Arg: no mdadm on Ubuntu 18.04.5 Desktop install disk?

[Liam Proven]

On Sun, 3 Jan 2021 at 02:06, Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com> wrote:
>
> This is seriously dumb. I mean why drop these modules and tools? To save
> space? Huh? I mean are they worried about the ISO not fitting on a 2gig thumb
> drive? (Can you still get thumb drives that small?)

The Pareto Principle, AKA the 80:20 rule.

It's not a simple proportion.

The reason software gets so bloated is that although 80% of people
only want 20% of the functionality, they don't all want the _same_
20%. They all want a different 20%. When you add together a base and
all the other different 20%s that different audiences want, the result
is... well, a lot.

Ubuntu desktop and server have different foci, and Canonical seems to
be trying to broaden the gap. Also, it has ZFS now, and this
effectively replaces both LVM and mdraid.

So, stuff is taken out, too.

> I have yet to see a desktop MB with fewer than 4 SATA ports, so having a RAID
> array on a desktop is possible, pretty much out-of-the box, at least on the
> hardware side. (Yes, I know laptops don't generally provide for multiple
> internal hard drives, so a *laptop* with an internal RAID array for the system
> disk is unlikely.)

Just FWIW I have at least 2 Thinkpads with both a SATA bay and an
mSATA slot (X220 + T420), but it's neither here nor there really.

Laptops are where it's at now, and Ubuntu is an easy distro for
end-users, remember.

> I do software development work (mostly with open source projects) and want to
> maintain a level of downward compatibility on my development systems.  I want
> to be able to support older (and still maintained!) systems.  *I* hate it when
> open source projects require "bleeding edge" O/S, esp. when the projects are
> not doing anything that really requires the "bleeding edge" O/S, but merely
> because the developers are just developing on bleeding edge O/S.
>
> It is not like 18.04 is going EOL anytime soon. And I will upgrade in a couple
> of years. I have never seen any *good* reason to stand on the bleeding edge.

OK. Fair enough.

> Something I would rather avoid.  The "standard" Ubuntu installer is way to
> user-friendly for my tastes.  I would really rather avoid an X11 based
> installer if at all possible (it looks like it won't be with Ubuntu).

So, install Server and then just do `apt install xubuntu-desktop` or
something like that. It's easy enough; I've done it a lot in my
experiments to build a GNUstep-based (and ROX Desktop-based) remix.

> Oh, I won't be having anything to do with GNOME or Unity -- just some minimual
> bits from Mate.  (I find *all* of the "modern" desktop environments horribly
> hard to use.)

Xfce causes me the least grief. It does everything MATE does, smaller
and simpler, but also supports a vertical taskbar, which MATE can't.

-- 
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