Ubuntu 18.10 Is A Nice Upgrade For Radeon Gamers, Especially For Steam VR

[edwaleni]

@dubt229, are you saying that upgrading drivers (mesa and kernel, and maybe xorg) is not going to work with the rest of a system? Are you serious? People do so, but use PPA or compile things themselves, the problem is that most distros don't. If what you are saying is the case, then the OS is simply rubbish. Well.. one Linus' rant comes to mind..https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/8/3/621

The Red Hat LVM dev is speaking from a datacenter stability perspective. That "user" (corporate IT) must be aware of their dependencies in the libraries and be tracking their use in their build packages.

The Linus rant is speaking from a human user perspective, the kernel should never interfere or require additional libs to run. A "do no harm" approach which is also valid. A desktop user shouldn't have to track all of his/her OS/app dependencies.

They are both right for different reasons.

I rely on the package manager to tell me if an installable program has a dependency that can cause instability if not followed. But kernel update packages have never done that. You install, you use and if it fails you roll back and that is the end of it. Virtual Box is one that never warns (as an example). They always suggest you run what the distro provides in their repository, nothing newer.

if you want a model that follows Windows, stick to LTS with approved updates. If you want the edge with all it comes with, go rolling release.

[numacross]

FireBurn, think of it like windows xp with service packs. windows xp was there 6 years before vista arrived. then 2 years for windows 7, 4 years for windows 8, 2 years for windows 10. these 2 year releases were failures so that's why so short period of time was in place. Heck, xp lost it's support a few years ago. Companies and home users don't like hassle. Meantime, Ubuntu LTS has to be updated to another version every ~3years, not 5, rest of the time is like xp support after new version was released. Look, 14.04, and previously 12.04, got extended paid support, because there was a need for it, as that is how companies work.

Don't worry... Microsoft is following the latest trends and implemented Windows 10 as the last version ever. Two new versions a year with each only being supported for 18 months. Home variant users will be forced to beta-test them all. Higher variants can delay the updates but not avoid them apart from running WSUS. Unless you can afford LTSC there is no long-term stability, and that version is super-crippled - Visual Studio 2017, their flagship IDE, will not work on it while it does work on Windows 7

Oh and those "feature updates" to Windows 10 are also very smooth... only the latest 1809 had to be pulled from everyone because the update process, which is actually reinstalling the whole system in-place, deleted user data. Not to mention that almost every previous update had major problems leading to either instability or outright inability to use the computer.

[duby229]

Don't worry... Microsoft is following the latest trends and implemented Windows 10 as the last version ever. Two new versions a year with each only being supported for 18 months. Home variant users will be forced to beta-test them all. Higher variants can delay the updates but not avoid them apart from running WSUS. Unless you can afford LTSC there is no long-term stability, and that version is super-crippled - Visual Studio 2017, their flagship IDE, will not work on it while it does work on Windows 7

Oh and those "feature updates" to Windows 10 are also very smooth... only the latest 1809 had to be pulled from everyone because the update process, which is actually reinstalling the whole system in-place, deleted user data. Not to mention that almost every previous update had major problems leading to either instability or outright inability to use the computer.

All the good Rolling Release Linux distro's use some sort of staging system to introduce new versions. It's an opt-in system where the user knows what to expect. Gentoo for example maintains two stages and they actually call them "stable" and "unstable". A user can apply ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" to enable a user to build a a userspace from that unstable stage of their repository. There is no reason for a rolling release to unwittingly release unstable updates to a stable stage of a repository.

[markc]

I've been using whatever is the latest alpha/beta Kubuntu release plus the Kubuntu-CI/stable packages for a couple of years now and only once, a few months ago, was my system so messed up I was forced to do a re-install. That's pretty damn close to a "rolling release" with the latest software always available and no PPAs needed. With one extra testing stage of packages I personally think "we" could have a fairly sane (k)ubuntu rolling release track for those that want it. My wish list would be that the 6 monthly releases include an "audit" script that basically diffs a system between the new release and the previous one and conditions the current system on a per file basis to ensure the essential foundation of the current desktop is in a sane state according to the latest release. So in other words, instead of having to do a complete fresh install for a release update, just keep apt upgrading and run this "official audit script" twice a year to align ones current desktop system to the standard of the new release. Another part of this rolling release scenario is to have something, anything, that takes a snapshot of all system and user configuration settings and stores them somewhere, anywhere, so that, in the case of a completely messed up system, a fresh re-install can more or less be painlessly automated. We already have LTS releases for those who simply cannot afford to take any risks and with a little bit of extra effort "we" could have a better Archlinux than Archlinux.

[Templar82]

My wish list would be that the 6 monthly releases include an "audit" script that basically diffs a system between the new release and the previous one and conditions the current system on a per file basis to ensure the essential foundation of the current desktop is in a sane state according to the latest release. So in other words, instead of having to do a complete fresh install for a release update, just keep apt upgrading and run this "official audit script" twice a year to align ones current desktop system to the standard of the new release.

Isn't this pretty much how openSUSE Tumbleweed works?

It doesn't do a diff of config files or anything if that's what you are suggesting. But it compares all your packages to a 'tested' snapshot rather than updating things individually.

[markc]

Isn't this pretty much how openSUSE Tumbleweed works?

I have no idea as I've been using Kubuntu for too many years. I'd rather see a file by file md5sum comparison from an official remote live snapshot of the current (new) release and be given an "audit report" of what's different on my local system compared to the remote snapshot then have the otpion of selecting which files I want to normalize with the remote snapshot or perhaps, after a quick review, update all mismatched files to harmonize with the remote snapshot. Keep in mind that continuous package upgrading is already taking place so I'd just like a relatively minor tweak to a possible few dozen FILES that may get out of sync to help ensure my system is not drifting too far away from the official release snapshot. Remotely storing config settings in a format that can be sanely restored is something that we should already have had for the last 10 years. There is no excuse we don't have an official way of doing this ever since Git become the defacto revision standard. It just happens to also fit in with the more risky strategy of using a rolling release as a daily driver to be able to recover from an errant update with a fresh install. Having an ongoing backup of user content is a separate issue which should also be a part of our desktop systems, with a few settings and a click to initiate.

[Guest]

Arc Menu extension for global menu: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1228/arc-menu/

Impatience extension for animations: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/277/impatience/ (or better yet, just disable them altogether in Settings)

Dock on the bottom can be easily changed in Settings also

Thanks for your suggestions. I'll try them out when I load up Ubuntu 18.10 over the weekend.

Regarding the animations, I meant just fixing all the stutters and dropped frames, not making them faster.

[OMTDesign]

I know that quite a few members have voiced their opinion about rolling release OS's and I happen to agree. But I can't leave Ubuntu because of all the little things that they do which make their OS so user friendly and well optimized, and also I prefer the familiarity of a Debian based OS. Is Debian testing any good?

Only a few things left to do...

Install Kubuntu.

[Guest]

Install Kubuntu.

I am running KDE Neon 18.04 but it's not as sexy as the new Yaru theme on Ubuntu. Also organizing the panels like I proposed in my post (system tray and global menu on top, dock on the bottom) always feels a bit hacky and rough around the edges on KDE.

[darkbasic]

Not really, I stop using arch and manjaro and antergos for a simply reason, when a big DE comes out or new major graphics black sreen, login errors and others things happen. I want a life and some stable system, ppl who use arch says always the same thing, they are stable and nothing bad happens, maybe it's my fault or maybe it's a lie, arch is good for testing new software, to learn linux cli not for stable desktop machine even less for server or workstation

Maybe it's just because I use it with a COW filesystem like btrfs and zfs. pacman automatically creates a snapshot every time you updgrade a package and if something happens to break your system it's very easy to roll it back to the previous, working state. But honestly it rarely happens.