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Ubuntu 15.04 Received Well By Linux Community
jones_supa writes: Canonical released Ubuntu 15.04 a couple of weeks ago, and it seems that this release has been a success. The community is mostly reporting a nice experience, which is important since this is the first Ubuntu release that uses systemd instead of upstart. At Slashdot, people have been very nervous about systemd, and last year it was even asked to say something nice about it. To be fair, Ubuntu 15.04 hasn't changed all that much. Some minor visual changes have been implemented, along with a couple of new features, but the operating system has remained pretty much the same. Most importantly it is stable, fast, and it lacks the usual problems accompanied by new releases.
Congratulations for specifically missing the entire point of the article.
I've never seen so much evangelizing about a particular subsystem change in Linux before, which makes me think that unlike other past changes, this one needs it rather than having it's own benefits do the selling...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
A Softpedia article gets linked to Slashdot story these days; can Slash-vertisement get any lower than this?
A friendly reminder that if you hate Unity, Ubuntu also supports KDE, Xfce, LXDE, Enlightenment, Cinnamon, GNOME Shell, MATE, and the CLI.
>As far as I can tell, there is no root account I could log into directly
Seriously?
$ sudo passwd
$ sudo passwd -u root
There, now you can log into root directly and have all the security issues you want. Thanks for playing the "I don't know how to use linux" game
15.04 is not an "LTS" (Long Term Support). So we will continue to run 14.04 LTS on our servers, and on my workstation. I guess we will stick to it for another year, until April 2016. Ah well. Good Luck, gang, and thank you for the good job, Ubuntu.
I installed in on my HP ProBook 6475b laptop the other day and have only run into some minor issues.
1. I opted for full disk encrypted LVM. It didn't ask for a separate Swap partition password, instead using the main one. Fine. However, when booting, I have to enter it twice -- once for the main partition, once for swap. [Bug reported and acknowledged]
2. It hangs on reboot. I have to boot twice every time to get it to get past the boot loader. I've tried "shut down", then letting it sit for 10 minutes. Next boot -- hang and I reboot and then it works.
3. My wifi doesn't come back after suspend. I think it has to do with the particular laptop firmware, because it does this with every distro I've tried. Everything else works, but the wifi never makes it out of suspend.
The rest works fine. Changing to the proprietary AMD video drivers was a snap, and it sped up video playback to what I would expect (no stuttering on HD).
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
It follows the same path that OS X and Solaris 11 do, with the root user disabled by default, with the first user created having sudo access to root. A quick change of root's password can enable this if needed.
All and all, this is a good thing. There are a lot of security audit checklists that are starting to require root not be able to be logged on directly, so shipping an OS that has this locked down is not unusual.
For personal use, there isn't anything wrong with unlocking root and using that with su or just logging directly in. However, in business/enterprise settings, it does make sense to have a user stage, even if it is just having different RSA keys in root's authorized_hosts file that belongs to each individual user. I like unlocking root locally, so I can log in with that in single user mode, but having remote root access completely disabled.
Yeah, I have seen far too many people who want to run as root/admin because it's more convenient.
And I have seen far too many people staring at a screen with that "oh, shit, what do I do now?" look because they just royally fsck'd their system.
In fact, I've known several admins who I subsequently came to realize were mostly faking it after several instances of completely hosing a system because they just thought it was easier to stay logged in as root/admin "just in case".
Same with all of the crap software on Windows which says "oh, just disable UAC or this software to work". or "this software needs to run as root/admin". Yeah, sorry, but no. If you're software insists I disable sane security on my system, your software sucks, and you were too damned lazy to write better code. Hell, I saw one thing years ago which said "the admin user should have a blank password for this software to work" ... and it didn't get installed.
The problem is people get into that period where they think "I'm a big boy admin now, I don't need safeguards because I'm that good". Those people are generally dangerous and reckless fools.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
How about sudo -i?
1. build quality of 14.xx was utter crap. It crashed more than windows.
2. Unity had some privacy issues with sending user search data to paying partners automaticly(amazon).
3. Canonical doesn't like to give back upstream. Before you say anything, there are many companies that do wonderful things for the kernel, GNU, and related bits and pieces to make the magic happen. The two biggest contributors being Intel and Red Hat, but linux has a lot of very large corporate heavy hitters world wide contributing great things. After not giving back, the CEO and founder Mark Shuttleworth talks a lot of shit about the people who are actually doing most of the real work. MIR/Wayland is the latest fiasco. instead of contributing to wayland, they decided to make their own graphics server, which ultimately will only be used by them. The supposed cause of wayland not being advanced enough turned out to be bogus, as RH will likely ship fedora with wayland default long before Canonical does a MIR default Ubuntu. Oh yeah. Speaking of Red Hat, not only do they make a rock solid distro, they contribute back, and oh, they still manage to turn a profit, something Canonical seems unable to do.
4. previous versions of Unity where dog slow, but they've seemed to have gotten better.
For the non-technical, I recommend Mint, which was forked from Ubuntu, and contains most of the good n00b friendly stuff from ubuntu. It goes down easy and it "Just works". The best part is I can "OEM Install" it, so I can put it as the default OS on computers I fix up and give away, and not have to worry about pirated copies of windows, or the non-techies getting all confuzzled.
I always tell new folk around here that there are three stages of competency in System Administration.
There is the newbie, that is afraid to do much because they don't know what they can do.
There are the old farts, that don't do much because they know what they can do.
And then there are the really dangerous ones in between, who do too much because they think they know what they can do.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
By default Ubuntu uses dash as /bin/sh, but has /bin/bash as root's shell. Both can of course be changed by the user.
I'm pretty sure the entire point of the article was that a good systemd flamewar is good for the hit count.
I've seen a lot of posts in this thread about how people have massively hosed a system while logged in directly as root. I'd be curious to know exactly what command(s) caused the issue. I'm guessing some variant of rm or dd. How would sudo have prevented it? I log in as root directly when I know I need to do something that requires it. My root shell colors the prompt red as a reminder. I log out when I'm done. I think at the end of the day, not hosing up your system is best prevented by constant awareness when you're logged in as root or running something as root. You could just as easily trash your box with a mis-typed sudo command.
After installing I have two main highlights. Excuse the verbosity, but since it's apropos, I really want to share my two cents and hear what other people thinks.
1) The shipped Plasma 5.3 is complete butt. Massive loss of functionality, completely broke my workflow. You might remember me defending KDE4 at every chance, and that's because it wasn't as bad as this by 4.3. Missing icons; lost of "old" systray icons; Icon-only task manager lost all options and unity launcher abilities; Klipper is half-baked and doesn't do a lot of things it did before (despite keyboard bindings showing those actions); kwin refuses to save per-window settings (works from control center, but not from window menu); the Breeze theme is bugged and doesn't show (instead Oxygen does, for whatever reason, despite zapping my settings entirely, and there's no matching GTK theme, so all consistency gets broken); dumps files on .config, making it super noisy; lots of actions that were able to get hotkeys don't accept hotkeys (despite the GUI being there, it refuses to save); several lost plasmoids (not even a simple network monitor now) and other surviving ones lost several options; and konsole refuses to obey the option to show "konsole - " on titlebar, making window matching by title never work. Kwin is still excellent, but it suffers being part of a desktop in such a miserable state and Konsole is still my favorite terminal. (I am open to suggestions just in case)
It doesn't even attempt to port old settings properly, and it's far too early to deploy. And this time there wasn't even the excuse to make it "for developers". It's really, really half-baked and I hope the missing stuff comes back eventually. It's only usable if you stick to the defaults and don't bother customizing it too much, and if you don't have habits or must-have plasmoids from KDE4.
2) Everything else worked really well. systemd works pretty well and I already got to tune it up. Very fast reboot and shutdown. Not seeing why the hate, it works for me.
Mod me down if you want, and I am aware anecdotes aren't data, but it works and I was able to migrate all my custom things easily. The only defect I found is that it likes to start disk checks more often than it should, like it does a main disk check once every 10 reboots. Doesn't take long so it's not a real problem, but it bothers me it's not doing every 30 mounts as I had it set as.
Otherwise, my system feels almost more responsive than before, and I am pretty sure it's not placebo effect. I mostly notice it with loading small apps and doing management tasks, but it's definitely a little bit faster. A few exotic bugs with my hardware got fixed and it's all now working great.
Anyway, I had to use Unity as a temporary desktop until I figure out some solution to my KDE problems and the good things and updates prevent me from rolling back. Two days later I got used to it and I am doing my usual computer routine with minor differences.
Gotta say, it's improved greatly since last time I used it. Having the menus in the window titlebar (saves space and doesn't require traveling to the top as in the OSX-like menu, best of both worlds), minimize-on-click, ability to adjust titlebar size and other minor fixes make it...*gasp* rather usable. I miss the window automation from kwin, but managed to replicate the missing window management features with some hackery and obscure Compiz features, so I only remember I am using another desktop when the windows appear in crazy places. Only took me a day to get used to the previously annoying "close button at left" business, but otherwise it feels usable for everyday work. Compared to its original incarnation it's quite the improvement. I'd even dare calling it "good enough", not the best, but just "good enough". The titlebar menus and the Launcher API abilities are pretty appealing features though.
A disclaimer, though, I always had a taskbar at the left even in the early 90s, so I find it "natural", but other people might be annoyed by the taskba
The 'article' is an editorial presented as something to be taken as representative of the community at large. My impression is that Canonical is losing mindshare quickly to Mint on the desktop, that Canonical really doesn't care that much about desktop anyway as they pin their business hopes and dreams on servers and embedded (where it also is failing to get much traction business wise).
Note that none of this has to do with the parents referenced points: Gnome 3 (which is largely defined by Gnome Shell, which Ubuntu doesn't even use by default) and systemd (I'm sympathetic, but not sure it's making much of a difference either way in the desktop distribution selection right now).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Seriously, stop spreading bad practice. The proper practice is "sudo -i".
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
It's not that being outsiders is the goal, it's that being popular isn't the goal. If a change will make things better for grandma and not affect me, then fine. If it'll make things better for grandma but affects my workflow negatively, then to hell with grandma, let her use Windows or Mac.
(Personally, systemd doesn't affect my workflow so I'll let others argue about it... but if you start talking about something like hiding configuration options and advanced features, I'll be objecting.)
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I think the latter is the cause of all the graphic problems I've been having. If I use the fglrx graphic driver (for AMD/ATI), I cannot sleep anymore (it wakes up to a black screen) and I don't have ctrl-alt-F consoles anymore. If I use the xserver-xorg-video-ati driver, I cannot unlock the screen (it loops back to sddm). Which makes having a laptop rather useless.
And there are plenty of other issues: opened windows are lost between logins (or moved to random places, and always to the 1st desktop), all opened konsoles are lost, kate doesn't reopen files, some login screens are all white. Or all black. The date on the clock is too big and doesn't fit ! And one thing that ails me is that your preferences are not kept between KDE4 and 5. You have to spend an hour or way more to go through all the options to try and get the desktop the way you want it again.
Non-Linux Penguins ?