Ubuntu Desktop "Charting A Course For The Future" With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Next Year

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu Desktop "Charting A Course For The Future" With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Next Year

Oliver Smith at Canonical who serves as the Product Manager for Ubuntu Desktop published a post on "charting a course for the future" of the Ubuntu desktop...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Desktop-2023-Future

[M@GOid]

AFAIK the situation on video acceleration on Chromium is that there is community patches that were never accepted by the official developers, but some distros embraced those patches and released their Chromium packages with them.

Now that Intel entered the scene, this may convince someone inside Chromium that was blocking the patches to be formally accepted, to remove the opposition and we can finally enjoy it by default in all distros.

[Hans Bull]

Let's not forget though how browser video acceleration on other platforms has just been pretty much assumed for years and it's due to Snaps that enabling this VA-API support has been more of a challenge.

Simple solution: offer non-snap packages for browsers. Those who want to stay with snapcrap still can do so.

[Artim]

AFAIK the situation on video acceleration on Chromium is that there is community patches that were never accepted by the official developers, but some distros embraced those patches and released their Chromium packages with them.

Now that Intel entered the scene, this may convince someone inside Chromium that was blocking the patches to be formally accepted, to remove the opposition and we can finally enjoy it by default in all distros.

Actually, Google might make such efforts finally irrelevant. With Lacros they want to finally split ChromeOS into separate Linux distro and a normal Linux facing Chrome Version. Which e.g. will mean they will just use Wayland instead of playing Canonical 2.0 and develop their own stuff. And for all I know this is to happen very soon, in early August it was rumored it would be done with v116. While it seems to be delayed, but when ChromeOS Chrome will be just the typical Linux version instead of being another version, this should mean any version of Chromium should be running on Linux just as well as on any other OS, with proper Wayland and hw accel support etc.

[Artim]

Simple solution: offer non-snap packages for browsers. Those who want to stay with snapcrap still can do so.

Heresy! How can you expect Canonical not to shove their crap that nobody wants to use down their users - and users of any official spinoff - throats?

[mirmirmir]

Your usual PR talks. So, what kind of crisis are they trying to address?

Also they mentioned AI, because that's what cool kids talk about.

[uid313]

Simple solution: offer non-snap packages for browsers. Those who want to stay with snapcrap still can do so.

Snap isn't crap. Snap is great as it increases security through sandboxing. I also like Flatpak though.

Why would you use a non-snap browser instead of a snapped one? The snapped one will be more secure.

[zexelon]

Snap isn't crap. Snap is great as it increases security through sandboxing. I also like Flatpak though.

Why would you use a non-snap browser instead of a snapped one? The snapped one will be more secure.

I have found that snap is is hell to use in an integrated desktop workflow. Its great for isolating an application... the problem is most desktop applications cant run in isolation and still be useful.

I have played with several snap packages and found them to be very glitchy, extremely slow to load and there are always problems integrating with the desktop.

If you are truly paranoid, spool up isolated "gold imaged" VMs for each "workflow" that you need... then at least you wont have the snaple pain, suffering and abuse.

[Ironmask]

tl;dr "We are really excited to harvest and sell even more of your data in the coming years."

[EphemeralEft]

Why would you use a non-snap browser instead of a snapped one? The snapped one will be more secure.

App sandboxing protects other software from the sandboxed one, but if the sandboxed one is compromised, then everything done inside that app is still compromised. Since most people use their web browser for online banking, social media, signing into other things, etc, your sensitive data is already compromised if the app is (or becomes) compromised.