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Ubuntu Linux

This Week Saw New Releases of 'Ubuntu Unity' and 'Ubuntu Cinnamon' (theregister.com) 74

Posted by EditorDavid from the reviewing-remixes dept.
The Register noted this week that two "unofficial" Ubuntu remixes "came out on the same day as the official flavors."

- Ubuntu Cinnamon (Linux Mint's flagship desktop environment)

- Ubuntu Unity, a revival of what used to be the official Ubuntu desktop by Ubuntu team member Rudra B. Saraswat (described the Register as "a 12-year-old wunderkind") Ubuntu Cinnamon is the older of the two and first appeared in 2019, while Ubuntu Unity came out in May 2020, soon after the release of Ubuntu 20.04.

Ubuntu Unity....has the macOS-like desktop that was Ubuntu's standard offering from 2011 until the company pensioned it off in 2017.... Ubuntu Unity is as free as Ubuntu itself, and the new remix continues to evolve. In 22.04, most of the GNOME-based accessory apps have been replaced with the MATE equivalents, such as the Pluma text editor and Atril document viewer. (A handful remain, such as the GNOME system monitor rather than the MATE one, but the differences are trivial.) The System Settings app is the original Unity one, and the Unity Tweaks app comes pre-installed.... The new "Jammy Jellyfish" version of Ubuntu Unity also adds support for Flatpak packages alongside Ubuntu's native Snap packages. To do this, it replaces Ubuntu's Software Store with version 41.5 of GNOME Software. Interestingly, this also supports Snap packages, so sometimes, when you search for a package, you might get multiple results: one for the OS-native DEB package, possibly one for a Flatpak, and maybe a Snap version too....

[I]f you dislike both the Unity and GNOME desktops and want something more Windows-like, but you don't mind GNOME's CSD windows, then Joshua Peisach's Ubuntu Cinnamon remix may appeal. Cinnamon is the default desktop of both Ubuntu-based Linux Mint and its Debian variant. Ubuntu Cinnamon combines the latest upstream version of Mint's Cinnamon desktop, 5.2.7, with the standard app selection of upstream Ubuntu. This means most of its apps lack menu bars, except for the Nemo file manager and LibreOffice. For these classic-style apps, the Ubuntu Cinnamon distro has tweaked the GNOME title-bar layout to be more Windows-like: minimize/maximize/close buttons at top right, and a window-management menu at top left....

Cinnamon's roots as a fork of GNOME 3 do offer a significant potential feature that MATE, Xfce and indeed Unity cannot do: fractional scaling. This is clearly labelled as an experimental feature, and in testing, we couldn't get it to work, so for now, this remains a theoretical advantage.... These caveats aside, though, Ubuntu Cinnamon is maturing nicely in the new version. While Ubuntu and Ubuntu Unity are now purple-toned, Ubuntu Cinnamon has switched to a restrained theme in shades of dark orange and brown, which reminded us of the tasteful earth-toned Ubuntu of the old GNOME 2 days...

Both these desktops are X.11-based, so there's not a trace of Wayland in either distro. Both also benefit from having working 3D acceleration.
Both remixes "are aiming for inclusion as official Ubuntu flavors," the article points out.

But then again, "There are dozens of Ubuntu remixes and flavors out there. The official Ubuntu Derivatives page links to 30, and DistroWatch has more than five times as many, including many which are no longer maintained."
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This Week Saw New Releases of 'Ubuntu Unity' and 'Ubuntu Cinnamon' More

This Week Saw New Releases of 'Ubuntu Unity' and 'Ubuntu Cinnamon'

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  • The question remains: is this still free software? Why should we care then (since Unity is in Debian)?

  • There are dozens of Ubuntu remixes and flavors out there.

    Yes, but if you use them, nobody will support you. You have to use Ubuntu, Kubuntu, or maybe Lubuntu if you want support for commercial software from Valve, Aspyr, or others. (Well, who's paying for application software on Linux anyway? A minuscule slice now that OO.o exists.)

    • Support? I use Debian. I do my own support and use "the Internet" for that. My SteamBox is literally Debian 11, booting into a very lightweight DE, autostarting the Steam client in Big Picture mode... all of the info to do that, is available online.
      • I use Debian too (OP is talking about game-related software, where this support issue is a real PITA for non-main Ubuntu... For non-gaming software, Debian support is much better than Ubuntu, in my experience...)

      • My SteamBox is literally Debian 11

        Then if you have a problem with Steam you can't solve yourself, you're fucked, because Valve will refuse to support you. I'm running Pop!OS which is just Ubuntu with some additional stuff to improve power management, and Valve refuses to support even that. System76 users may HAVE to run it in order to get working PM.

        • I don't expect support from any vendor on any platform. It's that simple.

        • What the fuck are you on about?

          I've been running PopOS for a year and a half and steam works just fine. I game all of the time on this machine. Steam is literally the only gaming platform I have, and I sure as hell wouldn't be using this OS if it didn't work pretty much flawlessly.

          The only issue I have is that if this goes to sleep with steam on an external monitor sometimes steam will hang, but killing it and restarting it fixes that issue.

      • Ditto on my Steam gaming system, I even have ESO working better than my wife's Win10 setup. Most of it has been cut and paste. I need more help in crafting the right search query in Google than I need in setting up something a thousand others have documented on forum posts and blogs.

    • I mean, you can't really expect them to support a bazillion different OS packages. This gives you the best of both worlds: use the remix of your choice if you don't have commercial software concerns (most Linux users likely don't) and if you do, use one of the supported packages.

      It's not as if you can't easily just install Unity or Cinnamon in "regular" Ubuntu anyways.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • You are silly. Support for almost all desktop Linux issues boils down to forums and search engine for other places (stackoverflow, etc.)

      Linux Mint "support" is great and I've been using that distro for over 10 years. Nice to have driver manager with recommendations too, even has the best nvidia driver for me listed with others with "recommended" highlighted and installs with a click.

      Paid support for Linux? Even at work where I manage hundreds of servers running five different distros I've NEVER had to c

      • I think the OP is speaking of game-related software (specifically at Steam/Valve): for other kind of software, there's several distros better than Ubuntu where's "support" (solving problems in-house) is corcerned...

    • There are dozens of Ubuntu remixes and flavors out there.

      Yes, but if you use them, nobody will support you. You have to use Ubuntu, Kubuntu, or maybe Lubuntu if you want support for commercial software from Valve, Aspyr, or others. (Well, who's paying for application software on Linux anyway? A minuscule slice now that OO.o exists.)

      That might be true of a thoroughly "remixed" distro like Linux Mint. But if the changes are only at the window manager level, how are the commercial software vendors to know you're not using official asterisk-buntu?

      This isn't Android, but GNU/Linux, where the computing environment is still presumably under user control. Unless Canonical has managed to so terribly break or "Snap" its Debian base, Ubuntu Official allows for changing (via the apt-get mechanism) stuff like window managers and even desktop env

  • Nope. (Score:3)

    by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Monday May 02, 2022 @06:58AM (#62496024)
    I'm going to need a non-stripper name to even consider that shit.

  • Who cares? (Score:3)

    by Teun ( 17872 ) on Monday May 02, 2022 @07:02AM (#62496030)
    Who cares when you can have Kubuntu or Neon?

  • Have you had any luck using this? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by leonbev ( 111395 ) on Monday May 02, 2022 @07:21AM (#62496064) Journal

    When I tried upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04 on my laptop, it screwed up the GRUB bootloader and left my system unbootable.

    I think that I'll wait for a point release before I try again.

    • No surprise there as grub is an over complicated piece of shit. Open up the config and it even says not to edit the file yourself. I use elilo.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Menkhaf ( 627996 )

        And apparently you can't read, because the reason for not editing the file is right there at the top:


        # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE
        #
        # It is automatically generated by grub-mkconfig using templates
        # from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        The shame is that grub supports straightforward configuration, but the distributions overcomplicate it and use the convoluted features to implement their vision of how grub configuration sources from multiple places

    • My experience with Ubuntu (and all other Linux flavors) is that they're even less friendly than Windows when it comes to from upgrading an in-place system from one OS version to another.

      Typically when I go from one version to another I backup my config files and data, do a complete reinstall, and then reintegrate what I can. That's also why I've settled on sticking with LTS releases - even on my home desktop. I'm only going to do that move all the files over dance every 2 years or so (and on my work serve

      • Re:Have you had any luck using this? (Score:4, Informative)

        by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Monday May 02, 2022 @08:25AM (#62496228)

        My experience with Ubuntu (and all other Linux flavors) is that they're even less friendly than Windows when it comes to from upgrading an in-place system from one OS version to another.

        My experience has been just the opposite. I've upgraded Kubuntu in place for over ten years. I do a full update (apt-get update), then a release upgrade (do-release-upgrade) from the command line. I have my home directory either on a separate partition or a separate drive, so I still have my data even if the upgrade goes wrong. Of course, I also backup my home directories to an external RAID on a regular basis, so I'm not that worried if the upgrade goes sideways.

        That brings back memories of why you may have had trouble. Back when I still used the GUI upgrader, I ran into occasional problems. When I switched to the command line upgrader, all upgrade problems stopped. I've been doing remote in-place upgrades ever since. Rumor has it that the GUI upgrader has been fixed, but I've not had any desire to use it. Command line upgrades are more convenient for me.

        Also, since you mentioned it, I've been sticking to LTS releases, too. Perhaps the short term releases have upgrade problems that don't exist in LTS releases. LTS releases are supposed to be the result of fixing bugs in the short term releases.

        • then a release upgrade (do-release-upgrade) from the command line

          In the past 6 years that command has failed me at least three releases.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kbahey ( 102895 )

          My experience with Ubuntu (and all other Linux flavors) is that they're even less friendly than Windows when it comes to from upgrading an in-place system from one OS version to another.

          My experience has been just the opposite. I've upgraded Kubuntu in place for over ten years. I do a full update (apt-get update), then a release upgrade (do-release-upgrade) from the command line. I have my home directory either on a separate partition or a separate drive, so I still have my data even if the upgrade goes wro

      • This is why Fedora Silverblue is so groundbreaking. Upgrading the OS is just swapping out one immutable base image for another. Maintaining support for customization done by the user is simply handled by flatpack.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        I take your point. I guess it depends on your definition of "friendly" and to which kind users it is friendly to.

        To me I was super impressed that I could upgrade Fedora in place from Fedora 32 to Fedora 35 at all. In one jump. And with a completely unsupported configuration, ZFS on root. I was totally expecting the upgrade to completely fail, but it didn't. After all sometimes I couldn't even upgrade ZFS itself without issues. The installer process essentially (behind the scenes) changed the dnf sourc

        • So to the point of this article, I updated my ubuntu clone today, and the upgrade failed.

          I was unable to log into my main machine.

          So, I fired up a terminal instead of logging into the desktop, ran through the upgrade process again, purged old files, rebooted, and I was back to normal.

          A lot of people would call that unfriendly, but I'm not sure what my Windows (or even Mac) fallback would have been. The GUI system failed me, but I still had a fully functional terminal to fall back on. And yes, I did need to

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Menkhaf ( 627996 )

      Upgraded 3 systems so far, no issues at all.

  • So, what's the average Joe's linux version these days? Which one is most supported and most stable, as you know, these things matter more than what the desktop layout is like. Also, there is a thing called "choice paralysis" and there is a thing where with a finite pool of resources (developers, forums, etc), the more you divide a project the more useless all variants become.

    • So, what's the average Joe's linux version these days?

      Mint seems to offer a good balance of "works out of the box" and "isn't too much like Windows." It's what I deploy on desktops for daily use. I wouldn't deploy it as a server, and my own systems, with which I don't mind fucking around, are on Arch or Debian.

      Mint does have systemd, always a point of contention but not such a PITA on desktops, and does not have the gnarly Snap stuff (I really don't need each app having one or several mountpoints, thanks, but it can be installed if needed).

      Every printer I'v

      • Thanks! Last I used linux was a few years ago with ubuntu/xfce, and nvidia drivers were nightmare. Mint sounds good to try out again (did try it 15 years ago now? I guess it's changed a bit)
    • Fedora Silverblue, using only the GUI app store.

  • Snap ? (Score:3)

    by dargaud ( 518470 ) <slashdot2@nOSpaM.gdargaud.net> on Monday May 02, 2022 @08:07AM (#62496192) Homepage
    I just upgraded one of my Kubuntu. Works fine so far, but one thing I noticed is that Firefox is now on snap. But WTF is snap ? What does it change, what are the pros and cons, how do you use it ? And WTF is flatpack ? So how do you deal with competing package managers in practice ?

    • Re:Snap ? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Entropius ( 188861 ) on Monday May 02, 2022 @08:34AM (#62496246)

      My naive impression (from a full-time linux user but not a developer) is that snap is a way to bring windows-style opacity and bloat to Linux. Flatpak is another way to do that but it sucks somewhat less.

      • Why so negative? Snap solves some very real issues related to dependencies and in theory allows for a faster and more flexible release cycle of app. There's nothing opaque about it, most people don't have the slightest clue what happens when they apt-get install something either and both of these are better than whatever the heck happens when you do a make && make install and hope the magic works.

        That said snap is a bucket of shit. It's one thing to package libraries and programs in a self contained

        • When I first got into Linux, this was one of the selling points I would explain to people. On Windows, each developer ships their software with every library that it needs. It's easy for the developer, sure; they ship the exact version they want and they know it works. When you have other software that uses the same library, it too will come packaged with that software and take up extra space both on disk and in memory. If a vulnerability is discovered in one of those libraries, you're now dependent on the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tukz ( 664339 )

      This is actually a decision from Firefox.

      As for the "what is snap", they're essentially sandboxed containers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      • I got the impression Firefox was also available as a regular apt package, so the ultimate decision would have been Ubuntu's?

        In fact I've been meaning to try to switch to apt. I much prefer the purity of apt in concept and snap currently has some bug where it can't properly access or remember my local folders because it doesn't run as my user. E.g. most of the time I try to save a file it reinterprets the previous ~/Documents as /var/run..../tmp or some such, and I have to browse manually.

    • Re:Snap ? (Score:4, Informative)

      by DeanonymizedCoward ( 7230266 ) on Monday May 02, 2022 @09:30AM (#62496416)

      ...But WTF is snap ? What does it change, what are the pros and cons, how do you use it ? And WTF is flatpack ? So how do you deal with competing package managers in practice ?

      Both of these try to mitigate the Dependency Hell problem by packaging an app with its dependencies (libraries and stuff) rather than relying entirely on system-installed versions of them.

      Snap does its thing by kind of being a graphical Docker, putting apps into containers along with a core set of system libraries (typically targeting an Ubuntu release), which get mounted on the fs tree, and it uses kernel magic to more or less isolate apps and users from each other.

      some Pros: it's easier for end users, who can usually just install a Snap and it works, and for devs, who don't have to worry so much about libraries, they just package what they developed with, and for distro builders who don't have to rebuild every package for their package-manager-du-jour, they just have to build Snap. Apps run in containers, with arguably better security than running them un-containerized, and the Snap architecture presents the developer with a somewhat-consistent environment in which their app runs regardless of what's on the underlying system. Snap, with its visible mounts and whatnot, might actually be one of the more transparent and Unix-ish ways to do this thing, even if it makes your tree look ugly.

      some Cons: Requires the snap daemon & associated stuff, which sets up and manages the aforementioned kernel magic and mounts. If your distro doesn't offer that as a package, installing it might be difficult for the average user. Makes a mess of the fs tree. And IMO one of the more important ones, moves development away from the "you can compile it yourself" model toward the "you'll install what we give you" model. Sure, it's possible and not even difficult to build a snap from source, but good luck if you want to build a non-Snap version from the source.

      I haven't worked with flatpak enough to say anything intelligent about it.

      As for multiple package managers, Snap coexists nicely because it exists outside of the "normal" package manager, and only the Snap Daemon is "installed systemwide" as far as apt or whatever is concerned. Coexisting with other package managers that use the same kernel machinery might be trickier, but presumably it can be done.

      • I'm not much of a fan of the compile it yourself approach. For the most part the result is usually a heck of a mixed bag and quite opaque as to what is going on unless you're a programmer yourself, setting flags, install directories etc. Then you end up with your program files god knows where (because who actually sets this up rather than just following an instruction of make && make install), and good luck uninstalling it.

        But you missed a huge downside to snap, they are SLOW. At least on first exec

      • Flatpak can install and run apps without administrative privilege, which is great to use and throw non-free apps, say on a temporary account. Finding and distinguishing free and non-free apps is also easy on flathub.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dargaud ( 518470 )

        Both of these try to mitigate the Dependency Hell problem by packaging an app with its dependencies (libraries and stuff) rather than relying entirely on system-installed versions of them.

        But doesn't that mean that every snap app now carries basically an entire OS-worth of libs with it, making it orders of magnitude bigger ? And that you now can't update a system lib (glibc anyone?) that'll benefit every app, but you'll have to wait for every app to be updated separately, if ever ?

        Personally with the speed of systems now, I don't understand why every app isn't compiled on the system and optimized with -native like in gentoo. Seems all backward to me.

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday May 02, 2022 @09:45AM (#62496464)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Snap and Flatpak are both package managers that employ 'container' design (ability to construct different filesystem views, with different contents and permissions, as well as other namespaces like process namespace and such). Better than Docker image in the respect that it inherently supports 'library' type images to share things (e.g. a 'gnome 42' container can be used by multiple gnome applications).

      This allows the application developer to pick the libraries they think make sense rather than trying to s

  • ...it's secure, well-supported/documented, I can change the desktop image to something neutral, it has minimal animations & doesn't get in my way, I don't care what the desktop looks like. Bog standard, out of the box Ubuntu works fine for me.
  • "Cinnamon's roots as a fork of GNOME 3 do offer a significant potential feature that MATE, Xfce and indeed Unity cannot do: fractional scaling."

    Since 2020, Xfce supports fractional scaling.

  • "I like cinnamon."

  • I prefer drop down dialogs and windows, so shade(drop down) is a plus for me. I am thinking Unity does not do shade and Cinnamon might? W
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • What fanboi nonsense.

      No, don't use Ubuntu. Use the fork, Mint has better installer and more polish, has proprietary driver manager too for picking the best suggested from list at a click. Mint makes the Cinnamon and MATE.

      Compatibility? Linux Mint's Device Driver Manger beats the pants off of Ubuntu's

      Stability? The parts of Mint that would make "the stability" are from Ubuntu LTS anyway (you can choose other kernels and modules if you want)

      Seriously, who runs the rougher Ubuntu these days? I stopped doi

  • Let's all remember that Unity's core mission was to unify the interface modals across the complete spectrum of hardware all the way down to the telephone.

    Now try to tell me that using my desktop with phone-compatible modality (single window per screen, keyboard optional, touch-UI as primary interface) has *anything* to do with reality. It was such a profound mistake and misunderstanding of how and why we interact with computers I still boggle to this day to comprehend the true depth of Unity's hubris.

    Perha

  • It's a tossup between Unity or Gnome 3 that ruined the Linux Desktop initiative.

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