, so was trying out various Linux distros. I'd tried Red Hat 8 and also whatever the current Mandrake release was at the time and found them OK, however I picked up a copy of SUSE through work and finally settled on that for a couple of years. As you say, rpm-hell was a real thing, but I found that SUSE mostly worked for me.

Come 2004, I saw a magazine with a CD of Ubuntu on the cover, so thought I'd give it a go. It was a revelation! Small, fast and apt was (comparatively) amazing. Gnome 2 was a breath of fresh air too.

That machine was upgraded all the way to Gutsy in 2007 when I bought a new computer. Happy times!

I still have a Surface machine running the latest Ubuntu to this day. It's not as revolutionary as it was back in the day, but it's still fine for me.

I even had that Alcatel modem, although I think I was running at 256kbps.