Distro News - Ubuntu 20.04 'Focal Fossa', Ubuntu MATE and other flavours released

Quoting: kaiman

Quoting: SchattenspiegelStill don't see a usecase for snap (or fatpak) on the desktop that would not be better (less time, less space, more reliable functionality) solved by Appimage if you do not get a native package.

Amen! I've been distributing Linux binaries in AppImage format for quite a while, and I really like how they're small and self-contained, with no daemon required in the background for them to run.

I had looked at both snap and flatpak as alternatives, but the whole idea of distributing binaries in the first place was for stuff to just work across distributions with minimal dependencies.

In general though, I'll want to use the regular binaries, managed via the package repository. With the image based applications, if some library they include has vulnerabilities, all the applications need to be patched and updated individually. With regular programs, the library in question can be updated and all the dependent applications are golden.

Sorry for my ignorance, but is there some kind of appimage store? I really find the appimage concept convenient, but is there something for the automatic updates aspect?

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: obscurenforeign

Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: eldakingI'll wait a bit anyway and probably will update to 20.04 if it isn't too obnoxious to avoid snaps for most things, or if at least it works well.

sudo apt purge snapd will get rid of snaps entirely. Easy enough.

Sure, but will any default programs be removed by that - like say, the calculator? (I legit don't know what would happen to installed snaps)

And will the Ubuntu repositories contain non-snap alternatives for stuff? If they stop maintaining stuff in the repos because they now use snaps, it becomes impractical to use the distro without it. (While, presumably, other distros could still have those normally... at least for now)

Hey, thank you both for this! I had a look on my system and sure enough, not only was snapd installed but among the few snaps installed on my system was gnome-calculator. I was wondering why the hell the calculator in Ubuntu took a freaking minute to load. Went ahead and installed the calculator from apt and now it loads in less than a second like a good calculator should... oh, and also I'm removing all of snapd and REPLACING ALL THE OTHER SNAPS WITH PACKAGES THAT ACTUALLY WORK RIGHT. ...And seriously contemplating switching to like, Debian or something.

I have been running Debian Sid for pretty much decades at this point. Sure I've played with other distributions along the way, but mostly stick with Debian Sid. You CAN install snapd and flatpak if you'd like in Debian, but it doesn't try to abuse it's users and force it upon anyone.

Thanks for the advice, but my musing about switching to Debian is largely fueled by wanting to avoid snapd. Maybe flatpack's better, but frankly I don't see the use much. ("Am I so out of touch...?")
But no matter what you think of the concept, I hope we can all agree that taking a minute to load a calculator, something that could load in about a second on Windows 95, is unacceptable.

Quoting: obscurenforeign

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: obscurenforeign

Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: eldakingI'll wait a bit anyway and probably will update to 20.04 if it isn't too obnoxious to avoid snaps for most things, or if at least it works well.

sudo apt purge snapd will get rid of snaps entirely. Easy enough.

Sure, but will any default programs be removed by that - like say, the calculator? (I legit don't know what would happen to installed snaps)

And will the Ubuntu repositories contain non-snap alternatives for stuff? If they stop maintaining stuff in the repos because they now use snaps, it becomes impractical to use the distro without it. (While, presumably, other distros could still have those normally... at least for now)

Hey, thank you both for this! I had a look on my system and sure enough, not only was snapd installed but among the few snaps installed on my system was gnome-calculator. I was wondering why the hell the calculator in Ubuntu took a freaking minute to load. Went ahead and installed the calculator from apt and now it loads in less than a second like a good calculator should... oh, and also I'm removing all of snapd and REPLACING ALL THE OTHER SNAPS WITH PACKAGES THAT ACTUALLY WORK RIGHT. ...And seriously contemplating switching to like, Debian or something.

I have been running Debian Sid for pretty much decades at this point. Sure I've played with other distributions along the way, but mostly stick with Debian Sid. You CAN install snapd and flatpak if you'd like in Debian, but it doesn't try to abuse it's users and force it upon anyone.

Thanks for the advice, but my musing about switching to Debian is largely fueled by wanting to avoid snapd. Maybe flatpack's better, but frankly I don't see the use much. ("Am I so out of touch...?")
But no matter what you think of the concept, I hope we can all agree that taking a minute to load a calculator, something that could load in about a second on Windows 95, is unacceptable.

The calculator defaults to the deb package in 20.04 and you can avoid snaps on Ubuntu if you want.

Quoting: MohandevirSorry for my ignorance, but is there some kind of appimage store? I really find the appimage concept convenient, but is there something for the automatic updates aspect?

The one I'm aware of is AppImageHub. Not sure about automatic updates, though. My own stuff is no longer in active development, so I never really have given that aspect much consideration.

And as a user, I try to get everything from either the official repository or a PPA.

With all the positive reactions here, I forced the upgrade from 18.04, as it was a relatively fresh install anyway. I think it's the first time that upgrading from one LTS to the next didn't break the graphics driver, so that's a positive :-).

It didn't, however, go totally smooth. For one it came up with python2 as the default interpreter instead of python3 (the only package actually still depending on python2 being mercurial, which I cannot get rid of, unfortunately). That caused unity-mail to crash, which is still my preferred notification app.

My gnome extensions also weren't updated automatically, and while a notification popped up that updates were available, it took me a while to figure out that what looked like a settings button was actually the button to load the update. But that's on Gnome, not Ubuntu. Also, for some reason, gnome-shell-extension-prefs was not or no longer installed, so extension preferences did not work initially.

But the worst was the new theme. I hate black in particular and dark themes in general. So I switched to the light variant, only to find that all console windows still sported a black window border. Well, turns out console has its own theme settings that for some reason is not following the system default. At least the upgrade preserved my desktop background, but I still have to change grub to show something other than black & white.

And finally, none of the few PPAs I use is yet available for 20.04. Though I guess this will be only a matter of time.

On the whole, I'm content with the updated system, but there's nothing to be ecstatic about.


Last edited by kaiman on 25 April 2020 at 10:13 am UTC

i hope 'Fractional Scaling' is refined sooner rather than later as i would love to scale my display to 125%

Quoting: obscurenforeign

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: obscurenforeign

Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: eldakingI'll wait a bit anyway and probably will update to 20.04 if it isn't too obnoxious to avoid snaps for most things, or if at least it works well.

sudo apt purge snapd will get rid of snaps entirely. Easy enough.

Sure, but will any default programs be removed by that - like say, the calculator? (I legit don't know what would happen to installed snaps)

And will the Ubuntu repositories contain non-snap alternatives for stuff? If they stop maintaining stuff in the repos because they now use snaps, it becomes impractical to use the distro without it. (While, presumably, other distros could still have those normally... at least for now)

Hey, thank you both for this! I had a look on my system and sure enough, not only was snapd installed but among the few snaps installed on my system was gnome-calculator. I was wondering why the hell the calculator in Ubuntu took a freaking minute to load. Went ahead and installed the calculator from apt and now it loads in less than a second like a good calculator should... oh, and also I'm removing all of snapd and REPLACING ALL THE OTHER SNAPS WITH PACKAGES THAT ACTUALLY WORK RIGHT. ...And seriously contemplating switching to like, Debian or something.

I have been running Debian Sid for pretty much decades at this point. Sure I've played with other distributions along the way, but mostly stick with Debian Sid. You CAN install snapd and flatpak if you'd like in Debian, but it doesn't try to abuse it's users and force it upon anyone.

Thanks for the advice, but my musing about switching to Debian is largely fueled by wanting to avoid snapd. Maybe flatpack's better, but frankly I don't see the use much. ("Am I so out of touch...?")
But no matter what you think of the concept, I hope we can all agree that taking a minute to load a calculator, something that could load in about a second on Windows 95, is unacceptable.

Ha, yeah my point is you can avoid both by going to debian, they just give you the option if you want to go down that path, which is fantastic.
Flatpack and snap both try to fill up /, so if you have a separate /home, it can cause some issues. I had been testing something in a VM and the flatpak package cache did that to me.

Quoting: UltraVioleti hope 'Fractional Scaling' is refined sooner rather than later as i would love to scale my display to 125%

That's... one of the features that's included in 20.04 for Gnome. The other desktop environments have had it for a long time already.

Quoting: slaapliedjeFlatpack and snap both try to fill up /, so if you have a separate /home, it can cause some issues. I had been testing something in a VM and the flatpak package cache did that to me.

That's true. Flatpak cache directories can really pile up in your /var/tmp/. These are used to enable partial downloads if I've understood correctly. I manually delete them every once in a while, but a simple script or systemd service could take care of that just fine at shutdown/startup.

The packages themselves can be installed either in a system-wide prefix (/var/lib/flatpak on Mint) or per user (under ~/.local/share/flatpak).

KDE allows scaling in steps of 6.25%, that's definitely more granular than 25% steps.