Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 23, 2022 10:43 UTC (Sat) by JMB (guest, #74439)
In reply to: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released by jfebrer
Parent article: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Forced SNAP usage for default and important components is of general concern.
I would understand that proprietary programs may be used with snap or flatpak - or that it may be used
on smartphones which lack any reasonal security.
But for important - standard - programs of a distro this is just madness.
The interesting things it that this is explained in some new with reduced maintenance costs.
I thought that those things get compiled automatically on all supported systems.
Would be nice if the reasoning for this could be clarified.

Additionally I would reall know what Canonical is aiming for - as the quality of Ubuntu is really low.
Is it IoT - containers - support for special companies ...
But it is definitely not the desktop.

I struggled to install 21.04 STS ... lots of single problems - and at the end the installer crashed and left a
non booting system (I don't care about grub of the system - may master grub was configured to the
partition and kernel and could not come up - so installation was not completed.
21.10 STS just hang after looking for the partitioning ...
21.04 and 21.10 both were tested with the officially released images - not in development!
22.04 beta (image dating 18.04.2022 - 3 days before the release crashed like 21.04.
So the last correct installation was with 20.10 STS Groovy.

* Installer problems (used Kubuntu flavour - which should not matter for installer - at least I hope so):
- The crash of 21.04 and 22.04 was caused by me selecting the disk for Boot Loader device. I did never anything else before - but now one has to give the device of the new / to be about to get installed. Why?
- Both choices cause the same warning, but only the 1st crashes the installer. And without data or reason, as is given explicitly.
- I want the partitioning untouched (using several OS partitions of 128 GB each) - and I would prefer grub to be installed as package - but not configured - as I want to configure grub master by hand. Would be nice to select these two things so one can rest assured that a profession worstation is not ruined.
- The partitions are no longer shown entirely - only the first few (with both 21.04 STS and also 22.04 LTS).
- No longer a line to type to test keyboard settings - but only a layout which doesn't mean anything - key like ~, |, <, > are not shown (I use English language but German layout and German (no dead key) as variant - not relevant for this problem, though).
- If DisplayPort and HDMI (latter on powered but switched of TV; both using 4k) are connected, the installer is not visible on the Display Port screen (tested on 21.04 STS after release).
- The installer crashed when looking an partitions (only 21.10 STS after release).

* Documentation problems:
- A document stating installer for 21.04 and 21.10 showed images of 20.10 or before.
- The only installer manual found (shortly before release of 22.04 LTS) was for 20.04 LTS.

* Bug Reports no longer welcomed:
- My first bug report (12/2012) took time ... but it was addressed (a TeXLive problem concerning English language and A4 paper format).
- All bug reports thereafter caused no real action - and no positive change ... so just a waste of time on my side.
- And the last one for the installer of 22.04 LTS was even labeled "invalid" (I thought they switched to Subiquity with 21.04 as so many things regressed heavy - but no, they just deliberately ruined the installer ...) and I was asked to send in all installer problems separately (would have laughed if this would have been demanded by IBM, HP or Sun - I worked more than 10 years in IT business as Senior System Engineer and Unix consultant).
* Testers are normally paid - and showing this kind of disrespect is not ok. And hinting to volunteers dealing with this bug reports is just crazy - at least concerning an LTS release! But this explains why bug reports may not be considered to improve the situation.

* General quality (installer, documentation and bug reporting were given - but that's not all ...):
- There had been several releases were the dependencies were wrong (after release - even after xx.04.1 release - causing to select X.org and other decisive components for deletion - no joke!). And yes, I am installing a lot of packages (also from universe and multiverse) - but in former times this caused no problem at all.
- They deliberately spoiled their kernel PPA as 5.11.16 (26. May 2021) was the last kernel to be installer under 18.04 LTS or 20.04 LTS - both still maintained, due to problems with dependencies. So this PPA was not meant for users ... thanks, Canonical.
- They use LTS kernels for 20.04 LTS as well as 22.04 LTS - which are really ancient - if you have new HW. I needed 20.04.2 to use my Navi 10 without having to use Kernel PPA (at least it worked at the beginning ... cough) and Mesa PPA to have a stable and performant system. I tried to reach out - even Shuttleworth - to switch to a rolling base of kernel and mesa - as from my experience this causes no problem at all (x.x.1 Mesa and x.x.3 Linux would be on the safe side - so a real HWE support and not these franken-kernel with huge backports).
- A mass of libraries were no longer provided by Ubuntu - still needed for proprietary SW to work. It is an adventure to get old libraries - and this would be a genuine part of distros. Canonical even proposed at first to no longer support 32 bit (which would be a nice idea if there were not proprietary games even released after 2019 still using 32 bit).

From my point of view the quality of Ubuntu gets similar to Windows ... I am not used that a GNU/Linux system can crash - or even the installer - and the same is true for programs under it.

This is no rant - and I am happy if others did not ran in such problems.
I would even be happier if someone at Canonical would care and solve the many problems of the desktop.
And maybe a good start would be to explain what current Ubuntu users do have to experience ...

I hope for KDE neon based on 22.04 due in a few months (the current one based on 20.04 LTS is terrific - I would just like to have huge components like TeXLive and GCC to be kept rolling in the same stable way they managed to keep KDE rolling and permanently stable: big thanks to provide a stable #2 system for me!) - and maybe I will switching next year to Debian for my #1 system - in former times Debian Testing was a good choice and more stable then current Ubuntu LTS versions (at least before x.x.2).

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Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 23, 2022 17:38 UTC (Sat) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link] (18 responses)

> as the quality of Ubuntu is really low.

Nowadays I prefer to recommend to my acquaintances using enterprise distros even for the desktop.

SUSE (SLED) or RHEL.

Ubuntu/Canonical is "semi-enterprise" oriented, as I see it. Or maybe it's also an enterprise distro, just with a lower quality.

I try to convince my acquaintances to pay a subscription for the distro, that way it also brings more funding for the Linux desktops. Otherwise openSUSE Leap or something like CentOS is just fine. (Note that SLED is much cheaper than RHEL Workstation).

> Documentation problems

The SUSE and Red Hat distributions are really well documented. That is a big plus for using an enterprise distro in my opinion.

Instead of searching randomly on the web, finding stack-overflow posts and such.

> Installer problems

A few years ago I also had problems with the Ubuntu installer.

When I used Fedora, also a few years ago, Anaconda was a bit buggy. It's now improved. The advantage with the Fedora/Red Hat installer (for the desktop), is that it's fast.

The SUSE installer, with YaST, is very stable in my experience. It's more customizable, but an installation takes more time.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 23, 2022 18:44 UTC (Sat) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link] (13 responses)

Oh, I see that Canonical is hiring several developers for Ubuntu Desktop:
https://canonical.com/careers/engineering

So, good news for the Linux desktop at large!

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 24, 2022 11:06 UTC (Sun) by JMB (guest, #74439) [Link]

Yes, this would be good news if this hiring is done for a change ... but after the hiring news the quality
dropped severely. So I would not hold my breath.
A desktop distribution must stay current - while on a stable base.

And I mean stable - not dead as the enterprise distros - and next to RHEL and SLE it is Ubuntu LTS.
Ubuntu started to be a Debian with fresh Mesa and Linux and related components building around
an open and friendly atmosphere ... which suddenly dropped totally.
[First it was orange and brown dominating the desktop themes - suddenly black and purple which
was more to the Apple side and showed that values were dropped along the way. Just my feeling.]

While Red Hat and SuSE products lacked concerning recent stable SW, Ubuntu shined - even LTS used
the current kernel - while 20.04.0 and 22.04.0 used LTS kernel which were never welcomed by desktop
users - and backporting is just a bad habit, no cure ... and Linus was always trying to make users follow
mainline kernels ... which would be the way forward.
Additionally only Debian had all the necessary SW in repos so only special SW had to be added to
the distros next to SW from repositories (this might have changed a little - but not that much).

And unfortunately industry wants well tried SW - so after several years they might consider these,
while HW urges for fresh releases - so not only bug fixes - and have large phases were updates
are just forbidden (even when necessary).

All should work on the same Mesa and Kernel - which seems to be really the case except minor
corner cases - and similarly one should work together on all the other packages.
Caring means better security ... if people focus on security instead of quality, security vanishes totally!
There is progress for a common caring atmosphere (well, except some companies ... we all know them),
but this is slower than other environmental changes which make adaption necessary.

Thus hiring people may be a good thing in a motivated environment.
In an environment were IPO and other things are of more concern than real quality, hiring does not change
anything (this might apply to Canonical, but this is meant for all technical companies - no real innovative
products or strategies these days - it is NOT ONLY the amount of people being the base for advancements).

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 24, 2022 12:58 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (11 responses)

Those positions have been advertised for a while, seems like they aren't having much hiring luck.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 25, 2022 7:39 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (10 responses)

If Canonical wants to fill those positions, it's going to have to improve its hiring practices to reflect the reality of the tech world.

I was approached by a Canonical recruiter to fill one of their engineering positions; my LinkedIn profile apparently qualified to get me past their first step (resume review), but the next step (for a candidate who'd been approached by Canonical, not an applicant!) was to answer a huge pile of questions (over 50) about why Canonical should consider me, and the recruiter asked me to write an essay response, aiming for 10 to 12 sides of A4 (US Letter would be an instant reject). In those questions, I was asked to basically answer everything they could think of about the past 3 decades - from how I did at school aged 14 all the way through to why I would consider Canonical to be the perfect employer for me, and who I would consider to be competitive threats to Canonical.

Bear in mind that they approached me cold (LinkedIn messages) and asked me to write this essay for them so that they could consider me - I didn't even have my profile flagged as "looking for work" at the time. If that's how they treat people they approach, then their system is basically set up to get rid of all but the least qualified candidates.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 25, 2022 17:47 UTC (Mon) by jbicha (subscriber, #75043) [Link] (5 responses)

Sorry for only replying to one tiny issue, but it's fine to submit your answers with the US letter size.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 25, 2022 18:48 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (4 responses)

The recruiter who approached me told me the exact opposite to you - that US Letter would be rejected, because it's not A4, and thus judging whether my essay was long enough would be harder.

As this demand was part of a cold message, I simply ignored it and never replied. But if recruiters for Canonical are making up extra requirements beyond the actual requirements, and including those as part of a cold approach message to someone they've found on LinkedIn, it just makes the situation worse.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 25, 2022 18:53 UTC (Mon) by jbicha (subscriber, #75043) [Link] (3 responses)

If you want, feel free to email me the recruiter's name jeremy.bicha at canonical

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 25, 2022 18:54 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

I no longer have the invite - but you can feed back to your team that demanding hours of work from someone you've cold-approached who's not job hunting is not going to work to fill the roles you want filled.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 25, 2022 19:07 UTC (Mon) by jbicha (subscriber, #75043) [Link] (1 responses)

That decision is far above me, but I and many others have voiced concerns about the written interview questions.

Last year, Canonical received 110,000 job applications for a dramatically smaller number of open positions. So the company is trying to figure out some way to fairly judge candidates from a huge variety of backgrounds. Canonical's CEO talked for a few minutes about the hiring process just a few days ago:

https://youtu.be/Owwtcx6QJVo?t=3137

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 25, 2022 22:03 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

It sounds like you've got into a sucky place, so please, please take this just as constructive criticism you can take to management as an outsider's view, and not as an attack - I'd like this to be ignored at worst, and helpful at best.

The first thing I see going wrong is that the list of questions I was sent is huge, and the recruiter was unable to help trim down to the set that are relevant for me, instead recommending that I answer the full set in a big essay. That is unfair - I could write an essay answering all the questions, but some of them require you to have several years of experience, while others are asking about stuff that happened decades ago and is no longer relevant to who I am today. A fair process would give guidance on which questions you want answered given my history; someone you want who's switching careers at 40 would not be able to give good answers to all the questions I could answer well, while someone who's just finished their Comp Sci degree at 21 would be able to give better answers than me to some questions (because they're talking about the last 5 years, where I'm talking about something that's over 20 years ago).

This is something other companies fix via web forms; you get given a pack of questions to choose from, and the system only allows you to pick a limited set to answer, doing its grouping so that you can't focus on one area, but instead answer questions that give a clue about all the areas you're interested in - maybe one group for "can you code", another for "are you able to form part of a team".

The second is that the entire recruiting process is two-way; there are 7 billion people (give or take) on the planet. Of those, there's a chunk who'd never apply, a chunk that you'd reject at some point in the process, and a chunk that you'd hire if they went through the process at a time when you have a vacancy. The goal of a good recruitment process is to get everyone in the "would reject anyway" pile to not apply, while keeping everyone in the "would hire" chunk interested in following the process; however, because this process is weighted such that you ask a lot of people before telling them what the vacancy is (beyond "software developer at Canonical"), you're likely to put off a decent fraction of the "would hire" chunk, while not putting off that many of the "would reject anyway" pile.

Related to this is that Canonical is competing for talent with other companies - if your process is too heavyweight, some of the "would hire" pile will find jobs they're happy with elsewhere (e.g. at Collabora, or Amazon Web Services) and not be willing to put effort into your process. On the other hand, the "will reject" pile at Canonical almost certainly overlaps with the "will reject" pile at Collabora, AWS etc, and thus the people you don't want will still be willing to put time into the process because they don't get jobs elsewhere.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 25, 2022 18:33 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

On the other hand, one can also go too far in the other direction. I apparently passed some interview Rust test I never took for one company.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 26, 2022 12:58 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

I had the worst interview experience of my life interviewing at Canonical. The impression I was left with was of a dysfunctional company with a terrible workplace culture. I am not surprised they have trouble finding talent.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 26, 2022 18:41 UTC (Tue) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link] (1 responses)

I worked there for a year. The interview process was a mess. The team held interviews where they never told the candidates that the whole team is listening. Worse than that, the whole management chain was a bunch of cultish yes-men, so we changed direction every time Shuttleworth had a Thought. Seemed like that was the way to get ahead in management.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 26, 2022 18:59 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

OK. So my impressions gel (Jammy Gel) with yours... :)

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 25, 2022 7:40 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (3 responses)

I've found it hard to find documentation for RHEL. It seems to be behind a paywall or at least some enterprisey knowledgebase requiring a login. Sometimes it has been easier to look up CentOS documentation instead. And information about the live state of the distribution (for example, what are the current rpm packages and their versions) is also hard to find. I expect SuSE is a lot better, but I would not say that RHEL is well documented.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 25, 2022 13:54 UTC (Mon) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link] (1 responses)

Lots of documentation is available freely, for both RHEL and SUSE:
- https://access.redhat.com/products
- https://documentation.suse.com/

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 26, 2022 2:06 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

I wish RedHat would release the git repos containing asciidoc source code for their documentation, would be nice to be able to package that documentation for offline use on other distributions like Debian.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 26, 2022 18:28 UTC (Tue) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link]

IIRC you need an account for (some of?) the knowledge base, but not a subscription.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 23, 2022 18:55 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

> I would understand that proprietary programs may be used with snap or flatpak - or that it may be used
on smartphones which lack any reasonal security.

It doesn't make sense on phones because Android's permission-based model is already ubiquitous there, and unlike this, actually adds security — just use that. It doesn't make sense on the desktop either because it's as secure as a submarine bulkhead on a straw hut.

Canonical can spin it any way they want, but Snap and its ilk exists primarily to create a chilling effect against freedom of user movement in Linux; the established culture that build systems are ubiquitous, software is built for a platform and not a Brand, and distro-hopping is low friction.

And despite not even using Ubuntu I'm getting hit by the fallout from these office politics. I recently had to reinstall GIMP because it's no longer possible for even distro maintainers to build a fully functional Krita from source (https://bugs.gentoo.org/831139)

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 24, 2022 12:02 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

I suspect my message would be read as a sarcasm, but I assure you, I'm pretty serious.

> Additionally I would reall know what Canonical is aiming for - as the quality of Ubuntu is really low.

World domination, obviously, like always.

> Additionally I would reall know what Canonical is aiming for - as the quality of Ubuntu is really low.

Low from your POV or low from Joe Average User POV?

> would have laughed if this would have been demanded by IBM, HP or Sun - I worked more than 10 years in IT business as Senior System Engineer and Unix consultant

You mean: losers who are no longer even in that business at all and have stopped selling Unix workstations years ago… these guys did things differently, right? That's a good sign.

> From my point of view the quality of Ubuntu gets similar to Windows ...

So it becomes like the most popular and most used OS for desktops out there… why is that a bad thing?

> Forced SNAP usage for default and important components is of general concern.

That's how Android and Windows and handling the browsers: they are upgraded independently from the rest of the system thus you can be sure even Android 7 or Android 8 phone has the latest and greatest WebView.

> I would even be happier if someone at Canonical would care and solve the many problems of the desktop.

They are doing that, sure. They just ignore people who don't like to live with choices Canonical does for them. Preserve partition payout, install GRUB but don't install GRUB… WTH are these? These who want strange things and deviate just a bit from what was picked by Canonical can support themselves if they wish, but Canonical is not interested, really.

Sure, unlike Apple or Microsoft they couldn't hire people who may tell that truth with a lot of words which would be heard as “we care, we would help you” on the other end… but it takes time to perfect that art.

P.S. And yes, I'm in the same camp. I, too, feel frustrated that, e.g., ChromeOS couldn't support two layouts for Linux apps (bug is there for last 5 years), but I, at least, understand why. You, on the other hand, expect that needs of fringe unpaying user who's doing many strange and unusual things would be catered too… why?… where money in that?…

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 25, 2022 5:02 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (2 responses)

I too was mystified by that comment. I have been a Ubuntu user since probably 2006. But I never have the default install. Separate swap, /home on zfs, windows dual-boot though I never use it. All just works. I use sway not gnome/unity. I don't use the Ubuntu software centre or any of those frills, it's apt and sometimes synaptic. All that customization is perfectly easy with ubuntu. Maybe arch or gentoo are more tweakable but Ubuntu is easy to install and works so I have stayed with it.

Bugs? The few glitches that I run into can be attributed to sway being a very non-standard environment (installed manually, not from the ubuntu repos). I have also had issues with python packages: I install a minimal system python and use pip for everything else. But hardware support, LTS kernels etc are absolutely not an issue.

I have used SunOS, DEC Unix, IBM AIX back in the day. A modern Ubuntu system is far, far *less* buggy than those.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 25, 2022 6:03 UTC (Mon) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link]

My experiences are not from 22.04 yet, still 20.04...

All just works is not my experience. The installer crashes if you want to keep your old LUKS container and just install into a new LV.

Saying *the* installer is wrong. The were at least 2 installers, prossibly even 3. Server and desktop were different ones. I believe Xubuntu might have been a third (older) one; I vaguely remember it might have been the latter one that made it work for me in the end after many failed attempts. Documentation of what is really in use was not great.

Thinking what distro to use next...

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 25, 2022 10:45 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Back in 2016 or 2017, the Ubuntu installer installed EFI and everything fine…except it didn't create an EFI partition. This is basically an unbootable setup. I went back to Fedora for the CI machines after that. FWIW, we're back on Ubuntu LTS to avoid upgrade pressure every year, but sysadmin does the installlations for us now.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

Posted Apr 25, 2022 18:47 UTC (Mon) by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152) [Link]

>The interesting things it that this is explained in some new with reduced maintenance costs.
>I thought that those things get compiled automatically on all supported systems.
>Would be nice if the reasoning for this could be clarified.

My understanding is that the Firefox snap is managed by Mozilla so the reduced maintenance cost is that Canonical no longer have to do any forms of maintenance at all for Firefox.