Ubuntu 21.10 Beta is one of the final steps before the next release of this very popular Linux distribution. It's time to get testing and reporting issues to ensure it's a good one.
One of the big highlight changes is the upgrade to GNOME 40, with all the design changes there like the new Activities Overview, workspaces are arranged horizontally and the overview and app grid are accessed vertically. With a little Ubuntu flavour of course thanks to Canonical continuing to include a dock on the left side of the screen.
They've also enabled Wayland support with NVIDIA drivers, PulseAudio upgrades with support for bluetooth LDAC and AptX bluetooth and HFP profiles, upgrades to lots of the main applications like Firefox 92, LibreOffice 7.2.1 and Thunderbird 91.1.1. Click to enlarge the below pictures:
An interesting change and one that will likely cause a stir is that Firefox has moved to a Snap package, instead of the usual deb packaging. This is a joint effort between Mozilla and Canonical, while the deb package is still available so users of it will still get updated. You will only be affected if you've done an install of Ubuntu 21.10 or later. Explaining why in a post a few notes were pointed out:
- Cross-platform support: The snap will run on all distributions that run snapd - now and in the future
- Authenticity: You’re getting Firefox, unadulterated, straight from the source
- Effortless updates: Get security updates from Mozilla, fast
- Less time on maintenance, more time for features: Community developers can focus on innovation, instead of being mired in support
Currently it's using Mesa 21.2.1 and Kernel 5.13.
If you do decide to install it, worry not about how to get the final release. All you will need to do is keep updating the system to get the latest.
You can download here. See their currently unfinished release notes. The full release is scheduled for October 14. Since this is not a Long-Term Support release it will have support end in July 2022. The next LTS release will be Ubuntu 22.04 scheduled to release April 21, 2022.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
Quoting: Purple Library GuyExamples that stand out in my mind are articles on the CBC website (that's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's BBC equivalent), where Chrome seems to show the conversation threads below but Firefox does not, and EBSCO, a major player in scholarly journal publication.Comment threads on CBC seems to work fine here, Firefox 90.0. EBSCO I can't test (I just mooch journals off Sci-Hub).
Try temporary creating a new profile for Firefox (firefox -P from a terminal) for a fresh setup.
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Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: TuxeeHuh. Maybe it has something to do with extensions, then. Perhaps I'm typically using an adblock on Firefox but not Chrome? I should do a bit of experimenting.Quoting: Purple Library GuyBut I've been forced more and more to switch to Chrome (or rather, at home at least, Chromium) because I hit more and more websites Firefox just doesn't manage to load, or can't show article comments, or stuff.
Could you share some examples? Being a web developer I would be genuinely interested in such pages, because so far I haven't come across such websites (or rather these which showed quirks showed - different - quirks in Blink based browsers, too). And since I web development is my daily job, I'd say nowadays you have to put in some real effort to get something to work on Chrom(e|ium) but not on Firefox.
Examples that stand out in my mind are articles on the CBC website (that's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's BBC equivalent), where Chrome seems to show the conversation threads below but Firefox does not, and EBSCO, a major player in scholarly journal publication. I work in a university library and often have reasons to follow links to articles in our holdings. Chrome shows Ebsco articles no problem, Firefox shows a blank page. The problems seem to be the same on Windows at work and on Linux at home.
Adblock can slaughter some webpages. (I have a PiHole running on my router and Google AdSense won't work (on any browser) before I turn it of.) On cbc.ca 28(!) resources are blocked by uBlock Origin. Turning of uBlock PiHole blocks some more requests AND the "Facebook Container" add-on.
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Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: TuxeeHuh. Maybe it has something to do with extensions, then. Perhaps I'm typically using an adblock on Firefox but not Chrome? I should do a bit of experimenting.Quoting: Purple Library GuyBut I've been forced more and more to switch to Chrome (or rather, at home at least, Chromium) because I hit more and more websites Firefox just doesn't manage to load, or can't show article comments, or stuff.
Could you share some examples? Being a web developer I would be genuinely interested in such pages, because so far I haven't come across such websites (or rather these which showed quirks showed - different - quirks in Blink based browsers, too). And since I web development is my daily job, I'd say nowadays you have to put in some real effort to get something to work on Chrom(e|ium) but not on Firefox.
Examples that stand out in my mind are articles on the CBC website (that's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's BBC equivalent), where Chrome seems to show the conversation threads below but Firefox does not, and EBSCO, a major player in scholarly journal publication. I work in a university library and often have reasons to follow links to articles in our holdings. Chrome shows Ebsco articles no problem, Firefox shows a blank page. The problems seem to be the same on Windows at work and on Linux at home.
Just tested it with Firefox 92.0 and with Adblock Plus on and I could see the comments section on the first article on CBC website. So it's probably some other extension.
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Quoting: F.UltraLooking at the Firefox I'm using at work, I do have Adblock Plus and one other extension . . . but they're both disabled already, so I dunno.Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: TuxeeHuh. Maybe it has something to do with extensions, then. Perhaps I'm typically using an adblock on Firefox but not Chrome? I should do a bit of experimenting.Quoting: Purple Library GuyBut I've been forced more and more to switch to Chrome (or rather, at home at least, Chromium) because I hit more and more websites Firefox just doesn't manage to load, or can't show article comments, or stuff.
Could you share some examples? Being a web developer I would be genuinely interested in such pages, because so far I haven't come across such websites (or rather these which showed quirks showed - different - quirks in Blink based browsers, too). And since I web development is my daily job, I'd say nowadays you have to put in some real effort to get something to work on Chrom(e|ium) but not on Firefox.
Examples that stand out in my mind are articles on the CBC website (that's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's BBC equivalent), where Chrome seems to show the conversation threads below but Firefox does not, and EBSCO, a major player in scholarly journal publication. I work in a university library and often have reasons to follow links to articles in our holdings. Chrome shows Ebsco articles no problem, Firefox shows a blank page. The problems seem to be the same on Windows at work and on Linux at home.
Just tested it with Firefox 92.0 and with Adblock Plus on and I could see the comments section on the first article on CBC website. So it's probably some other extension.
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Quoting: GuestUbuntu will get a lot of hate for the switch to snap for Firefox even though this is driven by Mozilla and a lot of the arguments used against it just aren't true anymore. Frankly I think it this move makes perfect sense and I would wager that the vast majority of users won't even notice the change
Not really driven by Mozilla since they cannot dictate what Ubuntu does or doesn't do. Sounds more that Ubuntu wants to no longer have to rebuild Firefox for every release and just hand that and support off to Mozilla.
My issue with this is how it will effect extensions, I remember when Chrome moved from a deb to snap in one version of Ubuntu and none of the databases from the extensions where moved over and simply deleted from the machines at work.
And this will probably not be a problem with Firefox since it should really only have access to the Downloads folder but since Ubuntu moved Totem from deb to snap it can only open videos from a few specific locations which e.g means that it refuses to play videos included as extra or DLC in games from Steam unless I copy the file to the Desktop first.
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Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: F.UltraLooking at the Firefox I'm using at work, I do have Adblock Plus and one other extension . . . but they're both disabled already, so I dunno.Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: TuxeeHuh. Maybe it has something to do with extensions, then. Perhaps I'm typically using an adblock on Firefox but not Chrome? I should do a bit of experimenting.Quoting: Purple Library GuyBut I've been forced more and more to switch to Chrome (or rather, at home at least, Chromium) because I hit more and more websites Firefox just doesn't manage to load, or can't show article comments, or stuff.
Could you share some examples? Being a web developer I would be genuinely interested in such pages, because so far I haven't come across such websites (or rather these which showed quirks showed - different - quirks in Blink based browsers, too). And since I web development is my daily job, I'd say nowadays you have to put in some real effort to get something to work on Chrom(e|ium) but not on Firefox.
Examples that stand out in my mind are articles on the CBC website (that's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's BBC equivalent), where Chrome seems to show the conversation threads below but Firefox does not, and EBSCO, a major player in scholarly journal publication. I work in a university library and often have reasons to follow links to articles in our holdings. Chrome shows Ebsco articles no problem, Firefox shows a blank page. The problems seem to be the same on Windows at work and on Linux at home.
Just tested it with Firefox 92.0 and with Adblock Plus on and I could see the comments section on the first article on CBC website. So it's probably some other extension.
So Wizards and Warlocks then... The web have become far to complex.
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Quoting: Guesteven though this is driven by Mozilla
Mozilla says it's Canonical building the snap packages: "Canonical is now building the official Firefox snap"
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/93.0beta/releasenotes/
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Probably not the answer you guys want, but you can actually run Firefox from your home directory. Just download the file from Mozilla, decompress it wherever you want and execute the binary. I used it that way for years because Canonical usually take a week to release a package of the new version.
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Quoting: PhlebiacQuoting: Guesteven though this is driven by Mozilla
Mozilla says it's Canonical building the snap packages: "Canonical is now building the official Firefox snap"
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/93.0beta/releasenotes/
From the linked article:
QuoteWait, why the change?
Good question! When Mozilla approached Canonical, they had some clear benefits in mind. Those included:
Cross-platform support: The snap will run on all distributions that run snapd - now and in the future
Authenticity: You’re getting Firefox, unadulterated, straight from the source
Effortless updates: Get security updates from Mozilla, fast
Less time on maintenance, more time for features: Community developers can focus on innovation, instead of being mired in support
The Firefox snap is listed on snapcraft as being from Mozilla.
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