
What's new in Ubuntu 19.04 - logix
https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/04/whats-new-in-ubuntu-1904-disco-dingo.html
======
Iv
And here again, of course, they are going to change the behavior of default
shortcuts in a totally unnecessary way (Alt-Tab, really?) and move settings in
different places so that all of stackoverflow's answers become obsolete.

They also mention a "better" multi-monitor support. that scares me. I have a
multi-monitor setup that works. I could do with a few more options but it
works. Every change of behavior has required me to whack down some quirks. I
am pretty sure the behavior when booting/rebooting with our without the screen
connected, with or without the power plugged, is going to change in a way they
found "logical, practical and intuitive" and that will waste me a few hours of
correcting.

~~~
Lorkki
Staying with the LTS release is a perfectly valid choice if you want a slower
pace of changes.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
The way Linux distros have no conception of separating "system" from
"application" ensures that anyone sticking with an LTS release will have a
much harder time getting new software installed.

Is it really so crazy to want a stable platform on which to run current
applications? In the Linux world: yes.

~~~
hathawsh
Canonical's Snap system is intended to solve this. Snaps are packages that
bundle their dependencies, so they are bigger, but they run successfully on
most modern versions of Linux.

[https://snapcraft.io/](https://snapcraft.io/)

AppImage solves the problem in a different way, although AppImage doesn't have
a concept of automatic upgrades like Snap:

[https://appimage.org/](https://appimage.org/)

I suppose one could put an appimage in a snap, leading to either the best or
worst of both worlds.

~~~
PhilippGille
> although AppImage doesn't have a concept of automatic upgrades

It does:
[https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageUpdate](https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageUpdate)

~~~
hathawsh
Thanks, I had no idea. I don't know how to update the AppImages I use except
by downloading new AppImages manually.

------
radarsat1
So many complaints here. I just want to say that I love Ubuntu. It's the
perfect combination of the sturdiness of Debian combined with easy access to a
sprinkling of proprietary apps that I need on a regular basis. Thanks Ubuntu!

~~~
ramy_d
We don't say thank you enough :( Thanks Ubuntu!

------
sharno
I understand how hard it is to improve an open source software to get to be on
the same level of proprietary ones, but it seems that Gnome took multiple
steps backwards, or rather maybe the ubuntu adaptation of it.

I saw multiple UX hiccups and small missing functionalities that makes me
wonder when would a DE reach the full maturity to stay as it is with small
improvements and doing what's intended to be done. For the time being I think
KDE is a more stable and functional DE than Gnome, hope Gnome returns to its
glorious days soon though.

~~~
hathawsh
I understand why Ubuntu doesn't switch the default to KDE; there's too much
history and people would recoil at such a big change. That said, I always run
Kubuntu rather than the default Ubuntu desktop and I'm really happy with it.
Switching to KDE is almost as smooth as it can possibly be: once I have Ubuntu
installed, all I have to do is "sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop" and then
choose KDE at login.

Some of the reasons I really like KDE:

* I have keyboard shortcuts for switching desktops; I feel much more productive with 9 easily accessible virtual desktops. I use the "windows" key, sometimes called "meta": meta-Q, meta-W, meta-E, meta-A, etc.

* I've added rules for automatically changing the window title bar colors to make it easier to distinguish between very similar-looking windows. My Sublime Text windows in particular have a different bar color for each project. Sometimes I have as many as 4 projects open at once.

* I can lay out and enhance my screen any way I like. KDE doesn't quibble and even encourages it.

~~~
newscracker
I have long stayed away from KDE because it used to require better hardware
than Gnome, which requires better hardware than Xfce. I haven't even kept up
with KDE's performance and hardware usage on older systems. Does it still need
better hardware compared to Gnome (for a machine that's, say more than a few
years old)?

~~~
__HYde
Just one data point but compare the RAM usages in this comparison:
[http://archive.fo/eB8If](http://archive.fo/eB8If)

~~~
panpanna
I think I read somewhere that kde has improved even more since tha.

------
modeless
Updating is going to be a huge pain. It always is, for one reason: Nvidia. I
need CUDA for ML, and nouveau is so bad anyway that 18.10 wouldn't even boot
on my machine when I tried to install it.

It's guaranteed that if I upgrade right now I will be troubleshooting black
screens, hangs, and compiler incompatibilities for hours if not days in an
attempt to install a working set of ML tools including up to date drivers and
CUDA.

It's sad that one required proprietary component ruins the whole experience.
But there's no other option for ML research. AMD just isn't investing enough.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
In theory, things should be better[1] (I have an nvidia card too, I will
probably hold off for a few weeks).

1:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/04/15/ubunt...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/04/15/ubuntu-19-04-delivers-
a-welcome-surprise-for-nvidia-gpu-owners/#32163a243c93)

~~~
sneakernets
We've said "things should be better" since GLX became a thing. The real
problem is that every Linux-based OS is too stupid to realize when something
in the windowing system is broken. Every time I upgrade Ubuntu, I run into a
login loop where Xinit refuses to work, gets sacked, then redirects me back to
the login screen. The fix is a simple one liner. I see the solution to my
problem has 11k upvotes. The solution is 5 years old.

It's been like this for almost a decade, and I haven't even gotten into
Laptops with Integrated/Discrete "piggyback" setups. That nut _still_ is not
cracked.

It's kind of sad.

~~~
mort96
I have one of those laptops with integrated and discrete cards. Really, it
works way better than you'd think; the official discrete GPU driver is a part
of the kernel and gets better with each kernel release and requires no weird
proprietary blobs, and running a program on the discrete instead of integrated
GPU just requires running it with `DRI_PRIME=1` in the environment.

The main issues with GPUs in Linux rests squarely on nvidia's shoulders. Intel
has worked flawlessly for ages, and after AMD actually started upstreaming
their drivers, their cards have been a dream to work with.

~~~
sneakernets
Thing is, I need NVidia because of CUDA. It's so frustrating to be put in a
situation where I have to deal with the sucky drivers because, where else am I
going to go? For some silly reason, AMD still has a reputation of "sub-par" to
some science circles, and to this day I have no idea why that is the case. I
suppose it's hard to market "OpenCL", which is why Khronos is rolling it into
Vulkan very soon. NVidia showed up with just as much marketing as they did a
useful product.

And (please correct me if I'm wrong) OpenCL support in NVidia drivers is still
in the "consideration" phases as far as I understand it.

~~~
mort96
Yeah, it's certainly an issue, because people do have nvidia cards and they
don't work as well as they should have on Linux. I'm just pointing out that
it's in large part nvidia's fault, not really Linux' graphics stack's. I
myself have an nvidia card in my desktop, and while it's _mostly_ fine with
the proprietary drivers, there are occasional graphical glitches which just
don't happen with other cards. (The nouveau drivers just don't work at all,
which is also largely nvidia's fault from what I understand, due to not
providing many docs and forcing the nouveau folks to reverse engineer
everything.)

Coincidentally, I decided to try getting into OpenCL a couple days ago. I've
just used the Intel OpenCL runtime, but Arch Wiki's GPGPU page mentions
opencl-nvidia:
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GPGPU#NVIDIA](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GPGPU#NVIDIA)

I don't understand why CUDA is that big, when it's locked down and supported
by only one vendor, and OpenCL exists and is open and supported by all
vendors. But then again, there are probably some market forces I don't
understand; I also can't really grasp why Direct3D is that big when it's
locked down and supported by only one OS vendor and OpenGL exists.

------
Andrex
Looks great!

The screenshots really made me pine for the days of using Ubuntu as my daily
driver circa ~2010, right before the (IMO detrimental and pointless) switch to
Unity instead of Gnome 3.

Giving Unity up and switching back to Gnome was such a step in the right
direction. Look how big that feature list is because they can lean on Gnome's
development! This represents open source at its best.

------
siriniok
Does anyone still use good old Unity? :)

~~~
someguy101010
I liked it a lot, really didn't understand the community hate for it. At first
it was not nice but it was pretty nice before it was deprecated.

~~~
zanny
When it came out it was a substantial UX regression from Gnome 2 and it took a
few releases to even reach feature parity.

The same thing has been seen with KDE 4 and 5, Gnome 3, and how long LXQT has
taken. Users _hate_ experience regressions passionately, and will actively
hate projects that depreciate or replace their workflows, sometimes for years,
and sometimes forever.

------
sebastos
>new Ubuntu 19.04

Oh sweet, did they make NetworkManager not garbage?

>no

Cool, cool.

I do appreciate some of the other updates though. A little user-friendly
support for Nvidia cards is a welcome add, and the latest Gnome is looking
sexy.

------
cuu508
> Tracker is installed by default

And is a dependency of Nautilus – cannot remove tracker but keep Nautilus :-(

~~~
mbrumlow
What is "Tracker" \-- it does not sound good...

~~~
jayalpha
Did not know either.

"Tracker is installed by default with Ubuntu 19.04. Tracker is a filesystem
indexer, metadata storage system and search tool"

So no real privacy issue here or anything. But load on the system may be
annoying. Boloo should be the KDE equivalent and I don't like it.

PS: Yes, this stuff can be annoying: " It wasn't installed by default until
now due to performance concerns, but those issues seem to have been resolved."

~~~
eitland
Isn't the KDE equivalent named Baloo?

~~~
jayalpha
Yes, and it is annoying.

For finding stuff I use recoll. Not sure if baloo has also other uses.

~~~
zanny
Its not that annoying because you can go into the Search settings page of
system settings (or just search for "search" in any of the various launchers)
and turn it off with a checkbox.

------
brightball
Gnome is A LOT snappier after the update. Update was very simple and quick
too. I especially appreciate being able to set the flag to avoid disabling
every PPA.

------
jwr
I really hope that some day Ubuntu will have enough power&steam to attack the
Clipboard Problem. It is the #1 issue that makes me dislike working with a
Linux desktop.

Consistent system-wide clipboard behavior with consistent keyboard shortcuts.
Look to Mac OS for an example of how to get this right. And I don't even need
graphics/media support in the first iteration: just get me basic plaintext
copy/paste.

~~~
eitland
What?

I never realized there was a problem with clipboards on mainstream Linux
desktops?

Edit: after a couple of minutes of thinking I have found one single thing that
isn't consistent: when copying and pasting from/to a terminal I have to use
ctrl + _shift_ \+ c or ctrl + _shift_ \+ v (understandable since ctrl + c is
used to terminate running programs).

Personally I guess cut, copy and paste should have been moved to Super + x/c/v
since they are global os-level shortcuts, but it would break the habits of
many of us so I guess that should be configurable as well.

~~~
jwr
Yes, most people do not realize there is a problem. You have to use a
different OS (Mac OS in my case) to discover how nice a working clipboard can
be and to feel the pain when going back to Linux.

~~~
fnord123
Not sure if you're joking. So many programs are broken on OS X. Mostly
Electron ones like Teams.

~~~
zapzupnz
That's the fault of (A) Electron and (B) developers who use Electron who (B.A)
erroneously think that because Windows users don't mind having no menu bar
then everybody else feels the same and (B.B) don't reimplement what
Cocoa/Carbon give developers for free.

It's not macOS' problem if people seem to prefer writing mediocre cross-
platform apps than proper, native apps with full support for macOS-specific
features like system-wide automation, proper integration with the system
pasteboard, Quick Look, accessibility features, etc.

~~~
fnord123
Is it Gnome's fault that XTerm has shonky cut-paste behaviour? gnome-terminal
works wonderfully.

Or is this the projector problem again: when you plug a mac into a projector
and it doesn't work, people blame the projector. When you plug a linux machine
in, people blame linux.

~~~
zapzupnz
Of course it isn't GNOME's fault if xterm has shonky cut-paste behaviour, but
that really only serves to back up my point — don't blame the system if one
(or a handful of) apps happen to behave contradictorily to its conventions.

I'd never heard of the projector problem, but given Linux's unreliable track
record with multiple monitors, I'm not surprised people blame Linux. The
problem as stated doesn't define whether or not the projector is actually at
fault or not, so we can only really start diagnosis where intuition leads us.

------
jammygit
Installed this last night a couple of hours early. Compared to 18.04, boot
times and the ui seems a lot snappier because of some gnome updates. This was
the reason I did the upgrade so I'm pretty happy. Haven't tested on my laptop
yet though.

------
sneakernets
I dunno what Ubuntu did, but Filesystems tab in gnome task monitor is now
completely useless. It's filled with virtual file systems from packages that I
will never ever care about accessing in this way, and they can't be hidden.

Why? Whyyy why why.

~~~
justwalt
Might those be snap packages? It sounds like a similar annoying I had, where
df would be filled with /dev/loop entries, multiple for each snap package, to
the point where 20% of the lines were actually useful. That was enough for me
to purge every snap package from my install and remove the snap core
altogether.

~~~
sneakernets
This is exactly what it was. It has since been purged from my system. Thank
you!

------
yNeolh
I have been using Windows and Mac for years now, and Ubuntu on servers.
Yesterday I made a dual boot between Windows 10 and Ubuntu 19.04 and I have to
say... It's been pretty awesome, almost everything was configured out of the
box, I have 3 monitors and this works almost as good as W10 (Maybe the way to
arrange windows could improve). For now I will use it as my main Desktop OS
and I will just change to W10 for the games.

Very happy with it, good job Ubuntu and Linux teams! :D

------
anderspetersson
Default python3 version is now 3.7. Upgraded and found python performance
improvement over py3.6 to be quite significant.

------
mehrdadn
Does anybody know why this happens when I try to do-release-upgrade 18.04 in
WSL? I didn't have trouble going from 16.04 to 18.04...

    
    
      $ do-release-upgrade
      Checking for a new Ubuntu release
      Get:1 Upgrade tool signature [819 B]
      Get:2 Upgrade tool [1,243 kB]
      Fetched 1,244 kB in 0s (0 B/s)
      authenticate 'cosmic.tar.gz' against 'cosmic.tar.gz.gpg'
      extracting 'cosmic.tar.gz'
      [sudo] password for $USER:
      $

~~~
trogdor3000
You have to add a flag to get off of the LTS brach, Maybe '-d"? Both 16.04 and
180.04 are LTS. the next LTS will be 20.04

~~~
mehrdadn
Thanks, but nope that's not the issue, I've already done both. It's just
failing to do anything for some reason.

    
    
      $ do-release-upgrade -p -c
      Checking for a new Ubuntu release
      New release '18.10' available.
      Run 'do-release-upgrade' to upgrade to it.

~~~
e12e
I'm not sure if do-release-upgrade supports skipping releases, except for
going from lts to lts? In other words, it might either: 16.04 -> 18.04 ->
20.04, or 18.04 -> 18.10 -> 19.04. But not 18.04 (lts) -> 19.04?

~~~
mehrdadn
I think it should:
[https://askubuntu.com/a/240189](https://askubuntu.com/a/240189)

~~~
e12e
Actually, that answer seems to imply that "skipping" is just for lts>lts?

~~~
mehrdadn
I guess so. In my case I'm not skipping anything. It's set to normal and
clearly trying to get 18.10.

~~~
e12e
Ah, I missed your original comment. I see you hit a bug with missing
depencies.

------
jayalpha
I never liked Unity nor Gnome. I use KDE but also like enlightenment
distributions like Bodhi Linux. Would someone explain why to use Gnome? Just a
habbit?

~~~
petepete
It's better-looking and more consistent than KDE and more actively-developed
than Enlightenment (which feels at best half-finished).

~~~
jayalpha
Moksha Deskop, based on a previous E version, is actively developed.

[https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-
desktop/](https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/)

------
jammygit
I noticed the update mirror uses http. In my inexperience, I'm not sure
whether this introduces a MitM vector or not.

Can anybody comment?

~~~
anowlcalledjosh
Not exactly the same, but:
[https://whydoesaptnotusehttps.com/](https://whydoesaptnotusehttps.com/)

tldr: if you verify the download against a trusted PGP key, it doesn't matter
where the download actually came from.

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
Which is, IMHO, a ridiculously short-sighted approach that ignores the
difference between theory and practice.

If there is a vuln in (or before) the GPG signature check, using HTTPS has a
good chance of making it a _lot_ harder to exploit (because the attacker will
likely need to get into a trusted position instead of MitMing any HTTP
connection).

------
berbec
Is the promised land of a pure snap distro, devoid of apt, still "just around
the corner"?

~~~
wmf
I don't see that ever happening; the amount of work needed would be enormous
and the breakage would be epic. Even in Fedora land, Silverblue still uses
RPMs to build OSTree layers.

------
terryschiavo22
Does anyone have a recommendation on which version a total noob should
install?

~~~
AsyncAwait
If you like to try a new type of working environment, the main Ubuntu with
GNOME is a solid choice. GNOME is actually pretty great.

If you're more looking for familiarity coming from Windows, go with KDE and
their Ubuntu-based distro, Neon - [https://neon.kde.org](https://neon.kde.org)
-

Also, I have to mention, If what you want is the latest & greatest, want
continual updates, great setup for multimedia & gaming etc. try
[https://manjaro.org](https://manjaro.org) \- this is not based on Ubuntu, but
rather on a distro called Arch, however the advantages are that you're always
getting the latest software & as a result there's much better support in terms
of the latest GPU drivers etc.

Many are afraid of occasional instability that can come with fresh software
that Manjaro ships, which is something to consider, but it hasn't been a
problem from what I've seen.

~~~
mrwebmaster
I've been using XFCE for years. It worked better in my old computer. Now I
have a fast i7 w/8GB now and still using old XFCE with Ubuntu. Am I missing a
lot?

~~~
AsyncAwait
If Xfce works for you, not really. :-) On the other hand, am not sure things
like GTK2 etc, would make a good first impression on a new user such as the
OP.

------
sahaskatta
Has anyone tried it out on the Dell XPS 13 (9370 or 9380)?

~~~
jammygit
I will update an xps 13 later today. I'll try to remember to post about it.

~~~
jammygit
So far at least, working great with no issues. In the case of the xps, I
reinstalled from scratch instead of upgrading.

Apparently things often use 16% less battery now too based on some benchmarks
I read. Its been about 3.5 hours I guess and I've went through half my battery
wile downloading packages and browsing, and haven't set up powertop or tlp
yet.

Its a lot snappier than before. I know that before I had an issue with resume
from suspend where the machine was just slow on waking, haven't used it enough
to tell if its still happening though.

xps-9360

------
liquidify
What does optional GCC 9 mean? I've really been hoping for a major GCC update.

~~~
no_wizard
This is typically an indicator that its upgradable via an apt install.

For reference, a quick search on launchpad appears that yes, this is now the
case for Disco:

[https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gcc-9](https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gcc-9)

`sudo apt-get install gcc-9` away!

------
brightball
Wait...I can't get automatic security updates anymore if I install this? Am I
misreading that?

~~~
e12e
I'm not entirely sure what canonical guarantees in terms of "security"
updates, but non-lts releases do get updates - just for a shorter window than
lts releases.

~~~
brightball
This update just warns that it disable LivePatch. I've never seen that in a
release before.

~~~
e12e
I guess it makes sense that live patch is (primarily) supported on lts
releases?

------
indigodaddy
What happened to the xx.10 releases? They still do that?

~~~
teach
Every October.

They only do long-term-support (LTS) releases every two years, and those are
always in April, so you're reading references to the most recent LTS release,
18.04.

I'll be upgrading to 19.04 from 18.10, though.

