Ubuntu 17.04 Released
insights.ubuntu.com
insights.ubuntu.com
the LXD and Snap are fun to watch, Canonical always does things a bit different here and there.
There's the convenience of being able to re purpose the storage as long as swap isn't being used.
Riiight.
We need a kernel maintainer here.
> The swap file implementation in the kernel expects to be able to write to the file directly, without the assistance of the filesystem.
So apparently it can work with a file that has holes, but then it cannot entirely bypass the filesystem, I guess.
If you mean a fragmented file, it works but it is slightly slower but not by a relevant amount. The kernel just remembers which blocks are in the file and uses these.
As the swap file typically is created during installation it is unlikely to be fragmented anyway.
It is perhaps not too surprising but if you ever swap to a non-SSD device you're effective computation rate is reduced by 3 orders of magnitude.
That said, yes, we just got done upgrading all of our workstations to new self-built systems with 64 GB of RAM and I would definitely consider having to go to swap file to be an error.
All of our systems have 5 SSD drives: System, Data, Library, Development, Swap.
They are all 1 TB SSD's with the exception of the 256 GB Swap/Temp drive. The idea is to distribute read/writes and organize things so that no SSD, and, in particular, the system SSD, is abused. Running a large number of FEA thermal simulations or a bunch of FPGA compilation jobs can produce an amazing amount of files.
This approach seems to do a decent job of spreading that out and keeping it off the System drive. That, coupled with local (network) and remote backups has worked well so far.
I get that it is built on Gnome technologies but is it like gnome2/mate or like gnome3 or something completely different?
After a fresh install I usually start with removing the apps I don't use -- games, accessibility tools, print drivers, cd burner, document indexer, default email client etc. etc. etc. So I guess this flavor would be the opposite of what I want...
Prior to that I used gmail. When I used thunderbird it often seemed to spend all of it's time indexing. It has some nice plugins though.
One of these days I'm going to get it packaged in Fedora too...
And the trope that KDE is bloated hasn't been true for the past 6 or 7 years too.
Ever since moving to just a window manager (awesomeWM to i3wm) I've not felt the need for a full-fledged desktop environment.
Took a screenshot for you also: http://i.imgur.com/bPyvCsN.png
Oh, and other really neat feature: "terminix --quake" (https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix/wiki/Quake-Mode)
DIY: Arch Linux > Slackware
Compile It Yourself: Gentoo > BSDs
Friendly: Fedora > Mint > Ubuntu > Solus > countless other Desktop Env specific distros
Developer Focused: openSUSE > NixOS > Fedora > Debian
I want something that's a bit stable with more recent packages. FreeBSD seems to be semi-rolling release, comparing package versions in the 'current' release with that in the snapshot versions. Debian testing has packages as recent as I can use, but I heard it's less stable than Ubuntu and bad things happen too. I'm considering Fedora, but I prefer rolling release distros to fixed release ones (I don't want Rawhide for stability sake). OpenSUSE has older packages in its repos: PHP < 7.0, gcc < 6, ...
Now to your original question:
If you want bleeding edge packages go with either Arch Linux, Gentoo, openSUSE or Solus. I haven't used openSUSE as extensively I'd like to but haven't had any issues with it yet. The package format is a bit too much if you want to create your own packages though. openSUSE ticks all the marks in your checklist too.
Other than that I will suggest to keep your local dev environment as close to production as SANELY possible. Fedora and openSUSE are good bets.
Personally for rolling releases I've found Arch Linux to be the best (not because they are rolling release but because they generally keep the packages without any modifications from upstream). There is a huge selection of packages. But it suffers with the problem that it's not used in production and hence some issues can't be caught on it.
I've used Slackware before, and it was an easy look into the system; except that package management is a bit stressful on Slackware, and its packages are not so up-to-date.
I'm running a VM with FreeBSD now; how suitable it can be for a laptop, I don't know yet. Battery life matters there too.
Fedora looks good; I already have a Fedora 24 disc, so I might go from there instead of Slackware. openSUSE tumbleweed looks great too. I'll probably try it.
I can't vouch for the package breakages on any system other than Fedora. I've just had a single package breakage on Arch in over a year. It was fixed by simply moving a file and making a symlink.
Pretty much every popular distro has this experience nowadays. Fedora(as a sibling poster mentioned) is indeed one of them and may I add, at least, twice as stable.
apt install ubuntu-restricted-extras, does it in Ubuntu.
On the other hand, although I understand your need, keeping the /home in a different partition and just installing the next Fedora release every 13 months does the job for the most part. And the installation(from a USB) is not more than 15-20 minutes.
Around 2011-2013, I used on my work(office) machines Ubuntu while I continued to have Fedora on my laptop.
Fedora not only did it have more recent packages, it was so much more stable than ubuntu that it was incomparable.
In general I find Ubuntu as the most unstable distro one could use :/
Also, dist upgrades are a bit unnecessary when you can have your /home in a separate partition and do a fresh install of the newer Fedora version in a couple of minutes.
> It also doesn't even pretend to support upgrades
This was certainly true in the past but hasn't really been the case for the last couple of years.
I suppose you mean the recent news about abandoning Unity and focusing on a gnome shell desktop for 18.04 LTS? Sure, it must suck for those who have invested a lot of their time and soul into Unity and are now losing their jobs.
Personally, having used fvwm, olvwm, afterstep, window maker, gnome 1, 2, 3, kde 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, fluxbox, unity, xmonad and a dozen more or less shorter acquaintances, my experience is that I can get work done on all of them. What the Linux desktop needs is not yet another reiteration of roughly the same concepts, but more elbow grease and polishing. Which happens when you have more users and developers. So with three of the major distros shipping with gnome 3 out of the box (ubuntu, fedora, debian) I think this will eventually be a net positive for the Linux desktop experience.
Thinks like hot plugging thunderbolt and having audio work perfectly, monitors readjust automatically, and variable dpi support. Actually so far ubuntu's been the only distro that makes it work well. This is the only reason I use unity.
I guess time will tell if your optimism or my pessimism is correct.
https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...
Her system was an early experiment, though, and seems like it had a more than a bit of admin needs - in other words, it was meant for general users. But she made some good points on why containers on the desktop could be useful, and from what I understand, Snaps is a part of this kind of idea.
Maybe I'm wrong - but if I'm right, this could be a big deal, though hopefully it's so transparent as to be something you don't really notice.
Its all there and available right now. At some point soon I'm sure deb packages will start wrapping snaps and an 'apt full-upgrade' transitions people without them noticing.
https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...
She gives some good reasons why it can be a good thing; it sounds interesting - I've thought of trying it myself, and might with a new future system. It's downsides (though this may have changed since I last saw this and looked into it) would be difficulty setting it up, and that some applications might need some tweaking to get them to play nice (?). It still seems like something fun to play around with.
Container'd (?) apps would make for an easier system to admin overall, I think. Oh - yeah, SNAPS are kinda a refining of the idea of running individual apps in their own containers, from what I understand (plus making it easier to package apps so that they will run anywhere properly - at least, that's the way I understand it; I haven't done a lot of research on it).
Anyhow - I was a bit confused by this release, too - it does seem server focused, but the mention of SNAPS makes me wonder if they aren't trying to move in that direction, that is, a more unified system that isn't differentiated between desktop or server (or whatever), and is just a container ecosystem of apps for whatever you want to use the system for?
What comes next, three A's, or maybe something else?
Just moments ago I set up fusecompress in a DigitalOcean droplet to compress an .rbenv/versions and node_modules directory. It would be better if the filesystem supported transparent compression by default (zfs does, and I think brtfs)