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Ubuntu Operating Systems Linux

Canonical Releases Ubuntu Linux 19.10 Eoan Ermine with GNOME 3.34, Light Theme, and Raspberry Pi 4 Support (betanews.com) 50

Posted by msmash from the weekend-project dept.
Following the beta period, one of the best and most popular Linux-based desktop operating systems reaches a major milestone -- you can now download Ubuntu 19.10! Code-named "Eoan Ermine", the distro is better and faster then ever. From a report: By default, Ubuntu 19.10 comes with one of the greatest desktop environments -- GNOME 3.34. In addition, users will be delighted by an all-new optional Yaru light theme. There is even baked-in support for the Raspberry Pi 4. The kernel is based on Linux 5.3 and comes with support for AMD Navi GPUs. There are plenty of excellent pre-installed programs too, such as LibreOffice 6.3, Firefox 69, and Thunderbird 68. While many users will be quick to install Google Chrome, I would suggest giving Firefox a try -- it has improved immensely lately. "With GNOME 3.34, Ubuntu 19.10 is the fastest release yet with significant performance improvements delivering a more responsive and smooth experience, even on older hardware. App organization is easier with the ability to drag and drop icons into categorized folders, while users can select light or dark Yaru theme variants depending on their preference or for improved viewing accessibility. Native support for ZFS on the root partition is introduced as an experimental desktop installer option. Coupled with the new zsys package, benefits include automated snapshots of file system states, allowing users to boot to a previous update and easily roll forwards and backwards in case of failure," says Canonical.
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Canonical Releases Ubuntu Linux 19.10 Eoan Ermine with GNOME 3.34, Light Theme, and Raspberry Pi 4 Support More

Canonical Releases Ubuntu Linux 19.10 Eoan Ermine with GNOME 3.34, Light Theme, and Raspberry Pi 4 Support

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  • (as I open up DistroWatch and see Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Ubuntu MATE all had new releases on the same day) Makes me feel lame for just running stock Ubuntu.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 )

      Nothing wrong with stock Ubuntu. Often the people who use the variants are the ones with the issues. Because they just can't to seem to get over not using their WM that they had used for the last 25 years. Now that said, these variants tend to run better on other platforms, and some with Older systems. So going with the variants is a good choice.

      However I normally stick with stock, primarily because it makes support much easier. A quick google search on how to do something in Ubuntu would probably give

      • Nothing wrong with stock Ubuntu. Often the people who use the variants are the ones with the issues. Because they just can't to seem to get over not using their WM that they had used for the last 25 years. Now that said, these variants tend to run better on other platforms, and some with Older systems.

        Case in point, I use the Ubuntu MATE variant as much I prefer it to GNOME, especially since they "upgraded" to release 3. It also seems to work better on my slightly older hardware... I'm currently using Ubuntu 16.06.6 on my main Linux system, but with the latest LibreOffice installed.

      • Yep, I also run stock Ubuntu on my Linux dev machine. Since my software is going to be deployed on three desktop platforms, it makes sense to work on what is one of the most popular Linux variants right from the start, especially for gaming. And since I'm not nearly as knowledgeable regarding Linux as with other platforms (learning all the time though), I didn't mind a more noob-friendly distro.

        As you indicated, people enjoy customizing their tools, but I avoid that for practical reasons. Beyond picking

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by sconeu ( 64226 )

          Since I'm an independent developer, I don't have a large number of PCs to test on

          That, my friend, is why God invented Virtual Machines.

          Try VmWare or VirtualBox

          • Virtual machines don't seem to be as practical for game developers. I tried VirtualBox a few years ago without much success. Instead, I have three machines hooked to a KVM switch. On my Linux box, I'll probably just install multiple distros on different partitions for testing / diagnosis when I get a bit closer to shipping.

            Appreciate the suggestion though.

            • Virtual machines don't seem to be as practical for game developers. I tried VirtualBox a few years ago without much success.

              Especially for gaming there is no substitute for running on the bare metal, but vmware's 3d acceleration support is literally years ahead of virtualbox. However, Player is only free for non-commercial use, so if you're charging for your labors, you don't get to use it anyway. I've had surprisingly good luck with it when playing games in it, though. Older games actually run without perceptible difference.

              However, the suggestion was that one could use it for testing other Linux variants to see which ones were

              • Yeah, honestly I haven't regretted taking the "real hardware" route. Avoiding VMs means just one less thing to worry about. My three-machine KVM switch setup has worked pretty nicely so far. And since I have a dedicated Linux box with lots of free disk space, it shouldn't be that hard to just install a few additional distros for testing purposes on new partitions once I'm a bit closer to release.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tailhook ( 98486 )

        Because they just can't to seem to get over

        Right. Couldn't be a technical issue... it's all just silly hangups.

        Gnome is slow remote. If you want fast remote desktop you need old fashioned non-composite rendering, and Gnome can't do that properly. Don't bother with you're guesswork; you're wrong. It's laggy no matter what settings or tricks you think you know about and that's by design.

        You can turn off compositing and effects with both Xubuntu (Xfce) and Kubuntu (KDE) and get a fast, low lag remote desktop using TigerVNC over 1000g Ethernet.

      • " they just can't to seem to get over not using their WM that they had used for the last 25 years."

        Sure, just point me to the modern environment that offers the viewport and pages of FVWM2.

  • Gnome? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 ) on Friday October 18, 2019 @02:18PM (#59323156) Homepage Journal

    >comes with one of the greatest desktop environments -- GNOME 3.34

    I must be in a parallel universe where sensible environments like xfce don't exist.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kazymyr ( 190114 )

        "Xfce gang gang report in"

        I'm here, do we rant on Gnome again?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Psion ( 2244 )
        Reporting in as ordered, Capt'n! I like my resource consumption as light as possible. The more you overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain!

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        Proud Xubuntu user since 2011, when after a month of 11.10 I decided I had had enough of Un(usabil)ity and did sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by doom ( 14564 )

      Yeah, I'm on icewm myself. I periodically try something trendier, but run back to icewm because it has keyboard commands to manipulate everything-- I can move windows, change sizes, switch between workspaces, and run commands without grabbing the mouse if I don't feel like it.

      The kids keep shipping UIs with only half of a keyboard story (like, each window may still have a menu with keyboard alternates indicated, but if there's a keyboard command to open it, it's not alt-space any more and I can't discov

      • Oh hell, it's even worse than only having half a keyboard story. I've noticed in a few prominent places we've actually regressed to "mystery meat" navigation, tossing aside several decades of UX wisdom. That is, there are several places I've noticed with nothing but an icon to press with no tooltip telling you what the hell will happen when you click on that icon.

        Obviously, that's inescapable on mobile due to space constraints and a lack of a notion of "hover", but it's absolutely inexcusable on a desktop

      • Back in my day we didn't have "environments". We had window managers, and we liked it!

        icewm workspaces are the closest I can get to to the viewports of FVWM2 out of the "environments" available on the compute servers at work. Someone managed to compile their own copy fvwm2 and get work setups to run it instead of the preselected list, but I haven't figured out how he did it.

    • I used Kubuntu for a long time but because of some bugs found myself back on stock Ubuntu. It turns out with a couple of extensions Gnome isn't bad. Primarily "gnome tweak tool" and "dash to panel", which makes it behave much like KDE with a little customization. It would be nice if some of this stuff was built in.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hackel ( 10452 )

      XFCE is indeed sensible—on old and underpowered hardware. I can't imagine using it as a daily driver. It's somewhat painful to look at. It feels like going back in time at least 10 years. Surprisingly, it doesn't even reduce system resource usage all that much and certainly doesn't feel particularly snappy. But obviously some people prefer it, and that's the great thing about running a Linux distribution, you can choose what you like.

      But going out of your way to put down the thing you don't like

      • >But going out of your way to put down the thing you don't like every time it's mentioned? That's just pathetic.

        I was just responding to the claim TFS made that it is the greatest desktop. It's a highly subjective judgement.

  • Firefox 69 (Score:2, Redundant)

    by stinerman ( 812158 )

    What a nice version to include in the release!

  • I Switched to Manjaro (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tempest_2084 ( 605915 ) on Friday October 18, 2019 @02:32PM (#59323226)
    I was a devout Ubuntu user for 7+ years, but I've since switched over to Manjaro. It seemed that every new release of Ubuntu was buggier than the last, and the 'improvements' being mostly useless. The last straw was when my laptop's wifi card suddenly stopped being recognized for absolutely no reason. I appreciate everything Ubuntu did to bring Linux to the masses (although that may be an unpopular opinion to have around here), but it just sort of stagnated after a while. Now that I have some decent Linux knowledge under my belt I find Manjaro (and Arch) to be much more usable. Plus I don't have to try and find all those codecs that Ubuntu refuses to put in the base install because they're not open source.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by doom ( 14564 )
      Around the time of Unity (great name eh? Talk about your unintentional irony...) I switched back to Debian, myself... it does more or less what I need it to do-- the issues that created a need for Ubuntu are long since gone-- and I trust the volunteer organization behind it more than I do Ubuntu.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hackel ( 10452 )

      You are thinking of Debian. Unfortunately there's loads of proprietary software in Ubuntu. God for bid anyone actually have moral standards or anything, though.

      • God for bid anyone actually have moral standards or anything, though.

        You sound like a vegan complaining that supermarkets sell beef to others. If you want to live in some moral edge case then by all means, but you should be catered for either through a specialist distribution, or at the very most a checkbox. No modern OS should force a user to have to figure out how to play a video.

  • I'll give it a try. :)

  • Ubuntu is closest to a de facto linux desktop (Score:5, Interesting)

    by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Friday October 18, 2019 @02:35PM (#59323248)

    IMHO, if your hardware is modern, and you only want a linux desktop, go to Ubuntu, is as close as a de facto linux desktop as possible. Many manufacturers ship machines with Ubuntu out of the box, which means that chances are there will be drivers for similar machines in their lineup. Chances are the programs you want to run will have a ubuntu specific install method, and documentation will be abundant.
    So, if all you want is a productive Linux desktop with minimal fuss, go Ubuntu.

    The the blessing and curse of linux desktops is that there are much choices... just go to VirtualBox (to cite just 1 example) and compare windows, mac and Linux installers.

    But that also means there are distros that catter to special needs. Some of my personal favourites:

    If you come from the windows/mac world*, and are intimidated by all this linux thing, go to ZorinOS, they go out of their way to mimic those systems.

    If you have really underpowered/ancient systems, go to CrunchBang ++ . Is more up to date compared to debian than Bunsenlabs (#!++ is in Debian 10, while bunsen is still on Debian 9), and has low ram modes that use half the ram of the minimum of bunsen, which in turn uses less resources than Lubuntu et al.

    Try them with VirtualBox, and compare yourself

    * Needless to say, the optimal path is to gradually transition your apps to FOSS first, while mantaining your OS, and after you transitioned your apps, you change the underlying OS. Otherwise, there will be too many learning curves at the same time, and you will fail.

    • Re:Ubuntu is closest to a de facto linux desktop (Score:4, Informative)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Friday October 18, 2019 @02:54PM (#59323344)

      It seems for the past 15 years. Ubuntu has been the top Distribution. Shortly after RedHat went commercial, and Fedora became rather crippled.

      It seemed that from 93-1996 (3 years) Slackware was the main Distro, 1997-2004 (6 Years) Red Hat. Ubuntu has been pushing 15 years, with no real replacement at the moment.

      • There can be only one top distribution. Importantly though, those just behind it are almost entirely compatible, and perfectly viable in their own right - so there is no dangerous dependence upon Ubuntu. Should anything happen to the company, everyone can just switch to one of several alternative distributions with a modest, but not insurmountable, level of difficulty.

      • It seems for the past 15 years. Ubuntu has been the top Distribution. Shortly after RedHat went commercial, and Fedora became rather crippled.

        I can't speak for anyone else, but I didn't stop using redhat (around v6.x) because it was crippled, I stopped using it because of dependency hell. And when I tired of Ubuntu because of Unity, I didn't go back because I didn't want to be one of Redhat's alpha testers for RHEL components, which is what Fedora users are. I just went to using Debian directly. Then I held off updating until Devuan became available, for one obvious reason.

        • So you're saying that essentially mimics Debian?

          • So you're saying that essentially mimics Debian?

            What mimics Debian? Debian was part of that story, so you're going to have to try harder to make sense.

      • ZipSlack in '98 was the first Linux for me. Running an OS, on crap hardware (Cyrix MII with 48GB. yes 32 + 16 RAM), over a Iomega 100 MB Zip drive ( OS fits on 100 MB disk!!!), and it worked, Slackware it is then, Win 98 for the stuff that needs Windows. Ubuntu, Mandrake/Mandriva, Suse, Debian, have come and gone as installs, many others as live CDs or USBs. Slackeware makes sense if you want reliable. Yes, reliable may be boring.

  • Does this mean my MSDOS 3.1 is out of date already?

    Dang, and I was thinking of installing Windows 3 so as to get all GUI on it.

    Time flies eh?

  • I use Ubuntu because I want things to just work (Score:3, Insightful)

    by smokingsomething ( 6183192 ) on Friday October 18, 2019 @03:57PM (#59323542)
    I use Ubuntu because I want things to just work. I also want all the supported applications out there to have installation that are simple. Every important piece of software that I use has a easy method to install on Ubuntu. Spotify, steam, various music production software. That being said there are some rough corners still. There are things that don't go as smoothly as expected. the last two releases seemed mostly focused on catching up with the transition back to gnome. Each time a Ubuntu tries to create a solution in-house to similar ideas already being worked on it tends to fizzle out. Unity and mir come to mind. Snap may go this route as well. I think ubuntu's strength has been in creating a rock solid well rounded distro that is stable, usable and well supported. Or at least that's the idea. Unfortunately sometimes they fall short of this. Unfortunately/fortunately, there is a lot of room for improvement for Linux desktoping. They have helped the cause though and i hope they continue working to smooth out the rough edges.

    • Ironically this applies well to the desktop but not at all to the server. Ubuntu's server infrastructure is now so cloud centered that on every boot it attempts some kind of weird automatic system provisioning through some services that basically ensure the network configuration will not be the same before and after a reboot.

      The amount of config files I had to dig through to stop that behaviour was just ridiculous. I will probably migrate the server to either Debian or Arch at some point. When your "Linux"

  • That's like, man, your opinion, you know, man.

  • Why would anyone install Chrome on Linux? That makes no sense at all. Even if you prefer it over Firefox, why wouldn't you install Chromium without all of the proprietary Google spyware backed-in? I just don't understand. Is it simply a lack of awareness? Linux users are typically a little more informed than your average consumer.

    It should also be mentioned that Ubuntu 19.10 has actually *removed* Chromium from its repositories, and will automatically install the distribution-independent Snap package o

  • Thus all but guaranteeing that Linux will continue spinning its wheels in the desktop.

  • Can anyone indicate how this compares to Raspbian, on the Pi? Wondering whether there is any good reason to switch?

  • I absolutely cannot stand having window and app controls on the same bar.

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