Ubuntu 22.04 LTS comes with the latest GNOME 42 desktop environment with the triple buffering patch included, yet it still uses apps from the GNOME 41 stack due to compatibility issues between GTK4 apps included in the upstream release and Ubuntu’s Yaru theme. Apps that weren’t ported to GTK4 are from the GNOME 42 stack, such as the Nautilus (Files) file manager.
This is also the first LTS release with Wayland as its default (except for machines with NVIDIA GPUs, which will stick with X.org), which is a major milestone. On top of that, it comes with the latest releases of all the various packages that make up a Linux system, and will serve as the base for countless popular Ubuntu-based distributions.
Of course, the countless other Ubuntu flavours also made the jump to 22.04.
Before people ask why Nvidia won’t release a driver for Wayland: it’s because they consider the fact the have the only decently-performing X.org driver out there a competitive advantage of theirs. And yes, they will happily hold back progress towards Wayland because of that. Also, you can’t create your own open-source drivers because they require signed hardware images, so your open-source drivers will run with low clocks (although to be honest, I never understood why it can’t be done, considering they only have to replicate the binary driver).
And that’s why Microsoft has WHQL, so they can selectively boot hardware that doesn’t play nice. If Desktop Linux had something similar, they could be like “Sorry Nvidia, no Wayland driver, no certification”.
What are you talking about?
Nvidia already supports Wayland since last year.
Then why Ubuntu uses X.org for Nvidia?
It’s just not the default but one can choose Wayland at logon with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with Nivida. Wayland is the default regardless of graphics card on Fedora now.
It’s not that simple.
Early in the 22.04 Wayland was allowed on Nvidia. I tried it out, it worked okay. It had trouble with resume/suspend. Recently they removed the wayland support (even at the login screen) in my case. So unless you hack stuff, you can’t use wayland on nvidia.
I suspect, they will wait for a much better nvidia wayland driver before giving people an easy ability to use nvidia+wayland.
@Yamin
BTW this is my annoyance with Desktop Linux. On Windows, it’s either WHQL certified or it’s not (yes, I know you can disable signature checking if you are an advanced user, but hardware vendors can’t realistically ship commercial hardware with that requirement from the user, not after Windows 10 anyway). And yes, I know WHQL is not a source code review, but obviously broken drivers won’t pass, not for long anyway.
On Desktop Linux, you have a Desktop Linux OEM selling expensive laptops with Nvidia RTX graphics cards despite the fact Nvidia cards don’t work on Wayland. Here it is:
https://system76.com/laptops/oryx
Which means distros have to keep supporting crusty X.org to keep the Nvidia driver happy, so the Nvidia driver can in turn keep the user (who shelled a couple G’s for a fancy System76 laptop) happy. But… until when?
To be fair, Microsoft did the same mistake up until Windows XP (not enforcing WHQL), but they stopped doing it for a reason, and they went from displaying scary warnings (Vista and 7) to requiring a manual install (8.1), to dropping unsigned third-party drivers altogether without tricks (10). Can Desktop Linux please take notice?
I am always amused by Desktop Linux’s desire to shoot itself in the foot in the name of supporting every piece of hardware out there, even hardware that doesn’t want to be supported (Nvidia). It’s just wrong on so many levels. At this point let me remind you that MacOS has the narrowest hardware support of all mainstream OSes in existence and users love the thing.
kurkosdr,
I actually think enforcing signed drivers cost microsoft dearly in terms of FOSS kernel developers. They had a huge developer following and their controls only served to erode their market advantages when there were viable alternatives. Many kernel developers, myself included, who had been doing windows kernel and userspace development exclusively but flocked to linux as a result of microsoft’s “your not wanted here” attitude. IMHO the rise of linux in the data center and IoT circles had as much to do with microsoft’s sourness towards FOSS as linux’s innate qualities.
What’s done is done but I think in retrospect microsoft would have done better to “out-FOSS” linux and defeat linux on it’s own turf than to turn away scores of FOSS developers and drive us towards linux. MS may have grown beyond their “linux is a cancer” phase, but speaking for myself they’re not doing enough to attract us back. I don’t know how they can earn back trust especially when they’re still push unwanted features through force.
@alfman
Sorry, you can never convince me that unsigned drivers are a good thing. Desktop Linux could “out Microsoft” Microsoft and introduce driver signing that isn’t hostile to FOSS developers.
But even then, not ready drivers even by open-source developers should be marked as such.
kurkosdr,
Good thing I wasn’t trying to convince you then.
It clearly was hostile and moreover I think it was intentionally so. In any case it convinced many FOSS developers to migrate to more open platforms. This is one reason 3rd party open file systems languished with vista and beyond. You may not care that we left, but there’s no denying that locking down the kernel resulted in a FOSS brain drain encouraging indy developers to migrate to linux and others for their own projects.
I have never used a 3rd party open file system on Windows, and most people don’t. And if they need one, they can buy one. Or FOSS devs can sign their work like they do for apps.
I don’t care that you left. Or about the FOSS brain drain. Hardware drivers are written by the hardware vendor and then the product overall is judged accordingly. It’s the hardware vendor’s responsibility (indy or not) to make a driver that will drive their product properly and do it without hacking the OS (aka pass WHQL verification). This goes back to the “it’s either supported or not” thing. Licensing is irrelevant and not an excuse to skirt that responsibility.
WHQL driving all those “buy my university project” types out of Windows (and the OEMs building minimal-effort commercial products on top of their university project) was one of the major benefits of WHQL. Good.
kurkosdr,
3rd party windows file systems suck because microsoft discouraged FOSS development. This has long left windows behind the curve with open distributed file systems and even simple things like multibooting with linux and supporting open source volume managers and whatnot.
You might not care, which is your prerogative, but you don’t speak for others who do. Or did, as was the case for me personally.
FOSS devs have no problem self signing their code, but microsoft doesn’t allow owners to install their own certificates, microsoft required us to purchase corporate code signing certificates every single year. Never mind the fact that the cost barrier was egregious for potential indy FOSS developers like myself who wanted to tweak the code, the corporate certificates where flat out inaccessible to us.
You may not care about any of this, and that’s fine, but still it motivated tons of us to seek alternative platforms where owner tweaking and FOSS developers were actually welcomed. I did not think linux was technically superior to windows when I switched, but I was sold on the freedom and IMHO it is this freedom that lead to linux’s dominance over windows for IoT and server applications. Yes MS is doing what it can to bring us back now, but IMHO it was a strategic mistake on their part to incentivize developers to seek other platforms in the first place.
I understand that you don’t care, but microsoft on the other hand does care that they lost tons of mind share to it’s competitors.
BTW I had a search on “why it can’t be done” question, and it appears Nvidia hides their firmware in their drivers in a way it’s very hard to extract.
I’m eager to see how Ubuntu will solve this supposed theming issue with regards to libadwaita and the Gnome devs.
Same here. Question: Would it not suffice to rewrite libadwaita (and to provide a binary compatible replacement), so it accesses the GTK4 themes?
There is no need for such nonsense. Libadwaita is still as much a stylesheet-based solution as vanilla GTK was before it. Right now libadwaita is just hardcoded to load the Adwaita stylesheet and there’s no external way for overriding it. That’s why I also don’t buy the drama of losing themability with libadwaita, but I am waiting to see how they (either Canonical or Gnome upstream) actually solve it.
To add to my previous response, libadwaita is also improving the GUI with custom widgets that will not become part of GTK. Hence vanilla GTK themes will not be (fully) compatible with “Gnome apps” i.e. those built using libadwaita, since GTK stylesheets will lack the required theming for these new widgets.
I have just tried it:
are@archlinux ~> export GTK_THEME=Juno-palenight
are@archlinux ~> gnome-calculator
Works like a charm with Gnome Calculator (which is my only GTK4/Libadwaita Application).
Obviously all GTK apps, including those resorting to libadwaita, use built-in GTK widgets for the most part, especially in the early phase of porting apps to libadwaita.
Libadwaita seems to be more about providing extended, standard-to-Gnome features that previously had to be written in custom code separately in each and every app, while trying to mimic the behavior and appearance of previous implementations.
But, I have to say, I don’t fully comprehend why e,g. real-time re-coloring and animations had to be implemented in a theme utility instead of being part of GTK core…
https://blogs.gnome.org/alexm/2021/12/31/libadwaita-1-0/
Thanks to all the people involved.
Just updated to it from 21.10 this morning. Great release, every animation is smooth, love that they added accent colors (remember Blubuntu anyone?) where you can have different color that out the box w/o any tweaks or add-ons. All the other settings that has been added makes this a whole release. For instance you can have the Ubuntu Dock as a dock and not a panel. Desktop icons that actually work this time. Some other GNOME 42 tweaks like having a active top left corner for Activities to show, dynamic/static virtual desktops, and including applications from all Workspaces or just the active one. Not a fan of animations well you can turn them off all together.
I took the time today and tested all the flavors minus the Kylin edition. From my personal point of view and expectations i would first point out Lubuntu. As being the only one with default memory consumption just below 500MB. The rest of them are all around 700MB to 800MB. Xubuntu and especially Mate edition feel somehow lacking in appeal. I would be OK with that if lets say default memory consumption would be half. Budgie was rather good in the appeal regard and so was Ubuntu Studio. The two options with the most bling and features available by default are Ubuntu and Kubuntu. Ubuntu to me doesn’t feel anymore as it is addressing the general public. To me it has more of a niche look and feel. Kubuntu is a winner for me. From desktop usage point of view i would say it’s somewhere in the range of Windows 7. That is the last of the fully featured, polished and desktop oriented user interfaces. In my opinion it’s time for Ubuntu to start using KDE in the default flavor. And i guess some of the more “lightweight” options should care more about things like default memory consumption. As if it’s the same as the one of Kubuntu or Ubuntu. Then the lack of features and bling will make it much less desirable. In compared to just using a fully fledged desktop oriented flavor.
Firefox is installed via snap by default. Remove Firefox snap. apt install firefox , it gets installed again via snap not via the old apt repo mechanism you might expect.
Not cool.
I agree that they are trying to force Snap a bit with Firefox. On OMG! Ubuntu! site there is an article on how to install Firefox .deb package from a PPA. If you are interested you can look it up. I agree that Firefox should still be provided as .deb package. Especially as the current Snap package is not on pair in terms of features. Compared to the .deb package option.
I was just providing tldr of ubuntu’s shoehorning, other people might find your site mention useful
thnaks for this information