[bananas]

Really don't know what to do about 14.04 landing. I maintain a few systems which are in devops territory on top of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, a single desktop machine and a laptop. 12.04 is EOL in 2017 and we plan to replace them next year (we operate a 3 year standard cycle).

With the other major distributions moving towards systemd and eventually wayland (that includes the base of Ubuntu: Debian), I'm not sure I really want to move onto 14.04 and continue this cycle further and risk it on Mir, Upstart, Unity and various other Canonical worldview items.

I'm considering ignoring this release and moving to CentOS 7 when it hits the ground.

[rlpb]

Ubuntu is also now moving to systemd, following its Debian base: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316

Assuming that you're not a toolkit (or further down the stack) developer, can you explain why Mir affects you?

What other "Canonical worldview items" affect you?

[bananas]

As follows:

systemd - glad to hear that. Missed that one.

Mir affects me because of the inevitable safety in numbers that going with the majority display server technology. Graphical stacks are terribly complicated and terribly involving for hardware manufacturers. Canonical are pretty much on their own with it and it takes a hell of a lot of people to keep the plates spinning on this. hell they can't even get X, DRM, GLX etc stable after all these years and thousands of eyes.

Other canonical worldview items:

Unity. Sorry but this doesn't actually work properly. Various applications have focus problems still after years of it, it's unstable, inconsistent, breaks apps (menus for example) and has incredible usability problems. I know you can use gnome but it's not a priority support item for Canonical so various things don't work consistently.

Launchpad. Launchpad is a total pile both from a tracking and management perspective. It's basically a baron land of neglect.

Probably more that I've forgotten.

[rlpb]

You're claiming "safety in numbers" by moving away from Ubuntu on the desktop? Surely you're joking?

> Unity

So don't use it. Ubuntu is more than just priority support items from Canonical. I'm using Xubuntu right now - it works great.

> Launchpad is a total pile both from a tracking and management perspective. It's basically a baron land of neglect.

As opposed to...Bugzilla? Again: surely you're joking?

[bananas]

Yes 100%.

I want stability. In fact I need stability and there's nothing more stable than a boring corporate desktop so...

CentOS 6.x's Gnome desktop despite being considerably older is an order of magnitude more stable, works flawlessly on every bit of kit I've tested it on and doesn't fall over on minor patches or kernel releases. I lost count of the number of times I've had power management and display regressions on 12.04 LTS. The only reason I ended up with LTS is because the NetworkManager VPN stuff that I need on my laptop is tied into later versions of NetworkManager which aren't supported on CentOS at the moment. I will say that they don't actually work on 14.04 either and I have to resort to manually adding a route because NM doesn't handle default routes properly.

On my personal laptop (Lenovo T400) I binned Ubuntu and actually run Windows now because the PM regressions were unbearable and the battery life was shitty even with 30 minutes pissing around with powertop.

Yes comparing to bugzilla. People haven't managed to displace bugzilla for a good reason: it works pretty damn well on massive projects.

[kbenson]

I think what you are seeing is the ancestry of these projects coming to the fore. Ubuntu is, to my eyes, first and foremost a desktop OS that is trying to make inroads into the server OS space (replace OS with distro if if helps helps lower your pedanti-meter). RHEL/CentOS have always been very server/workstation based (and I do consider a workstation different than a desktop).

You can see this in how they focus their work. Ubuntu, while it's contributed much to the ecosystem, has focused quite a bit of those contributions to ease of use and graphical stack items. These are important, but less so to workstations (of a particular breed) and servers. Red Hat has focused on stability and management. Need a full virtualization stack? RHEL has developed a stack they are pushing as competition for VMWare. Want directory services? It's an officially supported component with documentation (as of at least 4-5 years ago). Want a bug tracker with lots of info on exactly what's going on and what to expect? Use Bugzilla. It's overkill for most user-facing projects, but for IT staff who may be expected to file a fair number of bugs over time, after you've invested some time to learn it, it's great.

Ubuntu is a great OS/distro, but I don't think they've reached the same level in the server space as RHEL yet. Similarly, I wouldn't necessarily push RHEL/CentOS for desktops for home users or most businesses needing Linux on the desktop, unless there was a need for a much more controlled environment, and the long time between versions is not an issue.

[puppetmaster3]

Just wondering, do you think mir or x is installed on servers?

[bananas]

See my original post. I use a laptop and a desktop as well on LTS.

[kylemaxwell]

Why would you run a GUI on a server in the first place?

[bananas]

"I maintain a few systems which are in devops territory on top of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, a single desktop machine and a laptop."

To quote myself...

[rmgraham]

Do you realize your opinions _appear_ to be based on something that is 2 years old?

It's not really logical to judge whether or not something has improved over the last 2 years if you're willfully avoiding most of the changes made in the last 2 years.

[bryanlarsen]

But systemd isn't going to be in 14.04. Like bananas, over the next year we'll be moving our production servers off of 12.04. Whatever we switch to will be in production for 3-4 years. So we have to ask ourselves, do we want to be stuck with upstart for another 3-4 years?

[jcastro]

There are tons of production servers and laptops using upstart. It will take a while for Debian and Ubuntu to migrate to systemd so you're probably overthinking it.

RHEL7 isn't out yet, what server distros can you run in production today that use systemd?

[Daviey]

Not to mention... 'worldview' was OK, when RHEL6 was shipped with defaulting to upstart.. But then later NIH'ing to systemd? .. Even if Ubuntu hadn't committed to switching, suggesting that Upstart is anything other than a stellar contribution to FOSS is BS.

Whilst on the subject of world view, how is cloud-init working out? This is a Ubuntu technology that has become a defacto standard for ALL cloud images initialisation handling across every OS (incl. Windows!). With worldview like this, keep it up.

[jdboyd]

The Mir change wasn't made in 14.04, so if you update from 12.04 to 14.04, you will be using unity, X11, and Upstart, much as you are now.

If you don't specifically want software that is available on 14.04 but not 12.04, and you are replacing the machine next year, I'm not sure why you'd bother doing an upgrade.

I upgrade when it stops being convenient to get current versions of the desktop applications I want as backports ( VLC or Gimp for instance).

[plg]

I also have concerns about this sort of thing. On the other hand as far as I can tell Ubuntu is still the easiest, fastest way to get a Desktop environment up and running on a new machine, one that looks decent (e.g. fonts) and one that plays nicely with hardware.

[zanny]

"plays nicely with hardware" isn't really an Ubuntu thing. Hell, some distributions like Manjaro and Mint play better with hardware by including proprietary graphics drivers on the disk if your system can't boot on Mesa. Ubuntu doesn't have that.

In my experience of Linux distros, Fedora, Suse, Manjaro, Chakra, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, all the Linux derivatives like Zorin / Elementary / Mint / Bodhi, Crunchbang, etc all do the exact same thing and do it right:

Boot ISO, get live desktop, have a launchable guided installer. There are only a few such installers, a lot of distros reuse them (but some still duplicate the work needlessly) and they all perform relatively the same.

The outliers are your Arches, your non-live Debians (the default iso isn't live, for example) and your Gentoos, where you don't get a live desktop and have to do the routine manually.

> one that looks decent (e.g. fonts)

I've been installing Suse 12.3 and 13.1 a lot recently because I find a lot of users like Yast, and I think they have gotten their fonts pretty well in order. They used to be the poster child for bad font rendering, too.

[pedrocr]

Shuttleworth has announced Ubuntu will be moving to systemd. 14.04 is also the first version to have a Ubuntu GNOME spin if you want that. KDE/Xfce/etc are also easily available. That leaves Mir as the real potential difference going forward.

[gauravkumar552]

I am also archlinux fan but this could be game changer.

[thinkmassive]

I ran Arch on my laptop for a couple years until switching to Ubuntu Server 14.04 a couple months ago. It more closely matches my dev servers taht run 12.04, and using i3 I hardly notice a difference day to day.

[ithinkso]

Hope dies last but please, let systemd die before.