Ubuntu 20.04 desktop - are these features or bugs?

Ubuntu
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So far - loving 20.04… those “features or bugs” are neither… a user desktop cluttered with icons is a pox, a curse, on desktops… it’s a form of pollution… simple… get used to it - or go back to the blight of Windows…

20.04 does everything I need… my favourite shit is a click (sometimes a right click) away on plank (“sudo apt install plank”)…

My non-Ubuntu shit (i.e. not available ouside of Ubuntu - been burned before so I avoid PPA’s like the plague [or Covid9]) that I use is there in my cloud folder of software (LInux-SOE) with DEB files that install flawlessly (or work after a simple “sudo apt install -f”).

Ubuntu 20.04 kicks arse (even if my path to it will continue to be via 18.04) - because of legacy shit I need for my job) - never been happier with a Ubuntu release than I have been with 20.04 (I really did kinda liked [loved] 16.04 - and I still miss Unity).

It also helps that the fossa is one of my favourite critters - critters are awesome, and it’s tragic we’re losing more critters every day, to extinction (I should know, I’m in Australia, and us white folks have managed to wipe out 75% of all critters that lived here before, with black folks)…

I like everything about it… Nautilus… gedit… Gnome Terminal (where I do 97% of my “stuff” anyway)… minimalist… but I’m still not ready for a tiling window manager (been using X Window since early 1990s, i.e. ancient Solaris days and CDE)… I guess I’ll never be 100% ‘minimalist’.

But on top of the legacy stuff - 20.04 does everything else I need in my NIX desktop : NFS mounts, media (music and movies [VLC or Sayonara] via NFS over 5 Ghz WiFi) , runs Google Chrome better than Windows ever could (too late Microsoft) - Remmina to Windows computers for work (cloud sync of remmina needs a little work), and it runs Microsoft Teams Preview (been using WebEx for years - seriously Microsoft Teams knocks WebEx into the dirt!).

Seriously - I can do a Ubuntu 18.04 install, sync to cloud, test all my WFH stuff I need, then “sudo do-release-upgrade -d” and from woe to goe, I’m up and running 100% productive within three hours (sometimes a bit longer for all my ~125 GB of music to sync)…

And I’m more than ready for 20.04.1 (unless it kills shit I installed in 18.04)…

Happy customer (and having said that - I did make it all the way to a third interview to work for Canonical - but no further - and that was 3+ years ago) here, and happy camper…

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The whole “desktop metaphor” was always bullshit from the start anyway…

Mac users (I was one, on and off) got used to ejecting media (I still kinda miss the Apple robot that would eject your floppy disk) by dragging it onto the trash icon… Why? How was that a metaphor? Do you really want to destroy your data? No? “Oh you just wanted to eject a disk”… AI ? I think not…

Windows 95? No, dragging an icon from your desktop onto the recycle bin would delete it (thankfully not permanently)…

When I was at Uni, I’d sometimes dread having to use a Mac lab - because invariably the room would be full of morons trying to use metaphors for everyday existence (inserting drinks into CD trays - yeah - that shit was real)… And there’d always be some a-hole c–t trying to print their 1,000 page thesis on a dot matrix printer, despite the WHOLE lab being off limits to non-multi-media students… I should have gone all Nazi on their arses, but I’m not a Nazi…

One of the things I hated most about Apple was the ghastly file descriptor shit they’d enforce on their main customer users files (ADOBE!) - I’d spent days making flawless TGA (targa) image files, some the work of days worth of 3D rendering time… put them on Mac formatted floppies from my Windows 3.11 or Linux box - take them to “school” and Photoshop would just ignore them all because they didn’t have the correct “file descriptor”… ARRRGH!

Seriously - F–K you apple and f–k you Steve Jobs - the best thing that ever happened to Apple was when that loser chose quack remedies over science… But I will also state, that one of the best things that ever happened to Apple was when Steve Jobs brought NEXT back inside Apple…

I love / hate Apple (nearly ALL the Microsofty is gone out of my house - both my daughters now predominantly on Mac OS - missus only uses her iPad - and we’ve NEVER had an “xpox”) - because Apple are pretty crap, but at least they rest atop UNIX… Microsoft? Some of their stuff is “okay”, but those BILLIONS of lines of… (to be continued)…

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These and many other reasons as to why there are so many different Ubuntu based desktop environments out there, because maybe of a slight lock down on things that you used to be able to do? I remember just before Unity came out, of course Ubuntu was Gnome 2 and was how we see Ubuntu Mate today but without the green. The last version of Gnome 2 desktop they only had Applications and System showing, not Places in the panel and that done my head in, plus the Apport messaging app Something went terribly wrong, or Internal error kept on coming up.

Something has closed down unexpectedly would you like to report it to Canonical? I found that even that little change of not having the Places list in the panel put me off of Ubuntu, then of course the move to Unity which was in my opinion the dumbest move ever. So I moved to Linux Mint after my brother introduced me to it, way back in 12.04 which to this day I think was the best Ubuntu release ever, for Linux Mint it was anyway. Linux Mint Maya was absolutely gorgeous if it was a woman I would of married it, it was that good.

Canonical love to make little changes on every release of their Ubuntu OS and like it or not, they seem to lock things down, that you used to be able to do or give alternatives, or no alternatives at all. I’m now using Peppermint 10 Re-Spin and have not looked back.

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After upgrading my desktop machine to 20.04 and converting to Unity, the desktop functioned normally. Then I did a fresh install of the same OS on my laptop. All the basic desktop functions on this machine were dead from the outset. While searching for a solution, my desktop machine picked up the same problem, apparently after some updates: the desktop no longer functions as a useable folder. I eventually came across this indication that it’s a bug: shortcut keys - Basic desktop actions are not available on Ubuntu 20.04 - Ask Ubuntu

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