The Case Against LTS on the Desktop

Software & Operating Systems Linux
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42

Theres only a few reasons I prefer the torture feel of mint to anything else.

  1. I’m far too lazy to learn other distros quirks. Ubuntu is what I know.
  2. Windows-like layout out of the box. Seriously, I dont need to mess with it. Windows is muscle memory for me so its already what I’m looking for.
  3. Works gud enuf. I may run into issues here and there, as one does with ubuntu :wink:, but I dont have to do stupid stuff like the nomodeset trick. When I built my 2080ti box, mint was one of the few distros I could get to even boot live with any UI at all. Many others left me with garbled unreadable errors on the screen when trying to get booted.

If mint went away tomorrow I would probably start using something a little more red in the hat.

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43

Bro I’m convinced the devs are poors that can’t afford GPUs. My 2080 SUPER didn’t work for shit either. Arch and FreeBSD is it

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arch installation media also gave me a garbled mess. luckily someone else was doing the install with ssh so I didnt need to do anything but get ssh working :wink:

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And that, kids, is why I don’t use linux anymore…

not great, not terrible…

yes I’ve heard that, but also not as much as mint tho

I loved that motherfucker, had to jump between infinite hoops when trying to install android studio and amd virtualization stuff, yet it was full of bugs

46

Opensuse Leap 15.2.

Lots of reasons.

Opinion: Because it’s better then Ubuntu.

For all the reasons everyone else has stated here and many more.

Ubuntu installs all kinds of “stuff” that I don’t want, need. Doesn’t install stuff that I do. And opensuse actually lets me choose at install.

I don’t have to deal with the store. And I still get 1 click install of “most” software.

I install using the “network install” ( I’m old. I liked Gnome 2 ALOT. I can install Mate at install. ). Takes longer to install, but I’m okay with that because of the choices I get to make. And the control that I have.

It’s not LTS ( as most people define LTS. It’s like a 2 year (?) upgrade cycle ), nor rolling, but I get updates when they are actually available ( Like ALL the damn time. ). Like right now there is a notification that there are 4 updates, including a kernel.

It installs exactly the same way, and with out any problems on my Lenovo Thinkpad 595, my all AMD desktop, My 10 year old all Intel Acer SFF desktop and my 10 year old all Intel Acer laptop.

And I’ve been using it ( SuSE/opensuse ) for the better part of 20+ years. And I have tried, but haven’t found anything “better” or more “comfortable” ( both are just opinion ) even though I have tried several other distros.

So basically ( for me, YMMV ) …

“Out of the box”, “it just works”!
And IIRC, it always has, does.

Edit: Well okay, with one exception. My Thinkpad 595 seems to be running at less then advertised speeds. According to sysbench it is running at 1.3/2.3 instead of the 2.3/4.0 ( base/boost ). Don’t know why, and haven’t looked into it yet…

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47

i’ve never had ubuntu break like that or if it did it was many years ago. i don’t install it on a shit ton of machines either though but, def more than a few.

if you don’t want old/LTS but, closer to cutting edge maybe try TumbleWeed?

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OpenSUSE LEAP is their LTS version though.

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“Stable” and “Regular Release”. It’s their LTS with Upgrade paths. Seems akin to hopping from a *.04 to *.10 version Ubuntu.

I did try to upgrade from LEAP to Tumbleweed one time and it didn’t go so well though.

Glad you got what works for you.

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49

Interesting.

Tried SuSE in the 90s, didn’t like, just seemed like a worse supported version of RedHat.

Might take a look. I think most of the commercial software I want to run directly supports it.

Did you try vanilla Debian? That eliminates most of the Ubuntu issues IMHO.

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Yep, several times.
Keep ending up back at Leap.

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51

Yep, several times. Including Linux Mint Debian Edition. And …
back to opensuse.

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52

From my point of view as a desktop user, having ability to launch terminal and fix anything that’s being broken I find rolling release much more confortable to fix, because sometime you don’t know what broke what is difficult to determine and on from a small subset of packages you can quickly react with the current development with upstream.

If I was using LTS, far too few would care with my issue because most developpers from that breaking package is thinking about the next best release and not older version I have in LTS version.

–Small footnote–
And from stability point of view, what helped me the most is running simpler software that is verywell made and not to strive for eye candyness. For example having Sway WM was the best decission I could have made.
Not a single major issue with non running Window Manager since version 1.0, it also enabled me to disable complex login managers like LightDM/GDM or SDDM, agetty will do the job just fine.

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53

Lol yeah xdm-archlinux and i3wm was the best decision I made.

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54

Popos is the user friendly version of Ubuntu. It is what I’m using as a Linux newb…

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55

For sure, to their credit POP!_OS is Ubuntu but working out of the box lol.

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56

I don’t understand people’s obsession with Ubuntu. I used to run Xubuntu for about 3 yrs on my workstation at work back in the day (~2010), and simultaneously I ran Fedora on my home workstation. Now all my desktop/laptop machines run Fedora, and I have vowed never to touch Ubuntu with a 10-foot pole.

In fact I still have that 10 yr old home workstation, which is alive except for the disks, they gave out end of last year. And over the years it had been upgraded through all the versions of Fedora, starting from F10 to F31.

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57

used ubuntu and xandros as my first linux os’s but have switched over the years to many different flavors.
for my radio room Im using andys ham linux, for my shop desktop Im running peppermint 10, and for my laptop Im running cyborg hawk(forensic).

a persons choice of OS. is based on their need and comfort level.
For many people thats windows or mac. and often they are uncomfortable trying something different.
one cant expect jumping on a new os to be the same as their old one, There is always a learning curve to any new product.
my discomfort with windows was not the price, but the monopolistic attitude of the company.
removing your freedom and control of the system, in favor of an easy user environment (basically making computers for (if you’ll pardon the phrase) Idiots!)
I’M not maligning anyone but making tasks operate in the background all the time a user does not know whats being changed during updates to the system software.
nor do they know the lengths that are taken to hide snoop and spyware in your computer to analyze your demographics.
this info is often sold to spammers and you get targeted advertisements.

But apple and linux are not entirely safe from that either!
as a linux user for many years Ive definitely learned your system is only as secure as you make it. you as a user must choose your method of security (and there are many methods)
encryption is fine but you must choose a strong key and remember it.

windows and macs have touted cloud storage ! and some linux versions offer it too.
But do you really want to store your data on a machine someone else owns and has access to?

not this guy!
but as i stated before use what you want to use, that’s your choice to make not mine.

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58

Exactly, but sometimes its just a case of right tool for the job/path of least resistance.

I used to be Windows/Linux depending on circumstance. Now it’s Mac/Linux. Mac has replaced the windows side fo things like productivity apps, integration with other devices, etc. Most because the types of things I need to do for work I typically need to take with me, and Apple’s portable hardware just rocks. Things like the trackpad, mission control, 3 finger swipes between desktops, battery life, etc.

Could I use linux for that? Maybe. But the hardware wouldn’t be as nice, and the integration with the OS and my other devices wouldn’t be as nice either. I’ve tried. I spend less time fighting the computer or dealing with 3-4 different 80% complete/functional apps to do a job, and more time just getting shit does with my Macs.

Linux has replaced Windows for gaming (ironically) via Proton and “other general purpose desktop stuff”.

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I would agree with many points. But I do - in part - disagree with blaming LTS and the backwardness of it.

Ubuntu desktop has gone through several revolutions, which often leave behind some carnage. Ever since Ubuntu came out with that silly tablet look desktop (looks nice, but not practical to me), I ditched it for a Ubuntu based substitute named Linux Mint, specifically the Mate edition which is the successor of Gnome 2. Not Cinnamon!

Half a year ago I finally pulled the trigger to purchase an AMD based Ryzen system, after reading about it supporting VFIO etc. Linux Mint 20 wasn’t out yet, so I installed Pop_OS 19.10, another Ubuntu variant. Many of the issues you describe surfaced with that release. Most annoying was the frequent breaking of desktop features, networking and printer issues. Every little update could break things.

I moved to Manjaro, a rolling release based on Arch. I had run it for at least half a year in a gaming / experimental VM and it worked fine. Boy did I discover that I was wrong. Yes, it delivers the latest and greatest kernel and apps. But that doesn’t mean much. QEMU 5.0 broke VFIO, and it took days or more until they finally found the issue and came out with a fix.

Two days ago a 1 GB update had Thunderbird crash at least 3-4 times until all of sudden it would miraculously start and work. In that respect, Linux Mint was rock stable for the last 10 years or so that I use it. In fact, I used it for Xen passthrough and later kvm passthrough with QEMU 2.11 until recently.

In my humble opinion, the problem is not with this or that distribution, but with the lack of hardware vendor support for Linux in general, and for their ignoring blatant bugs like the AMD FLR bug with all their newer GPUs. It’s not only AMD.

Then there are the motherboard vendors that can pretty much screw up things by choosing bad components (NICs, SATA controllers, USB controllers, chipsets), or through a bad BIOS.

In other words, good hardware will give you less trouble. Until you run bleeding edge, where new updates will most likely break things at one point.

While I’m still on Manjaro, I will probably go back to Linux Mint now that LM 20 is out.

My mistake was buying bleeding edge hardware (Ryzen 3900X) too early. It just isn’t ready for deployment. Even today some things aren’t solved yet, such as L3 cache alignment in VMs.

So if you run into hardware support issues, see what the vendor has done to support Linux.

As to Ubuntu, yes there are a number of annoying things - netplan is one of them. But the good thing with LTS is that once it runs stable, and provided you choose a stable desktop environment, it will run for years without issues.

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60

One more thing I learned recently the hard way: Things like web servers, DNS bind, etc. are best run in containers. Cleaning up the host from misconfigured apps can be a nightmare, whereas removing a container is simple.

Running Kubernetes in VMs also works fine. So my takeaway from recent experiences is to containerize as much as possible, and run new/experimental stuff in VMs before deploying anything on the host.

By the way, running an Ubuntu server without desktop is pretty rock-solid.

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61

My old platform is X79 with a 3930K - it’s been a beast 8 years ago and still kicks butts. What I’m trying to say is that your X99 / i7-5820K is a much better CPU/chipset combo than most users care to spend money on.

On the software side, Mint does NOT use Snap by default. I usually use Synaptic and it works like a charm. With every update notification you can check the changelog BEFORE running any updates.

Linux Mint uses apt as the package manager which works pretty good. You can easily hold packages to not upgrade.

I found the Mate desktop to be the most solid one, but that might be a matter of taste. It definitely beats the default Ubuntu desktop by a mile or more.

I’m running Ubuntu 18.04 servers inside VMs, and have a Ubuntu 18.04 desktop in a passthrough VM which doesn’t get much use.

From a desktop user perspective, Linux Mint is a pretty different experience from Ubuntu and definitely better for Linux newbies. And not only for newbies (I’m using Linux for ~24 years and for about 20 years as my mainstay OS, around 10-12 years I’m on Linux Mint).

Linux Mint also has a nice out-of-the-box software collection, including “ugly” / closed-source options for proprietary codecs, drivers etc. And up-to-date beginners documentation and a good forum.

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