
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) - dragonsh
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FocalFossa/ReleaseNotes
======
thdrdt
Most reviews are very positive. Faster, better, Amazon removed, maybe the best
Ubuntu release until now.

The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. It looks like deb files only
can be installed via the terminal.

Ubuntu is also researching if they can get Adobe on board. I doubt this would
ever happen, but that would be huge. Most people stick on Windows and MacOS
because Adobe software is not available on Linux.

Personally I switched back from Xubuntu to Ubuntu. And I must say: Ubuntu is
back on track!

~~~
jamieweb
> The only 'con' is the pushing of Snap packages. It looks like deb files only
> can be installed via the terminal.

My main concern with Snap is security.

Using the default Ubuntu Apt repositories, I can `apt install` pretty much
anything I want and it's almost guaranteed to not be malicious/dangerous, as
only trusted/well-established developers can get their package into the Apt
repos.

However, with Snap, everybody in the world can publish any old rubbish in the
Snap Store, including packages that typosquat the names of others.

Snap's current 'protections' for this are mainly reactionary rather than
preventative, which is far from satisfactory [1].

For me, the absolute key selling point of Linux over Windows/Mac is the
secure-by-default and natively integrated package management. Pushing Snaps as
the main package management method goes too close to the Windows way of just
downloading random EXEs from the internet.

I personally would like to see Apt remain as the default system package
manager for all common/well-known software, with Snap existing purely as a
'community' repository for software that is known to be untrusted/unknown.

[1] [https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/is-there-any-protection-
against...](https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/is-there-any-protection-against-
typosquatting-on-the-snap-store/10815)

~~~
kd913
The amount of cases for malicious snaps was about 1 with the cryptominer that
was addressed within 3 days. Those snaps that are published go through static
analysis and unless manually vetted will not have access to the rest of your
system. You install it, at worst it will cryptomine that is it. Oh and you can
remove it completely with all traces unlike deb equivalents.

Snaps come with a tick against verified snaps coming from first party. Such as
those from Jetbrains, Mozilla, Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify etc..

If you are downloading from a software center this would all be handled for
you and typo squatting will not be a problem.

In contrast with debs, the person who owns the PPA for those third party
packages do have unfetted, root access to the system. The most popular PPA to
this day is a closed down Java PPA run by 3rd party dev. That could easily
turn malicious easily.

~~~
foresto
> You install it, at worst it will cryptomine that is it.

Last time I looked, snaps still had access to the X server. They were
therefore perfectly capable of logging and inserting keystrokes, capturing
whatever sensitive information is on screen, etc. Has this changed?

I don't think Wayland would solve this, because even if Ubuntu switches to
Wayland, variants like Xubuntu (which inherit snap from the base distribution)
still use Xorg.

This sort of thing is often overlooked when we talk about linux sandboxing
technologies. People see the word "sandbox" and assume safety, but the fact is
that most of these sandboxes are leaky in one way or another. Does it protect
X11 abuse? DBus abuse? Shared memory? Microphone access? Device node access?
The list is long, and the leaks are different in each of the sandboxes.

~~~
kd913
You are right, there are still issues and vulnerabilities present with using
X. That is the case with every distribution mechanism ever in existence.

You would have to be a complete numpty to download and install such a thing as
it wouldn't come from anything with first party support. Enough of a numpty
that you shouldn't be trusted with root to begin with.

Wouldn't be surprised if this specific thing was scanned for and flagged with
their static analysis tool. It seems like something that would be flagged.

> DBus abuse?

When I added the dbus slot for the firefox snap, Canonical wouldn't push to
the store until it was manually reviewed. So yes, asking for new
permissions/unusual permissions would probably need review.

------
LeonM
Looking through the features

    
    
      Gnome 3.36
      - X11 fractional scaling.
    

I got all excited, because this means that now finally Ubuntu will be usable
on my Lenovo X1E with High-DPI display.

But then further down below:

    
    
      Fractional scaling does not work with the NVIDIA proprietary driver (bug 1870736, bug 1873403).
    

OK, nevermind, back to Windows with WSL...

~~~
globular-toast
Throw your nVidia card in the bin and be free. After many years with nVidia I
removed the card and I've been happily using Intel hardware for a year now.

~~~
LeonM
Lenovo X1E is a laptop... So removing the GPU will be a bit of a challenge ;)

I thought of turning the GPU off under Linux, but external displays (through
the thunderbolt port) can only be used with the nVidia GPU. I need external
displays for my work, so disabling the nVidia GPU is not an option for me.

~~~
devit
You may be able to either:

\- Use Nouveau instead of the proprietary driver

\- Use a nested X/wayland server, which should then presumably support
fractional scaling

\- Use non-fractional scaling and adjust font sizes

------
linsomniac
In the linked post they mention "ZFS Native Encryption", but (to save others
the time I spent on it): Encrypted ZFS is not available in the installer.
However, it will boot encrypted ZFS fine.

If you boot the live image and modify a source file, you can install to an
encrypted ZFS. I've documented what I had to do here:
[https://linsomniac.gitlab.io/post/2020-04-09-ubuntu-2004-enc...](https://linsomniac.gitlab.io/post/2020-04-09-ubuntu-2004-encrypted-
zfs/)

~~~
paines
Highly appreciated. Thanks!

------
zeppelin101
"Fractional scaling does not work with the NVIDIA proprietary driver (bug
1870736, bug 1873403)." That's kind of a big deal for any desktop users with a
high resolution display.

~~~
sho_hn
While I would agree it's certainly not insignificant, fractional means, say,
1.5.x. A nice high-resolution display will be 2x, which will generally result
in a nicer experience (largely due to how software deals with it or not). Now
many people do indeed have displays where a fractional multiplier works
better, but as a buying rec - try to avoid them.

~~~
innocenat
You usually want 1.5x for 13.3" laptop with 1080p which is not uncommon at all
and is kinda hard to avoid.

~~~
jhasse
I work around that by setting the default scale in the browser and that's it.

------
doublesCs
For a long time I've been using Lubuntu on my laptop. However, a couple of
years ago they changed focus and

From wikipedia:

Lubuntu was originally touted as being "lighter, less resource hungry and more
energy-efficient", but now aims to be "a functional yet modular distribution
focused on getting out of the way and letting users use their computer"

I stopped updating my OS since (I'm on 14).

Does anyone care to suggest an ubuntu-like distribution for someone like me
who wants their OS light?

~~~
Zhyl
If you're just looking for a DE/WM that's light on resources, I can definitely
recommend tiling window managers like i3 [1].

I'm not sure what other changes would be in your sightlines given that you
were happy with Ubuntu, but I usually go to the Arch wiki in those times to
see what fat I can trim off of my setup.

[1] [https://i3wm.org/](https://i3wm.org/)

~~~
doublesCs
I enjoyed reading i3's landing page, thanks for linking.

So could you clarify for me, what's the relation between being a "tiling
windows manager" and being light? Is it that for some technical reason one
would expect tiling windows managers in general to be lighter than non-tiling?
Or is it that orthogonally to the tiling aspect, i3 specifically aims to be
light?

~~~
Zhyl
I don't think that there's anything inherent in tiling managers that mean they
_have_ to be light, but it's very common for them to be light. Ratpoison,
xmonad, awesomewm and i3 are the most well known tiling managers (unless I've
missed any out?) and all of them are very minimalist and resource light.

My non-expert take on this is that the sort of person who sees value in the
efficiencies from using a tiling WM are also of a kind to use system resources
efficiently too, even though they are orthogonal characteristics.

~~~
greggyb
DWM, too.

------
llarsson
Hard to not read that code name as "fecal fossil". Sorry if you can't get that
out of your head now. I know I can't.

~~~
CrLf
In portuguese I'm having a hard time not to read it as "fossa fecal"
(~cesspool).

------
cHaOs667
The best news from an Ubuntu release is that a new Pop_OS! Release is
available. Can't wait for the final release tonight!

~~~
zeppelin101
It's the best Ubuntu-based distro for desktop use!

~~~
throwlaplace
how well does workspaces work? are they at all close to workspaces on mac?

~~~
zeppelin101
I hate to say it, but I don't use workspaces. I use a number of window
management keyboard shortcuts in place of it.

------
iso1631
Ubuntu has been regressing on the server side for a while. 1804 introduced
netplan, a proprietary wrapper around systemd-networking. Going back to
/etc/network/interfaces is an uphill struggle, but it is required for some
functions.

This time they've removed debian-installer, so it's no longer a matter of a
new kernel/initrd/preseed file. On top of that, the automation has only
appeared in the last few days.

------
philliphaydon
I've been running this since mid Feb at home. It's been rock solid.

I've only had 1 issue (other than it never remembering default audio devices
which I set manually to resolve)

Snaps break all the time for me. I installed VS Code, after reboot I couldn't
launch it, had to uninstall/reinstall. Fixed, reboot, broken. Installed it via
terminal. 0 issues.

Same with Slack, Chrome, and Skype, and anything else I tried with Snaps.

Very happy with 20.04 so far.

~~~
llarsson
That sounds like a huge "1 issue", then, if Snaps are supposed to be the way
forward for installing packages in Ubuntu as other threads make it seem.

~~~
philliphaydon
One thing that threw me off is Snaps are sandboxed. So I installed Slack, and
I clicked on support ticket links and I had to sign in again. Cos when it
loaded Firefox it loaded a separate instance of Firefox rather than re-using
my existing open instance.

So I've resorted to removing all the snap apps and installing them from
terminal and no longer have any issues.

I'm not sure who the target audience is for Snaps.

------
FpUser
If I really need to sandbox anything I'll use the VM for that. As for the rest
as a user I am staying away from bloat, slow startup and lots of other
inconveniences of snap.

This whole security thing is getting really annoying.

------
laurentdc
Did they fix the dbus (?) bug that made some applications like FileZilla or
VLC hang for about a minute on startup? [0]

[0] [https://askubuntu.com/questions/1184774/some-applications-
on...](https://askubuntu.com/questions/1184774/some-applications-on-
ubuntu-19-10-very-slow-to-start)

~~~
bArray
Not sure if it's related, but I have a nice bug with VLC where if I suspend my
machine with it open, /var/log/syslog fills my main disk to the brim with
error messages!

------
d99kris
Note that it's still in beta as of now. But it will (most likely) be released
today.

~~~
aritmo
It is released in the afternoon. Someone posted the releae notes a bit too
early.

------
someperson
This is the first Ubuntu LTS release without a 32 bit version

~~~
e12e
Oh? I'll have to see if I can boot 18.04 on an old laptop I found. I think it
was one of those mismatched efi vs arch things (32bit boot, 64bit cpu ?) - and
last time I couldn't get it to boot... Maybe I can just run it as 32bit...

------
globular-toast
I wonder if we'll ever get /usr/bin/python back. Or is it going to be like
browser user-agent strings where we call it "python3" forever and forget why
we can't just call it python?

~~~
markrian
You can install the [python-is-python3][0] package on 20.04, which symlinks
/usr/bin/python to python3.

[0]: [https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/python-is-
python3](https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/python-is-python3)

~~~
globular-toast
I saw that, but it's not the default setting. You can't just write a python
script and expect it to work on Ubuntu without putting python3 in the shebang.

------
joshuaellinger
Yesterday, I didn't know what Snaps were. I'm returning to Linux from years in
Microsoft land. Used to use Solaris back in the 90s. I'm running big servers
in a coloc environment (not desktop) but I want nice things like, oh Python 3,
by default. Now, I know way more than I ever wanted to.

So far, there have been two real pain points: 1\. Netplan is a mysterious
friend who occasionally rearranges my furniture when I'm not looking. 2\. Snap
is a young kid who wants to make help me get groceries but borrow my car to
drive to the store.

I'll leave netplan aside for a moment and focus on Snap.

I got 20.04 to fail badly under KVM using either the just released version or
the nightly build because Snap fails. I can see exactly where it fails thanks
to Python (cool). It's in an error handler for a UI view that's reading a
property that doesn't exist and it hoses the install (ouch). It appears to be
triggered because I was testing an odd network configuration.

Once something goes wrong, after that, every change just results in a one-line
"apt-get fails" error message.

But consider the implications...

Canonical apparently doesn't have an automated testing system which checks how
Snap behaves under failure conditions but they put it into the install process
without protections around it. This feels pretty half baked....

------
ramboldio
I love how easy it is to install snaps.

And no more including of PPAs of some developer whose apps seems nifty at
first glance.

~~~
ramboldio
If only, not every snap would come with its own version of Chrome/Electron..
Would save lots of storage and potentially RAM.

------
bkovacev
Was anyone able to run 18.04 or 20.04 successfully on a relatively modern
desktop spec (AMD Ryzen 9 3950X / Nvidia 2080 TI / 32GB RAM / Custom water
cooling) and two displays? I'm thinking of upgrading my development machine
and running ubuntu only and I'm looking for some hints as to what could go
wrong.

~~~
orbifold
Personally I won't upgrade until NVIDIA releases their next CUDA version
officially for 20.04. Past experience leads me to believe that otherwise I can
run into a few unpleasant surprises.

~~~
LandR
A couple of weeks ago I installed Ubuntu 18.04, it took hours to get it
working fine.

I had to install the properitary NVidia drivers but it kept locking the entire
machine, sometimes 30 seconds after booting, sometimes a few minutes. Took
hours of restarting and trying to get the drivers installed before it would
hang to get it stable.

Since getting them installed it's been solid.

I'd now like to upgrade to 20.04, but not if I need to go through the whole
ordeal of racing to get drivers updated before the system crashes.

------
AzzieElbab
Apparently everyone hates snap, while I hate Gnome, especially purple Gnome
with oversized windows titles and borders

------
mehrdadn
Just tried upgrading on WSL and I got an endless loop of

    
    
      sleep: cannot read realtime clock: Invalid argument
    

Ctrl+C and then I get

    
    
      $ sudo apt --fix-broken install
      ...
      Setting up libc6:amd64 (2.31-0ubuntu9) ...
      Checking for services that may need to be restarted...
      Checking init scripts...
      Nothing to restart.
      sleep: cannot read realtime clock: Invalid argument
      dpkg: error processing package libc6:amd64 (--configure):
       installed libc6:amd64 package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
    

and I have no clue how to fix this. (Edit: Found a fix. [1]) For the life of
me I don't get how people always say upgrades are so easy on Ubuntu. I
practically never have a pain-free Ubuntu upgrade experience... _never_. And
while this particular issue appears WSL-related, I'm not just talking about
WSL. There's always some random things breaking in the middle.

Update: After fixing that and upgrading everything, now I get this nonsense:

    
    
      The following packages have been kept back:
        libpython3.8 libpython3.8-dev libpython3.8-minimal python3.8 python3.8-minimal
    
      $ sudo apt-get install --upgrade python3.8
      ...
      The following packages have unmet dependencies:
       python3.8 : Depends: python3.8-minimal (= 3.8.2-1+bionic1) but 3.8.2-1ubuntu1 is to be installed
                   Depends: libpython3.8-stdlib (= 3.8.2-1+bionic1) but 3.8.2-1ubuntu1 is to be installed
      E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
    
      $ sudo apt-get install libpython3.8-stdlib
      ...
      The following packages have unmet dependencies:
       libpython3.8-stdlib : Depends: libffi6 (>= 3.0.4) but it is not installable
                             Depends: libreadline7 (>= 7.0~beta) but it is not installable
    

[1]
[https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4898#issuecomment-61...](https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4898#issuecomment-613385939)

~~~
Tade0
_For the life of me I don 't get how people always say upgrades are so easy on
Ubuntu._

They do? I just assume that I have to do a backup of my data, wipe the disk
and install they new version.

Ubuntu updates never worked for me.

~~~
CarVac
I don't understand how for some people it "never works", while for me it's
literally never once failed, all the way from 6.10 up until now, my latest
desktop install lasting through 12 updates, plus motherboard and GPU change
(between Intel and AMD CPU, and Nvidia and AMD proprietary driver and then AMD
open source driver no less) and four different desktop environments (Unity,
Gnome, Mate, and finally KDE).

The closest it's ever come to failing was literally yesterday when I realized
that my desktop was still on 19.04 and they had closed the old repositories so
the GUI upgrade utility failed. The CLI upgrade didn't skip a beat, though.

~~~
creeble
Do you run mysql / MariaDB? That's the one that bites me, 100% of the time.
There are other packages that often require "adjustments" but the db makes
dist-upgrade a total fail for me.

Not fun with servers, unfortunately.

~~~
CarVac
No, I don't. I use Linux strictly on the desktop.

------
franky47
My first Ubuntu install was 7.04 Fiesty Fawn, a full alphabet circle ago,
crazy how time flies.

~~~
scns
Mine too

------
renewiltord
It isn't released yet, right? My package manager isn't bumping up.

~~~
jpsnz
From the link, I had to run

    
    
      sudo do-release-upgrade -d
    

to get mine to upgrade.

~~~
renewiltord
Thank you. Wow, they removed Python 2.7 huh? Had to clear out some packages to
let that go through.

~~~
nsomaru
Python 2.x is EOL Jan 2020

~~~
renewiltord
Yeah but didn't think anyone would have the balls to do it haha.

~~~
Lev1a
IIRC Arch did that years ago.

~~~
bscphil
No, it was a few months ago, and it's still a work in progress:
[https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/python2/](https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/python2/)

------
clappski
I use Ubuntu via WSL2 when WFH (i.e. always, at the moment). I've ran into
lots of issues trying to use snaps (e.g. for ccls) in WSL, because of the lack
of systemd as PID 1.

Does anyone know a robust way to get snapd running properly in WSL2? I would
prefer to use whatever package there is than compiling everything that isn't
packaged as .deb myself. In the case of ccls it's particularly annoying
because I had to install the whole clang toolchain just to build it (which
isn't typically on my dev machines, because the work I do is GCC-based).

~~~
simosx
There are guides for this at
[https://discourse.ubuntu.com/c/wsl2](https://discourse.ubuntu.com/c/wsl2)
That's the place where you can find any working solutions for WSL2 and Ubuntu.

------
sireat
I fondly remember the free CDs in early Ubuntu days.

Is it actually possible to buy an "official" USB/DVD of Ubuntu these days?

When I say buy I mean most of money would go to support Canonical.

There used to be such an option about 10 years ago but I guess there is very
little demand.

The world has moved onto mostly online distributions.

For some reason I still do yearn for the world of "touchable" official
software - the world of 6 foot long Borland C++ manuals.

PS One of honorable sources -
[https://www.osdisc.com/](https://www.osdisc.com/) \- closed last August

------
xvilka
Finally with more recent (4.08.1)[1] OCaml version, even though significantly
behind upstream (4.10.0 - was released in June 2019!)[2]. The problem with
Debian and all distributions based on it, including Ubuntu, is the ancient
versions of the software.

[1]
[https://repology.org/project/ocaml/versions](https://repology.org/project/ocaml/versions)

[2]
[https://ocaml.org/releases/4.10.0.html](https://ocaml.org/releases/4.10.0.html)

------
diehunde
> In 20.04 LTS, the python included in the base system is Python 3.8. Python
> 2.7 has been moved to universe and is not included by default in any new
> installs.

Finally.

------
nairnkenedy
(1) After update to 20.04, my Ubuntu Software Store app wasn't there, and
neither wad there an icon for Snap Store. (2) Aftet I installed snap-store, it
showed me only 16 available apps rather than the umpteen which should have
been there. I'm sure these are only intitial glitches, and I'll wait patiently
for an update to fix the bug.

------
8bitsrule
Noticed the Xubuntu flavor has some graphics problems on some hardware
combinations (as did 18.04 & 19.10).

------
rcarmo
Awesome. Now let's wait for Elementary to upgrade (all my Linux machines with
a GUI run it)

~~~
driton
How is ElementaryOS doing nowadays? I used it for about a year a few years
back and while gorgeous to look at, it had quite a few UI glitches.

------
Osiris
If you usual from scratch you can use ZFS as the root filesystem and until
will automatically create snapshots before software updates.

The feature is still experimental but has been working well for me during the
beta period.

------
wheresvic3
It does not look like it is available yet:
[https://releases.ubuntu.com/](https://releases.ubuntu.com/)

~~~
ataylor32
I see it at that address now. Also at
[https://releases.ubuntu.com/focal/](https://releases.ubuntu.com/focal/)

------
enriquto
is there an apt-file equivalent for available snap packages?

I rely strongly on this tool and would be sad to lose its functionality if
everything becomes snap-based.

------
turowicz
Any news on CUDA Drivers/Toolkit for 20.04?

------
punnerud
I will definitely try this out: “Support for raspberry pi (Pi 2B, Pi 3B, Pi
3A+, Pi 3B+, CM3, CM3+, Pi 4B)”

------
hn20180220
all sorts of apparmor issues, dhcp client doesn't even work out of box, need
to run dhclient on every reboot

[https://pastebin.com/PUkH3Y1P](https://pastebin.com/PUkH3Y1P)

with rtlsdr (RTL2832U) plugged in, every process gets blocked

with nouveau, as soon as onboard HDMI (Intel) is connected, desktop becomes
very sluggish and system locks up in a few minutes

I am impressed it works at all on release day. Previous LTS releases are
hardly usable until LTS .03

------
vermaden
Still no ZFS Boot Environments ... pity.

Maybe in 2022.04 LTS then ...

