I'm here for the upstreamed Arc GPU support, lol. I could probably have made it work with 22.04 with enough poking but I don't generally like upgrading major versions anyway. I was actually checking earlier but it hadn't released yet, lol.
Probably jumping the gun anyway - it doesn't look like Arc has a release of the dev tooling for 24.04 yet anyway, no `noble` repo yet either.
I figured at least I could get passthrough working to a 22.04 container, couldn't get the intel_iommu to behave, looks like it was still getting sucked up by the parent OS despite my GRUB kernel options. Might need to try HWE on the VM host too, or maybe it's just a fact of life based on how the outputs are wired up on my serpent canyon NUC (headless might work better, perhaps?).
I'm actually fine if the ML stuff takes a bit, I kinda just want to play with GPGPU and I definitely want to play with the AV1 encoder.
I ended up bumping into the same issue that stalled me out before, it happens in both 22.04 HWE and 24.04, the step about installing the out-of-kernel modules is busted. Installing the i915-dkms can't be done at the same time as the platform-vsec-dkms and platform-cse-dkms, apparently? But I pushed on it a little harder, and it seems like it works if you run two separate apt commands.
I've got a couple of these weird environments, I need to set up a way to virtualize and passthrough them so I don't have to maintain actual machines for it. Not sure exactly what that looks like, maybe proxmox and some qemu machines in a pseudo-ESXi configuration or something. When I get around to getting the new disks in my NAS, I can also do iscsi/iPXE I guess (and I have optane for write cache).
Sorry, I don't understand your question. By "treadmill" I mean sticking to a particular distro year after year, upgrading regularly -- it could be Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, CentOS, etc. Unless you're constantly switching distros, you're on a treadmill. I wasn't comparing Ubuntu to other distros.
If you use the non-LTS versions of Ubuntu then you are expected to upgrade to each new version in short order, the previous version (23.10) is only supported until July.
I've been running my ML stack on Arch for the last six months and haven't had any issues so far. So perhaps not a big issue on a more stable distro like Ubuntu.
I'm still torn about whether I want to stick with Ubuntu a little longer or move onto Debian/Fedora. I've been a happy Ubuntu user for a long time, but each package that gets converted to snap makes it harder for me to stay. I'm getting really tired of having to fight the distro and look for a bunch of my applications elsewhere to get a version that doesn't suck.
I felt the same way with Ubuntu. It was so frustrating. I was also considering moving to Debian or Fedora but a few years ago I ended up cracking the shits with Ubuntu and installed Mint for my daily driver just to finally move on and I've loved Mint and never felt that friction that makes me want to try other distros. I was originally intending to use Mint as a stop gap until I could be bothered with Fedora oops lol
It's got sane defaults with great configurability, and the familiarity (and popularity) that comes worth being Ubuntu based helps, of course. It has been great for me and all the people IRL who I have encouraged to install it.
Give Fedora a try! If you already know a bit about Linux configuration and are not afraid of the terminal, as it's a tiny bit more hands on and blank than Ubuntu.
I switched about two years ago and it's the best Linux experience I've ever had and I do regret not trying sooner. No bloat at all. DNF is awesome. Flatpak > snap. The release cycle is a nice compromise. Really, I am in fucking love!
When I was younger, hands on felt like a good thing (we kinda had no options) and it let to learning a lot.
But, for desktop and being productive, specially now a days, the least I want is to be hands on with my system.
I kinda want something that’s mostly out of the way. Heck, when looking at platforms, depending on scale, I prefer something opinionated to something that lets me shoot myself on the foot 30k different ways.
It’s not that I don’t want to be able to tune it. It’s just that if I need to spend hours on that tweaking vs using it, there’s eventually a loss. I’m also not saying something that can’t be tweaked, just that if it has a set of best practices, let’s start with those vs trying to rewrite it all.
I did try it a couple times in the past, it just never quite felt like home. I don't know why, I couldn't give you an objective reason as to why I didn't like it. I probably should give it another try soon.
To each their own but I find Fedora upgrade cycle is just a bit too tight for my preference. Properly planned you can get away with yearly but it still feels like I'm due for a dist upgrade every few months.
I'm curious to try out Silverblue, though, where this shouldn't be an issue in the same way.
I moved to Fedora (Xfce spin) for that exact reason and I've been incredibly happy for the last ~2 years.
The last straw for me was the calculator app being a snap. I was frenetically working on a thing, and suddenly opening the calculator app took ~15 seconds. Looked deeper into that, it (suddenly) was a fucking snap. Ubuntu developers had decided it was a good idea to mount a 500+ megabytes layer full of gtk shit in order to run the calculator. A fucking 600kb binary. And I was running a gtk based desktop environment anyway (xfce).
Nowadays I run Fedora on laptops (or systems where I prefer software abundance to stability) and Rocky Linux (basically RHEL without logos) on my home server.
I've kept myself far from Ubuntu and GNOME and stuff works and I'm happy.
I also moved from Ubuntu to Mint, and from GNOME to MATE. Been very happy.
The only time I got annoyed at Mint was when they recently changed the default mouse pointer into something that looks like a deformed marshmallow. So instead of a pixel at the end of the pointer, we get a fat finger. I don't understand the UX mentality that thought that this was a good idea.
It's easy enough to change, but every now and then, something clobbers my UI settings and I have to remember how to change it back to the mouse pointer that actually works as a pointer.
The major downside (for me) was Debian not supporting ZFS on root out of the box. :(
Now toying with the idea of using Proxmox on my main development system (R5950x desktop), as Proxmox is based upon Debian 12 and supports ZFS on root mirrored (and RAIDZ* too if desired) across multiple devices.
Would need to figure out PCI pass through for my Nvidia graphics card though. Probably do-able, but it's an unknown factor presently.
So far, an update from 22.04 LTS to 24.04 LTS on an Intel based Dell Lattitude laptop without any weird hardware produced a failure that was a white screen that just said to contact a system administrator. Could be a fluke. Trying to rescue this produced a non-bootable system. Could be user error.
After that a clean install of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on the same machine worked, but after installing the latest Chrome on top of this, it won't start. After installing the latest Slack, that won't start either. BitWarden from the snap store will start, but after logging in, I get a endless spinner instead my vault contents. It is hard to believe that the Chrome/Slack/BitWarden issues are user error.
I'm not sure I've ever seen such a rough LTS release. I still wonder if this is just somehow me since surely they wouldn't release it without Chrome and Slack working, but I can't see what I could have done wrong just following the directions here.
Ah, that's one annoying thing I had forgotten about ubuntu, thank you for reminding me!
So i've been using ubuntu for many years (my first release was 6.06). Updating to a new release never worked. Around 12.04 times (when I started to seriously feel the need for stability) i started to only to LTS-to-LTS update, which basically meant a full reinstall, but once every two years was a more manageable.
Nowadays I run fedora, so far the upgrade experience has been incredibly great. I already did three versions jumps (36 to 37, 37 to 38, 38 to 39) and it didn't break.
I understand that 24.04 isn't really LTS until the 24.04.1 update comes out, but I like to start trying it on a secondary computer earlier, and I'm hoping not to wait that long since I really want the podman updates.
Well, for one thing, Ubuntu 24.04 got to be the first big Debian-based release after 64-bit time_t migration, and they got rid of backwards-compatible package names early. I suppose removing hundreds of libraries, including heavily dependent on, to install them from new packages (with `t64`) in proper order can cause a lot of problems on non-trivial configurations.
Existing binary code should work (unless it interfaces with 32-bit code in some affected way), but external packages need to include new dependencies.
I also had a slightly rough experience. I started my upgrade from 22.04 -> 24.04 and walked away. I came back to my system frozen on the Plymouth screen. After trying and failing to get into a TTY a few times, I booted into recovery mode, re-ran the upgrade, and it actually worked.
That was a lot rougher than my experience upgrading from 20.04 -> 22.04, which went off without a hitch.
Believe the kernel is 6.8.0, which is surprising. Fedora is a faster moving distro and the bugfix digits incremented quickly every few days to 6.8.7 today. I wouldn't run a .0 kernel and didn't allow 6.8 to install/run on my machine until it hit .5.
I'm sure they have added a few patches, but seems like they could have shipped fewer basing off .5+ ?
If you set up ozone platform using chrome://flags, it will affect you. You can start with manually specifying --ozone-platform and then in chrome://flags, set ozone platform back to default.
I haven't been able to complete a fresh install on an empty drive yet. Either the installer crashes (most common), the installer throws an error, or the live USB freezes during booting.
> In combination with the apparmor package, the Ubuntu kernel now restricts the use of unprivileged user namespaces. This affects all programs on the system that are unprivileged and unconfined. A default AppArmor profile is provided that allows the use of user namespaces for unprivileged and unconfined applications but will deny the subsequent use of any capabilities within the user namespace.
Welp, that kills any chance of namespaces being widely used by anyone outside the likes of Docker and systemd. I'd been using unprivileged mount namespaces as a way to create anonymous temporary directories, but I guess they just weren't so long for this world after all.
How is it not on the front page? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40154395 with 36 points over 10 hours is but this submission with 89 points over 4 hours isn't. The submitter seems to have plenty of karma too.
Readit News
Key differences versus the previous LTS version:
* Distribution packages built with additional security-hardening features
* Linux Kernel 6.8
* Gnome 46
* Updated utils and apps
---
Users who train AI models on Ubuntu machines should wait until their ML stack (typically, Nvidia + PyTorch) is known to run without issues on 24.04.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40157645
---
Source: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/noble-numbat-release-notes/39...
NVIDIA + PyTorch user here. No issues at all (w/ 550.54.15).
Probably jumping the gun anyway - it doesn't look like Arc has a release of the dev tooling for 24.04 yet anyway, no `noble` repo yet either.
I figured at least I could get passthrough working to a 22.04 container, couldn't get the intel_iommu to behave, looks like it was still getting sucked up by the parent OS despite my GRUB kernel options. Might need to try HWE on the VM host too, or maybe it's just a fact of life based on how the outputs are wired up on my serpent canyon NUC (headless might work better, perhaps?).
I'm actually fine if the ML stuff takes a bit, I kinda just want to play with GPGPU and I definitely want to play with the AV1 encoder.
I ended up bumping into the same issue that stalled me out before, it happens in both 22.04 HWE and 24.04, the step about installing the out-of-kernel modules is busted. Installing the i915-dkms can't be done at the same time as the platform-vsec-dkms and platform-cse-dkms, apparently? But I pushed on it a little harder, and it seems like it works if you run two separate apt commands.
I've got a couple of these weird environments, I need to set up a way to virtualize and passthrough them so I don't have to maintain actual machines for it. Not sure exactly what that looks like, maybe proxmox and some qemu machines in a pseudo-ESXi configuration or something. When I get around to getting the new disks in my NAS, I can also do iscsi/iPXE I guess (and I have optane for write cache).
It'll take forever for ML packages to upgrade. The Python/ML/PyTorch ecosystem is slow to move.
- Kubuntu https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/24.04/release/
- Xubuntu https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/24.04/release/
- Lubuntu https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/24.04/release/
- Budgie https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-budgie/releases/24.04/rele...
- MATE https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/releases/24.04/releas...
- Cinnamon https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntucinnamon/releases/24.04/rel...
- Unity https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-unity/releases/24.04/relea...
- Kylin https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/releases/24.04/releas...
- Alternate "Ubuntu" Builds https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/24.04/release/
It's actually a very nice DE, wish Ubuntu never abandoned it https://unityd.org/
https://ubuntuunity.org/posts/ubuntu-unity-2404-released/
Including RISC-V, and ready to use images for many boards such as VisionFive 2.
It's got sane defaults with great configurability, and the familiarity (and popularity) that comes worth being Ubuntu based helps, of course. It has been great for me and all the people IRL who I have encouraged to install it.
I switched about two years ago and it's the best Linux experience I've ever had and I do regret not trying sooner. No bloat at all. DNF is awesome. Flatpak > snap. The release cycle is a nice compromise. Really, I am in fucking love!
But, for desktop and being productive, specially now a days, the least I want is to be hands on with my system.
I kinda want something that’s mostly out of the way. Heck, when looking at platforms, depending on scale, I prefer something opinionated to something that lets me shoot myself on the foot 30k different ways.
It’s not that I don’t want to be able to tune it. It’s just that if I need to spend hours on that tweaking vs using it, there’s eventually a loss. I’m also not saying something that can’t be tweaked, just that if it has a set of best practices, let’s start with those vs trying to rewrite it all.
I'm curious to try out Silverblue, though, where this shouldn't be an issue in the same way.
The last straw for me was the calculator app being a snap. I was frenetically working on a thing, and suddenly opening the calculator app took ~15 seconds. Looked deeper into that, it (suddenly) was a fucking snap. Ubuntu developers had decided it was a good idea to mount a 500+ megabytes layer full of gtk shit in order to run the calculator. A fucking 600kb binary. And I was running a gtk based desktop environment anyway (xfce).
Nowadays I run Fedora on laptops (or systems where I prefer software abundance to stability) and Rocky Linux (basically RHEL without logos) on my home server.
I've kept myself far from Ubuntu and GNOME and stuff works and I'm happy.
Now that the LTS has been updated, probably all machines can use Mint again.
The only time I got annoyed at Mint was when they recently changed the default mouse pointer into something that looks like a deformed marshmallow. So instead of a pixel at the end of the pointer, we get a fat finger. I don't understand the UX mentality that thought that this was a good idea.
It's easy enough to change, but every now and then, something clobbers my UI settings and I have to remember how to change it back to the mouse pointer that actually works as a pointer.
Now toying with the idea of using Proxmox on my main development system (R5950x desktop), as Proxmox is based upon Debian 12 and supports ZFS on root mirrored (and RAIDZ* too if desired) across multiple devices.
Would need to figure out PCI pass through for my Nvidia graphics card though. Probably do-able, but it's an unknown factor presently.
> Cloud images no longer preseed any snaps by default
Yes! Small improvement, but still.
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/noble-numbat-release-notes/39...
After that a clean install of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on the same machine worked, but after installing the latest Chrome on top of this, it won't start. After installing the latest Slack, that won't start either. BitWarden from the snap store will start, but after logging in, I get a endless spinner instead my vault contents. It is hard to believe that the Chrome/Slack/BitWarden issues are user error.
I'm not sure I've ever seen such a rough LTS release. I still wonder if this is just somehow me since surely they wouldn't release it without Chrome and Slack working, but I can't see what I could have done wrong just following the directions here.
Which indeed makes it a quite rushed release.
So i've been using ubuntu for many years (my first release was 6.06). Updating to a new release never worked. Around 12.04 times (when I started to seriously feel the need for stability) i started to only to LTS-to-LTS update, which basically meant a full reinstall, but once every two years was a more manageable.
Nowadays I run fedora, so far the upgrade experience has been incredibly great. I already did three versions jumps (36 to 37, 37 to 38, 38 to 39) and it didn't break.
Existing binary code should work (unless it interfaces with 32-bit code in some affected way), but external packages need to include new dependencies.
That was a lot rougher than my experience upgrading from 20.04 -> 22.04, which went off without a hitch.
I'm sure they have added a few patches, but seems like they could have shipped fewer basing off .5+ ?
For the entire lifecycle (bar HWE kernel), it will remain at 6.8.0 and the number after - will be incremented with upstream and their own patches.
If you set up ozone platform using chrome://flags, it will affect you. You can start with manually specifying --ozone-platform and then in chrome://flags, set ozone platform back to default.
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/329678163
Welp, that kills any chance of namespaces being widely used by anyone outside the likes of Docker and systemd. I'd been using unprivileged mount namespaces as a way to create anonymous temporary directories, but I guess they just weren't so long for this world after all.