As others have said, Ubuntu is great for non-technical users. The only issue I could forsee is drivers. Apt loves to brick itself after 1 mistake. Since apt lags behind it may not support new hardware, forcing you to download drivers elsewhere, which is a recipe for disaster.
What? Modules (drivers) are absolutely updated all the time. What do you mean between major versions? Of the distro or the kernel? The distros generally choose a specific kernel (lts or otherwise) for their release cycle, but to think it’s static or that backports isn’t a thing isn’t true.
This is all from the POV of a person who just installs Ubuntu and expects it to work. So yes. I meant major releases of the distro and I assumed they weren’t going to fuss with backports.
I figured modules that already exist in the kernel would be updated, but I’ve seen new modules added in later versions of the kernel. And since distro releases seem to stick with a specific kernel version, you would need to completely update your distro to get that support.
Genuinely curious since I haven’t used Debian-based distros in a while, I always thought new modules are installed via the linux-kernel package. Are kernel modules installed separately?
I use workspaces regularly. Typically a browser in one, terminal in one, and the third is where I put whatever else I’m currently working with which could be dolphin and maybe gimp or an IDE, whatever the other is might be in the moment but browser and full screen terminal in separate workspaces are daily standard.
I love the gnome workflow. Coming from MacOS it’s more familiar to me than a windows layout, but still so much better than macOSs defaults. I usually have 3-4 workspaces open, with a specific “environment” in a single or a few workspaces. E.g a browser window with email, todos, calendar etc and other “personal things” in one, maybe one for a certain project I’m working on, another for a work project, etc. This way I’m always focusing on one thing at a time but can quickly context switch and have my laptop “switch with me”. I also make heavy use of alt-tab and Ctrl-tab for window switching. Together with fewer windows per workspace, this makes it super fast to navigate without ever taking my hands off the keyboard. If I forget where things are, a glance at the overview is enough.
It should be noted that I don’t use a mouse and if I love touchpad gestures, so gnome is perfect for me. Even using a keyboard only and the very occasional touchpad is very comfortable on gnome. At least compared to macOS and windows.
There was no special reason for switching 25 years ago. A friend of mine used Debian and I tried it out. Not being a gamer must have helped because if you like playing, chances to encounter a game that only runs on Windows are quite high.
Now the reason why I never changed back. Once the system runs, which may take some rime depending on how customized you want it, it always runs the same way. I never had a slowing down due to updates. Another reason may be not having to think about viruses or malware. Never had it and most likely never will. Antivirus? They may exist for Linux but I have never used them.
Workspaces might be a bit overkill if you’re only switching between two-ish windows. For more you might find a benefit to using workspaces, especially if you group windows related to specific tasks, or if your brain likes having windows “stored” spatially.
Pop! It’s easy to install, stable, and works great with Nvidia drivers. If I have more time on my hands then Arch, because it’s good old-fashioned computing fun.
Xubuntu for “I need this to just work” daily driving, and assorted other stuff for screwing around with. I like the idea of immutable OSes and have considered silverblue and am watching the development of vanillaos…
Xubuntu has been my go-to so I installed 23.04 on both my wife’s new computer, her netbook and our htpc recently. Turns out it ships with a broken xfce4-screensaver that crashes when you try to unlock the computer and you get stuck (unless you switch to a virtual console and kill the process). A xubuntu dev was helpful and directed me to a ppa that had a patched version, but I was still surprised that such a central feature wasn’t working.
In addition there appears to be some kind of screen blanking that I haven’t been able to disable. At first I just turned off the screen saver and all power saving features in the control panel, but the htpc would still turn off the monitor if left alone for some time, and then refuse to turn it back on unless I switched back and forth between virtual terminals while the TV was turned off. It got a little bit better after uninstalling xfce4-power-manager, and now the screen can be woken by moving the mouse, but it shouldn’t turn off at all since it’s supposed to be disabled.
I hope they manage to sort all those things out. I used Xubuntu for 5+ years with almost no issues.
Yeeeerah, I tried 23.04 too and was surprised how buggy bits of it are. I had screensaver issues too, though not quite as bad. I never could manage to get the notification widget to actually work. I gave up and dropped back to 22.04 LTS.
I moved to a 4k monitor and could never get an experience I was happy with, had to move back to Windows. I could use it at 150% scaling and get blurry apps, or 200% scaling and get no screen space.
Now, most programs did work fine or I could tolerate them (I don't care if Spotify is a bit blurry). But gaming was just bad, GNOME told the games a fake resolution and then rescaled them, so they looked awful. The best solution I found was using a Python script to disable scaling before launching a game, but it was clunky at best.
Now, the new fractional scaling extensions did add the ability to have the app handle scaling by itself, so I'm really just waiting for an option to disable scaling for X11 programs or for Gamescope to add a "tell the compositor I will handle scaling but then don't do anything" option so I can actually get full resolution for my games.
I'm also waiting for variable refresh rate, but I can live without that as GNOME Wayland doesn't really get tearing ever.
I’m in the UK and open street map has mapped out my local area more accurately than google. It is marginal, but I stopped using google maps after a few issues: I was hiking and it directed me into a privately owned farm (claiming it is a permissive footpath).The farmer was very racist.
Another time I was directed through the middle of a primary school.
I don’t like workspaces. It may be due to my asymmetric vision, but I need to have two or more screens with the data I’m going back and forth with. With hobbyist embedded stuff like Arduino, I need the datasheet and IDE side by side to be effective and laptop screens are too small for tiling IMO, even my 17’s (1080p) don’t cut it. Maybe my next with a higher resolution will be better.
Makes sense! I agree laptops tend to be too small for tiling; I don’t really use the tiling part of i3 on my laptop very much - usually only to pop open a terminal window on the side that I close after a few minutes.
It's pretty decent for me with ten workspaces (and each one mapped in a sequence from Alt+1 through Alt+0). Text editor always in the first workspace, browser in the second, music in the third, etc. What's nice is that you can (almost) replicate the same workflow if someone forces you to use macOS or Windows at work
Virtual Desktops haven’t really been a thing that I’ve really needed in my work flow. Maybe one day I will give using one a shot. I actually prefer my current setup with dual 27" monitors.
More/better atomic distros, like Silverblue, Kinoite, VanillaOS, etc. Silverblue is already excellent, easy to use and extremely solid, but there are still some odd rough edges that I think would make it less appealing to new users. When we can offer newbies a personally unbreakable Linux system that does basically everything they want and more, then I think it'll be easy to recommend. At this point it's hard to imagine going back to a traditionally updated distro.
The next steps for PipeWire, which has improved and streamlined audio (and sometimes video) handling and production immensely. I can imagine a future where we can easily send, audio, video, midi, and all kinds of other data streams between arbitrary programs on Linux, easily routing things with GUI frontends, having connections establish automatically, etc. I don't know how much this stuff is in the works, but I think PipeWire has a ton of potential left to be explored.
I’m a happy user of Fedora workstation. What makes Silverblue better? I’ve never tried it. I’ve done lots of changes but my system has been rock solid since Fedora 36.
I was on Fedora workstation before switching to Silverblue and they're both quite solid, to be fair. The big feature that differentiates Silverblue is immutability--you can't easily make changes to the base system.
Now, to some people I think that's going to sound awful, but it has its pros and cons. The biggest benefit being that your base system is solid (and not just solid as in unlikely to break, but literally unchanging over time). Updating your system is effectively replacing it with a different system entirely (delta compressed, so it's not too inefficient, if I understand correctly), and you can rollback/revert/swap between systems on the fly, in the unlikely event that an update makes something worse, though I haven't needed to. You can even rebase your Silverblue (Gnome) system into a Kinoite (KDE Plasma) system, pin both "commits" and swap between them. I haven't tried that though, since I'm pretty happy with the Gnome workflow. Long story short, immutable distros like Silverblue are basically as solid as solid can be.
There are two drawbacks that I can think of, and then a couple of minor nitpicks. The biggest being that you need to restart your system after making changes or installing packages. You don't need to restart between each package install or anything, but any system-level changes that you make won't take effect until you restart. The second drawback is that layering packages is not always ideal and working inside docker/podman containers (often via toolbx/distrobox) is the best way to do some tasks. For example, if you're a programmer and need to install a lot of dependencies to build some program, I find it's best to create a "pet container" to work in. That doesn't both me much though, in fact I kind of like that workflow.
So basically, it's probably not for everyone, especially people who really love to tinker and customizes everything. But if you want a basically unbreakable Linux machine, it's worth looking into.
Thanks much for the detailed reply. It’s obviously not for me since I do a lot of tinkering and I’m used to the traditional system. But it definitely should be suitable for some scenarios. Scools and kiosks come to mind.
The base os is immutable, but you can still change configuration files, compile and install local software (but not in the immutable directories), install desktop environment extensions, add custom repositories, etc. You can also layer packages, but most graphical software is best installed as flatpaks (but not mandatory). So it depends on what tinkering means for you. If it means messing around with binaries in the default locations, like /usr/bin, then it’s not for you, but for many other things there is a way, it’s just a matter of getting used to the separation between the immutable base layer and the things that you build around and on top of it.
It feels great on my laptop with gestures. On desktop, not so much. Feels like it’s designed to have one full screen application up at a time. Removal of tray icons is just stupid, and they should just give up on their push against them. Which their quest against tray icons is actually worse then just unstandardized tray icons themselves. Still, it’s definitely the most polished DE out there, so that’s why I tend to stick with it and run dash-to-panel. The overview mode is actually better then I realize now that I got used to it. Even pressing the mouse against the top left corner starts to feel nice.
linux
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.