Posts by corb

Ubuntu 25.04 beta takes flight – but this Plucky Puffin is still molting

Re: Interesting

For most people, the "free" in FOSS means they don't have to pay for it. Dreams of users becoming coders and making meanmeaningful contributions are fantasy.

I've been around Linux long enough to remember Red Hat, Suse, and others selling shrinkwrapped boxes of their install CD's in the retail chain. Suse inlcuded a very nice hardcopy manual. Well, as long as everyone was using dial-up comms, they'd pay $39.95 to get Linux in a box. But, as soon as broadband spread, that market vanished. Why pay for something anyone could build and host for nada?

Re: Big Images, Bumpy Rides, and Lunar Lake

Oh... and dnfdragora isn't returning search results, for anything, on Gnome or any spin I've tried it on during the 42 prerelease cycle

Big Images, Bumpy Rides, and Lunar Lake

I've always found Ubuntu's pre-release ride bumpier than Fedora's, at least after the latter branches off the new release from Rawhide.

I am curious why Ubuntu's ISO images are so large. Seems like everyone's are larger, and slower to boot, but Ubuntu's are significantly larger. Doesn't really have a practical impact, though, unless you only have a tiny USB stick.

The 6.14 kernel works better on Lunar Lake than the 6.11, at least on this XPS 9350. I would not use 6.11 on it.

On Lunar Lake, both Mate and XFCE, on any distro I've tried, show some graphic weirdness when the cursor is pushed to the top display edge and there's a top lanel: Small rectangular boxes with stacks of what looks like distorted text inside.

OBS-tacle course: Fedora and Flathub's Flatpak fiasco sparks repo rumble

Re: Surely users can understand the choice between slow-but-sure and sexy-but-edgey?

Pretty much every day I see at least one post telling someone who is thinking about replacing Windows with Linux that they should use Debian Stable, that it's peaches and cream. But no one ever asks them "How new is your hardware?"

Not only are newbies *not* going to get the sexy new stuff from Debian, they might not get a workable machine. E.g., I have a Raptor Lake Dell laptop and a Lunar Lake Dell laptop. On Stable, there's no sound on the Raptor Lake. The hardware isn't recognized. I cant get a bootable install on the Lunar Lake. I could do a backports dance but that's not something anyone should recommend to a new convert.

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

Re: No Thanks

>>"most users now don't know the keyboard UI. They find desktop UIs complex and opaque...:

Part of it, I think, is most users don't do enough with a keyboard, beyond typing text, to remember the needed keystrokes. People also don't like to learn new ways to do something they already know how to do.

Re: l

I'm not a keyboard person. I liked Unity but never found the HUD and the other bits useful. (Unity leveraged Compiz to make a click on an icon in the dock get you an expo display of all workspaces. These days, everybody has an expo display but I've found nothing that can be triggered like that.)

One of the first things I do after an install is remove packages I will never use. That cleans up clutter and simplifies using whatever desktop it happens to be.

l

I'm not a Gnome user because I think the One-and-Only theme looks like an unfinished wireframe. It does, however, leverage Wayland very nicely on laptops. Quite fluid and smooth. Less advantageous on desktops clicking around with a mouse, I think.

I'm not an "app store" user. But I am a Fedora user. Gnome Software ending RPM support and relying on flatpaks would encourage my continued avoidance. I'm still looking for a reason to prefer flatpak packaging versus RPM packaging.

Words alone won't get the stars and stripes to Mars

I'd be very happy if Musk put himself on a Mars-bound rocket tomorrow but, when you look at it, his vehicle is minimally capable of doing what he wants it to do.

As far as I recall, his Starship rockets can't leave Mars without being refueled from automated facilities that were somehow set up and operated, before the crewed vehicle's arrival, to manufacture and store propellant and oxidizer using subsurface water ice. Seems to me a very long tent pole.

Only a bit shorter is the pole representing the requirement for Musk's vehicle to be refueled multiple time in low Earth orbit before it can go anywhere else, including to the Moon.

(I'd also like to know if his vehicle is capable of navigating to a landing next to those automated fuel depots if Mars gins up one of its long-lasting dust storms while the ship is en route.)

Linux Mint 22.1 Xia arrives fashionably late

I'm a "seasoned linux veteran" and I could happily run Mint if it was compatible with my hardware because I'm bored with timewasting tweaking just to get to the point of having a usable system. We all need to abandoned the notion that "easy to use" is the same as "dumbed down toy".

IMO, Muffin, a fork of Mutter, is a better X compositor than XWFM. For me, that translates into smoother, more fluid, use of a touchpad. (Posted from Fedora XFCE).

Mint's focus on continued refinement of an established product should be emulated. I can't run it on this Lunar Lake laptop, though, because it can't find the Intel wifi card. There's also a kernel patch in the 6.12 series that fixes really annoying mouse/touchpad/keyboard stuttering delays. Canonical doesn't seem to have backported that patch into either the 24.04 kernel Mint uses or the kernel shipped with 24.10.

Xfce 4.20 is out: Wayland support lands, but some pieces are still missing

I'll wait for XFWM4 to move to Wayland. I agree that when I use Wayland on a desktop it doesn't offer me an obvious advantage. But, I spend most of my time pushing the cursor around with a laptop touchpad, not using keyboard shortcuts. Gnome and KDE feel more fluid on Wayland than X11. But, since I use XFCE, that matters little to me. (For what it's worth, XFCE, MATE, Cinnamon -- all X11 -- feel faster on their Fedora spins than on their Ubuntu and Mint counterparts.)

Wubuntu: The lovechild of Windows and Linux nobody asked for

Seems pretty much a lure to get naive people to buy their app.

My guess is most people this kind of fake Windows might appeal to never use more than a browser and one of two other apps. An easy-to-use desktop for them would be a few big app-launching icons against some nice desktop wallpaper.

Elementary OS 8 'Circe' conjures Wayland magic

Elementary isn't for me but the distribution has always emphasized design and usability and I credit it with helping nudge the rest of desktop Linux along in the right direction, especially back in the day when anything that looked good on screen was often derided as eye candy.

Good now to see the emphasis on accessibility, where Linux lags.

GNOME 47 brings back some customization options, but let's not go crazy

The color tweaks in Gnome 47 are fine as far as they go but, of course, don't have any impact on the design incompatibility of GTK apps subsumed into Gnome when used in non-Gnome GTK environments. The argument that Gnome is well within its rights here is accurate but irrelevant.

Personally, I find Gnome styling to be thin and sketchy, while KDE's default Breeze is awash in grey, while user-contributed themes are dominated by often amateurish efforts of almost identical muddy dark schemes.

Fedora 41 beta arrives, neck-and-neck with Ubuntu – but with a different focus

Some DNF incantations have change in DNF5. I found that a few of RPMFusion's cut-and-paste DNF snippets didn't work as intended.

Linux Mint 22 beta sprinkles Cinnamon desktop on Ubuntu

The interface inconsistencies revolving around Gnome apps on non-Gnome platforms are annoying enough to push me to look for alternative apps that are not affected. It's pretty fruitless, though.

Re: Mate -- Fedora 40 has release 1.28. Externally, I see no change from 1.26 other than the addition of a system info app.

Meta will use your social media posts to train its AI. Europe gets an opt out

What's the opt out tied to? IP? Username? Email address?

Each of those can change, the first without the user's knowledge. It might change the next time the user's device renews a DHCP lease.

Meta will harvest (steal) from users who think their opt out is still working.

This is why opting in is fundamentally better than opt outs.

Endless OS 6: How desktop Linux may look, one day

EndlessOS isn't targeting Linux enthusiasts and current users, including kids. Evaluating it from that perspective misses the point. It specifically targets educational uses and "tackling the global digital divide". To that end, it offers 12-gig+ install images intended to be useful without a network connection, in addition to the standard ISO image.

I suspect most who install Endless have never heard of Linux. I gave it an install. It works as advertised. It's polished and well done. I felt confined and limited but that is a selling point elsewhere. Its approach to updating and app installation is, I think, the best in the atomic/immutable arena, where other distros layer complexity onto what is intended to be a simplified architecture by adding gizmos to allow "choice". Most people do not want to tinker with or configure their computer. They want it to work well and look nice out of the box.They see post-install configuration as an annoyance. They want to install apps and use them. They don't want to leverage an operating system. They don't want to be bothered with updates. So, yes, like a phone. That's what most people on the planet want.

With Asmi 24.04, Ubuntu's never looked so snappy (without the Snaps)

Snap is a Canonical software packaging and distribution method similar to Flatpak and, in an approximate way, to Apple's technique in MacOS.

The target audience for Snaps is clearly enterprise Ubuntu customers, not individuals who do not buy Canonical support.

Snaps have not yet been widely implemented and supported by Canonical. The number of Snaps in a default Ubuntu install is still in single figures. Most are not user-facing. Mozilla packages Firefox as a Snap for Canonical. Early versions were annoyingly slow to load. In my experience, this hasn't been the case for some months.

The app store in in Ubuntu 24.04 offers only Snaps and will not install traditional deb packages, which are otherwise installable via apt, etc. Snaps produced by independent developers and hosted by Canonical have been criticized for bugs and for being out of date.

Because of the way they are constructed, Snap apps may not allow the kind of tweaking Linux users are accustomed to doing. Ditto Flatpaks.

It is possible to "de-Snap" an Ubuntu installation by editing repository files and creating rules for apt. If that is not done successfully, deleting the Firefox Snap and then trying to re-install it as a deb will result in the Snap version's reinstallation.

My take: As an individual user, Snaps don't solve any of my problems or offer any benefits. With only one Snap I might actually use -- Firefox -- performing well enough for mr, it's not *now* an issue, however.

Re: Nice one.

Yep.It's a usability failure in XFCE. I'm sure it sends new users elsewhere.

People have complained about one-pixel window borders in XFCE for years. And other people have told them to use the keyboard. But...that's why I have a mouse and a touchpad. If it was more convenient to use the keyboard to move and resize windows, I'd use it. Window borders should be 5-10 pixels wide. They don't need to be visible. And, per KDE, users could be given the option to select from different sizes, or have no border at all.

Xubuntu 24.04: A minimal install that does what it says on the tin

Know How To Install A Browser Before Installing Xubuntu Minimal

Worth emphasizing that if you're motivation for installing Xubuntu Minimal is avoiding Snaps then you need to know how you're going to install your favorite browser before you install Xubuntu Minimal. A browser is not available after the install and "apt install firefox" will get you the Snapped Firefox.

Fresh version of Windows user-friendly Zorin OS arrives to tempt the Linux-wary

Re: Coincidence...

Linux applications can typically be installed with click or two via whatever "software store" is used. The real difference re: Window is that Linux distributions maintain repositories of software that their software stores access, while Windows apps are strewn around the internet in uncurated places. Linux also deals with software dependencies as part of the install process, something I recall Window does not do, so it's up to an individual software vendor to package those in the installation file. That's one way Windows gets cluttered up with redundant files.

Getting executable code to execute by clicking on an icon is simple in Windows and Linux. It's typically discouraged in Linux because installing random code from random sites can play havoc with the curated software management tools distributions use.

A finer grained approach to installing Linux software -- libraries, drivers, etc. -- typically requires uses of the command line or a GUI tool that does the same thing.

The web is littered with haphazard and outdated and often lazy and unnecessary "guidance" to install X, Y or Z via the command line. (It's also easier to do than writing a piece leading someone through the use of a GUI tool.) The first recourse for Linux users should be the GUI tools present in the distrobution.

Crunchbang++ versus Bunsen Labs: The pair turn it up to 12

Re: Openbox is No Go on 4K

The window decorations/headers don't expand well vertically when I increase font size. I think 9pt is the usual default, I want 11-12 pt and that, iirc, doesn't work well for me. Ditto the traditional XFWM themes in XFCE.

I'm also not satisfied with the compositors available for Openbox. Scrolling in Firefox in Openbox with a touchpad, with or without a compositor, is "ripply" with smooth scrolling on (and I want it on and am too lazy to fiddle around with compositor configurations). I notice it less on a desktop with a mouse and the larger display.

Openbox is No Go on 4K

As a Crunchbang user way back when, I like that these two derivations are still around. I've always liked the menu-on-right-desktop-click approach of Openbox (and XFCE).

That said, Openbox themes don't know about 4K/HiDPI displays. They're broken enough there to be unusable. LXDE and LXQT, both much like Crunchbang and both using Openbox, have the same weakness.

It's not appropriate to think these distributions are candidates for mainstream use. The amount of configurability they expose, out of necessity, limits their appeal to users who are attracted by the need to spend time learning how Openbox and things like pipemenus work. Most users would be stumped trying to figure out "what to do next" after the first boot of an installed system.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

Those nonsensical one-pixel window borders in XFCE were very likely thanks to the Greybird theme, which is very often the default in XFCE distributions, and very often puts one-pixel borders on its windows. Other XFCE themes use more practical borders that work well with a mouse.

That problem is compounded by using XFCE on a 4k/HiDPI screen. GTK components can be scaled at 200% but only the default XFCE window theme (providing the header bar and borders) honors that. Other XFCE themes shrink to an unusable size. And, of course, it makes the problem of chasing a one-pixel window border twice as fun. Various workarounds exist that attempt to remedy this built-in XFCE weakness. I've found them incomplete and not worth the annoyance.

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

If Microsoft was selling an NT 4.0 for current hardware, with better looks, and nothing more, I'd probably be using it.

RHEL and Alma Linux 9.3 arrive – one is free, one merely free of charge

How are Red Hat's enterprise customers reacting to the change in licensing, or whatever they did, that's generating all the hostility from users who almost certainly have never used RH, and never will?

Canonical shows how to use Snaps without the Snap Store

*You* don't need another package manager. Neither do I.

We have things like snaps and flatpaks and appimages because developers want to package their products once, not repeatedly for every distro, and they want control over their software, rather than permitting what shows up on user hardware to be determined by distribution packagers.

And because distributions want to get out of the packaging business.

This will change the nature of distribution because packaging is most of what distributions do.

None of this will happen fast but I expect we will see developers only supporting their software when it's packaged in the format they released it in.

The trolling gets in the way...

When I see "proprietary software" I think branded closed-source products where access to the code is either impossible or requires payment of significant fees.

I don't see anything Canonical is doing re: Snap that fits that. Their Snap Store itself is an irrelevancy, as all such shops are. They're user-side programs to access a repo. "Store" is only a metaphor.

Hostile reaction to all-things Snap sure looks like kneejerk trolling intended simply to punish Canonical for not adhering to someone's demand that everyone in open source must abide by the notions in their head. Or maybe they're still mad about Gnome or whatever.

Snaps, flatpak, appimages and the technology surrounding them merit serious investigation, experiments, and testing. The trolling just makes that more difficult.

It is obvious that all the commercial Linux players are moving toward containerized/immutable/etc systems. It makes good sense for those kinds of markets. And, they're competitors in those markets so, of course, they're fielding different approaches to the same end in hopes of locking down market share.

For individual Linux users and enthusiasts, I don't think it will make much difference as long as debs, rpms, and other traditional package systems are supported. I suspect they will be supported for a very long time because Canonical, Red Hat, etc., will spend years, if not decades, trying to transition their existing paying customers.

For me, if I can tweak and fiddle with things as I currently do, I'm not sure I care about snaps vs flatpaks vs appimages. That's not the case, now, however. There are applications I use that I would not use if I couldn't do use an external tool to adjust one thing thing or another that the app itself does not expose to users. And that's why I don't use flatpaks or appimages.

Fedora 39 waves goodbye to modularity, but has enough spins to make your head spin

Re: I really do not get this...

In addition to using metapackages to add/remove DE's, etc., to existing installations, Fedora offers a 0.6gig network installion "Everything" ISO that allows picking components to install in a fine-grained manner: DE's, window managers, dev tool sets, office apps, etc. E.g., if you want something that's completely different from Gnome and the other releases, you can do it.

A Fedora SIG has for a very long time released updated ISO's -- "Live Respins" of Gnome and the spins wrapping up all the previous updates. It's a nice, reliable way to install Fedora later during a release cycle and avoid most of the inevitable long stream of Fedora updates that happen when you install from a release ISO some time after release day. The ISO's are available on Fedora's infrastructure at https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/live-respins/.