Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Will Ship With Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS

prisoninmate writes: The current daily build of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) remains based on the Linux 4.2 kernel packages of the stable Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system, while the latest and most advanced Linux 4.3 kernel is tracked on the master-next branch of the upcoming operating system. In the meantime, the Ubuntu Kernel Team announced plans for moving to Linux kernel 4.4 for the final release of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.

Comments

first

[Anonymous Coward]

And not a single f was given (first)

wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Breaking news!!! Could this be *any* less relevant?

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if there were f-bombs, Apple's latest slashvertisment or Uber.

Whoopty

[Anonymous Coward]

effin' do.

But will unity suck any less?

[Neo-Rio-101]

Title says it all

Re:But will unity suck any less?

[hcs_$reboot]

Took me some time, but eventually could get used to Unity. Usable now, less bugs and quite convenient - again give it time to get used to it.

Re:But will unity suck any less?

[Anonymous Coward]

Title says it all

It is not bad with Mate or XFCE

Re:But will unity suck any less?

[Anonymous Coward]

Same experience here. I was KDE only but after using Unity for a while (since 14.04 IIRC), I think it's one of the best (if not the best) UI for a desktop.

My only complain are notifications. Not being able to interact with them is just plain stupid.

Re:But will unity suck any less?

[Anonymous Coward]

sudo apt-get install mate-desktop
sudo apt-get purge unity*
sudo reboot

Re:But will unity suck any less?

[hcs_$reboot]

'sudo' is your prompt?

Re:But will unity suck any less?

[hcs_$reboot]

Hmmm http://askubuntu.com/questions/187022/how-can-i-send-a-custom-desktop-notification
To customize a few stuff like notifs time ... http://askubuntu.com/questions/110969/notify-send-ignores-timeout
Also some applications, eg skype, allow to enter a script path in the settings, triggered each time a notification is sent.

Re:But will unity suck any less?

[Anonymous Coward]

'sudo' is your prompt?

No

Re:But will unity suck any less?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just install Xubuntu or MATE and don't worry about it. XFCE has advanced far enough to be a suitable replacement for MATE and is less resource hungry.

Even the crap GNOME3 is better than Unity.

KDE is the only "full" DE that doesn't kill OpenGL performance though. I don't care for it though, it's always been so buggy (does QT breed bad code or something? QT apps tend to be the buggiest). The only other alternative is to run something like OpenBox as the XFCE or MATE window manager, that keeps OGL performance where it should be.

Re:But will unity suck any less?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes

Re: But will unity suck any less?

[Anonymous Coward]

sudo apt-get purge systemd*

FTFY

Re:But will unity suck any less?

[jones_supa]

But will unity suck any less?

Unity is one of the rare remaining DEs that don't have the amateurish flat look. Windows 10, OS X, KDE, GNOME, all went with it.

Re: But will unity suck any less?

[Anonymous Coward]

He stole my prompt!
Bastard.
Now I'll have to get a new one. Maybe open up a Kickstarter campaign to fund a project for it...

Re:But will unity suck any less?

[Anonymous Coward]

No thanks. Mint with CInnamon for me.

It is the top distro on Distrowatch for that reason, since 2010 year on year growth to top #1.

Re: But will unity suck any less?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe.

Re:But will unity suck any less?

[Anonymous Coward]

PS1="sudo "

...I must say that putting PS1="${PS1}sudo " in your shell's dot rc file would make a pretty fun prank.

Re:But will unity suck any less?

[Teun]

And KDE is about the only one left that you can configure to your own taste, including non-flat.

Re: But will unity suck any less?

[xd1936]

Amateurish? Gradients look tacky and 90's; Flat and clean is so much nicer. All of those OS' you named moved to clean designs for a reason...

Re: But will unity suck any less?

[jones_supa]

I don't mean gradients but a sense of depth.

systemD

[dattaway]

Yes, but it will have systemD...

Re:systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

And, it's dropping of stderr that makes troubleshooting problems starting services very difficult.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

systemd works just fine for casual desktop users. Of course on servers, swallowing stderr and a lot of syslog messages makes it a pain.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on. stderr is an out of date concept. I bet if you asked ten professional Linux admins, only one would grok it.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because it is old doesn't make it bad, Mr systemd fanboi.

Re:systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully someone figures out how to remove it!

Re:systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares?

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

What moron modded this up?
Hint: man 5 systemd-system.conf - DefaultStandardOutput and DefaultStandardError options.

Re:systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who wants their Linux systems to boot reliably will care!

I used Debian for many years, without experiencing any problems booting it. Then systemd was included in Debian. The first update I did that installed systemd ended up rendering my system unbootable, and it was nearly impossible to debug. I finally got it fixed, after far too much effort. Only a week or so later, while doing another routine update of my Debian packages, my system was once again rendered unbootable thanks to a problem with systemd.

As somebody who has also followed the Debian mailing lists and bug tracker for many years, I quickly became aware that I wasn't alone. What's more, there were a lot of people reporting a lot of different problems, all involving systemd. After my second disaster involving systemd, I resolved to never use it again. I backed up my files, and since then I've been happily running FreeBSD. In many ways it's like what Debian used to be, but it's also much better. Best of all there's no systemd!

Re:systemD

[ZorinLynx]

Can someone explain why ALL THE MAJOR DISTROS have switched to systemd, when all I've seen is universal hate for it?

Either distro maintainers are masochists, or there's someone pulling strings somewhere to get this bullshit into every distribution.

We've slowed our move to newer versions of RHEL and Ubuntu at my workplace because of systemd. Eventually we're going to have to deal with it, but we're putting it off as long as we can. Everyone I know hates this thing. HOW did it become so pervasive?

Re: systemD

[buchanmilne]

Except it doesn't. The examples provided in the past supposedly proving this used the wrong Type= value (should have been forking, not left to the default which is 'simple').

Re:systemD

[gQuigs]

Sure. systemd is fine. People hate change. Hate is louder than praise.

I like it.

Re: systemD

[buchanmilne]

This must be debian-specific. On my 4 personal machines running one distro using systemd, and all the systems at work running a totally unrelated distro that also uses systemd, I have never seen this (neither distro is Debian-based).

Re:systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of us who dislike systemd have absolutely no problem with change. In fact, it's the one thing we've come to expect, especially those of us who are professional system administrators. People like us have each dealt with more versions of UNIX, Linux, Windows and other OSes than you could possibly imagine. Change is the least of our concerns. It's something we've dealt with every day, for decades on end, without even thinking about.

The problem with systemd isn't that it's a change. The problem with systemd is that, in our experience, it suffers from a huge number of serious problems! We're talking about problems ranging from logging output that's not easily usable through to systems that unexpectedly stop booting properly and that are difficult to diagnose.

We dislike it because it causes us nothing but problems, and these problems can't even be easily fixed. A bad architectural decision, like the use of binary logging, can't simply be patched away! The only reasonable way to "fix" it is to not use systemd and any Linux distro that uses systemd.

Re:systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure there's plenty of reading material out there.

It was written by the same cadre of villains responsible for PulseAudio. Unfortunately they're Redhat employees. Debian's governance bodies had slowly been stacked with Redhat sympathizers who snuck it in through the backdoor (used an inappropriate committee to make the decision) and a Redhatter cast the tie breaking vote. When the community demanded a general vote, there was one option for "let's just go with systemd" and like 4 options for differing levels of rejection. By splitting the opposition into 4 categories, the systemd-friendly option managed to get a plurality of the votes.

Ubuntu had to follow suit because Canonical doesn't want to expend the resources to maintain an init system anymore.

It is a genuinely surprising outcome. There are attempts to fork Debian (Devuon (sp?)), but it seems many people who are serious about avoiding it are moving to BSD (where systemd will not appear since it relies on features specific to the Linux kernel).

Re:systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

universal hate? No, there's just a very very small vocal minority. in places that matter, like dev lists, people who want to make linux better welcome systemd. I think the hold outs are the ones that have never done reinstalls, customized their system to the max, etc. They already have 'fast' systems, and see any change to the old way of doing things as bad. They are the minority. Also, most of them are users and don't contribute back.

Re:systemD

[invictusvoyd]

the only reasonable way to "fix" it is to not use systemd and any Linux distro that uses systemd.

Which means pretty much every major distro out there .

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

But stderr is dropped by systemd by policy. That makes it very difficult to troubleshoot start-up problems.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't work. systemd throws away stderr as is its policy.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

Stderr is something no modern user understands so systemd is correct in throwing it away.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

systemd has a policy against logging stderr. On a desktop system that is fine, but in a server that is a showstopper.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

And why does systemd by default throw away stderr?

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

Why lie about it? The ruler of systemd said he hates stderr and people that use it so he decided to be an ass and throw it away. Throw it away.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Lennfart says he wants to analy rape the people that use stderr.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

But the hero you cocksuck says he want to anally rape everyone that uses stderr.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

Only old morons that need to be put down care abt stderr.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

Your hero says we need to die for understanding UNIX concepts like stdout and stderr.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

This. systemd is correct in dropping it.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

This. Only old people care about stderr.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

If that's true, then no modern user has the mental competence to be using a computer. Sad.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

And that is why people hate systemd. Its creator doesn't understand UNIX.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

This. stderr is no longer needed.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please. No one needs stderr any longer. There's a good reason as to why systemd drops it.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't make mistakes then you don't need stderr.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

Because stderr is not important.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. stderr is just not important any longer.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

U only tink u need stderr.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

This. We need stderr, and systemd's policy against logging it makes life difficult.

Re:systemD

[thegarbz]

Stderr is not and never has been dropped. RTFM.

Re: systemD

[thegarbz]

Of course on servers, swallowing stderr

It doesn't. Not per design, not per default configuration. stderr is logged and can be redirected to the console. That is if you ever bothered to read the manual.

Re: systemD

[carnivore302]

Try updating /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf and restart the daemon. Systemd will state everything is fine, but it isn't; it fails to kill the old process. Maybe this isn't casual desktop usage, but it's just not supposed to work that way.

Re: systemD

[dotancohen]

And that is why people hate systemd. Its creator doesn't understand UNIX.

Of this whole stupid shit-fest, THIS is the comment that needs to be modded up. And I'm typing this on a systemd-based Linux distro.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

If a professional UNIX sysadmin doesn't grok stderr, they aren't a professional UNIX admin.

Oh. You said Linux admin. Nevermind.

Re:systemD

[serviscope_minor]

Can someone explain why ALL THE MAJOR DISTROS have switched to systemd, when all I've seen is universal hate for it?

The hate isn't universal.

It's certainly easier for distribution integrators than the old RC scripts. Also, there has been considerable external pressure because some of the major packages like Gnome more or less depended on systemd, so not having it meant no Gnone which was a showstopper. Actually you can now run Gnome without systemd but for a while that wasn't possible.

Another reason for the hate is that there are a lot of awfully obnoxious systemd fanbois out there who make claims like:
* You hate change (literally ad-homenim, attaxking the person not the message)
* Making claims about things that are only possible with systemd that demonstrably are not (I debunked a bunch of these in the last thread)

There's a lot of FUD on both sides, and frankly after the PulseAudio debacle, a lot of people have a deep distrust of Lennart Pottering (well justified IMO), and are incredibly leery of making the core of a Linux system depend on code written by a cowboy coder who doesn't seem to care about stability or quality.

Re: systemD

[greenfruitsalad]

[sarcasm]the biggest gnu/linux server company (redhat) clearly does not know what they're doing by implementing systemd into their distribution. [/sarcasm]

btw, i also hated systemd until i was forced to use/learn it. now i only hate aspects of it but overall perceive it as an improvement.

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. The systemd people know far better than you, the end users, what it is that you do and do not need. Let us worship the systemd team and their very finite wisdom.

Re: systemD

[kthreadd]

That doesn't work. systemd throws away stderr as is its policy.

Is not reading the manual also a policy among sysadmins these days? Hint, it doesn't throw it away. Just tell it where it should go and it will go there.

Re:systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

It's certainly easier for distribution integrators than the old RC scripts. Also, there has been considerable external pressure because some of the major packages like Gnome more or less depended on systemd, so not having it meant no Gnone which was a showstopper. Actually you can now run Gnome without systemd but for a while that wasn't possible.

Just to clarify. GNOME depends on a D-Bus interface that logind (a systemd component) implements. It does not depend on systemd itself, only the D-Bus interface. Anyone could implement it, and I believe at least OpenBSD and FreeBSD has patched ConsoleKit to do it. Also note that logind although it is part of systemd can run without the systemd init system. For example Ubuntu 14.04 has logind but uses Upstart.

Re:systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with systemd is that, in our experience, it suffers from a huge number of serious problems! We're talking about problems ranging from logging output that's not easily usable through to systems that unexpectedly stop booting properly and that are difficult to diagnose.

I've used systemd in production since Fedora 15, that's four years ago now? Since then also on RHEL, Ubuntu and Debian.
I have never EVER run into a system that couldn't boot because systemd did something bad.
I don't use pre-production or beta versions though.

Re: systemD

[kthreadd]

Debian had some early issues when they switched to systemd in the testing distribution, the one that you are not supposed to run in production or anything that you think of as important. But of course that's what people did. I have used Debian 8 now for a while and never run into something like that.

Re: systemD

[Eunuchswear]

You claim

systemctl restart speechd

doesn't work?

On what system, what does the unit file look like, where is the bug report?

Re:systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

Found the only intelligence in this whole exchange.

You can tell when an idiot is talking because they say unfounded idiocy like, "people who have lived through absolutely nothing but change are scared of change." One has to be extremely arrogant and mentally retarded to make such declarations.

I'm not sure how it happened, but we've had an entire generation grow up and with mental retardation and take hold of everything which was good - and they've fucked up, without fail, everything they've touched. Mental retardation is a bitch.

 

Re:systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

God damn your misleading words. You write intentionally or incompetently missing the point. "Change" isn't the problem, it never was, it is people being stripped of options by fools pushing SystemD who believe they know better than everybody else. People who enjoy freedom to choose solutions based on their own use cases are being demonized.

Re: systemD

[daid303]

stderr is send to the logging facilities by default. Which makes debugging issues easier instead of harder...

Re: systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

On what system

It's clearly on his system.

where is the bug report?

It's here.

Re: systemD

[cthulhu11]

Wish I had mod points for you. Linux: *still* no bundled compressing file system.

Doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't matter.
systemd turns any LTS into a linux that s*cks.

Xenial is for Cows

[Anonymous Coward]

You are all Cows. Cows say Mooo. Moooo! Moooo! Mooo cows Mooo. Mooo say the cows. YOU XENIAL COWS!!!

Re:Xenial is for Cows

[hcs_$reboot]

fyi
apt-get install cowsay

Re:Xenial is for Cows

[armanox]

sudo apt-get moo

Re:Xenial is for Cows

[Anonymous Coward]

The irony is that the apt-get package manager has super cow powers.

Re:Xenial is for Cows

[Anonymous Coward]

apt-get make me a sandwich

LTS?

[jamstar7]

I thought 15.10 was going to be a LTS release. They push it back to every two years now instead of 18 months?

Re:LTS?

[hcs_$reboot]

nah

Re:LTS?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why you thought that. Ubuntu LTS releases have always been on a 2 year schedule.

Re:LTS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please tell us you haven't used odd-numered Ubuntu releases in production before due to the erroneous belief that you were running LTS versions. -PCP

Re:LTS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Addendum: or even even-numbered released that don't end in ".04" ... -PCP

Re:LTS?

[umafuckit]

No, thankfully 15.10 is not LTS. I don't know if the problem is widespread, but on my i7 X99 system I saw a big performance nosedive on some CPU-intensive tasks. Desktop locking up, computations becoming 3 to 4 times slower, etc. This happened both with an in-place upgrade from 15.04 and when running from the 15.010 USB stick. Downgrading to 14.04 fixed everything.

Avoiding systemd for now

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll be sticking with the 14.04 LTS since it should be maintained until the 2018 LTS release. Hopefully by then systemd will either be an unpleasant memory or will have been beaten into shape (as PulseAudio eventually was, mostly...)

But if it's still a hot mess in 2018 then we'll be moving to FreeBSD for sure.

Move along, nothing to see here

[Anonymous Coward]

Recently, Kroah-Hartman announced that there will be one longterm kernel per year (the kernel released in January of each year). Linux 4.4 is expected for January 2016.

Ubuntu LTS releases come out every other April. Makes perfect sense for them to employ the longterm kernel released a few months earlier. That would be Linux 4.4 for Ubuntu 16.04. Nothing newsworthy, really.

Why SystemD was adopted

[Anonymous Coward]

SystemD is the big push by Redhat. Redhat is making a lot of other tools they provide dependent on SystemD. Most of the other distros don't see the danger.

SystemD is hideously complex. It is far more than an init system but rather controls now video, sound, and a host of other things. Guaranteed, the overly complex nature of SystemD will BREAK MOST DISTROS. Period.

The sole exceptions? Redhat and of course, CentOS. Redhat engineers will make sure that "Redhat Certified" systems with a subset of thoroughly tested hardware and software will just work. Everything else will break, hard and bad, when it goes past the limited ability of Distros to test things.

Most of the people running Distros are technically adept but naive and stupid when it comes to politics and business. Redhat can only make LOTS of money by being the only Linux Distro that works. They are mildly profitable now but like all businesses want monopoly rents. Most distros are stupidly handing it over because they trust the technical people at Redhat.

Ubuntu, Debian, etc. are making a big mistake embracing SystemD. ANY system running anything other than bog standard hardware and software packages will break, hard and bad, since the code base is so massive and complex.

I certainly won't be running anything using SystemD. I'd rather use Windows as revolting as that sounds* than spend five consecutive weekends just trying to get my computer to boot and stay up.

Add to it that Lennart Poettering ships legendarily bad code that has oodles of bugs, and you get the picture. [At least Theo Van Radt of OpenBSD ships pretty clean and pretty bug free code and fixes things fast when they break.]

*Windows resource hogging, and system/software updates are horrific compared to Linux/BSD. But at least a vendor install boots up the computer.

What a coincidence

[MichaelSmith]

Just as I scrolled into this article, 15.10 hung on me again.

Re:What a coincidence

[umafuckit]

Ah, so you're experiencing this sort of shit too, then?

Re:What a coincidence

[MichaelSmith]

This is on an HP Pavillion 11 inch laptop. Not the best hardware and almost certainly my last HP device. It seems to be associated with use of an external monitor connected with HDMI. I had one or two hangs over several months on 15.04 but on 15.10 its every day. I will most likely go back to 14.04 for the time being.

Re:What a coincidence

[umafuckit]

This is what I did for my desktop. Back to mint 17.x (which is 14.04). I do image registration with elastix and my registration times jumped from about 10 to 15 minutes with 14.04 to about 45 to 50 minutes with 15.10. I also work with the MATLAB parallel computing toolbox. Connecting to parallel workers normally takes a few seconds. With 15.10 it took over five minutes or never happened at all. Also the desktop (KDE) would lock up for many seconds at a time when the workers were running. Total train-wreck. Same symptoms running off a freshly downloaded 15.10 USB stick.

Re: What a coincidence

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the same problems with 15.10 and 15.04 running from a USB stick. Can't even install either of them without the installer freezing the entire machine. 14.04 has no such issues, haven't tried 14.10.

Re: systemD better than UNIX

[Anonymous Coward]

UNIX and POSIX will become obsolete.
Better and more powerful systems and concepts will take their place.
It was a good standard for it's time but now UNIX/POSIX is becoming outdated and insufficient.

Re: systemD better than UNIX

[Anonymous Coward]

> UNIX and POSIX will become obsolete.

I think you misspelled "mature standard."

> Better and more powerful systems and concepts will take their place.

Yep.

> It was a good standard for it's time but now UNIX/POSIX is becoming outdated and insufficient.

Then why not replace it instead of breaking it? There's an old saying: "If it works, don't fuck with it."