Ask Slashdot: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Desktop Default Application Survey

Dustin Kirkland, Ubuntu Product and Strategy at Canonical, writes: Howdy all- Back in March, we asked the HackerNews community, "What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?": https://ubu.one/AskHN. A passionate discussion ensued, the results of which are distilled into this post: http://ubu.one/thankHN. In fact, you can check that link, http://bit.ly/thankHN and see our progress so far this cycle. We already have a beta code in 17.10 available for your testing for several of those:

- GNOME replaced Unity
- Bluetooth improvements with a new BlueZ
- Switched to libinput
- 4K/Multimonitor/HiDPI improvements
- Upgraded to Network Manager 1.8
- New Subiquity server installer
- Minimal images (36MB, 18% smaller)

And several others have excellent work in progress, and will be complete by 17.10:

- Autoremove old kernels from /boot
- EXT4 encryption with fscrypt
- Better GPU/CUDA support

In summary -- your feedback matters! There are hundreds of engineers and designers working for *you* to continue making Ubuntu amazing! Along with the switch from Unity to GNOME, we're also reviewing some of the desktop applications we package and ship in Ubuntu. We're looking to crowdsource input on your favorite Linux applications across a broad set of classic desktop functionality. We invite you to contribute by listing the applications you find most useful in Linux in order of preference.

Click through for info on how to contribute. To help us parse your input, please copy and paste the following bullets with your preferred apps in Linux desktop environments. You're welcome to suggest multiple apps, please just order them prioritized (e.g. Web Browser: Firefox, Chrome, Chromium). If some of your functionality has moved entirely to the web, please note that too (e.g. Email Client: Gmail web, Office Suite: Office360 web). If the software isn't free/open source, please note that (e.g. Music Player: Spotify client non-free). If I've missed a category, please add it in the same format. If your favorites aren't packaged for Ubuntu yet, please let us know, as we're creating hundreds of new snap packages for Ubuntu desktop applications, and we're keen to learn what key snaps we're missing.

• Web Browser: ???
• Email Client: ???
• Terminal: ???
• IDE: ???
• File manager: ???
• Basic Text Editor: ???
• IRC/Messaging Client: ???
• PDF Reader: ???
• Office Suite: ???
• Calendar: ???
• Video Player: ???
• Music Player: ???
• Photo Viewer: ???
• Screen recording: ???

In the interest of opening this survey as widely as possible, we've cross-posted this thread to HackerNews, Reddit, and Slashdot. We very much look forward to another friendly, energetic, collaborative discussion. Thank you! @DustinKirkland On behalf of @Canonical and @Ubuntu

Comments

My Ubuntu Gripe List

[damn_registrars]

Two things really grind my gears with the version of (K)Ubuntu (16.04.2 LTS) that I currently run:

• CUPS crashes randomly. Yes, I've updated it since installing and it still crashes randomly. Yes, I've checked the logs and it logs nothing at all. My solution is to set up a cron job that runs every 10 minutes to restart it, which is tolerable but shouldn't be necessary. This problem did not exist in previous versions.
• Sleeping my laptop locks a config file and prevents me from changing monitors until I move .config, .local, and .kde directories. I have not been able to find the locked file. Why is this important? Because I use a docking station at work but some times bring my work home where I use a different monitor configuration.

There are other less dramatic problems I've run into, but these are the two that eat the most of my time. Other than that Ubuntu has been a real pleasure.

Re:My Ubuntu Gripe List

[mjwx]

I fell of Ubuntu when they moved the X, + and - buttons over to the wrong (left hand) side of the windows.

I've switched to Linux Mint and never looked back. So...

Dearest Ubuntu,
if you want to get users back, move the buttons back to the correct side.

Re:My Ubuntu Gripe List

[Hognoxious]

Retarded though that is, isn't that in the options somewhere? I think in Gnome you can even switch the order somehow, so close is between minimise and maximise, though why anyone would want to is anybody's guess. Is it like that on Macs?

I vaguely remember accidentally setting it and thinking "this totally fucking sucks" then switching it back and nearly forgetting about it.

Re:My Ubuntu Gripe List

[damn_registrars]

Mine are on the right hand side with Kubuntu 16.04.2 LTS. Is it perhaps a GNOME vs KDE thing?

Re:My Ubuntu Gripe List

[AmiMoJo]

I'd like to see self-encrypting drive support. Windows has had this for years now, and it's great. SSDs that support it will accept a key from the system, and use that for encryption with 0% performance loss (they encrypt by default anyway, just with a random key they generate internally).

I think the kernel supports this now, it just needs enabling and maybe some kind of UI (because this is Ubuntu, after all).

Re:My Ubuntu Gripe List

[Nunya666]

I fell of Ubuntu when they moved the X, + and - buttons over to the wrong (left hand) side of the windows.

One of the best things about Linux is also one of its downfalls: choices. If you don't like something about Linux, just change it. Select (or install) a different one, no matter what "it" is that bothers you, or you don't like the options, or you don't like the UI, or whatever. Those choices are also its downfall because new users don't know which they need, or why they would want one vs. another.

In your specific example, those buttons are controlled by an app called the Window Manager. It lets you easily change which ones appear, their location, and their color/graphic theme.

Re:My Ubuntu Gripe List

[Anonymous Coward]

Fukn'A, Clement at Mint should organize a "Devuan Mint" distro. The little flunky distros that are based on
Devuan floating around are pretty goddam stable and work well on my machines. Bring the heat to the
fuckwit Pottybrain and the rest of the pungent anal crinkles that think the invasion of the entire
ecosystem by a single piece of software is a good idea.

Re:My Ubuntu Gripe List

[Dragonslicer]

Yes, KDE still puts minimize/maximize/close on the right end of the title bar by default. You can move individual buttons to wherever you want.

Re:My Ubuntu Gripe List

[thegarbz]

Sleeping my laptop locks a config file and prevents me from changing monitors until I move .config, .local, and .kde directories. I have not been able to find the locked file.

This must be a problem specific to you. Every laptop I ever tried sleeping in Ubuntu including my current one is just fine after it wakes up.... after the reboot that is needed to wake it from it's deep deeeeeeep sleep.

*sigh* I wish I had a lockfile problem.

Re:My Ubuntu Gripe List

[Hognoxious]

Select (or install) a different one, no matter what "it" is that bothers you

Unless it happens to be the init system.

Re: My Ubuntu Gripe List

[Zero__Kelvin]

No. In that case you just stop complaining and pretending it matters, do as you always did and use the system which works as it always did because if the init system didn't work nobody could use the system.

Re:My Ubuntu Gripe List

[Hognoxious]

Or copy Android. Put them in the middle of the window and make them invisible.

Re: My Ubuntu Gripe List

[Hognoxious]

Right, because "working" is 0% or 100%.

Centos6: uuidd starts automatically, like I want.
Mint 18: Doesn't. But the system still boots.

Re: My Ubuntu Gripe List

[Zero__Kelvin]

Which is not the fault of systemd, but hey, let's blame it anyway. Dumbfuck.

Re:My Ubuntu Gripe List

[st0nes]

If you don't like them on the left, you can move them back to the right very much more simply than changing distros. There are on-line lessons on how to use Google.

Wow.

[Feyshtey]

In other news, /. ends tradition of summaries and posts entire encyclopedia to front page.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

$ grep -i "removed systemd" slashdotmegasummary
$

Re:Wow.

[postbigbang]

Peas too close to your potatoes, or just having a bad morning?

bring ifconfig back

[TheGratefulNet]

many of us have typed 'ifconfig' for decades. its sad to see a perfectly good command go away. yes, I know I can re-add it back, but taking it away because its not 100% perfect was just stupid.

CD burning?

[jandrese]

Would it be possible to get a CD burner built into the file manager again by default? The people who need it the most are people without internet access, and the dependency tree for brasero makes it a hassle to install offline.

Re:CD burning?

[l20502]

I suggest Xfburn, not many dependencies, runs fine on early 2000 hardware and I've never had issues with it, unlike brasero.

Re:CD burning?

[TheGratefulNet]

you don't want brasero; you want cdrskin.

it has a better back-end engine. the other burner apps seem to have gone way backwards since they first worked, some 5+ yrs ago.

Re:CD burning?

[thegarbz]

What is a CD burner? ;-)

Re:CD burning?

[fizzer06]

xfburn does this

Time to update my Buzzword Bingo card

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> crowdsource input

Why can't you just say "survey"?

On second thought, why can't you just post this on some crappy survey site and point anyone who cares to it instead of dropping a wall of text here?

Re:Time to update my Buzzword Bingo card

[thegreatbob]

All too many; we need people that are willing to expound upon their reasoning why. If enough people raise a significant, intelligent stink about it, it has a much better chance of getting ... resolved. To me, "eggs in one basket", the lead dev's user-hostility and apparent self-absorption, poor service start checking (fails to error out just because an old instance of the process is still running, context: debian SSH), damaged/broken logging, and, finally, the terrific bugs are all great reasons to have stayed the course with (insert something that isn't systemd).

Snap Apps?!?

[r_naked]

I understand the need for Snap and Flatpak for closed source. It makes it much easier for say Spotify to distribute their app, but there is NO FREAKING REASON to package up open source apps that are being maintained by a distro. They are MUCH larger, and you can't theme them. WTF is Ubuntu thinking. This *has* been my distro of choice, but I guess it is time to start looking elsewhere.

seriously

[Malenx]

WTF

Re:seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

        Web Browser: Firefox
        Email Client: Thunderbird
        Terminal: doesn't matter
        IDE: don't need one
        File manager: GTK2 Nautilus
        Basic Text Editor: gedit
        IRC/Messaging Client: X-Chat
        PDF Reader: Evince
        Office Suite: LibreOffice
        Calendar: don't need one
        Video Player: VLC
        Music Player: Audacious
        Photo Viewer: default GTK2 photo viewer
        Screen recording: don't need one

Re:seriously

[Blaskowicz]

GTK2 Nautilus is included in RHEL 6 :)

Otherwise, in MATE desktop it has moved to GTK3 and so it's GTK3 Caja rather than GTK2 Nautilus yet it's really really close. It's maintained plus a handful features such as closing tabs with middle click. GTK2 applications ported to GTK3 but keeping the UI traditional are a minimal disruption.

Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Because fallback kernels are for pussies, right?

Re:Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[tbannist]

Do you really need to have 16 fallback kernels?

Re:Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[Lonewolf666]

I don't entirely disagree, but please make autoremoval of old kernels opt-in. Or maybe an option you have to explicitly choose after installing a new kernel (although that would not be quite "auto" anymore ;)

Re:Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[Gavagai80]

I can see the value to keeping one fallback kernel. I can't see the value to keeping a half dozen of them.

Re:Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, the problem is when you can't install the latest security patch because /boot suddenly ran out of space because you have kernels in there nobody touched in 3 years. And the error messages don't even tell you the problem in a comprehensible manner!

Re:Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[s.petry]

Because removing them is rocket surgery?

Re:Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[Lonewolf666]

Until a new kernel is broken for your specific hardware configuration, and you don't have a working fallback.
We could discuss various compromises like "keep the last three versions" but my point is that breaking your system is worse than an update not going through.
And if an update fails to install because the disk is full, I hope there is an easily understood error message about it, so the user can fix it without a degree in CS. But that is a slightly different topic.

Re:Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd prefer, at most 3 versions of the kernel and its image available, including the current running kernel.

Thank you.

Re:Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[Kjella]

Do you really need to have 16 fallback kernels?

I agree, you need one - the version you launched the update from because you know that one boots and can access the repositories. If it breaks something else, you can always manually reinstall and pin the older kernel.

Re:Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[cellocgw]

Do you really need to have 16 fallback kernels?

64k[ernels] should be enough for anyone.

Ahhhh, c'mon: you knew someone was going to go there.

Re:Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[thegarbz]

There are many Ubuntu installations out there that are running kernels that are several versions old with intermediate versions that never got booted into being kept perpetually.

It doesn't make sense by default to keep anything more than the most recently installed + the current working one.

Re:Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[Blaskowicz]

Related is the problem of the / partition filling because of the APT cache. You have to go delete the cache yourself. More funny if your / partition contains /home as well and there are zero bytes left (more likely than not if you installed on a 20GB or 30GB drive and tried to do the right thing by not partitioning excessively)

Re:Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[johannesg]

And the error messages don't even tell you the problem in a comprehensible manner!

Is there even _one thing_ in Linux that fails with a comprehensible error message? Because I have yet to see one...

Re:Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[Hognoxious]

The previous one and the one before that. Just in case.

Re: Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[Zero__Kelvin]

apt-cache clean all

Re:Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[Trogre]

Are they asking about whether to include an installonly_limit=n parameter, that automatically removes kernels from the nth-oldest back, like YUM and DNF have had for years?

Re:Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[TheOuterLinux]

The problem is that you can go to http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kern... and download the latest kernel for Ubuntu but may cause problems so you would want to have a working kernel to fall back on.

Thanks For Asking

[Tenebrousedge]

Thanks for doing this, and thanks for doing this in this way. I appreciate especially the idea that this place has any currency :)

Flavor

[puddingebola]

Spearmint flavor. Also, although it's adware, Foxit Reader for PDF.

Ubuntu... meh...

[__aaclcg7560]

I haven't used Ubuntu since the days when automatically upgrading the Nvidia video driver FUBAR the entire installation. I got tired of reinstalling the OS for my file server every month and eventually switched to FreeNAS. That was years ago. These days I use Red Hat Linux on the terminal server to my Cisco rack and Linux Mint on my vintage 2006 Black MacBook.

Re:Ubuntu... meh...

[omnichad]

Why did you need to update video drivers on a file server? Just switch to a basic video driver, don't run X, and don't connect a screen.

Re:Ubuntu... meh...

[__aaclcg7560]

guess all that bragging makes u a l33t lunix haxxor.

I've been using Linux since 1997. Back in the day where just about everything didn't work out of the box, you had to roll your own kernels, and cross your fingers that everything worked well enough without taking your RAID5 with it. Now get off my lawn!

Re:Ubuntu... meh...

[__aaclcg7560]

Why did you need to update video drivers on a file server? Just switch to a basic video driver, don't run X, and don't connect a screen.

My file server was also doing double duty to teach me the Linux desktop (I'm CLI guy at heart), and the basic video from the motherboard was slow as molasses. Switching over to FreeNAS and using the web interface made Nvidia video card redundant.

Re:Ubuntu... meh...

[0ld_d0g]

I've been using it since Slackware .9x. It really wasn't THAT difficult to setup. Primarily because you didn't have fancy video cards/wifi/weird chipsets and you (I) didn't care about it working on laptops.

Re:Ubuntu... meh...

[ls671]

Then, just run VNC server and connect to the desktop with any VNC client duh! No video card specific driver needed!

It also allows you to connect to the desktop from anywhere you wish to, I have been doing this for 15 years+

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Request for Ubuntu 18

[Anonymous Coward]

Remove systemd

Re:Request for Ubuntu 18

[GlennC]

Seconded!

I would mod this up, but I'm out of points.

Re:Request for Ubuntu 18

[wonkavader]

Agreed. Systemd is making me look at other distros and consider dumping Ubuntu, which I otherwise like.
 

Re:Request for Ubuntu 18

[Foresto]

Underrated comment.

Re:Request for Ubuntu 18

[TheOuterLinux]

I would kill to have a systemd-free version of Xubuntu.

In & out

[gti_guy]

In with MATE and out the systemd, Otherwise all my new boxes get Devuan!

Re:In & out

[thegreatbob]

Second; this is basically what it would take to get me recommending Ubuntu in addition to Mint for average users. Remember, the techie crowd is largely the bunch that winds up fixing stuff for family/friends using it, so making it less hostile to the grey-beards would be nice.

Re:In & out

[carnivore302]

absolutely

Re:In & out

[AmiMoJo]

Sub 5 second boot times though. Some of us like to turn stuff off when we are not using it.

Re:In & out

[corychristison]

I use OpenRC on Funtoo Linux. I get very fast boot times since moving to SSDs. I've never actually timed it, but definitely in the 5 second range from POST to login screen.

But I also remove services if I don't need them, unlike the majority of Ubuntu users that have no idea how to do that.

Re:In & out

[Hognoxious]

Hibernate it then, you SJW weeabo.

Re:In & out

[AmiMoJo]

That was randomly hostile.

It must mean something when you get personalised trolling on Slashdot though.

Re:In & out

[Thelasko]

It means the mod system is messed up. There used to be a time where that sort of thing defaulted to level zero. Now these types of comments default at level 2.

As POTUS would say, so sad.

Re:In & out

[Misagon]

I already use Ubuntu Mate, but the GTK+ 3.0 widgets that it uses are still written by GNOME developers and there is a lot of GNOME 3 stupidity still left in them.

There have been lots of problems with GNOME/GTK+ 3 developers being too full of themselves and for instance broken the binary compatibility minor revision changes, but I expect GTK+ 3 to be relatively stable now that GTK+ 4 has started.

Scrollbars and sliders behave in a special GNOME 3 way different from other major OS or toolkit.
For instance, if you move it slow enough it goes into a "high precision" mode where you have to move the mouse more to make the slider move. It was touted as a feature, but for most users, this appears as if the slider just has a hick-up and refuses to move.
There is no option to disable this behaviour. The volume control especially is very annoying.
Also, don't want smooth scrolling which feels like sliding on ice? There is no option to disable that either.
If the GTK/GNOME 3 developers had any reason and humility, they should not have changed the default behaviour of these widgets in the first place. Default should have been the old one, only with additional behaviour being optional.

Re:In & out

[chihowa]

If you like fast startup but you like not wasting electricity, I suggest you look into putting your system into suspend or hibernate mode. I haven't seen the grub prompt on my desktop or servers for a while and even my laptop has an uptime measured in weeks. Who cares how fast it can startup services?!

(On the other hand, since using systemd on one of my systems, I've had to reboot that machine way more than I ever had to before. It reminds me of Windows now. I can see why fast boot times are an important feature of systemd!)

Re:survey response

[Anonymous Coward]

Web Browser: emacs
Email Client: emacs
Terminal: emacs
IDE: emacs
File manager: emacs
Basic Text Editor: vim
IRC/Messaging Client: emacs
PDF Reader: emacs
Office Suite: emacs
Calendar: emacs
Video Player: emacs
Music Player: emacs
Photo Viewer: emacs
Screen recording: emacs

Chromium

[bluefoxlucid]

Web browser - Chromium. Not Chrome; I've been using open-source Chromium, and it logs into Google and acts like Chrome just fine.

Real GNOME, not that Mate/Cinnamon bullshit.

Evolution is no longer the horrible horse shit it used to be. E-mail, calendar, and the lot go fine in Evo. Just make sure you get the latest versions of the plug-ins for things like Google Calendar and any Office 365 integration (Outlook365) available; Google Calendar broke for multiple releases in Ubuntu! Likewise, Evo kept breaking with the Gnome Online Accounts agent, requiring restarts of the goa-daemon and Evolution; there was a patch for that (Fedora got it, Ubuntu didn't until the next release).

If we're going Gnome, do Gnome-terminal, gedit, and the lot. Honestly, though, I'd like to split the desktop installs. Gnome-shell, MATE, XFCE, whatever, bring along their own application suites; this is dumb. Maybe I don't want Gedit, Gnome-terminal, and the lot; maybe I want the minimal functional Gnome-Shell, and then the XFCE suite. I quite like Mousepad over Gedit. There should be a gnome-desktop-environment and a gnome-desktop-suite, and maybe I install gnome-desktop-environment with xfce-desktop-suite.

Don't know what to say about office. LibreOffice is a horrible piece of shit and there's no real alternative.

My Response

[Thelasko]

• Web Browser: Firefox or Chromium

• Email Client: Thunderbird

• File manager: Nautilus

• Basic Text Editor: Gedit

• IRC/Messaging Client: I haven't used one in years. Pidgin was the last one

• PDF Reader: Evince

• Office Suite: Libre Office

• Calendar: Lightning

• Video Player: VLC

A few things

[John Allsup]

Do less, but more reliably. Let spins like ubuntustudio or kubuntu add the packages. Have metapackages corresponding to them on the installer, with a simple choice (think of the chooser in Noobs), with some spins requiring a network connection. Have an install tab creator which lets you easily choose defaults.

Then have a very minimal default desktop and an easy way to choose bundles. Put GNOME and LXDE on the standard I so, use GNOME as the default choice. Put Firefox and chromium on as browsers by default. I generally have Firefox as default.

Those are my thoughts. For now I use ubuntustudio with a script and a tar of my usual convenience scripts (so install from iso, copy script and tarball over, run script as root, leave to simmer for 30 minutes, or until well cooked). I do have a big pile of cheap laptops, and the creative, writing and python stuff are what I want out of the box.

I've started exploring debootstrap. Being able to image a drive you can then stick in a machine is something I'd love.

Drop GNOME3 and go with Mate or Cinnamon instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome 3 is a joke made by self-appointed user experts who have no eye for how a user interface should wok. Gnome 3 is the same junk like Unity and Windows 8 where they tried to shove a tablet interface onto desktop users that like to use a real mouse and keyboard and do not have a touch screen.

I say drop the horrible Gnome 3 and use Mate or Cinnamon instead.

By the way, ever since Gnome 3 / Unity because the standard on many distros, I no longer felt the inclination to use Linux anymore. I felt that Ubuntu, Fedora, and others have abandoned their existing user base. And they do not care what their users think either.

Microsoft realized they made a mistake with Windows 8.0/8.1 and came out with Windows 10.

I wish the Gnome 3 developers would be enlightened too...

Basic Text Editor: ???

[Albanach]

Basic Text Editor: ???

I'm glad someone is finally asking this question. It's a debate that's long overdue in the *nix community and I can't wait to hear a decisive answer to a question that's bothered me for years.

Re:Basic Text Editor: ???

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Text Editor...a debate that's long overdue in the *nix community

Winner: most subtle troll on the board today.

Re:Basic Text Editor: ???

[puddingebola]

Pointless really. Microsoft established Notepad as the dominant standard in this niche and open source gurus are just fooling themselves with their babbling.

Re:Basic Text Editor: ???

[jeremyp]

Well if you want a text editor that is basic, ed, is probably the one. The only practical choice for a text editor - vi(m) - is pretty sophisticated.

There's one other text editor whose name escapes me, but the only way they could make it usable was to write a Lisp extension that makes it behave like vi.

Re:Basic Text Editor: ???

[corychristison]

I understand this is meant to be funny, but I fall in the nano camp. vi/vim and emacs be damned.

Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[Anonymous Coward]

My computer has one Ethernet port. In pre-systemd versions of Ubuntu, it would show up in ifconfig as "eth0". That makes perfect sense to me. "Eth" appears to be short for "Ethernet", and the "0" indicates it's the first of possibly many Ethernet ports.

Then I upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04, which as I understand it uses systemd. For some reason, ifconfig started showing the one and only Ethernet port on my system as something like "enp0s19". Where the fuck does that come from?! I have one Ethernet port. So why the fuck is it mentioning a number close to 20?!

Of course, things went down hill after that. I ran into so many problems with systemd breaking in weird and unexpected ways. I spent more time on my phone trying to search for ways to fix systemd problems than I ever spent actually using that Linux installation.

After a couple of days I gave up. I installed FreeBSD, and I haven't looked back. It gives me all of the benefits of Ubuntu, but without the downsides. My Ethernet port now shows up in ifconfig as the very reasonable "em0".

I don't care what Ubuntu does to their distro at this point. I don't think I will ever be able to switch back to Linux as long as systemd is still being used.

Re: Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[Anonymous Coward]

There are Linux distros that don't use systemd by default. You do know that, right? If you didn't know that, looking it up would have been much faster than migrating to a new operating system.

Re:Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[jabuzz]

open up your machine, and add a second nic. Now you find your new nic is eth0 and your old one is eth1, and everything is potentially broken.

I didn't think the enp0s19 was a systemd thing, rather something to do with udev and consistent device naming when the hardware changes.

Re:Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[GoingDown]

Network interface naming has nothing to do with systemd. Reason why your ethernet adapter was suddently named as enp0s19 is because of this: "udev supports a number of different naming schemes. The default is to assign fixed names based on firmware, topology, and location information. This has the advantage that the names are fully automatic, fully predictable, that they stay fixed even if hardware is added or removed".

https://access.redhat.com/docu...

Re:Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[jeremyp]

Isn't udev now part of systemd?

Re:Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[danomac]

open up your machine, and add a second nic. Now you find your new nic is eth0 and your old one is eth1, and everything is potentially broken.

I've never had that happen before udev decided to give really stupid names to ethernet ports. You know why? udev was smart enough to remember what mac address tied to what port. I had eth0, installed a card with two ports on it, and they became eth1 and eth2. Persistent rules are a thing in udev. Or was? I have a machine that will rename its ethernet port from the enp0s19 to enp0s116666777 or something stupid once in a while on reboot breaking all sorts of things. I had to turn that "persistent network names" off (tip: net.ifnames=0 on kernel parameter line) so it wouldn't occasionally screw up my networking on reboot. So much for predictable network names...

Re:Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[fisted]

names are [...] fully predictable

Yeah this goes under the name "predictable network interface names", however, it doesn't mean predictable for humans. It's predictable to a machine having all available information (and note that things like "what PCI slot does the NIC sit in" may play into this -- it's this retarded.)

Re:Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[afranke]

https://www.freedesktop.org/wi...

Re:Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[johannesg]

I'd just like to point out that your reaction is actually very similar to what happens when a Windows user decides to try this Linux thing. Those people are usually told to RTFM (for many this is also the point where they learn a life-long hatred of all things UNIX). I don't know, maybe the same advice could work for you?

Re:Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[PincushionMan]

My Ethernet port now shows up in ifconfig as the very reasonable "em0".

em0? Do you mean en0? IIRC, it stands for Ethernet Network #0. IRIX uses (used) the same network naming scheme as well.

Pedantry aside, I sort of understand why the do the funky name scheme. The idea is that the name is based on the location of the slot, so PCI/PCIx slot #0, so that's where the p0 comes from. The s19 is a unique identifier based on some properties your card has. This way your cards don't bounce around the network names. However, some problems arise due to wireless cards identifying themselves on bus -209, so you get wireless names like wlx32559s18 and so on.

ArchLinux has come up with a way to deal with this, so long as you stay away from the standard eth0 (I use en numbers myself). It should work in the other Linux versions, also, but I've not tried it. Here's the link. That said, even back in the ifconfig days, I used something on a CentOS server these lines to give a specific eth-number affinity for a specific Ethernet port by mac address.

I understand why you've switched to BSD (FreeBSD?), I've used it in the past, back in the late 90s. My suggestion is to track stable, and dedicate some time to the mailing list to understanding what they are doing what they are doing. But don't upgrade stable (build world) without reading the release notes. There was a big deal when one of the stable bumps (like 3.8 to 3.11) broke world if you didn't stop off at 3.9 first. Also, build your own kernel. The kernel config for BSD, IIRC, is a giant text file. You flip the bits that you want, recompile, reboot and you are good to go.

Re:Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[jandrese]

FreeBSD names the devices by the type of driver it uses. The em driver is used for Intel Pro/1000 type cards. If his system also had a Broadcom NIC in it the device would show up as bge0.

In theory I think it is possible to screw up the device numbering by moving cards around or adding/removing a card from the system, but in practice that doesn't tend to happen very often. It's more of a problem for people using USB NICs, but even then it's usually not an issue.

Re:Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[KiloByte]

These names are not predictable for computers either. These random numbers get rerolled on major kernel upgrades (quite rarely but enough in the ong run), when kernel config changes, when you attach a new piece of hardware, for no reason whatsoever, or in some cases even every single boot.

Re: Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[Zero__Kelvin]

Try 'lspci' and see if you see those numbers. It is just a guess, but your NIC likely is device 19 on PCI bus 0. You might think it makes more sense the other way, but in a highly parallel startup environment there is a race condition, and your cards might not be enumerated and registered in the same order every time.

Re: Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[fisted]

Typical Linux user response... "Hey, we did something retarded and as an added bonus, we enabled it by default! Why, if you don't want it you can go out of your way to undo our mess."

Re: Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[Zero__Kelvin]

Typical retard ... "I'm too retarded to understand why things are this way, so I'm going to say it is stupid that it is this way to deflect the fact that I am stupid!"

Re: Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[fisted]

So then let's hear why predictable(TM) interface names are the way they are, how they are useful and why it is a good idea to make servers default to it, dear zealot.

Re:Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right, it is not a systemd thing, more connected with the migration away from a manually (via scripts in most distros so it may not seem manual to the user) maintained /dev filesystem with simple, but high maintenance in complex use-case situations, ifconfg based commands for managing network devices, to a kernel managed /sys filesystem and NetworkManager based management of network devices (which handles mobile scenarios such as different priorities for wireless networks, and handover from wireless to wired when an ethernet cable is plugged in much better)

Re: Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[Hognoxious]

I must have angels watching over me. Whatever the problem is that they're trying to solve by making the names look like line noise has never, ever, bothered me.

Re: Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[Zero__Kelvin]

Yes. The angels that changes to this scheme so that race conditions introduced by newer systems that boot faster and advancements in boot parallelism didn't bite you in the ass. Now seriously, you are clueless on so many things. Just accept it and move on with your pathetic life. You ReALLY aren't smarter than the people who develop Linux and udev, etc. I PROMISE.

Re: Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[fisted]

You're beyond pathetic, but I suppose Ican consider you representative for the Linux zealot community, given how you insult arbitrary people including those which appear to be supporting your argument (which is ultimately at authrority, but oh well).

I'm having fun watching your trainwreck go down and be windowsified from a real operating system that works as expected and doesn't add random shit breaking things left and right because some idiot has an oh-so-nice idea. Increasing boot speed by nondeterministically probing the hw busses? I'm not even sure that's actually true, but hey. Boot time. Highly important especially on servers, right? This is one of the features that specifically help absolute niche applications of Linux, when the whole thing is already pretty nice except on the server side, where things get increasingly broken and ass backwards.

Re: Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[Zero__Kelvin]

Boot time is *especially* important on servers, as these days people use virtualization and spin them up on demand. As usual you just keep making yourself look more and more stupid. Off you go now little troll ...

Re:Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[johannesg]

I was talking about the overal experience, not just the name of the ethernet device.

Re:Why the fuck did eth0 become enp0s19?!

[jabuzz]

On the other hand you have a server with built quad gigabit ethernet, you open it up to add a dual port 10GbE card for an upgrade, start the machine and all your firewall rules are completely foobar till you fix everything up, because the 10GbE card now grabs eth0/eth1 or more likely em1/em2.

In my view those bitching about ethernet device names have never had to maintain a server with multiple ethernet ports and doing upgrades on them. There is plenty to hate about systemd, but this even if was a systemd thing is not one of them.

Actual responses

[Cyrano de Maniac]

Here's what I use regularly:

Web Browser: Chrome, then Firefox when needed. lynx if it gets bad enough.
Email Client: They all suck, but Thunderbird and alpine
Terminal: xfce4-terminal, xterm when needed
IDE: Don't need one. But please package cscope, xxdiff, and hexedit. diffuse would be helpful as well.
File manager: I accidentally start this once in a while. Then I close it ASAP.
Basic Text Editor: vim
IRC/Messaging Client: pidgin, xchat, epicII, in that order
PDF Reader: evince
Office Suite: OpenOffice, because there's no other realistic choice outside of Google Docs or Office 365.
Calendar: Lightning in Thunderbird, but it sucks. Would use Orage if it played nice with Exchange (sadly no choice in mail server at work), or if you could at least add calendar entries via an .ics file from the command line without restarting Orage.
Video Player: Don't use.
Music Player: Don't use.
Photo Viewer: eog, because I don't know what else is out there. Not a great choice, admittedly.
Screen recording: Don't use.

What about better blockchain integration?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why aren't they planning on doing more blockchain integration? Blockchain is the big up and coming technology. If they don't support blockchain technology now then they will fall behind.

When I install Ubuntu I want the kernel to be blockchain-enabled by default. I also want the basic UNIX commands, like "ls", "cat", "df", "ps" and so on to at least be blockchain-compatible, if not blockchain-enabled by default, too. I haven't used GNOME in a long time, so I don't know how well it supports blockchain, but if Ubuntu is switching to GNOME then I hope they have reviewed its blockchain support. Like in the other cases, I want GNOME to be blockchain-enabled by default.

My last request would be to make sure that cron also supports blockchain, so that I can use it to schedule blockchain maintenance periodically. I know some people like the use automatic mark-and-sweep garbage collection with their blockchain, but I prefer a more manual approach combined with minimal cron-scheduled automatic blockchain maintenance scripts.

This release of Ubuntu clearly features some big changes, so I hope they go all the way and make sure that their blockchain support and integration is the best that it can be. Think of blockchain as like UTF-8 was a decade ago: it's the big upcoming technology. If you support it early, like Linux did, then things will be golden in the future.

Re:What about better blockchain integration?

[tommeke100]

it will be called blockchaind

You are not going to listen anyway

[iamacat]

If you did, Gnome -> Unity -> Gnome fiasco would have never happened, not to mention ads in local search. This rules out truly non-technical users who expect stability, but Ubuntu is still pretty good for a little more experienced users who know how to install and configure another desktop. Please at least stick to one thing for some time now and don't move to KDE or XWayland in the next release. And don't even think of Yahoo as default search in anything - put users before politics.

My wishlist

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

Bug fixes first, new features second.

Re:survey response

[thegreatbob]

Sorry I've got no mod points xD

My software list

[Kreuzfeld]

My go-to list, in priority order:

        Web Browser: Vivaldi, Firefox, Chrome
        Email Client: Thunderbird!
        Terminal: Terminal, xterm
        IDE: meh
        File manager: any
        Basic Text Editor: emacs, vi
        IRC/Messaging Client: meh
        PDF Reader: evince, okular
        Office Suite: LibreOffice!
        Calendar: Thunderbird/Lightning
        Video Player: VLC
        Music Player: VLC
        Photo Viewer: meh
        Screen recording: meh

Too Late...

[Anonymous Coward]

I started using Ubuntu when 10.04 came out. When they forced that Unity shit on us I had to instal gnome-flashback to get a "not shit" desktop back. I just recently installed Ubuntu Mate w/compiz which gives me the traditional desktop without the shitty new gnome or unity wad.

AWS

[swan5566]

Use it a lot in that environment. Having smooth updates from previous versions, as well as network reliability.

Re:

[LinuxRegisteredUser_]

Web Browser: firefox, chromium
Email Client: thunderbird
Terminal: konsole
IDE: vim
File manager: konqueror
Basic Text Editor: vi
IRC/Messaging Client: irssi
PDF Reader: okular
Office Suite: libreoffice
Calendar: ???
Video Player: mplayer
Music Player: clementine
Photo Viewer: gwenview
Screen recording: ???

Bring back renameable terminal tabs

[21st Century Peon]

They vanished in 15.04, and the world wept at their departure.
...OK, I wept.
...OK, I shouted at the screen, spent too long searching for it as a bug, eventually found it was a "feature", then shouted at the screen some more.

Remote Connection GUI

[gachunt]

Built-in ability to remote connect, similar to RDP.

It's a pain to try and configure xrdp, vnc4server. So much frustration.

Supporting tools

[peterofoz]

I dabble in development, but mostly work in project management and business analysis.

The primary tool I see needing the most work in my daily use is a good note taking tool alternate to OneNote. I've used Baskets, but found it has stability issues and had not been updated is a while. Other tools are too rudimentary being text only or having a predefined structure like being a daily journal.

Other favorite tools are LibreOffice, PDF editors, mind mapping View Your Mind, yEd, Inkscape and Dia, ProjectLibre, NotePadQQ, Vokoscreen, Remmina remote desktop

For collaboration I use cloud tools like HipChat and Zoom.us

Response

[gsliepen]

Web Browser: firefox
Email Client: mutt
Terminal: xterm
IDE: vim
File manager: ls
Basic Text Editor: vim
IRC/Messaging Client: irssi
PDF Reader: evince and okular, whichever annoys me less
Office Suite: latex
Calendar: orage
Video Player: mpv
Music Player: mpd
Photo Viewer: geeqie
Screen recording: n.a.

Re:Response

[TheOuterLinux]

You mentioned latex; I like to use Lyx as a wysiwyg editor for it. Makes everything look professional. The only down side is that installing Lyx usually pulls about 1GB worth of packages.

Re:survey response

[fph il quozientatore]

Well I wouldn't call Emacs a "basic text editor", would I?

Make SystemD Replaceable

[kbahey]

I have been using Linux as my main desktop for around 15 years, and Kubuntu as my main desktop from ~ 2006 until last February or so. I switched to Xubuntu because Kubuntu 16.04 started going down the 'dumb it down by removing configurability' track.

So, I can't comment on Unity or Gnome since I never used them, and probably never will. XFCE does what I want, as did KDE before it.

I also use Linux for all my clients (Ubuntu LTS Server).

What bugs me is that Ubuntu decided to go down the systemd route blindly. If it was made optional, I would not mind much. As in: choice! But it is is not, and I cannot make a server or desktop be 'systemd free' by just removing packages and installing others.

The arguments against systemd are known to any experienced system admin with lots of years in the field.

Make systemd replaceable please!

Autoremove old kernels from /boot

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy common sense, Batman. This has been one of my biggest gripes about running Ubuntu on a server platform for years. I know there are tools out there that automate this, but it really should have been part of aptitude from the start.

Maybe future Ubuntu user? (again)

[SpaceAmoeba]

Currently using Linux Mint Cinnamon, but will be looking at Ubuntu 18.04 for possible switch.

Web Browser: Vivaldi, Firefox, Chrome
Email Client: Thunderbird
IDE: IntelliJ, Eclipse
File manager: Nemo, Nautilus
Basic Text Editor: Xed / Gedit
PDF Reader: evince
Office Suite: Libreoffice (but needs so much work!)
Video Player: MPlayer / Xplayer
Music Player: quodlibet

Survey response

[rnm4446]

Environment: Ubuntu Desktop Web Browser: Firefox Email Client: Thunderbird Terminal: GTerm IDE: Geany, Eclipse when required File manager: Nautilus Basic Text Editor: GEdit IRC/Messaging Client: Thunderbird (chat) PDF Reader: Evince Office Suite: LibreOffice Calendar: Google Calendar Video Player: VLC Music Player: RhythmBox Photo Viewer: GNOME Image Viewer Screen recording: none; live screen share would be useful, I haven't found any cross-platform that work well yet. In short, most of what you have selected as best-of-breed work really well for me.

or even worse...

[gosand]

You go to install the latest kernel, and then it errors out in a partially-updated state because /boot is full.
It took quite a bit of googling to find the right solution of how to remove old kernels to make enough space to get the latest installed. An option to safely do this automatically would be nice.

(I am on Mint, and my system may or may not have been in a bad state with a partially-installed kernel, but I wasn't about to reboot and find out)

Re:or even worse...

[Hognoxious]

In sensible distros you can set it in yum.conf:
installonly_limit=3
Gives you one as a spare and one for a scare.

Survey

[jon3k]

• Web Browser: qutebrowser, chromium, elinks, firefox
• Email Client: gmail
• Terminal: rxvt (-unicode)
• IDE: vim
• File manager: (none)
• Basic Text Editor: vi(m)
• IRC/Messaging Client: irssi
• PDF Reader: chromium
• Office Suite: google docs
• Calendar: google docs
• Video Player: vlc, plex via browser
• Music Player: mpd via ncmpcpp
• Photo Viewer: web browser, feh
• Screen recording: n/a

Re:Actual responses (suggestions for you)

[gosand]

Web Browser: Chrome, then Firefox when needed. lynx if it gets bad enough.

Pale Moon, then Firefox, then Chromium, then Lynx.

Email Client: They all suck, but Thunderbird and alpine

YES... alpine (combined with fetchmail) all the way, been using it forever. If I have to I will use webmail as a backup.

File manager: I accidentally start this once in a while. Then I close it ASAP.

LOL. Yes, exactly.

Office Suite: OpenOffice, because there's no other realistic choice outside of Google Docs or Office 365.

LibreOffice

Video Player: Don't use.
Music Player: Don't use.

VLC for both

Photo Viewer: eog, because I don't know what else is out there. Not a great choice, admittedly.

geeqie is great. I still alias it to gqview, because that is what I used to use until it forked into geeqie and I can type gqview easier.

Mint takes care of my needs, thanks... BUT

[gosand]

Can you please please please offer a good replacement for systemd. Of course it was all over that survey, but I guess it fell on deaf ears.

I've been on Mint XFCE for several years now, and recently upgraded 18.1 to 18.2. Smooth and fast. I love Mint, but I see systemd being the death knell for it in my eyes if things keep going the way they are.

Re:Mint takes care of my needs, thanks... BUT

[gosand]

I used to use Xubuntu (after Kubuntu and KDE declined). It worked well, but I always keep an eye on what's out there, and I tried Mint as a live distro for a bit and really liked it. Just enough polish in the right areas for me. I tried MATE and Cinnamon, but I like XFCE better. I didn't care for the upgrade philosophy of "re-install" at first, but it made me re-organize my partitions in what is really a better way of doing it. I had done a long series of rolling upgrades while on Kubuntu, and things just got unstable and kind of weird.

Now my eye is on Devuan.

Re:Mint takes care of my needs, thanks... BUT

[gosand]

they switched FROM it.

Re:Drop GNOME3 and go with Mate or Cinnamon instea

[Camel Pilot]

Microsoft realized they made a mistake with Windows 8.0/8.1 and came out with Windows 10.

Give some points to the AC above.

Yes Gnome 3 is non-intuitive, breaks with gui common memes and is hard to configure. I manage a number of workstations for visiting scientist/engineers that come from different non-linux (ie Windows and Mac) backgrounds. When I have Mate configured they sit down and start work immediately without even noticing what is the underlying OS/GUI. Switched to Gnome 3 and immediately started getting questions and WTFs complaints.

I dont want 90% of it

[Osgeld]

It drives me nuts that you install a distro it has libreoffice, and 2 other word processors 3 draw programs and the gimp, 4 fucking terminal emulators, FIREFOX (puke) and 100,000 little widgets I will never ever open

Re:I dont want 90% of it

[Hognoxious]

Got a stable setup so it's been a while since I installed anything, but IIRC the DeadRat clan allow you to choose. To use a car analogy, there's several "set meals" (desktop, desktop with A/V shit, CLI only server etc) plus the option to pick & mix as you please.

Re:I dont want 90% of it

[Osgeld]

well now days even debian comes with more or less the entire ubuntu set of vomitware, the only way to get around it is to install from minimal cd, do not install anything but the basic command line tools and go from there

Re:Drop GNOME3 and go with Mate or Cinnamon instea

[Marisaze]

Personally, I can't imagine Gnome 3 being any good on a tablet. It might function okay with a touchscreen but I couldn't tell you as I don't use them. Gnome 3 is certainly different, but it's extremely powerful once you get used to it. That said, it's not going to be everyone's preferred DE and nobody should expect that there ever will be a perfect DE for everyone.

If you don't like Gnome 3, there's plenty of other flavors of Ubuntu, and certainly more than enough distros to try alternatives. Ubuntu MATE is a great spin if that's the route you want, and Martin Wimpress is a marvelous maintainer. It's official too, so you don't even have to worry about support.

My List

[Feneric]

Web Browser: Firefox Dev Edition, Chrome, Firefox, Opera
Email Client: Thunderbird
Terminal: terminology
IDE: Sublime Text, Komodo IDE (would love to see Coda for Linux, but alas)
File manager: Nautilus
Basic Text Editor: Vim
IRC/Messaging Client: Pidgin
PDF Reader: xpdf
Office Suite: LibreOffice, Google Docs, Abiword, LyX
Calendar: Thunderbird
Video Player: VLC
Music Player: XMMS2
Photo Viewer: GraphicsMagick, GIMP
Screen recording: N/A
Games: Battle for Wesnoth, Xconq, Oolite, FreeOrion, FreeDroid, Lectrote, XU4 (Ultima IV)
Other: POV-Ray, Blender, Inform 7, Twine, iPython QT Console, pgAdmin, Audacity, calibre, GoldenDict

sure my input

[btroy]

Web Browser: FireFox
Email Client: Thunderbird
Terminal: gnome default is okay
IDE: gedit
Basic Text Editor: gedit
IRC/Messaging Client: HexChat
PDF Reader: evince
Office Suite: Libreoffice
Video Player: VLC
Music Player: RhythmBox
Photo Viewer: gThumb

Dear Ubuntu...

[LVSlushdat]

Dear Ubuntu, I've been with you since 7.04/Feisty Fawn, and once you released 8.04LTS, I've upgraded with each new LTS with pleasure, however... I'm still on 14.04LTS, and WILL NOT be upgrading to 16.04 or 18.04 because you decided, along with Debian and quite a few other distributions to drop your -perfectly working- upstart init scheme and go down the toilet bowl with systemd. I'll be on 14.04 until its EOL in 2019, at which time, I'm planning on going to Devuan or back to my "Linux roots" with Slackware. Been using/admin'ing Linux for 20 years and systemd is by FAR the stupidest abortion to be inflicted on Linux since Linus gave birth to Linux...

Bye Bye, Ubuntu

Mine

[rgbe]

I started with Debian back as my primary desktop in 1998, but have been using different flavours of Ubuntu since it arrived. Currently using Ubuntu GNOME have used Xubuntu extensively too. Keep up the good work. Although, I have tried Debian again and may go back if the Ubuntu experience does not get better (unlikely). Biggest gripe is the state of screen rendering on Linux. Wayland is so important to get going. Web Browser: Firefox for personal stuff, Chrome for work. Email Client: Gmail for work and personal. Terminal: Tilix recently, but Terminator for sometime before that. IDE: Atom (if you call that an IDE), sometimes Eclipse or WebStorm. File manager: midnight commander, then default gnome. Basic Text Editor: vim. IRC/Messaging Client: web based clients only. PDF Reader: default gnome. Office Suite: Libre office, then Google Docs. Calendar: Google Calendar, integration with Gnome using online accounts. Video Player: vlc. Music Player: Rhymbox. Photo Viewer: Default Gnome, gThumb. Screen recording: For snapshots default Gnome app, for videos I use recordMyDesktop.

Re:Installed by default

[Hognoxious]

Web Browser: SYSTEMD!!!
                Email Client: SYSTEMD!!!
                Terminal: SYSTEMD!!!
                IDE: SYSTEMD!!!
                File manager: SYSTEMD!!!
                Basic Text Editor: SYSTEMD!!!
                IRC/Messaging Client: SYSTEMD!!!
                PDF Reader: SYSTEMD!!!
                Office Suite: SYSTEMD!!!
                Calendar: SYSTEMD!!!
                Video Player: SYSTEMD!!!
                Music Player: SYSTEMD!!!
                Photo Viewer: SYSTEMD!!!
                Screen recording: SYSTEMD!!!

Use KDE as default desktop

[allo]

KDE already looks like unity, if you want it to look like unity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I'm more of a debian guy, but

[tkotz]

Web Browser: Firefox/links2
Email Client: Thunderbird or maybe better yet None
Terminal: Sakura
IDE: Strictly None, but Graphical Text Editor: Kate
File manager: Match Desktop Environment
Basic Text Editor: nano
IRC/Messaging Client: Pidgin
PDF Reader: evince
Office Suite: libreoffice
Calendar: lightning
Video Player: VLC
Music Player: VLC
Photo Viewer: gwenview
Screen recording: No opinion

Bucket list

[maestroX]

MATE, because gnome is dead (=devs wanted a different audience) , never really liked KDE and cannot return to CDE-likes. Web Browser: firefox, hanging my laptop frequently, still don't like Chrome's developer tools Email Client: thunderbird, search really sucks and it's too big IDE: intelliJ IRC/Messaging Client: slack, left irc before icq PDF Reader: dunno, comes with Mate, works fine. It's really not that interesting Adobe would like you to believe with all the bells & whistles, just make it view and print. Office Suite: libreoffice Calendar: thunderbird + extension, the extension really sucks but at least I can respond to invites. Video Player: vlc Music Player: mpg123, audacious though it's not like xmms anymore Photo Viewer: they suck once you could view images in the file manager, before that ACDSee Screen recording: only use screencapture Shutter, is nice, includes editing, though a bit slow File manager, Basic Text Editor, Terminal are pretty much required for any desktop environment. nano always

Another actual reply

[Ruach]

        Web Browser: Chromium, Firefox, Midori, Qupzilla, Iron
        Email Client: Thunderbird
        Terminal: Gnome-Terminal
        IDE: none
        File manager: mc, double commander, nautilus
        Basic Text Editor: mcedit, gedit
        IRC/Messaging Client: none
        PDF Reader: qpdfview
        Office Suite: LibreOffice
        Calendar: google calendar
        Video Player: vlc
        Music Player: audacious
        Photo Viewer: picasa
        Screen recording: none

Thanks!

[michaelcole]

(I currently use Ubuntu GNOME 16.04. Start there and quit screwing around. Support existing alt desktop projects)
Web Browser: Chrome, Firefox
Email Client: none
Terminal: Gnome terminal + zsh
IDE: Atom
File manager: right-click -> new document. Why can't we have this? Zero fucks otherwise.
Basic Text Editor: gnome default, nano
IRC/Messaging Client: none
PDF Reader: gnome default
Office Suite: Libreoffice
Calendar: none
Video Player: VLC
Music Player: VLC
Photo Viewer: default Gnome
Screen recording: RecordMyDesktop, Kazaam
Always need better multi-monitor support. I use a USB DisplayLink adapter and it's a hot mess.

Are they asking for a name?

[quenda]

You know they should. Following Artful Aardvark we need an adjective and noun beginning with 'B' .

Do you think a "Mc" prefix is completely out of the question?

Don't install apps that most people won't use

[afgam28]

It's nice to have a web browser and a basic set of (pdf, image, etc.) file viewers so that double-clicking a file in the file manager works.

But there's a class of apps that most people won't use, and take up a lot of disk space (and bandwidth to install/upgrade) so the default should be to not install anything:

Email Client: Evolution is a large program that pulls in lots of dependencies. Most people use web mail anyway. People who want a native MUA either know how to install one, or have instructions from their company on how to set this up.
IDE: Even for people who need them, there's no one IDE that will handle every programmer, so there's no sensible default. The people who need an IDE will know how to install one.
IRC/Messaging Client: Again, the market is so fragmented that it's hard to pick a good default for this, and many people are using web-based IM clients anyway.
Office Suite: LibreOffice is probably the right default, but it's a very big piece of software. Many people use Google or Office 365 for this too, and many more don't have a need for an office suite at all.
Calendar: If there's a simple calendar app (e.g. GNOME Calendar) that doesn't require a lot of setup to start using, go with that. But not Evolution, which is too big and requires too much configuration on the first launch.

trackpads

[ricky_charlet]

Here are my suggested requirements for libinput with trackpads:

* during install, scan hardware and if supported
- enable two finger scrolling
- enable two finger clicking (right button)
- enable three finger clicking (middle button)
- if tracpad supports a distinction between taping and clicking then:
- require click to click
- if tracpad supports two finger swipe, use it for scrolling
(and test that scrolling is smooth even when disable click while typing is on)
- if tracpad supports three finger swipe, use it for switching desktops
* (forgot the exact name here) disable click while typing
* enable palm-detection by default
* provide a gui control panel with an 'advanced' section which can edit all this and more.

Oh well, I'll give it a go

[Trogre]

Web Browser: firefox
        Email Client: thunderbird
        Terminal: konsole, gnome-terminal
        IDE: n/a
        File manager: thunar, bash
        Basic Text Editor: vim, gvim, TeXStudio, bluefish
        IRC/Messaging Client: n/a
        PDF Reader: okular, evince
        Office Suite: libreoffice
        Calendar: lightning
        Video Player: mplayer, vlc
        Music Player: mplayer, audacious
        Photo Viewer: geeqie
        Screen recording: simplescreenrecorder

Categories you missed:
        Desktop environment: xfce
        System monitoring: gkrellm
        Remote access: ssh+xpra
        Graphics editor: gimp, blender
        Sound editor: audacity
        Video editor: kdenlive, openshot
        Network filesystem protocol: sshfs

My selection

[Barabul]

I haven't used Ubuntu since Unity, and I don't think I will with GNOME 3. Anything else will do, I don't even hate systemd. Kde, xfce, MATE, lxde/lxqt, even fvwm, anything is better.

Web Browser: chromium, firefox
Email Client: thunderbird, alpine
Terminal: don't care, whatever is default
IDE: vim, gvim
File manager: mc, thunar, dolphin
Basic Text Editor: vim, gvim
IRC/Messaging Client: pidgin
PDF Reader: okular or evince
Office Suite: Libre Office
Calendar: -
Video Player: mplayer / smplayer
Music Player: deadbeef, audacious
Photo Viewer: gqview, shotwell, gthumb. It depends.
Screen recording: simplescreenrecorder

Suggested Software

[TheOuterLinux]

• Web Browser: Firefox+w3m
• • I suggested w3m as well because you can change the user agent to mobile Safari and then set the external web browser short cut to "mpv -ytdl --vo=opengl --ao=alsa" (install mpv) and it will play the mobile formats (mp4, etc.) that youtube-dl supports, even in TTY environment.
• Email Client: Thunderbird
• • But you need to include Enigmail and Lightning by default
• Terminal: xfce4-terminal + tmux
• IDE: Geany
• File manager: Thunar
• • Thunar is very light and fast, but also has lots of ways to customize. I have no idea why anyone likes Nautilus or Nemo; if logging in and using 1GB+ of RAM at start is okay with you, score one for GNOME or Unity; Pantheon is pretty bad about it too.
• Basic Text Editor: Gedit
• IRC/Messaging Client: Hexchat, irssi
• PDF Reader: Evince
• Office Suite: LibreOffice
• Calendar: gxul-ext-lightning
• Video Player: mpv+youtube-dl
• • mpv is much better than mplayer or VLC and is very easy to use. To open a URL, you just type "mpv https://..../" and youtube-dl will usually do the rest for you, including streaming sites like Twitch. The support list is here: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-.... You will get the most bang per buck this way.
• Music Player: Clementine
• Photo Viewer: Viewnior, Shotwell
• Screen recording: gtk-recordmydesktop

If software isn't available as a .deb, but as source code or .rpm, please don't make a snap for it. Snaps feel too much like "closing" open source software and dangerously close to having Ubuntu creating its own version of Windows exe's; actually, that's exactly what it is.

18.04

[taikedz]

.... wondering why there wasn't a direct link in the Canonical blog but hey ho

        Web Browser: Firefox
        Email Client: ???
        Terminal: GNOME Terminal. Maybe guake.
        IDE: Geany
        File manager: ???
        Basic Text Editor: gedit (vim really, but ...)
        IRC/Messaging Client: ???
        PDF Reader: ???
        Office Suite: LibreOffice , accept no substitutes
        Calendar: ???
        Video Player: VLC
        Music Player: Rhythmbox
        Photo Viewer: ???
        Screen recording: Open Broadcaster Software

My selection...

[unrtst]

Web Browser: google-chrome, firefox, w3m, chromium
Email Client: alpine, thunderbird
Terminal: xterm
IDE: n/a
File manager: ls
Basic Text Editor: vim
IRC/Messaging Client: pidgin
PDF Reader: evince
Office Suite: libreoffice, gnumeric
Calendar: Google Calendar web, gcalcli, lightning
Video Player: mplayer
Music Player: clementine
Photo Viewer: geeqie, gimp
Screen recording: n/a

Ubuntu suggestions

[draciron]

I've been using Ubuntu for several years now. My frustrations with Fedora culminated with the lost of LTS support. Generally I love Ubuntu. Probably easiest distro to install on machines, best support for nonfree drivers, one of if not the best set of repos. There are a few things I miss however. The services command. Made it really easy to know what services are running, stop and start them and change their run level. Ubuntu has no equiv. ifconfig is another tool I really miss. Ubuntu's implementation never really seemed to work. Web Browser: Chrome, Firefox Email Client: Primarily web based but I still use Kmail from time to time. I'd love to see a grand conversion tool as I have emails stored from Eudora, Kmail, Thunderbird, Exchange, procmail, etc. Literally millions of email that I need to convert and pare down to the few hundred that still mean anything too me. I'd be happy to work on the project. Terminal: Konsole IDE: Depends on the language. File manager: Krusader Basic Text Editor: For GUI text editors where I do 99% of my edits any more. I truly miss Kedit. A port of Text Wrangler on the Mac would be awesome. I wind up using the Mac for most basic text stuff simply because Text Wrangler is light years ahead of anything i can find on Linux. Kate is buggy and a memory hog. It's also clumsy. Gedit is REALLY buggy and the odd keystrokes it uses difficult to remember. Gwrite is OK. I loved Kedit because it had the features I needed but was so light I could literally have 100s of kedit windows open at the same time and barely use any ram. It autosaved so if the system crashed I didn't lose my changes. IRC/Messaging Client: Rarely use IRC any more. PDF Reader: Okular does a pretty good job. But I'll defer if there's another light PDF reader that folks prefer. Office Suite: Open Office. Libre was insanely buggy in Kbuntu 14.04. Way too buggy to use. It crashes every 2 minutes and doesn't autosave even though I set the autosave to 30 seconds because it crashed so often. Office Libre seems to lack some of the features of Open Office that I use as well. Calendar: Looking for a good one. Video Player: VLC, Dragon Player, Kaffine Music Player: Not really enamored with any at this time. Amarok and Juk tries to do everything and all I want to do is play music. Clemintine is OK. XMMS plays music quite well but it truncates so much info that it's really difficult to tell what is playing sometimes. There are other frustrating aspects of XMMS. Photo Viewer: Gwenview, Gthumb this can reverse depending on what I am doing. Screen recording: No preference. Software management - Synaptic !!!! VERY first thing I do in a new install after security updates is install Synaptic. Ebook management - Calibre

Metric instead of Imperial

[Gunstick]

Make the default into metric system, even if you set language to english.
Every new installation I have to wade through libreoffice settings to get it to print on A4 and measure stuff in mm.

A bigger part of the world uses metric, so linux should too. Canonical has a big influence and could make upstream changes to make this into reality.

I basically like to hit all USA users wanting to print on Letter needing to research this stupid stuff instead of the rest of the world.
But you could create a "Imperial" package which changes all settings to suit the USA 19th century way.

Music player

[fapdafuk]

I like terminal style, so I want to add cmus movies torrent as default music player :D