* Select - Middle-click paste does not seem to work
* When something requires a password (ie just tried a bitlocker volume) the whole screen is blocked, so no password manager for you (unless you copy it before, or cancel - unplug drive-copy password - replug drive - paste.)
* The default tiling does not jive with me, sometimes I don't even know what it wants (it always tries to force you to also set a left windows if you tile right and vice versa) so I disabled it `gnome-extensions disable tiling-assistant@ubuntu.com`. Default Gnome tiling is ok (but missing quarter tiling (and 1/8th would be nice on my ultra-wide) imho so I use [0]
* I've been trying to use Nix home-manager for packages but I have GPU errors, need workarounds, icons that just remain generic. But I guess that is not Ubuntu's fault.
Ubuntu remains my nr. 2 choice, after NixOS (but I didn't get the latter to install on this Nuc, perhaps a bios update will help).
The installer offered (under experimental) to run root on zfs, I didn't end up selecting it because only on the forth try (and by that time you're clicking at a fast rate just taking defaults) I understood that it would only download packages via wifi, not the cable (same for NixOS installer, so must be my network).
I think power users are not the main target of Ubuntu.
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.
>I think power users are not the main target of Ubuntu.
Then who is? Normies buy iPads and casuals stay on Windows. Is this why Linux can't gain any market share?
IMHO, Ubuntu is trying to gain market share by targeting non-experts — making Linux simple enough for normies and casual users. Casual users are generally less likely to mess things up on Ubuntu than on Windows.
Every time I run Ubuntu on a computer it always ends up in a state where it does not boot after a few months. This has happened on multiple computers, none with nVidia GPUs, over a period of a bit over 15 years. I don't do anything funny with my computers. No custom kernel, no weird kernel modules, no trying to shoehorn in 3rd party repos intended for Debian, etc. The last time I tried was last year, when I got a new job and my work laptop came with Ubuntu 24.04. Sure enough, after a few months an update made it unable to boot. I have not had this problem with any other distro. I switched the laptop to Fedora and it's worked perfectly fine. This makes me question the logic of trying to give Ubuntu to novice computer users.
This isn't true any more, and hasn't been for some years, you know.
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.
>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.
Not really. Most normies seem to choose meme gaming distros based off Fedora like CachyOS or Bazzite. Many are waiting for official SteamOS release which is based on Arch.
Snap is TERRIBLE for non-technical people. Imagine installing an image editor via Snap, and then the default sandboxing making it unable to access the images on your media drive. No errors, it just silently fails.
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!
I often hear things like this, but I never encounter them myself.
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 find it hilarious how much religion is put into Gnome vs. KDE in this case. I did use both. I honestly have no strong favourite. After that many years of Linux desktop environment DE hopping I came to the conslusion that the DE should get out of your way and allow you to focus on your work.
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.
I pick the software best for my uses and then look at which desktop supports that software and workflows around them the best.
Not always clear/clean selections possible in my situation - I've a jumble of GUI designs and frameworks used, so I favour a more agnostic desktop.
UI designers got it right with a taskbar on the bottom and widgets to let you know what you have open at a glance without having to move the mouse across the screen or press buttons. For a multi-application PC desktop thats the right model. Not for phones ofc, they need a different model. Trying to force the phone model on the desktop PC model just doesnt make sense, not now, not then, not ever.
edit: grammar, also Cinnamon fixes these issues thankfully.
Preferences don't form in a vacuum though. There's a perception that GNOME is the "good environment" which means its decisions get treated as more important than other DEs' when things change: and that's somewhat self-reinforcing.
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.
where exactly did I say anything contrary to what you said.
Are you implying that GNOME is the only thing that should be considered graphical? That everything else has to be an alternative? That GNOME, by virtue of existing has infinite reprieve to change the definition of user interfaces at their leisure; even if it means breaking muscle memory hundreds of thousands of times over decades.
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:
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 fundamentally agree with you. I don't think responsibility is quite the right word. But if they don't seem to care about a massive portion of their users, why are they building gnome at all?
I agree that responsibility is the wrong word, but I've also noticed there's certainly some form of expectation, social responsibility, or care that other projects have and gnome has always lacked. When I started using Linux it was the desktop I liked the most, but some of the choices seem almost hostile or intentionally designed to drive current users away, and unlike most other projects I've used, I've never seen them listen or make improvements based on any feedback from users.
Part of why I've been pretty happy with COSMIC, even if a bit experimental in ways. The File Manager is probably the most quirky part for me... mostly it works fine though. Most of my other issues seem to be more about the wayland switch than anything specific to COSMIC.
Yes, I've migrated to Kubuntu first and now I'm enjoying Linux Mint. The Cinnamon environment gives me old-school GNOME vibes. And Mint doesn't have Snap, which is also a big plus.
It is a preference - and not everyones. I always hated middle click paste, middle click is amongst the first thing I remap on my systems to do the macOS "exposé"-style of window rearrangements. Other people will have other preferences.
I suppose you use Super+Middle Click? Not a bad idea, I dislike hot corners, and the "exposé" feature of niri is quite good. I might actually remap it to Super+Middle Click.
(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 don't use Super. Middle click (Button 3) = expose, Button 4 = workspace to the left, Button 5 = workspace to the right. Requires a good mouse with accessible button 4/5 of course. No key modifier.
No software I use, uses these buttons for anything integral by default, neither on Linux nor Mac. And if they do, the OS has precedence. On macOS I use BetterTouchTool for those mapping, you can define exceptions for individual apps.
That's what some people love about it. Gives them 2 clipboards. Personally I think copying into a shared space without an explicit action to do so is terrible from a security perspective, so getting rid of middle click paste by default is good to me.
To you it is, plenty of people -including myself- don’t find it so. And considering the ratio of MacOS+Windows desktop users to those of ‘nix (an increasing number of which are new converts), middle clickers are a minority here.
But hey! At least they are only flipping defaults, not removing the feature outright, like they did type-ahead search. [Insert angry rant here]
That is gnome's standard play: move a feature to a preference (“you can just turn it back on”), remove the preference from the control panel (“you can still turn it back on using ‹whatever conf backend they're using this year›”), and then finally remove the feature (“you could only turn it on by using an unsupported mechanism, and ‹conf backend they used last year› is deprecated anyway”).
I agree with the point about this being configurable.
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.
As a trackpoint user, I am glad it's off by default.
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.
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.
I'm guessing you have touchpad corners enabled. Usually by default lower-right is 2nd mouse button and upper-right is 3rd mouse button (middle click).
I only use the touchpad, but knowing where it is I can avoid it and almost never trigger it accidentally. It can also be disabled without affecting two-finger and three-finger tap, which I do use.
> only made because the same feature does not exist in MacOS.
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.
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)
I was never a fan of it. I always turned it off. And now it also freed up middle click for auto scrolling which is actually great, especially when the scrollwheel is somewhat broken.
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.
THANX! I don't know how people live on platforms that don't have this :)
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.
Neither Windows nor macOS have it, so it's surprising to new users. If your target market (as in support contracts) is EU public servants, it's sort of understandable.
I just use KDE on arch, though for a little while it was glitching out on me frequently, idk if I've been too busy to notice it recently or if they finally patched it up.
I miss KDE 3.5 it felt drastically more stable than KDE today.
I've tried other DE's but they get weird if your Distro is not built for them.
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.
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.
It seems that KDE is fairly consistent in calling this “Plasma” and specifically, “Plasma Desktop”, but English Wikipedia insists on prefixing the names of their products with “KDE”. Especially Plasma 4, 5, and 6.
"KDE Plasma" can be interpreted as "The KDE organization's Plasma" and probably saves on some article title consistency while avoiding the need to disambiguate the main Plasma article title with (Desktop Environment) or the like. Likely more trouble to try to change than it helps anything as a result.
It's really only calling it "KDE" in isolation that is a bit off. On the GNOME side, such a reference makes sense because the desktop environment is named GNOME and it's run by the GNOME Project/GNOME Foundation. I.e. a bit reversed which word in the order refers to the org's vs DE's name.
Most of the time people will probably figure it out at the end of the day via context either way though.
Unix workstations had mice with 3 buttons. The Mac had only one. Windows, Amiga, Atari had two. The Unix developers had choice that others didn't have. They came up with a use that existed forever. Now someone decided to remove the default for no apparent reason. It's like the Android product managers continuing to change the color, size and gesture to answer a phone call: every release, the first call is an exercise in managing frustration.
I like LLMs, I like Zed, but I turn off the AI features. I rather have Claude or Open Code in a container with only access to a mounted folder, or use a local model.
And Zed lets me do that while remaining fast and minimal.
As for (even more) minimal editors, perhaps just Gnome Edit? Or Kate?
“I’ve carried a Kindle in my bag for over a decade. Through every hardware iteration, from the physical keyboard right up to the latest Paperwhite, a Kindle has been with me everywhere”
Wow. I got a kindle keyboard in 2012? It gave out about 4 years ago when I got a PocketBook Touch HD3, which has been great these last 4 years. I think it’s just insane that some people buy all the generations. What a waste.
Was hoping it was so easy :) But I probably need to look into it some more.
llama_model_load: error loading model: error loading model architecture: unknown model architecture: 'gemma4'
llama_model_load_from_file_impl: failed to load model
Edit: @below, I used `nix-shell -p llama-cpp` so not brew related. Could indeed be an older version indeed! I'll check.
As it has been discussed in a few recent threads on HN, whenever a new model is released, running it successfully may need changes in the inference backends, such as llama.cpp.
There are 2 main reasons. One is the tokenizer, where new tokenizer definitions may be mishandled by the older tokenizer parsers.
The second reason is that each model may implement differently the tool invocations, e.g. by using different delimiter tokens and different text layouts for describing the parameters of a tool invocation.
Therefore running the Gemma-4 models encountered various problems during the first days after their release, especially for the dense 31B model.
Solving these problems required both a new version of llama.cpp (also for other inference backends) and updates in the model chat template and tokenizer configuration files.
So anyone who wants to use Gemma-4 should update to the latest version of llama.cpp and to the latest models from Huggingface, because the latest updates have been a couple of days ago.
I just hit that error a few minutes ago. I build my llama.cpp from source because I use CUDA on Linux. So I made the mistake of trying to run Gemma4 on an older version I had and I got the same error. It’s possible brew installs an older version which doens’t support Gemma4 yet.
And that's exactly why llama.cpp is not usable by casual users. They follow the "move fast and break things" model. With ollama, you just have to make sure you're getting/building the latest version.
Its not possible to run the latest model architectures without 'moving fast'. The only thing broken here is that they are trying to use an old version with a new model.
I'm a bit unsure what that has to do with someone running an outdated version of the program while trying to use a model that is supported in the latest release.
Part of this is also our culture that somehow decided kids need their own bed, and it's easy to get baby formula.
So the kids are not sleeping in our beds, where they feel 100% secure, getting to the breast whenever they want (and they quickly will want it at a lesser frequency). The woman will feel this, but hardly has to wake up, me... I slept right through all that. Fwiw, we had a bed for the baby that attached to ours.
In our time everybody advised us: Give the bady a load of milk at 23:00 just before you go to bed! We never did, just stuck to about did 20:00, or just when baby cried, both babies took about 2 months to sleep for about 12 hours straight (although soon after the second one developed reflux which had me watch Rick and Morty in its entirety somewhere between 2 and 4 for some time).
Anyway, not saying everybody is that lucky, just saying sometimes it's good to questions things that are given in one's culture. Worst advice imho is "let the baby cry" which was common on our days. How nice to let a baby cry alone in a room, not understanding anything about what happens...
I coslept, but I had shit milk production. Without formula my kid would be dead. My friend breastfeeds, but is an active danger when asleep, so without a crib, she'd have crushed her child.
It turns out that safe sleep rules and the availability of formula exist for a reason. Safe sleep rules exist in the west because pur beds are fundamentally different (and more dangerous) than in places here cosleeping is more common. Tp cosleep you need a certain situation that many people are not prepared to deal with.
There's literally nothing you can do about low supply at all. It's not a matter of trying for me. My body never made more than an ounce even with weeks of attempts. This is even setting aside that some people would like assistance so they can sleep and breastfeeding means dad can't take on night feeds, which is what another friend is experiencing and the child is having a bad time from her severe sleep deprivation.
And even more complications of small child. It's not as simple as "let's go back to the old days". The great days when kids died at much higher rates remember.
Sorry, I did not mean it like that, formula is fine. We also hated the breastfeeding mob.
And you're right about the rules they exist for a reason, but I think we should as parents take our space to try what works for us and our kids and what feels right.
Sometimes I just can't grasp how cruel nature is. Imagine no formula -> baby starving and you just have to accept it. When the tribe grows in numbers the baby is safe. When the tribe grows in numbers like mankind, you get cheats like formula and polio vaccine.
We're just replaying the life game on easier mode.
That is good to know. My original post was a bit reductionist, I do generally feel that people try to do good and are much more co-operative than adversarial. It is just that we can be dragged into a defensive/attack position easily if we do not keep an eye on that.
I suspect that despite all the issues of the world, we are slowly heading to a future that will be much more peaceful.
The book gives a lot of examples of where and how the beautiful sides op human nature surface in difficult times. It also argues that at least some of the things we hold as true (ie civilized behaviour is a thin layer of veneer) are not true.
One example is that we often think that as in "Lord of the Flies", a book that shaped us in a way, civilization slowly drains from the group as they become more primal when hunger sets in and oversight is lost. But Rutger finds an example of a real group of stranded kids, who thrived and generally showed admirable behaviour. That's just one of the examples.
Fwiw, yesterday I was messing about with GitLab backups. One of the options for direct off-site is S3. But I want that S3 bucket to live on a box on my own Tailnet.
So I too just want simple S3. Minio used to be the no-brainer. I'll checkout RustFS as well.
It does not sound hard (although it is hard for me!). It sounds like it should be some LinuxServer io container. Doesn't it? At this point S3 is just as standard as WebDav or anything right?
Nothing changed, it's new ground, we are searching it with a search light. From some vantage points our view on things may feel quite complete, even insightful. Then we look at if differently and feel lost. It's a process we are in together.
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