Ubuntu 20.04 has hit Beta (as have all the extra flavours) - help make it a release to remember

Nice. Gonna be testing my beloved Ubuntu MATE

Waiting for Debian testing to get Plasma 5.18. Plasma and KDE frameworks uploads are lagging a lot in Debian these days.

Quoting: slaapliedjeThen they kept determining to be 'unique' in the huge Linux landscape, and pushing technologies that no one else supported, so they didn't get that much support, as Canonical is not that big.. Snap is one of those things, and it's direct competition with flatpak, which a lot of distributions/software has adopted, is what rubs me raw about it at this point.

Some of the stuff Canonical does is / was better than what its competitors are / were doing... Unity for example, was far better than the garbage that is GNOME 3.x. And Snap is theoretically superior to Flatpak in various ways, though Flatpak is more "open", which is an especially big selling point in the Linux Community. Yet another example would be "Mir", which as I understand it is theoretically superior to Wayland, though again, the latter would be considered more "open".

Quoting: slaapliedjeMy point was that Canonical wanted their own so started Snap, instead of working with everyone else and supporting flatpak.

Your comments imply everyone supports Flatpak, which is not the case. And there are numerous "key" distros that have no support for Flatpak "out of the box" - some of those distros support Snap "out of the box", others support neither packaging format "out of the box".

Canonical is not the only one that uses "bully boy" tactics to push their agenda - The GNOME Project is notorious for this (though they are not the only ones), which is part of the reason why distros will sometimes package inferior GNOME programs by default, ahead of superior alternatives.

You can call out Canonical for being a bully - but not at the expense of pretending they're the only ones that do this...

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: slaapliedjeMy point was that Canonical wanted their own so started Snap, instead of working with everyone else and supporting flatpak.

You know snaps came first, right? The failed internal Ubuntu project was Ubuntu Phone. Unity, Mir and snaps were all created for that.

This.

And whilst most of the stuff Canonical were pushing has since been abandoned in part or in full, the "end goal" for many of these various projects was far more grand than what most of Canonical's competitors are or were planning... Sadly, most of Canonical's projects never came close to the desired "end goal".


Last edited by Cyba.Cowboy on 6 April 2020 at 5:22 am UTC

Quoting: Cyba.CowboySome of the stuff Canonical does is / was better than what its competitors are / were doing... Unity for example, was far better than the garbage that is GNOME 3.x. And Snap is theoretically superior to Flatpak in various ways, though Flatpak is more "open", which is an especially big selling point in the Linux Community. Yet another example would be "Mir", which as I understand it is theoretically superior to Wayland, though again, the latter would be considered more "open".

As I understand it, HURD is theoretically superior to Linux. Not sure how far those theoreticals get anyone.

Quoting: slaapliedjeWait, what? They switched back to Gnome because they don't have the man power to work on Unity, which is just a gnome hack.

No its not. Unless we have quite different ideas what a "hack" is.

Quoting: Tuxee

Quoting: slaapliedjeWait, what? They switched back to Gnome because they don't have the man power to work on Unity, which is just a gnome hack.

No its not. Unless we have quite different ideas what a "hack" is.

As far as everything I saw of it, they basically took gtk3 / gnome-shell and tweaked some things on it, made compoz sort of work with it and called it Unity. I never used it much because I hate having the dock take desktop space.

Quoting: Cyba.Cowboy

Quoting: slaapliedjeThen they kept determining to be 'unique' in the huge Linux landscape, and pushing technologies that no one else supported, so they didn't get that much support, as Canonical is not that big.. Snap is one of those things, and it's direct competition with flatpak, which a lot of distributions/software has adopted, is what rubs me raw about it at this point.

Some of the stuff Canonical does is / was better than what its competitors are / were doing... Unity for example, was far better than the garbage that is GNOME 3.x. And Snap is theoretically superior to Flatpak in various ways, though Flatpak is more "open", which is an especially big selling point in the Linux Community. Yet another example would be "Mir", which as I understand it is theoretically superior to Wayland, though again, the latter would be considered more "open".

Quoting: slaapliedjeMy point was that Canonical wanted their own so started Snap, instead of working with everyone else and supporting flatpak.

Your comments imply everyone supports Flatpak, which is not the case. And there are numerous "key" distros that have no support for Flatpak "out of the box" - some of those distros support Snap "out of the box", others support neither packaging format "out of the box".

Canonical is not the only one that uses "bully boy" tactics to push their agenda - The GNOME Project is notorious for this (though they are not the only ones), which is part of the reason why distros will sometimes package inferior GNOME programs by default, ahead of superior alternatives.

You can call out Canonical for being a bully - but not at the expense of pretending they're the only ones that do this...

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: slaapliedjeMy point was that Canonical wanted their own so started Snap, instead of working with everyone else and supporting flatpak.

You know snaps came first, right? The failed internal Ubuntu project was Ubuntu Phone. Unity, Mir and snaps were all created for that.

This.

And whilst most of the stuff Canonical were pushing has since been abandoned in part or in full, the "end goal" for many of these various projects was far more grand than what most of Canonical's competitors are or were planning... Sadly, most of Canonical's projects never came close to the desired "end goal".

There is a difference between a software project making UI decisions vs a Distribution pushing things. Unity has always been more garbage than Gnome everytime I attempted to use it. The truth of the matter is, both Gnome-Shell and KDE plasma should have been cooked a bit more before distributions started shipping with them. This hatred toward either was based on the few years where they were terrible to use. Now both are very nice, and Ubuntu wisened up and stopped taking the gnome libraries and making Unity.

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Tuxee

Quoting: slaapliedjeWait, what? They switched back to Gnome because they don't have the man power to work on Unity, which is just a gnome hack.

No its not. Unless we have quite different ideas what a "hack" is.

As far as everything I saw of it, they basically took gtk3 / gnome-shell and tweaked some things on it, made compoz sort of work with it and called it Unity.

What did you "see"? Did you dig into the code? I honestly didn't. But from the timeline alone that's already hard to accept: Unity was rolled out with 11.04 (the precursor came already with 10.10's netbook edition), pretty much exactly the same time as Gnome Shell 3.0 was presented. A cursory glance at the Wikipedia pages show that Gnome Shell is developed in C/JS, whereas Unity is written in C/C++/Python and Vala. Gnome Shell requires GDM, Unity requires LightDM, Nux instead of Clutter, Compiz instead of Mutter. If you wanted to use Gnome Shell on 11.04 you had to completely remove Unity beforehand.

They used the software stack of Gnome. But calling Unity a Gnome Shell hack is pretty far-fetched.

Quoting: slaapliedjeI never used it much because I hate having the dock take desktop space.

But you know it's a hack. This smells more like Canonical bashing.

Quoting: TuxeeBut you know it's a hack. This smells more like Canonical bashing.

This.

Canonical - like Valve Software - have probably done more for the Linux Community than most other organizations... All I am hearing in these comments is "Blah blah blah, Canonical is a big, evil corporation and everyone else is a saint."

After 12 years with Ubuntu, I became fed up with the need to compile apps which had been removed from the Ubuntu repos, in particular Aqualung, my must-have music player, which disappeared with 14.04.

I found that Aqualung, and other apps on which I had come to depend, were in the AUR.

I tried Manjaro. What an experience! As easy to install as Ubuntu, as user-friendly, as well-stocked with apps as Ubuntu, and a community which is as friendly as the Ubuntu forums. Using the not-that-scary AUR is a matter of selecting the package, clicking "Build," then "Apply" and watch the system download all the dependencies (!) and the source code, and autocompiles the code itself. And, practically every program ever written for Linux can be found there. Moving to an Arch-based system has been like falling in love with Linux all over again.

And Manjaro is noted for its hardware compatibility, too.

Just watch it when you're on the Arch forums, which have a reputation for being pretty touchy. There are people who show total disdain for not spending hours installing the most minimal installation possible. And there are reasons why people regard the Arch forums as The Most Likely Forum on which to get a "RTFM, or GTFO!"

Some few Steam games have required some tweaking, but the ones which have can be tweaked into playability.

I will also say that Manjaro has become the new Ubuntu.