* Select - Middle-click paste does not seem to work
* When something requires a password (ie just tried a bitlocker volume) the whole screen is blocked, so no password manager for you (unless you copy it before, or cancel - unplug drive-copy password - replug drive - paste.)
* The default tiling does not jive with me, sometimes I don't even know what it wants (it always tries to force you to also set a left windows if you tile right and vice versa) so I disabled it `gnome-extensions disable tiling-assistant@ubuntu.com`. Default Gnome tiling is ok (but missing quarter tiling (and 1/8th would be nice on my ultra-wide) imho so I use [0]
* I've been trying to use Nix home-manager for packages but I have GPU errors, need workarounds, icons that just remain generic. But I guess that is not Ubuntu's fault.
Ubuntu remains my nr. 2 choice, after NixOS (but I didn't get the latter to install on this Nuc, perhaps a bios update will help).
The installer offered (under experimental) to run root on zfs, I didn't end up selecting it because only on the forth try (and by that time you're clicking at a fast rate just taking defaults) I understood that it would only download packages via wifi, not the cable (same for NixOS installer, so must be my network).
I find it hilarious how much religion is put into Gnome vs. KDE in this case. I did use both. I honestly have no strong favourite. After that many years of Linux desktop environment DE hopping I came to the conslusion that the DE should get out of your way and allow you to focus on your work.
Both Gnome and KDE support that. Actually Gnome a tad better as it gives you less knobs to turn an waste your time. Accept the defaults and if defaults are bad move somewhere else.
I pick the software best for my uses and then look at which desktop supports that software and workflows around them the best.
Not always clear/clean selections possible in my situation - I've a jumble of GUI designs and frameworks used, so I favour a more agnostic desktop.
I think power users are not the main target of Ubuntu.
I have put my parents on Ubuntu (gnome) in 2013 to replace windows XP. My mother is 88 now. I think it is the perfect fit for her (dad is dead years ago).
I use ubuntu gnome because tweaking my computer is not where I want to spend my time. YOLO. Using a "mainstream" desktop that can be explained to "non specialist" has its benefits. I accept to suffer some annoyances and there is always a way to fix the most annoying ones by sacrificing time.
>I think power users are not the main target of Ubuntu.
Then who is? Normies buy iPads and casuals stay on Windows. Is this why Linux can't gain any market share?
IMHO, Ubuntu is trying to gain market share by targeting non-experts — making Linux simple enough for normies and casual users. Casual users are generally less likely to mess things up on Ubuntu than on Windows.
This isn't true any more, and hasn't been for some years, you know.
It was true but times change.
Microsoft chose to kill off Windows 10, which it once promised would be the last desktop Windows ever. Its replacement is bigger, slower, stuffed with adverts and upselling attempts, and has an artificial demand for TPM 2.
That's driven thousands of people to check out Linux, and if you don't know anything about Linux, then Ubuntu is the number one best-known distro. Many techies dislike Snap (to the extent of spreading lies like "it's not FOSS"), but it makes version upgrades safer, which matters more to non-techies.
(I say thousands so the pedants don't shout at me, but I suspect the reality is at least hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.)
Linux Mint is friendlier, yes, and so is Zorin OS, but both are based on Ubuntu.
Valve has sold millions of Steam Decks, which demonstrate that it's now possible to run premier new Windows games on Linux with performance at least as good as on Windows. All Linux users know their hardware runs faster and cooler with Linux than Windows anyway.
Chromebooks (which are as cheap as laptops get) outsold Macs (which are expensive) by revenue in 2017 in the USA and within 3 years in the rest of the world. ChromeOS is a desktop Linux, based on Gentoo. It has hundreds of millions of users who have never heard the word "Linux".
Companies with cloud-based IT are deploying ChromeOS Flex as a response to ransomware attach. (E.g. Nordic Choice hotels.)
Many of us see Ubuntu's characteristic desktop in shops, bars, travel stations and things regularly now. I hear its startup sound on trains. I have totally non-techie friends running Ubuntu at home. I've given Mint to lots of mildly technophobic friends and they get on just fine.
It's not over, but the year of Linux on the Desktop came about a decade ago, and the penguin taleban were too busy in-fighting to notice.
Snap is TERRIBLE for non-technical people. Imagine installing an image editor via Snap, and then the default sandboxing making it unable to access the images on your media drive. No errors, it just silently fails.
This has been a problem I’ve dealt with on nearly every single Snap I’ve installed. If you’re a file editor, you must let me edit my damn files!
I often hear things like this, but I never encounter them myself.
I've run every single version of Ubuntu ever released. Work machines stay on LTSes, testbeds run interim versions.
After the 22.04 release, I carefully de-snapped my work laptop, using `deb-get` to install native packages of everything. Worked a treat, took less disk space, things started a tiny bit faster.
Then I enabled Ubuntu Pro and it force-reinstalled snapd. It's fair enough to have it as a dependency: it's a standard component. I was very annoyed, though.
But when I upgraded to 24.04, a lot of things broke. I had to spend ages re-enabling repositories, getting new keys, changing version strings in stuff under `/etc/apt/sources.list.d` and so on. It's a PITA.
So I have performed a volte face. I removed all my `deb-get` packages, and reinstalled the snap versions. All my comms and messaging apps, music and media players, and so on.
It's much easier. No extra repos. I experimentally took one laptop from 24.04 to 24.10 to 25.04 to 25.10 and yesterday to 26.04. All my apps stay in place. Nothing broke. No custom repos. No changes needed to any config file. It just works.
I've been using Linux for 30 years, starting on Slackware and moving to Red Hat and Caldera and SUSE via lots of others. But I'm old and grumpy and I want stuff to work without fiddling. I want low maintenance. Snap is low maintenance. My messaging apps can download stuff into my Downloads folder, open attachments from Documents, and so on.
I run native packages of my own browsers (Waterfox and Chrome) and AppImages of Panwriter and Logseq, and I have none of these difficulties.
Life is easier if you don't fight the OS and the vendor.
And Ubuntu is still easier and less hassle than Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, or any of the other big names.
Preferences don't form in a vacuum though. There's a perception that GNOME is the "good environment" which means its decisions get treated as more important than other DEs' when things change: and that's somewhat self-reinforcing.
Distro: "The most used DE needs first class support, we should probably bend to it" → Distro: "We should probably make this DE the default since it's so widely used and supported" → User: "I choose the default" → Distro: "The most used DE…"
So yes, people have different preferences; but if your preference is GNOME today, it might not be GNOME tomorrow, and "I picked the default" isn't quite the neutral signal it looks like.
Since GNOME is the default Ubuntu DE, they have a certain responsibily to listen to the users/devs and leave the system open (to an extent). But their direction is the opposite:
They've been doing massive reduction in functionalities, really insane like limiting copy/past of terminals just to the current screen (which hurts any sysadmin), generally without any way to enable them back.
I haven't heard of any other OSS organization trying so hard to limit freedom of their users/devs, and this is an explicit goal - they don't want to weaken their brand.
GNOME is nothing short of the Oracle of open source.
I fundamentally agree with you. I don't think responsibility is quite the right word. But if they don't seem to care about a massive portion of their users, why are they building gnome at all?
I agree that responsibility is the wrong word, but I've also noticed there's certainly some form of expectation, social responsibility, or care that other projects have and gnome has always lacked. When I started using Linux it was the desktop I liked the most, but some of the choices seem almost hostile or intentionally designed to drive current users away, and unlike most other projects I've used, I've never seen them listen or make improvements based on any feedback from users.
UI designers got it right with a taskbar on the bottom and widgets to let you know what you have open at a glance without having to move the mouse across the screen or press buttons. For a multi-application PC desktop thats the right model. Not for phones ofc, they need a different model. Trying to force the phone model on the desktop PC model just doesnt make sense, not now, not then, not ever.
edit: grammar, also Cinnamon fixes these issues thankfully.
It is a preference - and not everyones. I always hated middle click paste, middle click is amongst the first thing I remap on my systems to do the macOS "exposé"-style of window rearrangements. Other people will have other preferences.
I suppose you use Super+Middle Click? Not a bad idea, I dislike hot corners, and the "exposé" feature of niri is quite good. I might actually remap it to Super+Middle Click.
(I use Super+side mouse buttons to move between workspaces, I hate the keyboard-centric workflow when one hand is always on the mouse)
As a trackpoint user, I am glad it's off by default.
Because of scrolling on Thinkpad keyboards (using the middle click), I had to turn that feature of every time, especially while working on longer documents I would otherwise accidentally paste stuff at random places.
From where I sit I have 5 Thinkpads set up within reach, and I have a few more in other rooms. They are by far my preferred laptop.
Most run Ubuntu as their default OS, most have the trackpad disabled because I usually use the trackpoint for everything, and on all of them I use middle-click to paste extensively.
To you it is, plenty of people -including myself- don’t find it so. And considering the ratio of MacOS+Windows desktop users to those of ‘nix (an increasing number of which are new converts), middle clickers are a minority here.
But hey! At least they are only flipping defaults, not removing the feature outright, like they did type-ahead search. [Insert angry rant here]
I agree with the point about this being configurable.
About your first point, however, keep in mind that "middle click insert" has been the default behavior in X since the 1980s, long before Windows or current generation MacOS's were around. To me, this is such a basic functionality, I would compare it something as fundamental as CTRL-X/C/V for cut/copy/paste on Windows.
That is gnome's standard play: move a feature to a preference (“you can just turn it back on”), remove the preference from the control panel (“you can still turn it back on using ‹whatever conf backend they're using this year›”), and then finally remove the feature (“you could only turn it on by using an unsupported mechanism, and ‹conf backend they used last year› is deprecated anyway”).
I was never a fan of it. I always turned it off. And now it also freed up middle click for auto scrolling which is actually great, especially when the scrollwheel is somewhat broken.
As someone that habitually highlights what they are reading it was generally beyond useless for me. It was actively making me mad when I accidenatally pasted some non-sense because I just highlighted a paragraph before and accidentally inserted it into something.
> only made because the same feature does not exist in MacOS.
Or in anything that's not X?
Speaking personally for me only, I don't think it's a great thing. The <however many> clipboards on Linux is... not really a great thing. I for one never know which of the buffers contain what. And this is compounded by the fact that selection may or may not overwrite what's in one of the buffers, and middle click may or may not paste whatever was in that buffer. Additionally compounded by how inconsistent the behavior is across apps.
I, for one, use the different clipboards concurrently all the time, with "highlight & middle-click" probably being the one I use most often. It's the most convenient for me most of the time:
- only two interactions (one drag & one click)
- completely mouse-based (no keyboard interaction necessary)
Neither Windows nor macOS have it, so it's surprising to new users. If your target market (as in support contracts) is EU public servants, it's sort of understandable.
THANX! I don't know how people live on platforms that don't have this :)
As for the negative Gnome feedback (not from you but others) I do like Gnome, it's just enough window manager for me, I like the defaults and I like the touchpad gestures etc. Generally looks and works well for all I do. I always feel swamped by KDE.
Note that the way this works is that after you activate your home manager generation it outputs a script path that you need to run manually as root which installs a Systemd service which ensures that the drivers are linked correctly.
I've been using the Kubuntu 26.04 prereleases for a few weeks. No surprises from KDE, but Wayland has broken a few things. Autotype in Keepass does not work, keynav and even the Wayland keynav forks don't work, and Wayland does not support priority keyboard layouts for switching between two specific layouts.
It seems that KDE is fairly consistent in calling this “Plasma” and specifically, “Plasma Desktop”, but English Wikipedia insists on prefixing the names of their products with “KDE”. Especially Plasma 4, 5, and 6.
What happened to the Ubuntu Core Desktop? Snap only immutable variant (like Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite). It was delayed in 2024 and haven’t seen anything about it ever since
I see this accusation and characterization in basically every thread about Rust, but I really don't think it's true. On the contrary, I strongly believe it's less that these people didn't consider that, and more that they willfully chose to ignore it.
If you always keep praying to the same old bit of code to "reliably" chug along (which people clearly cannot actually ascertain, otherwise these reimplementations wouldn't be struggling), you're forever just rolling the dice that some Pandora's box will simply never open (which it absolutely does and keeps opening), while also giving up on modern capabilities. What you see as old reliable, I see as a buried lede. I'd imagine these folks see the same. [0]
It's frustrating to see the software world contend with the same pushback and counter-arguments the infra/ops world (my neck of the woods) has already figured out and went past long ago during the advent of IaC. Cattle > pets, easily, every time.
[0] It's also not a cost-benefit thing, but clearly a principled decision, so arguments that aim to contend the ROI of it all are off-base from the get-go. If ROI is the key thing for you, then all this philosophical nonsense shouldn't even be on the table. Calculate.
“battle tested for decades” just lost a lot of its value with Mythos and the likes unfortunately. Rewriting in a different language became much faster with Coding agents at the same time.
I do agree that the second system effect is real, it’s just that the balance of benefits and drawbacks significantly shifted when it comes to “rewrite in Rust” (not limited to Rust though).
> “battle tested for decades” just lost a lot of its value with Mythos and the likes unfortunately
Isn't it a bit early to make predictions on the future of computer security and how we create good software based on something that's been out for 2 weeks?
Meanwhile the C version of coreutils has been in development for 36 years. There's no rush.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-35341 - `mkfifo` accidentally resets the permissions of files that already exist, so if you manage to do `sudo mkfifo /etc/shadow` then it becomes world readable.
Tbh I doubt if any of these would ever result in a real hack, unless your system is doing really mental things like running shell scripts with untrusted input.
I could only find a couple of CVEs that looked actually serious for GNU Coreutils too though. IMO if you're using these tools with untrusted input your system is janky enough that there are going to be serious flaws in it anyway. Probably though quoting mistakes.
Well the TOCTOU issues do not require you to run untrusted scripts to be exploited. Another user on your system can use a legitimate command that you may run to make changes to files they shouldn’t be able to, or further escalate privileges.
Fair point. Though tbh I still think the user-isolation security for Linux is only really suited for the University/company threat model, where you generally trust users not to actually use exploits because they would get expelled/fired.
If you allow a completely untrusted user onto your system I think your chances of staying secure are low.
Then why rewrite coreutils in rust? TOCTOU isn't exact some new concept. Neither are https://owasp.org/Top10/2025/ (most of which a good web framework will prevent or migrate), and switching to rust (which as far as I know) won't bring you a safer web framework like django or rails.
I'm sad about that too. I have been running MATE with XMonad for a very long time and has been very happy with it, primarily because the experience has remained entirely unchanged except for a few bugs which have crept in and have never been fixed, probably due to the maintainers not really being active. A particularly hilarious one is that every time the update notifier wants to restart the computer it tries to show an icon in the status bar which begins with `un-<...>.png`. The real icon file is actually missing, but some helpful fallback logic defaults to the closest match which happens to be a 512 pixel wide logo for the United Nations which gets vertically cropped and placed in the status bar.
I just got a new laptop this month and saw that Ubuntu MATE was probably going to be unsupported, so I switched to Manjaro Sway.
What should I use if I like Ubuntu but not snap, just Debian? Or are there alternatives around? Seems like Ubuntu has the best hardware and driver support so just curious what's new in Linux land.
I switched to Debian and have been happy with it. The release cycle is less frequent than Ubuntu Desktop, which means fewer disruptions, and Debian Backports make it easy to pick new versions of the important stuff. Flatpak is also available on Debian.
Linux Mint is widely praised for being basically Ubuntu without the worst Canonicalisms (such as Snap). They maintain a Debian edition in parallel to their main one, as an exit strategy in case Ubuntu ever becomes unsuitable for their base. Some people already use that as their daily driver.
Just in case you're not aware, the default desktop environment on whatever distro you pick doesn't have to be what you use. I switched to KDE Plasma when Gtk-based desktops became intolerable, and haven't looked back.
Now Debian is packaging non-free drivers in the iso images directly. I would suggest to try Debian first, if it works well for you just keep it.
If you feel the need for newer packages, try other alternatives (or Debian unstable). I’ve set down on Fedora with XFCE, it’s really stable yet packages feel new.
Dunno about the this release, but till 24.4 it was simply a matter of removing some packages then holding/masking the primary snapd one, followed by manually adding the official PPAs for Mozilla’s stuff (or just use the Flatpak).
Of course, there’s still the philosophical and long term issues with staying on a distro that’s promoting and continuosuly expanding the thing you dislike…
This is a bad strategy, I fell victim for. I configured so it would use apt instead of snap package, but canonical silently stopped shipping packages and I was running some packages that were not updated for a long time and debugging weird bugs, because I didn't assume that this was a problem. If one wants Ubuntu, one must accept snap. If you use apt with disallowed transition to snap, you might be stuck with old packages that were transitioned to snap.
My choice for now is Debian, didn't finish transition yet, very annoying to plan this in my schedule. I'll churn from Ubuntu after more than 15 years of daily driving... I also don't like ubuntu user with uid:gid 1000 in their Docker images. It's a cancer.
This is what I do, because on my work computer IT imposed Ubuntu.
I initially tried to just use snaps but firefox was crashing quite often so I had to go with adding the mozilla's repository and of course configure the fake "firefox" package that actually installs the snap to be low priority for apt.
I’m curious about proprietary Nvidia drivers. Ubuntu normally comes with fairly outdated, if not obsolete ones, but there’s a semi-official PPA with more recent versions. How does Debian handle this?
Debian has their own nvidia driver packages (it's nvidia's drivers repackaged in a nice way that integrates with the system well). I can't say if they're "outdated" or how different they are from what ubuntu ships, but they've always worked very well for me.
Debian offers Nvidia drivers as well although they tend to be outdated. Thankfully you can use Nvidia's official .deb repos to get the latest drivers on both Debian and Ubuntu.
I have used Pop OS for years and for me it was the most smooth desktop environment I've ever used.
They have been working on a custom Desktop Environment which sadly still isn't very stable yet. Promising development, but putting me off of using Pop for a while.
I just put the new popos on my laptop and am still running the old version on my primary desktop. Agreed that Cosmic is not quite ready for prime time yet, but it is pretty impressive the state it's in for how new it is. Haven't had any show stopping bugs on the laptop, just a few small quirks.
Anyway, the main issue with Debian, Ubuntu, and Nvidia is about licensing. GNU/Linux is free software, and Nvidia drivers are not. Loading a non-free driver is known as “Tainting the Kernel”.
Both are great. I'm currently using the Debian Editon, that at least for me works out of the box. The transition from the Ubuntu-based traditional edition was seamless. I used Mint MATE before.
I distro hopped for a while and settled on Linux mint. Uses flat packs. Hits the spot for easy to use and easy to maintain without needing to use terminal scripts to get things my way. Just my opinion.
If you want something desktop oriented and Ubuntu based without the focus on snaps, take a look at Linux Mint: https://www.linuxmint.com/ (there's Cinnamon, Xfce and MATE versions; personally I think Cinnamon is pretty good nowadays)
I have a year ago switched from Ubuntu to Fedora and I like it. Clean and stable. Uses Flatpak. I'm using Fedora Workstation which is the default, but Fedora KDE Plasma seems to be nice as well if you want to have more configuration options available directly in the GUI. And the layout is more Windows like with start button menu etc for people coming from the Windows side.
Easier said than done, surprise: apt, who we know and love, is redirected to Snap for an ever-increasing number of packages.
"Don't use Snap", you say? I'll do you one better! Skip Ubuntu. 'Just' use anything else more suitable. Debian is an excellent replacement being upstream, but I hold no illusions over undeclared requirements.
> With 24.04 at least, doing an 'apt purge snapd' seems to be quite useful. Is that not sufficient?
For the moment, later pulling a package that is redirected would undo that effort. As the peer points out, too, that would likely rip out stuff you're using without having already configured preference.
One could maintain a boundless list of configs pinning repository preferences... or they could use a distribution that doesn't have a predisposition towards Snap.
I can't believe people like Snap when in the name of security it breaks basic things such as accessing a folder on a different mount point that the user normally can access perfectly fine.
A packaging system should not break the basic abstractions of an OS.
Yeah, this was the frustrating bit to me. I use Firefox to look at stuff that lives in /tmp/, Snap Firefox can't do this. I'd remove Snap Firefox, pin the priorities and it would still silently crawl it's way back in after a week or two no matter what I tried. I gave up Ubuntu. Earlier versions used to respect the priorities but something changed.
The issue is them adding it back, sometimes even on apt upgrade, or silently installing it as a dependency for certain apps without mentioning it unless you look closely. That gets tiring after a while and I gave up on Ubuntu as even after having removed snap multiple times it always returned.
I've not used Linux on the desktop for some years⁰ but as I move back this sort of thing is why I'm not considering Ubuntu². If I want to dig into settings like that to keep my preferences I might as well stick with Windows.
Yes, the control to be able to tweak the system to my liking is one of the attractions or Linux, but not when I have to in order to avoid behaviours that I don't want being reasserted.
[not that I expect nor particularly want Ubuntu to change, I just accept that I'm not part of its target audience and I'll be better served elsewhere - choice is a great thing!]
----
[0] heading back there now as Windows11 is not happening on my home machines¹, I feel that I shouldn't have let Windows10 happen, looking back.
[1] aside from the laptop that came with it that I'll keep there for Office and DayJob compatibility for a while.
[2] Currently running Debian³ on the other laptop, main desktop will likely go that way if it isn't decommissioned completely, and I use a dock with the laptops instead.
[3] As that is what I use server-side more often than not.
Not listening to users is what drove me away from windows. Not a fan of snaps either (or forced windows updates). Recently re-tried linux going to debian instead, which i really like. Reminds me of the old dos days. Gnome was a no-go, kde was nice but too buggy, cinnamon turned out to be perfect. So here i am, on linux finally, enjoying having my computer back and playing around like its 1992 again.
Or, for a more server-appropriate example, 'frr'. The BGP daemon. It's not just desktop things like 'firefox' before someone tries that angle.
I haven't tried it in a few LTS releases and I'm away from a computer. Still, I'd bet this release continues the pattern. Fat chance Canonical decided to go back to more build targets/backporting/testing.
I was using Ubuntu and installed the apt version of Firefox as the snap version would not open html files in locations like /var/tmp and would not work with USB devices. Every time I ran `do-release-upgrade`, all of that work would need to be redone. It was very annoying.
Ubuntu is the Windows 11 of Linux. You have to do brain surgery on it post install, to remove unwanted crap. At least there's the option of using a different distro.
> What should I use if I like Ubuntu but not snap […]
Because of business needs, if you're stuck with using Ubuntu (at least in some situations), an `apt(-get) purge snapd` helps. It's in all of our auto/post-install stuff.
I was in the same spot recently, and my friends recommend Linux Mint. It is built on top of Ubuntu LTS, and no snap. I've been using it for the past few weeks in my old desktop computer. Definitely Good. Perfect fit for your needs
Snap is preinstalled on all official Ubuntu graphical editions.
However, Xubuntu's _Minimal_ install does not include any snap packages at all, not even a browser. This means it's trivial to remove snapd:
sudo apt purge snapd
Then you can install the `extrepo` command, and use it to install Firefox ESR direct from Mozilla's repos, or Chrome from Google's repos.
Once it's online you can copy and paste a couple of commands to "pin" snapd and prevent it from being reinstalled. Then you can switch to current Firefox or anything else without snapd sneaking back in.
Xubuntu Minimal is also available as a separate ISO file, which is not true of any of the other flavours.
“Urban myth” kind of suggests that it was never true, which isn't the case, though it is one of those out-dated truths that doesn't go away quickly.
At one time Ubuntu as the easiest distro to get certain hardware running with because of the inclusion of proprietary drivers & codecs (unlike its Debian parent, amongst others, at least at the time) and making them easy, near-automatic, to configure compared to others that did include them. The distinction is long gone, and Ubuntu is simply one of several (many) good ones in that regard, but the perception that others have not long since caught up persists.
This looks like it might be the best solution, no snap, maintained by an actual system integrator and laptop maker, and I also like the new Rust-based desktop environment. I wonder how well it runs on Framework laptops or MacBooks as well.
Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Linux Lite, Pop OS, and several less famous distros are all based on Ubuntu. New versions of all of them will follow this new LTS release in time.
Mint forked GNOME 3 to make something more Windows-like.
Zorin customised upstream GNOME with a lot of extensions.
Pop removed it and replaced it with their own homegrown desktop, written in Rust. It's actually pretty good and works well.
Gaming-oriented distros like CachyOS and Bazzite might be what you want. I'm on Cachy and can recommend it. Because they try to "just work" without jumping through hoops.
Even though I very much intenseley dislike the completely unintuitive idiosyncratic package management that Arch has. Which is further not helped by the fact that Cachy's default GUI for it isn't even integrated properly.
Ubuntu 26 + KDE Plasma 6.6 perfectly handles high-DPI scaling for me. I was originally planning to buy a Mac, but luckily I saw the news about Ubuntu 26 being released a few days ago.
I've just moved to a Mac for the first time, after using Windows for work for decades and Linux as my primary desktop for about 3 or 4 years. It certainly takes some getting use to:
- Keyboard shortcuts are all different
- Doesn't seem to like my Microsoft ergonomic keyboard (lots of keys do nothing)
- I really hate the dock
- Limited customisation on the menu bar
- I also hate the universal menu thing / menu bar in general ... I run a really wide monitor and having to go all the way to the left hand side to access the menu when working on an app that is on the far right is crazy
- Fonts look fat or washed out
I am sure a lot of this is fixable and will jsut take time to get used to, but honestly, at this point, I think I prefer ubuntu/linux to both Mac & Windows at this point.
I do love the hardware on the Mac and would probably try Asahi out if it wasn't a work machine.
Also worth pointing out that macOS is still better than Windows 11 at this point - MS should be ashamed at what they did to that OS.
3. I have the dock on the left hand side, not bottom and I have a 2 monitor (iMac 5K 27"+ Dell 4K 27") setup with the iMac flat in front of me and the curve/2nd to the right. Menu bar is then close to the main windows.
6. Use Macports to add all the Linux/Unix utilities, works with MacOS properly (eg Python/Java frameworks). Ports can have variants, plus you can have multiple versions installed side-by-side with `port select`. https://www.macports.org/
Not sure about fonts, on a 5K iMac they're fine and the 4K Dell works too. You need to use a resolution that fits with Mac's ideas of resolution, so I've got the 5K and 4K both at 2560x1440, which is Mac's idea of 2x resolution.
One option for the menus maybe is keyboard searching. Command-shift-/ aka Command-?then type the name and arrow navigate. (Key sequence might be wrong, it’s muscle memory at this point)
I wonder if Thaw could be modded to repeat the menu bar?
Dock can be hidden/revealed with a key sequence but I like the auto-hide with long delay to pop up idea, suggested elsewhere.
Another point, if you enable Settings > Desktop & Dock > Mission Control > Displays have separate Spaces, then you get a menu bar for each display, which helps with the menubar / window being far apart.
Ah I can resonate with your feelings! I've been using a MacBook Pro as my daily driver since 2013 and I initially liked it a lot, but things have not improved over time. MacOS got more buggy, bloated and less and less customisable. I never fully got used to the way window switching works, and to the fact that I always see all the apps from all work spaces. I still regularly switch to the wrong work space when I switch apps. So confusing. So now I'm in a process of switching back to Linux - it's just so much more fun! I have an M1 MacBook Pro now and Asahi linux is really nice on this one.
I do like the energy consumption of MacOS and that sleep just works so well. Also the laptops feel really nice. I got a few things to make life easier (sketchybar, rectangle.app, see other posts here) but overall these days Linux is just a more polished experience. Never thought I'd say that. At least it's the least glitchy experience nowadays.
Ubuntu LTS is still the choice for many production environments and education and learning. As someone with Ubuntu from 2010 CDs, I find it refreshing that modern Ubuntu distros work OOB on most computers these days with excellent driver support.
Is this even true? I mean, Windows is the main focus for all hardware vendors, and everybody who has owned a PC knows that malfunctions are unavoidable. If that is the case for Windows, then Linux cant be better.
20 years ago your Linux installation might not include wifi drivers, bluetooth support, decent GPU drivers, fat32/ntfs drivers, or the widely used video/audio codecs of the era. And you had to be careful when shopping for things like wifi cards, as only certain chipsets could be made to work.
Much of which was kinda fair enough, because if you're a volunteer making an open source OS because of a strong belief on the open source ideal, you don't want to distribute closed-source driver blobs or patent-encumbered codecs. But it meant mean the initial installation process was not always easy. One of the things that contributed to the success of Ubuntu was a particularly easy initial setup process.
Today, things are a lot better - you'll still get unsupported hardware from time to time, but it'll be much less severe. If your laptop has a non-USB integrated camera you might have to download and install a kernel module. Your corporate laptop's built in fingerprint scanner might not work, but who cares?
When I was shopping Lenovo.com for my ThinkPad in 2018, there was a table with ThinkPads certified for Ubuntu Linux in one column, and certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in another column.
I chose the T580 as a RHEL-certified notebook, and it was fantastic. Lenovo.com let me configure each individual component exactly according to my needs and tastes, and it was custom-assembled and shipped from Shenzhen.
It did arrive with Windows 10 pre-installed (this was the least hassle and most popular OS option). I initially installed CentOS, but quickly realized that Fedora would be the sweet spot, and so it was a Fedora system for most of its lifetime. Near the end, I did revert to Windows 10, which also worked flawlessly.
The ThinkPad T580 literally never malfunctioned. It was still 100% working when I turned it in for recycling in 2025.
I've also run Ubuntu on my "daily driver" desktop system, which ran from 2006-2022. Yes, that's 16 years' worth of Ubuntu installs and upgrades. It was mostly a KDE Plasma (Kubuntu) system. I enjoyed every bit of that.
In 1999, I was avidly using OpenBSD on really old hardware (such as HP Apollo 425t workstations.) OpenBSD simply couldn't deal with the special graphics subsystem on those machines. I tried and tried to get something working, but there were obstacles, not only with the hardware and drivers, but also the monitor connection needed a particular type of cabling and a proprietary monitor, too.
However, OpenBSD did great for networking, security, Squid cache, proxies, all kinds of things. And even in 1999, though it was early, I ran Linux on a 386DX-40, because Linux supported the "ftape" floppy tape driver at that time, and I had some kind of QIC tape backup from Eagle that wouldn't be recognized by OpenBSD or NetBSD.
Meanwhile, in that same year, my "daily driver" desktop machine was a 486 with VLB, dual-booting Windows 98 and OpenBSD. The Windows 98 was set up with a Cygwin system and X11 server, so that I could run X11 clients on the OpenBSD machines, or the Linux machine, or whatever else was on the LAN.
After using Ubuntu for many years both on the desktop and server, recent decisions have got me thinking that Canonical has lost a lot of its community spirit. That got me switching over machines to Debian which, to me, still feels like a community project. It's a shame.
I am pragmatic about it though so I still run Ubuntu for some things but it's no longer my first recommendation.
> recent decisions have got me thinking that Canonical has lost a lot of its community spirit
The rot set in when #ubuntu on Freenode (now Libera) became rigidly enforced as on-topic discussions of Ubuntu support only.
The channel is absolutely dead now. Maybe one person will say something in any given 12-hour period and no-one replies, just page after page of joins and parts.
For now, that is. I am afraid that they will stop providing coreutils and sudo for some of the future releases (like they did with upstart) because obviously they know better what's good for the users.
Cool. I'm pretty excited for the new login manager. Maybe now KDE will be able to fit all customization options (wallpaper, lockscreen, login screen) on a single Settings page.
I know that the interim releases had issues with zfs and trying to update gave the message "Sorry, cannot upgrade this system to 25.04 right now System freezes have been observed on upgrades to 25.04 with ZFS
enabled. Please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PluckyPuffin/ReleaseNotes for more
information. "
The release notes don't seem to mention zfs. I hope these issues have been fixed?
The comments there note there is no official Ubuntu MATE release for the first time since Ubuntu 15 (and before 14.04 gnome2 was an option). That's a shame but probably most people who chose MATE (or gnome2) no longer chose Ubuntu due to the conflicting ideologies inherent in the two. MATE users generally don't like change for change's sake.
not sure if this confirms the impression you have there... I wasn't like this until a couple of headless VPS'es (on Arm8) got through the upgrade from 18.x -> 20.x -> 22.x and then crashed out over -> 24.x for a still unknown reason. now I'm just afraid .. or I should say reluctant ..to repeat that whole fiasco.
There were some issues with how the menu icon manager handled the new security policy defaults. This means the editor will break, and the displayed menu may be missing any item that didn't follow the naming convention syntax. Its a lot of packages to bring into compliance, for that one silly feature the devs had to put in before it was ready...
Maybe they fixed it since the rc release, but there were some rough edges in Feb... the kernel USB support cooked the thumb drive partition structure.
In 22.04 to 24.04 the kernel Nvidia GPU driver EOL abandonment began... In 26.04 people will discover most EOL hardware support prior to RTX series will be difficult to bring up.
Probably wise to wait a few weeks for the bug reports to clear out a bit. =3
Keeping the key in the same room as the padlock only protects against casual drive theft and secure disposal.
Personally I'm more worried about someone stealing the entire server or a local threat actor.
Sure, keep TPM to help with boot integrity, maybe even a factor for unlock, but things like Clevis+Tang (or Bitlock Network Unlock for our windows brethren) is essential in my opinion.
The beta installer was completely unsuccessful in setting the TPM-backed disk encryption on both a ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Intel 258V) and a ThinkPad P14s (AMD 300-something). Hopefully they ironed that part out in the release, but it seems still early for this feature (at least for my comfort level).
The constructed policy is quite strict and expects certain UEFI things to be set up correctly. For example both this https://github.com/canonical/secboot/blob/7434bac27844362ff8... and https://github.com/canonical/secboot/blob/7434bac27844362ff8... are enabled in the policy. The policy choices and various early checks, even as trivial as confirming that the TCG log content is correct after booting into installation system, are enough to rule out a lot of potentially problematic EFI deployments. Effectively making it more strict helps avoid a lot of funny issues where the firmware is clearly buggy and things would fall apart sooner or later.
Strict is probably good. My company started to enable bitlocker this year on win11, and a non trivial amount of initial encryptions seem to be failing, destroying the user data and requiring a full reformat.
In what way is TPM protecting your data if someone steals the entire server? TPM only ensures that the boot environment has not been modified. Whatever key is being used to automatically decrypt the disk would be in the clear.
Unless I'm misunderstanding your situation, I think you should look up the "Evil Maid Attack" to better understand how to mitigate risk for your threat model.
assuming there are no bugs in linux and you enable full memory encryption in BIOS, it protects you in the same way the FBI cant get into a locked iphone they physically posess
but linux is not as secure as an iphone, and linux users typically dont know how to set this up, so in practice you are right, it doesnt protect you
My threat model is a junkie breaks in to my house and flips my server on facebook marketplace. Then the buyer curiously pokes through my hard drives. Of course if protecting against government agencies is the threat model then TPM alone isn't enough.
For me, a zero friction way to have decent security is worlds better than the normal state where homeservers are not encrypted at all.
* Select - Middle-click paste does not seem to work
* When something requires a password (ie just tried a bitlocker volume) the whole screen is blocked, so no password manager for you (unless you copy it before, or cancel - unplug drive-copy password - replug drive - paste.)
* The default tiling does not jive with me, sometimes I don't even know what it wants (it always tries to force you to also set a left windows if you tile right and vice versa) so I disabled it `gnome-extensions disable tiling-assistant@ubuntu.com`. Default Gnome tiling is ok (but missing quarter tiling (and 1/8th would be nice on my ultra-wide) imho so I use [0]
* I've been trying to use Nix home-manager for packages but I have GPU errors, need workarounds, icons that just remain generic. But I guess that is not Ubuntu's fault.
Ubuntu remains my nr. 2 choice, after NixOS (but I didn't get the latter to install on this Nuc, perhaps a bios update will help).
The installer offered (under experimental) to run root on zfs, I didn't end up selecting it because only on the forth try (and by that time you're clicking at a fast rate just taking defaults) I understood that it would only download packages via wifi, not the cable (same for NixOS installer, so must be my network).
[0] https://github.com/troyready/quarterwindows
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