I've spent the last 10 years off and on from Linux. Had I used something other than GNOME, I believe my experience would have been better.

I've been on KDE for the last 3-4 years and things work so well I could never imagine going back to GNOME.

Good. It shouldn't be on by default. It's surprising behavior, too easy to fat-finger, and too disruptive when it accidentally triggers.

Nowadays it is quite easy https://github.com/AntonFriberg/dotfiles/blob/master/modules...

Note that the way this works is that after you activate your home manager generation it outputs a script path that you need to run manually as root which installs a Systemd service which ensures that the drivers are linked correctly.

They did it on purpose for some reason. If I were you I'd give Plasma a try.

As for the negative Gnome feedback (not from you but others) I do like Gnome, it's just enough window manager for me, I like the defaults and I like the touchpad gestures etc. Generally looks and works well for all I do. I always feel swamped by KDE.

Personally I'm more worried about someone stealing the entire server or a local threat actor.

Sure, keep TPM to help with boot integrity, maybe even a factor for unlock, but things like Clevis+Tang (or Bitlock Network Unlock for our windows brethren) is essential in my opinion.

Make a list of all ppa before proceeding.

What is your use case?

The rot set in when #ubuntu on Freenode (now Libera) became rigidly enforced as on-topic discussions of Ubuntu support only.

The channel is absolutely dead now. Maybe one person will say something in any given 12-hour period and no-one replies, just page after page of joins and parts.

If you feel the need for newer packages, try other alternatives (or Debian unstable). I’ve set down on Fedora with XFCE, it’s really stable yet packages feel new.

Linux Mint is widely praised for being basically Ubuntu without the worst Canonicalisms (such as Snap). They maintain a Debian edition in parallel to their main one, as an exit strategy in case Ubuntu ever becomes unsuitable for their base. Some people already use that as their daily driver.

Just in case you're not aware, the default desktop environment on whatever distro you pick doesn't have to be what you use. I switched to KDE Plasma when Gtk-based desktops became intolerable, and haven't looked back.

On the other hand, I'm not a fan of people disparaging free open source software that they've never contributed anything to, either money or code.

I wish Ubuntu would just give up with GNOME and switch to something more sensible.

I've been using the Kubuntu 26.04 prereleases for a few weeks. No surprises from KDE, but Wayland has broken a few things. Autotype in Keepass does not work, keynav and even the Wayland keynav forks don't work, and Wayland does not support priority keyboard layouts for switching between two specific layouts.

Goes to show that not all security bugs are memory related bugs

Dunno about the this release, but till 24.4 it was simply a matter of removing some packages then holding/masking the primary snapd one, followed by manually adding the official PPAs for Mozilla’s stuff (or just use the Flatpak).

Of course, there’s still the philosophical and long term issues with staying on a distro that’s promoting and continuosuly expanding the thing you dislike…

I am sure a lot of this is fixable and will jsut take time to get used to, but honestly, at this point, I think I prefer ubuntu/linux to both Mac & Windows at this point.

I do love the hardware on the Mac and would probably try Asahi out if it wasn't a work machine.

Also worth pointing out that macOS is still better than Windows 11 at this point - MS should be ashamed at what they did to that OS.

not sure if this confirms the impression you have there... I wasn't like this until a couple of headless VPS'es (on Arm8) got through the upgrade from 18.x -> 20.x -> 22.x and then crashed out over -> 24.x for a still unknown reason. now I'm just afraid .. or I should say reluctant ..to repeat that whole fiasco.

https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/daily-live/current/

Both Gnome and KDE support that. Actually Gnome a tad better as it gives you less knobs to turn an waste your time. Accept the defaults and if defaults are bad move somewhere else.

Because maybe not all people have the same preferences as you?

I have put my parents on Ubuntu (gnome) in 2013 to replace windows XP. My mother is 88 now. I think it is the perfect fit for her (dad is dead years ago).

I use ubuntu gnome because tweaking my computer is not where I want to spend my time. YOLO. Using a "mainstream" desktop that can be explained to "non specialist" has its benefits. I accept to suffer some annoyances and there is always a way to fix the most annoying ones by sacrificing time.

My choice for now is Debian, didn't finish transition yet, very annoying to plan this in my schedule. I'll churn from Ubuntu after more than 15 years of daily driving... I also don't like ubuntu user with uid:gid 1000 in their Docker images. It's a cancer.

I do like the energy consumption of MacOS and that sleep just works so well. Also the laptops feel really nice. I got a few things to make life easier (sketchybar, rectangle.app, see other posts here) but overall these days Linux is just a more polished experience. Never thought I'd say that. At least it's the least glitchy experience nowadays.

I initially tried to just use snaps but firefox was crashing quite often so I had to go with adding the mozilla's repository and of course configure the fake "firefox" package that actually installs the snap to be low priority for apt.

I'd rather use something written in a crappier language that has been battle-tested for decades, personally.

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-35338 - `chmod --preserve-root` can be bypassed. That doesn't seem that bad tbh.

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-35341 - `mkfifo` accidentally resets the permissions of files that already exist, so if you manage to do `sudo mkfifo /etc/shadow` then it becomes world readable.

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-35352 - TOCTOU in `mkfifo` lets you do the symlink trick to get it to change permissions on an unrelated file.

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-35368 - You might be able to get chroot to execute arbitrary code.

Tbh I doubt if any of these would ever result in a real hack, unless your system is doing really mental things like running shell scripts with untrusted input.

I could only find a couple of CVEs that looked actually serious for GNU Coreutils too though. IMO if you're using these tools with untrusted input your system is janky enough that there are going to be serious flaws in it anyway. Probably though quoting mistakes.

I still mostly use Xorg though, I only have wayland on a tablet.

If you want something desktop oriented and Ubuntu based without the focus on snaps, take a look at Linux Mint: https://www.linuxmint.com/ (there's Cinnamon, Xfce and MATE versions; personally I think Cinnamon is pretty good nowadays)

It is - sucks that you have to though. For keyboard shortcuts use Karabiner Elements.

Distro: "The most used DE needs first class support, we should probably bend to it" → Distro: "We should probably make this DE the default since it's so widely used and supported" → User: "I choose the default" → Distro: "The most used DE…"

So yes, people have different preferences; but if your preference is GNOME today, it might not be GNOME tomorrow, and "I picked the default" isn't quite the neutral signal it looks like.

But seriously why would they disabled the middle mouse copy paste buffer by default? Anyways, gnome tweaks to the rescue I guess

Maybe they fixed it since the rc release, but there were some rough edges in Feb... the kernel USB support cooked the thumb drive partition structure.

In 22.04 to 24.04 the kernel Nvidia GPU driver EOL abandonment began... In 26.04 people will discover most EOL hardware support prior to RTX series will be difficult to bring up.

Probably wise to wait a few weeks for the bug reports to clear out a bit. =3

edit: grammar, also Cinnamon fixes these issues thankfully.

(I use Super+side mouse buttons to move between workspaces, I hate the keyboard-centric workflow when one hand is always on the mouse)

I was using Ubuntu and installed the apt version of Firefox as the snap version would not open html files in locations like /var/tmp and would not work with USB devices. Every time I ran `do-release-upgrade`, all of that work would need to be redone. It was very annoying.

If you always keep praying to the same old bit of code to "reliably" chug along (which people clearly cannot actually ascertain, otherwise these reimplementations wouldn't be struggling), you're forever just rolling the dice that some Pandora's box will simply never open (which it absolutely does and keeps opening), while also giving up on modern capabilities. What you see as old reliable, I see as a buried lede. I'd imagine these folks see the same. [0]

It's frustrating to see the software world contend with the same pushback and counter-arguments the infra/ops world (my neck of the woods) has already figured out and went past long ago during the advent of IaC. Cattle > pets, easily, every time.

[0] It's also not a cost-benefit thing, but clearly a principled decision, so arguments that aim to contend the ROI of it all are off-base from the get-go. If ROI is the key thing for you, then all this philosophical nonsense shouldn't even be on the table. Calculate.

I see the latest—580, 590, 595—available (scroll to bottom):

* https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=nvidia-dkms

Am I missing something?

Ubuntu 24.04 currently comes with 590, which is the most recent working driver.

Anyway, the main issue with Debian, Ubuntu, and Nvidia is about licensing. GNU/Linux is free software, and Nvidia drivers are not. Loading a non-free driver is known as “Tainting the Kernel”.

https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

The information on their wiki may be a year out of date. But the principles still apply.

1. Keyboard shortcuts are Emacs, Ctrl-A: start of line, E: end of line, K: kill selected or to end of line, Y to paste, etc. https://support.apple.com/en-au/102650#text

2. Karabiner elements (FOSS) fixes keyboard mappings outside of the Settings: https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

3. I have the dock on the left hand side, not bottom and I have a 2 monitor (iMac 5K 27"+ Dell 4K 27") setup with the iMac flat in front of me and the curve/2nd to the right. Menu bar is then close to the main windows.

4. Menu bar widgets etc are fixable with thaw https://github.com/stonerl/Thaw

5. Window management via keyboard is fixable with rectangle https://rectangleapp.com/

6. Use Macports to add all the Linux/Unix utilities, works with MacOS properly (eg Python/Java frameworks). Ports can have variants, plus you can have multiple versions installed side-by-side with `port select`. https://www.macports.org/

Not sure about fonts, on a 5K iMac they're fine and the 4K Dell works too. You need to use a resolution that fits with Mac's ideas of resolution, so I've got the 5K and 4K both at 2560x1440, which is Mac's idea of 2x resolution.

And yes, using a user-base as Beta testers is fairly cheeky. =3

You get all the driver support and tools from the Ubuntu base, with some nice additons. However, not all desktop environment are supported.

I just got a new laptop this month and saw that Ubuntu MATE was probably going to be unsupported, so I switched to Manjaro Sway.

Unless I'm misunderstanding your situation, I think you should look up the "Evil Maid Attack" to better understand how to mitigate risk for your threat model.

Since GNOME is the default Ubuntu DE, they have a certain responsibily to listen to the users/devs and leave the system open (to an extent). But their direction is the opposite:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210901171117/https://twitter.c...

They've been doing massive reduction in functionalities, really insane like limiting copy/past of terminals just to the current screen (which hurts any sysadmin), generally without any way to enable them back.

I haven't heard of any other OSS organization trying so hard to limit freedom of their users/devs, and this is an explicit goal - they don't want to weaken their brand.

GNOME is nothing short of the Oracle of open source.

I do agree that the second system effect is real, it’s just that the balance of benefits and drawbacks significantly shifted when it comes to “rewrite in Rust” (not limited to Rust though).

It doesn't. X was the only place I know of where that was a thing.

That doesn't work with a single monitor though.

One option for the menus maybe is keyboard searching. Command-shift-/ aka Command-?then type the name and arrow navigate. (Key sequence might be wrong, it’s muscle memory at this point)

I wonder if Thaw could be modded to repeat the menu bar?

Dock can be hidden/revealed with a key sequence but I like the auto-hide with long delay to pop up idea, suggested elsewhere.

For now, that is. I am afraid that they will stop providing coreutils and sudo for some of the future releases (like they did with upstart) because obviously they know better what's good for the users.

"Don't use Snap", you say? I'll do you one better! Skip Ubuntu. 'Just' use anything else more suitable. Debian is an excellent replacement being upstream, but I hold no illusions over undeclared requirements.

Isn't it a bit early to make predictions on the future of computer security and how we create good software based on something that's been out for 2 weeks?

Meanwhile the C version of coreutils has been in development for 36 years. There's no rush.

If you allow a completely untrusted user onto your system I think your chances of staying secure are low.

They have been working on a custom Desktop Environment which sadly still isn't very stable yet. Promising development, but putting me off of using Pop for a while.

20 years ago your Linux installation might not include wifi drivers, bluetooth support, decent GPU drivers, fat32/ntfs drivers, or the widely used video/audio codecs of the era. And you had to be careful when shopping for things like wifi cards, as only certain chipsets could be made to work.

Much of which was kinda fair enough, because if you're a volunteer making an open source OS because of a strong belief on the open source ideal, you don't want to distribute closed-source driver blobs or patent-encumbered codecs. But it meant mean the initial installation process was not always easy. One of the things that contributed to the success of Ubuntu was a particularly easy initial setup process.

Today, things are a lot better - you'll still get unsupported hardware from time to time, but it'll be much less severe. If your laptop has a non-USB integrated camera you might have to download and install a kernel module. Your corporate laptop's built in fingerprint scanner might not work, but who cares?

When I was shopping Lenovo.com for my ThinkPad in 2018, there was a table with ThinkPads certified for Ubuntu Linux in one column, and certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in another column.

I chose the T580 as a RHEL-certified notebook, and it was fantastic. Lenovo.com let me configure each individual component exactly according to my needs and tastes, and it was custom-assembled and shipped from Shenzhen.

It did arrive with Windows 10 pre-installed (this was the least hassle and most popular OS option). I initially installed CentOS, but quickly realized that Fedora would be the sweet spot, and so it was a Fedora system for most of its lifetime. Near the end, I did revert to Windows 10, which also worked flawlessly.

The ThinkPad T580 literally never malfunctioned. It was still 100% working when I turned it in for recycling in 2025.

I've also run Ubuntu on my "daily driver" desktop system, which ran from 2006-2022. Yes, that's 16 years' worth of Ubuntu installs and upgrades. It was mostly a KDE Plasma (Kubuntu) system. I enjoyed every bit of that.

In 1999, I was avidly using OpenBSD on really old hardware (such as HP Apollo 425t workstations.) OpenBSD simply couldn't deal with the special graphics subsystem on those machines. I tried and tried to get something working, but there were obstacles, not only with the hardware and drivers, but also the monitor connection needed a particular type of cabling and a proprietary monitor, too.

However, OpenBSD did great for networking, security, Squid cache, proxies, all kinds of things. And even in 1999, though it was early, I ran Linux on a 386DX-40, because Linux supported the "ftape" floppy tape driver at that time, and I had some kind of QIC tape backup from Eagle that wouldn't be recognized by OpenBSD or NetBSD.

Meanwhile, in that same year, my "daily driver" desktop machine was a 486 with VLB, dual-booting Windows 98 and OpenBSD. The Windows 98 was set up with a Cygwin system and X11 server, so that I could run X11 clients on the OpenBSD machines, or the Linux machine, or whatever else was on the LAN.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Plasma

https://kde.org/plasma-desktop/

Is this, like, a “GNU/Linux controversy” thing?

Distro like Ubuntu are a fair compromise to get amd/nvidia GPU drivers, wifi, and brother laser printer/scanner networking installed. =3

edit: seriously, why down vote the guys karma if its a honest question. Try to be kind people.

but linux is not as secure as an iphone, and linux users typically dont know how to set this up, so in practice you are right, it doesnt protect you

It was true but times change.

Microsoft chose to kill off Windows 10, which it once promised would be the last desktop Windows ever. Its replacement is bigger, slower, stuffed with adverts and upselling attempts, and has an artificial demand for TPM 2.

That's driven thousands of people to check out Linux, and if you don't know anything about Linux, then Ubuntu is the number one best-known distro. Many techies dislike Snap (to the extent of spreading lies like "it's not FOSS"), but it makes version upgrades safer, which matters more to non-techies.

(I say thousands so the pedants don't shout at me, but I suspect the reality is at least hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.)

Linux Mint is friendlier, yes, and so is Zorin OS, but both are based on Ubuntu.

Valve has sold millions of Steam Decks, which demonstrate that it's now possible to run premier new Windows games on Linux with performance at least as good as on Windows. All Linux users know their hardware runs faster and cooler with Linux than Windows anyway.

Chromebooks (which are as cheap as laptops get) outsold Macs (which are expensive) by revenue in 2017 in the USA and within 3 years in the rest of the world. ChromeOS is a desktop Linux, based on Gentoo. It has hundreds of millions of users who have never heard the word "Linux".

Companies with cloud-based IT are deploying ChromeOS Flex as a response to ransomware attach. (E.g. Nordic Choice hotels.)

Many of us see Ubuntu's characteristic desktop in shops, bars, travel stations and things regularly now. I hear its startup sound on trains. I have totally non-techie friends running Ubuntu at home. I've given Mint to lots of mildly technophobic friends and they get on just fine.

It's not over, but the year of Linux on the Desktop came about a decade ago, and the penguin taleban were too busy in-fighting to notice.

With 24.04 at least, doing an 'apt purge snapd' seems to be quite useful. Is that not sufficient?

Yes, the control to be able to tweak the system to my liking is one of the attractions or Linux, but not when I have to in order to avoid behaviours that I don't want being reasserted.

[not that I expect nor particularly want Ubuntu to change, I just accept that I'm not part of its target audience and I'll be better served elsewhere - choice is a great thing!]

----

[0] heading back there now as Windows11 is not happening on my home machines¹, I feel that I shouldn't have let Windows10 happen, looking back.

[1] aside from the laptop that came with it that I'll keep there for Office and DayJob compatibility for a while.

[2] Currently running Debian³ on the other laptop, main desktop will likely go that way if it isn't decommissioned completely, and I use a dock with the laptops instead.

[3] As that is what I use server-side more often than not.

As someone that habitually highlights what they are reading it was generally beyond useless for me. It was actively making me mad when I accidenatally pasted some non-sense because I just highlighted a paragraph before and accidentally inserted it into something.

A packaging system should not break the basic abstractions of an OS.

But hey! At least they are only flipping defaults, not removing the feature outright, like they did type-ahead search. [Insert angry rant here]

Or in anything that's not X?

Speaking personally for me only, I don't think it's a great thing. The <however many> clipboards on Linux is... not really a great thing. I for one never know which of the buffers contain what. And this is compounded by the fact that selection may or may not overwrite what's in one of the buffers, and middle click may or may not paste whatever was in that buffer. Additionally compounded by how inconsistent the behavior is across apps.

Because of scrolling on Thinkpad keyboards (using the middle click), I had to turn that feature of every time, especially while working on longer documents I would otherwise accidentally paste stuff at random places.

(It's not just macOS.)

For the moment, later pulling a package that is redirected would undo that effort. As the peer points out, too, that would likely rip out stuff you're using without having already configured preference.

One could maintain a boundless list of configs pinning repository preferences... or they could use a distribution that doesn't have a predisposition towards Snap.

For me, a zero friction way to have decent security is worlds better than the normal state where homeservers are not encrypted at all.

This has been a problem I’ve dealt with on nearly every single Snap I’ve installed. If you’re a file editor, you must let me edit my damn files!

About your first point, however, keep in mind that "middle click insert" has been the default behavior in X since the 1980s, long before Windows or current generation MacOS's were around. To me, this is such a basic functionality, I would compare it something as fundamental as CTRL-X/C/V for cut/copy/paste on Windows.

I haven't tried it in a few LTS releases and I'm away from a computer. Still, I'd bet this release continues the pattern. Fat chance Canonical decided to go back to more build targets/backporting/testing.

I've run every single version of Ubuntu ever released. Work machines stay on LTSes, testbeds run interim versions.

After the 22.04 release, I carefully de-snapped my work laptop, using `deb-get` to install native packages of everything. Worked a treat, took less disk space, things started a tiny bit faster.

Then I enabled Ubuntu Pro and it force-reinstalled snapd. It's fair enough to have it as a dependency: it's a standard component. I was very annoyed, though.

But when I upgraded to 24.04, a lot of things broke. I had to spend ages re-enabling repositories, getting new keys, changing version strings in stuff under `/etc/apt/sources.list.d` and so on. It's a PITA.

So I have performed a volte face. I removed all my `deb-get` packages, and reinstalled the snap versions. All my comms and messaging apps, music and media players, and so on.

It's much easier. No extra repos. I experimentally took one laptop from 24.04 to 24.10 to 25.04 to 25.10 and yesterday to 26.04. All my apps stay in place. Nothing broke. No custom repos. No changes needed to any config file. It just works.

I've been using Linux for 30 years, starting on Slackware and moving to Red Hat and Caldera and SUSE via lots of others. But I'm old and grumpy and I want stuff to work without fiddling. I want low maintenance. Snap is low maintenance. My messaging apps can download stuff into my Downloads folder, open attachments from Documents, and so on.

I run native packages of my own browsers (Waterfox and Chrome) and AppImages of Panwriter and Logseq, and I have none of these difficulties.

Life is easier if you don't fight the OS and the vendor.

And Ubuntu is still easier and less hassle than Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, or any of the other big names.

I, for one, use the different clipboards concurrently all the time, with "highlight & middle-click" probably being the one I use most often. It's the most convenient for me most of the time:

- only two interactions (one drag & one click)

- completely mouse-based (no keyboard interaction necessary)

- hence only requires one hand (look, ma!)

From where I sit I have 5 Thinkpads set up within reach, and I have a few more in other rooms. They are by far my preferred laptop.

Most run Ubuntu as their default OS, most have the trackpad disabled because I usually use the trackpoint for everything, and on all of them I use middle-click to paste extensively.

Bo! Let's fight! And both get banned from HN :)

The accidental pasting definitely kept happening to me, likely due to my bad habit of highlighting sections while to focus on them.