Ventoy

Sat Nov 20 11:39:42 UTC 2021

On Sat, 20 Nov 2021 at 11:02, Bo Berglund <bo.berglund at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have also installed Ubuntu Mate 20 on my two HP Elitebook workstation laptops
> since I cannot stand the stock Ubuntu GUI...

I can relate.

I do not really like MATE either, as it can't do vertical taskbars.

> These are normally running 24/7 as more server like devices, but I have
> installed TigerVNC so I can get to the desktops that way.

Reasonable. My old Ubuntu server has LXDE but set only to load on
demand, not by default.

> Questions:
>
> 1) Why is snap needed?
> I really do not understand that part of recent Ubuntus. What is it for?

Examples:

• As in my previous role, I use Slack to talk with the rest of the
team and company.
https://slack.com/downloads/linux
Slack is freeware but not FOSS. The company offers a Snap version
which makes it quick and easy to install it.

• I occasionally use Spotify to listen to music. Again, this is
closed-source freeware. I used to add a repo and install from there,
but the keys expired and I have failed in my efforts to update the
repo, or remove and re-add it, on several machines now.  The constant
errors from `apt update` were annoying. Totally removing the app and
its repo, then just issuing `snap install spotify` solves the problem
permanently. I now have the latest Linux Spotify client and it updates
invisibly.

Snap for me is just a quick easy way to add new programs to the distro
that aren't in the repos, and the packages are cross-distro and
usually well-maintained. It's handy for GUI apps; I have encountered
problems with integration of command-line apps before.

I don't use it much and I have disabled it on my server box, but it
does work and makes life easier.

Actually, Snap's isolation of even GUI Snap apps with the OS can be
problematic. E.g. I briefly tried plain Ubuntu 21.10 with GNOME. It
was, for me, a mess: I really dislike GNOME so I use a bunch of
extensions to try to make it a bit more sane. But Ubuntu 21.10 ships
Firefox as a snap. This means it can't load GNOME extensions from
https://extensions.gnome.org and the error messages are wrong and
actively misleading. (It tells you to install an OS integration
module, *even if that is already present*. Snap isolates the app from
the OS and so the app can't talk to the GNOME integration module.
Ubuntu team: you *NEED* to fix this.)

AIUI (I didn't try) if you add Chromium, it doesn't work either; it's
also a snap. The GNOME website tells you to use Flatpak to install
GNOME Tweaks but that didn't work as Ubuntu doesn't come with Flatpak
installed by default. I can install it with a single command, that's
easy, but it needs to be configured and at least one special Flatpak
repository added, manually. The GNOME site doesn't give instructions
for that; it assumes you already have it working.

GNOME is a Red Hat project. It was IMHO a mistake for Ubuntu to switch
back to it, but lots of people like it and I think I may be in a
minority there.

I found myself laughing at how *very* bad the Ubuntu experience was in
a shipping, final, released product. It was, in a word, crap.

The one thing I approve of in Ubuntu's adoption of GNOME is that they
adopted (and adapted) the Dash to Dock extension. I think they should
add "Extend Panel Menu"/"Panel Indicators", "Maximus"/"Pixel Saver",
and "Top Icons Plus" to give a more Unity-like experience. If that
basic set were present, and upgraded with the OS, it would make GNOME
more tolerable without totally changing the experience.

I reformatted the machine and installed Ubuntu Unity remix. It just
works, like Ubuntu used to years ago.

> 2) How come the kernel is old on Ubuntu Mint?

Mint used to be a derivative of Ubuntu back in the GNOME 2 era. It
added some more mainstream (greys and greens) themes, installed 3rd
party drivers and codecs by default, and was just a little bit easier
to use in general because of this. Ubuntu did not include drivers  and
codecs on the installation media that were not FOSS or could not be
distributed in all jurisdictions. (This mostly means the USA, where
corporate "rights" sometimes exceed private individuals'.) Mint is
Irish and it just included them, making life easier.

Mint's big break came when Ubuntu switched to Unity, after Microsoft
threatened to sue all the Linux vendors (around 2006-2007). Some
people hated the new Mac-like desktop. Mint adopted the MATE fork of
GNOME 2, and also started on a Win95-like fork of GNOME 3, now called
Cinnamon.

Mint also switched to a much slower release cycle around then: it now
only follows the Ubuntu LTS releases. With integrating 2 very new,
immature desktops, and a small team, I think they decided that it
would be easier and safer to only support LTS.

They also have a _very_ cautious policy regarding upgrades: for many
years, they only offered security fixes and nothing else by default,
and this means they do not include the HWE stack and newer kernels.
They also did not offer a direct upgrade path from one release of the
distro to the next: you were meant to back up and reinstall.

I have successfully upgraded Mint 19 to 20 (that is, 18.04 -> 20.04)
and it went fine. I also installed the HWE stack on a machine for a
friend and that went fine too. (Although it did not fix some minor
issues on an old MacBook.)

>
> And how did you do the above?
>

So, on this very new Dell, where I want Intel GPU support, USB-C, a
Thunderbolt screen and so on, I installed the HWE kernel:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack

... but it still misreported my GPU. So then I installed the OEM
kernels, a new thing I hadn't heard about before:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/OEMKernel

I took a guess and tried amending the command from:

apt install linux-oem-20.04b

... to...

apt install linux-oem-20.04c

... and then:

apt install linux-oem-20.04d

Now I have kernel 5.14, and while my GPU is still not being reported
correctly, the Cinnamon desktop has stopped complaining about
unaccelerated graphics. :-)

I do use LibreOffice, although mostly for doing word-counts, and LO
7.x is smaller, faster and has more features than LO 6.x -- but again,
Mint sticks to the older, tried-and-tested, most-stable version. So I
added "LibreOffice Fresh":

https://launchpad.net/~libreoffice/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

TBH I am not wild about Cinnamon but it works. The panel is very
clunky in vertical orientation; e.g. my clock's minutes are on a
different line to the hours! But it works, and if I can get my
Thunderbolt display working, and maybe my portrait monitor too, I will
have 3 very different display DPIs. I think I will need magnification
factors of 1.5, 1.25 and 1.0 respectively, and sadly that means the
only available desktops are GNOME, KDE or Cinnamon.

-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven
UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053