Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Release Candidate Images For Last Minute Testing

[kylew77]

That must be the "I hate Ubuntu channel" sponsored by Red Hat and SuSE then.

Firefox was switched to using snaps because that lets Mozilla manage the updates by themselves. Which Mozilla insisted to do.

And if I used appimage or flapak or snaps: I couldn't care less. Flatpak is a NIH-syndromed snap with less virtualization capabilities. Some might prefer that, some not. That's the beauty of open source. Some might want to stick to plain distro packages.

No it was DistroTube, i.e. the Linus Tech Tips of Linux on YouTube. I agree with him, I would never run a distro running gnome3 as the default desktop enviroment.

[arQon]

There's nothing wrong with the concept of snaps or flatpaks, the problem lies in the fact that neither of these specs are remotely stable or finished.

And you forgot "or competently designed in the first place". Regardless of which format "wins" in the end, it's *still* going to be crap.
There's also AppImage, because of course there have to be at least 3 different versions of anything like this, because Not Invented Here; and there's also a 4th one that I can't remember the name of right now, and probably several more that never got any traction because they don't have corporate funding behind them, regardless of the tech involved.

> With snap and flatpak, we're having a Wayland situation where they're pushing it on us before it's fully developed, while simultaneously not making developing it their primary focus because it's usage is too low.

I'm not sure if the second half of that is really accurate, unless you're talking about nvidia specifically, but other than that, yeah. RedHat in particular has a LONG track record of doing that: PulseAudio wasn't even close to *beta* quality when they first started shipping it, and the same goes for systemd, GNOME3, and plenty more. Whether you think of that mindset as "cutting edge, yay!" or "garbage-tier code, dammit!" largely depends on whether the systems involved are toys to tinker with or important parts of your business / leisure resources. (Phoronix leans strongly to the hobbyist side, often making it unrepresentative of the bigger picture).

One of Ubuntu's big selling points is the combination of "stable" LTSs while still having support for new hardware, but with the most-used application on almost every desktop machine now pretty much guaranteed to suck I think they're shooting themselves in the foot pretty badly here. There are probably two "good" reasons for that though: above all else, desktop is just a tiny part of revenue; but I suspect there's also a large selection bias at work, where the snap developers just permanently have the browser open with 400 tabs in it (and are also running new high-end machines on top of that) - i.e. they effectively treat the browser as part of the boot-time cost. It's hard to see how they could consider the end result as acceptable otherwise, especially given how trivial it would be to fix snap's performance problems, even if the rest of it would still be poor.

[Daktyl198]

And as a "security measure" Microsoft made it so that (some?) games on the Windows Store are impossible to add to a 3rd party launcher (like Steam) so that (for example) I can't "Big Picture" Forza Horizon 4, or use a PS5 controller with it (PS5 controller works great in Steam, but otherwise Windows ignores it completely)...

You're mistaking MSIX packaging with the UWP API. MISX is a packaging format that supports both Win32 apps, and UWP apps. It's why you can now install Win32 apps via the Microsoft Store.

UWP is the Windows-only framework/api/whatever you want to call it that allows for seamless development of apps that run across all of Microsoft's operating systems, but that is highly proprietary and very locked down... mostly due to the fact that it could be used as an attack vector for consoles otherwise.

[Daktyl198]

as said multiple times - its nvidia not gnome nor wayland per se. Its crazy how often this blame shifting is repeated.

Wayland is ready - Nvidia is not.

Wayland the API was ready ages ago for what it intended to be. The problem was never Wayland the API, the problem was always compositors, and the Linux community agreeing on standards to replace things that X.org helped with. Many compositors still barely treat Wayland as a 1st party API, and the "standards" for how to do things are all over the place. The only project actually working towards interoperability is SwayWM with it's wlroots library. Wayland took forever not because of Wayland, and not because of NVidia (I use an AMD card), it took forever because no compositor developers actually gave a damn about spending time working out Wayland's companion problems like screen sharing or copy/paste, and so kept putting off actually developing support.

Earlier this year was the first time I actually installed a Wayland setup (which still isn't default 10 years after it hit "stable") and felt like I had a smooth desktop experience. And there are still Wayland-only bugs for some applications like screenshot tools. On an AMD card. It's not Nvidia.

[Daktyl198]

There's also AppImage, because of course there have to be at least 3 different versions of anything like this, because Not Invented Here; and there's also a 4th one that I can't remember the name of right now, and probably several more that never got any traction because they don't have corporate funding behind them, regardless of the tech involved.

Interestingly enough, if I remember correct AppImage was the first out of all of the formats and honestly the one that makes the most sense for the majority of users. It solved one of Linux's biggest problems with software not in a repo by making apps essentially "portable" exes by default. Download a file, double-click, and it's as if the software was installed via your repo, except self-updating. Nothing fancy, just a solution to a problem that makes life easier.

I'm not sure if the second half of that is really accurate, unless you're talking about nvidia specifically, but other than that, yeah. RedHat in particular has a LONG track record of doing that: PulseAudio wasn't even close to *beta* quality when they first started shipping it, and the same goes for systemd, GNOME3, and plenty more. Whether you think of that mindset as "cutting edge, yay!" or "garbage-tier code, dammit!" largely depends on whether the systems involved are toys to tinker with or important parts of your business / leisure resources. (Phoronix leans strongly to the hobbyist side, often making it unrepresentative of the bigger picture).

I'm not talking about NVidia, I'm talking about WM/DE/Compositor developers and some distros. As I stated in the message before this, Wayland has been lower than 2nd class in their development plans for over 10 years. This year is the first year I feel like I can actually use Wayland on a daily basis, and there are STILL bugs. Not to mention, god forbid you install an app intended for use in Gnome in KDE Plasma while using Wayland, some shit like copy/paste might just not work since there are barely any standardized APIs yet for many desktop functions. And yet when it was halfway done they started pushing us to use it, WM and Distro developers alike. That was something like 3-4 years ago that they said it was "ready" despite it being anything but.

I'm getting the same feeling with Snap/Flatpak, where the entire spec is half-assed and full of bugs and usability problems, but they're already pushing you to use it saying it's "ready".

[Paradigm Shifter]

You're mistaking MSIX packaging with the UWP API. MISX is a packaging format that supports both Win32 apps, and UWP apps. It's why you can now install Win32 apps via the Microsoft Store.

UWP is the Windows-only framework/api/whatever you want to call it that allows for seamless development of apps that run across all of Microsoft's operating systems, but that is highly proprietary and very locked down... mostly due to the fact that it could be used as an attack vector for consoles otherwise.

I think you quoted the wrong person. What you quoted from me makes no mention of UWP, Win32, MSIX or whatever - just that I cannot add the games I have on the Windows Store to Steam for centralised access. Someone else quoted the same post from me which you quoted with that hypothesis, however.