Focal Testing of Kubuntu 20.04 LTS

[Don B. Cilly]

Here are all the not-so-technical facts I need to know about them.
(which seem to be "conveniently" ignored in both pages you linked to).

And which can be summarised as: Snaps are phriqqin 'orrible, is what they are

[GreyGeek]

I deleted snapd, which had the side-effect of deleting chromium-browser.
Now, I wanted to install JUST the chromium-browser so I tried:

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends chromium-browser

It failed.

I was presented with a message to install both both, or neither. I chose "n" and went looking for a deb package of Chromium-browser that I could download and install by itself.

To install that package from google would require I install the source, and bunch of additional dev tools, and compile it. I decided against that course and searched some more. I discovered two ppa projects but neither offered just the chromium-browser deb package without having to do a lot of hokus pokus stuff.

So, I reinstalled chromium-browser, which also pulled down and installed snapd.
BUT, I thought of using systemd to disable snapd:

sudo systemctl disable snapd.service
[sudo] password for jerry:
Removed /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/snapd.service.



Eureka!

As far as I know Muon doesn't play patti-cake with snapd so snapd is history on my machine.

[GreyGeek]

IMHO... purge snapd before it does damage.
Discover you can leave and just ignore.

Even though I hadn't given it much thought before, and just deleted snap and Discover, the differences between a Discover update and an Apt update made me wonder if removing snap and/or Discover would break Focal, or prevent it from being all that it can be.

I found this msg, written by a former snap developer: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comm...f_snap_vs_apt/

Here are the technical facts I wanted to know:
https://snapcraft.io/blog/a-technica...snaps-and-debs

Based on the fact that snap packages are uncompressed and mounted as loopback device which require squashfs and snapd overhead, whereas AppImages do not, I am going to uninstall snap and Discover, as I alway have in the past.

[Don B. Cilly]

IMHO... purge snapd before it does damage.
Discover you can leave and just ignore.

[GreyGeek]

Discovery, snap and apt

This morning I did my usual "sudo apt update" and "sudo apt full-upgrade" and 41 apps downloaded and installed, libwine(i386) and wine32(i386) were held back.

I was curious because in a previous update those two files broke the installation of two of my installed EXE applications so I rolled back to a previous snapshot pair and then used apt-mark to hold those two applications. Redoing the update without those two apps proceeded normally and my two EXE's ran without problems. I continued to do updates and upgrades for several days without problems. Three days ago I removed the holds and did an update & full-upgrade. Everything installed without problems, including the wine apps, and my two Windows programs ran without problems.

Today I got a notice of 41 updates. I opened a Konsole and ran update & full-upgrade and noticed that two programs were being withheld, libwine and wine2. I checked and they were not being held on my system. The rest installed without problems. My WIndows programs continued to work without problems.

So, I decided to see what Discover would do. It said 26 applications were ready to update. I let discover update them and after it was finished it, too, reported that the two wine files were being held back. Muon reports a total of 70 applications were updated or installed.

Most of the ones that Discover updated or installed appear to be coming from snap, and it appears to me that apt and snap are not coordinating their sources.list. Because of Discover's poor performance in the 16.04 and 18.04 releases I uninstalled it. I also uninstalled snap because I didn't use it and snapd was consuming CPU cycles.

My question is: What possible damage might I do in Focal by uninstalling both snap and Discover?

[NoWorries]

It is now 3 months to the release of Focal.

I am continuing to find this distribution very stable and have no hesitation to use it as my production system.

I have not experienced the problems reported above by Teunis as I do not use radio on my desktop. I also use Gimp for my photo editing rather than Showfoto. I have not had any problems with Gwenview which is at version 4.19.12.1-0 and I have not installed any add-ons for it.

My only outstanding annoyance is with Dolphin as it does not show "Removable Devices" when launched. I have to right mouse click in the left panel "Places" and select "Show Hidden Places" each time I launch Dolphin.

With my Pre-release updates selected and with additional repositories for the latest kernel and plasma, I get:

	4 Months to go	3 Months to go
KDE Plasma Version	5.17.4	5.17.90
KDE Frameworks Version	5.65.0	5.66.0
QT Version	5.12.5	5.12.5
Kernel Version	5.4.0-9-generic	5.4.0-12-generic

Focal LTS continues to advance on all major fronts with the exception of the QT Version. Other applications continue to be updated and I am delighted with the progress being made. All involved in the progress are doing a commendable job at producing a very stable system and are to be congratulated.

[Sothis6881]

Just installed today in Virtualbox, and I'm quite impressed! Should be an excellent release.

[MeMyself]

@MeMyself, don't come and cry over:

-19.10 to 20.04 SED Method

sudo sed -i 's/eoan/focal/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

sudo apt update && sudo apt -y dist-upgrade

Intermittent Solution: https://www.reddit.com/r/Kubuntu/com...r_not_working/

@Radcliff not sure where you see me crying about anything - I asked a simple question - one that did not need a sarcastic response

[Radcliff]

20200108 /AMDGPU /Kernel 5.3 Is Gone With The Wind

For LVM encrypted (20200107) after enabling Proposed (116 packages), all sorts of stability issues. Will retry sooner or later...

20200108 BTRFS no swap

-In Synaptic, over the last few weeks pattern (5.3.24 + 5.4.0-9), we were not always able to remove the lowest Kernel unless we compile a third one. A message says to fix broken package(s). Does not seem to be the case, Synaptic refuses deletion (image,headers,modules) and sees no such thing, nor this cmd line 'sudo apt-get --fix-broken install'. OK next morning.

@jlittle, thanks for replying,

-We still have the GUFW shortcut issue (plasma error) when we open it the first time and pin it to the taskbar after. From search in Kmenu: pin it or open it and pin it is the same ball game.

-We also have a second plasma error on our AMD mobo with the Driver Manager shortcut. On top, the app never collects information = no end loop scanning process, stays red.

In both cases, add to favorites and from there, pin to task manager removes the plasma error = opens normally.

Plasma errors:

Unable to run the command specified. The file or folder python3 does not exist

Unable to run the command specified. The file or folder kcm_driver_manager.desktop does not exist

inxi -G
Graphics:
Device-1: AMD Raven Ridge [Radeon Vega Series / Radeon Vega Mobile Series] 
driver: amdgpu v: kernel 
Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.6 driver: amdgpu FAILED: ati 
unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz 
OpenGL: renderer: AMD RAVEN (DRM 3.36.0 5.5.0-050500rc5-generic LLVM 9.0.1) 
v: 4.5 Mesa 19.3.1

For Kernel 5.5-rc5: glmark2 Score: 2849
For Kernel 5.4: glmark2 Score: 2824

@MeMyself, don't come and cry over:

-19.10 to 20.04 SED Method

sudo sed -i 's/eoan/focal/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

sudo apt update && sudo apt -y dist-upgrade

Intermittent Solution: https://www.reddit.com/r/Kubuntu/com...r_not_working/

[GreyGeek]

After Snowhog tipped my cow I went ahead and installed Focal this afternoon.
I used Guidus to burn a Persistent LiveUSB and booted it. I chose the run from RAM option.
The first attempt crashed because the install sequence jumped over the part asking the user's info and it couldn't create the first user account.
I rebooted, re-ran from RAM and this time chose to connect my wifi and include updates, and this time it didn't bypass the user info, so that problem could have been my shakey clicks. The install finished without problems in about 20 minutes and I rebooted. (Don, I have an 8 core i7 CPU with 16 GB of RAM). Oh, it automatically detected my Nividia GT 650M chip and installed the Nvidia 390 driver.

[FONT=monospace][COLOR=#000000]$ systemd-analyze[/COLOR]
Startup finished in 2.960s (kernel) + 8.753s (userspace) = 11.714s  
graphical.target reached after 8.175s in userspace
[/FONT]

I have a working desktop in 12 seconds from a cold boot (I'm using BTRFS).

There are some nits here and there with Focal, but nothing serious or a show stopper.
Apparmor is throwing a ton of "DENIED" messages relating to dbus, but nothing seems to be actually affected.

BTRFS does not use the swap file but the installer included "/swap" in the /etc/fstab file. It created some error messages that dmesg displayed. I put a "#" in front of that line and the error msgs stopped.

I installed openjdk-11 and then installed Minecraft. Ran beautifully. Very fast (150-250 fps without Optifine).

I installed WINE, WINEQT, winetricks, but NOT playonlinux. Then right moused on SE-0980-setup.exe (space engine 0.98) from Dolphin and selected Q4Wine as the install tool. Installed without problems and runs beautifully.
BibleAnalyzer_5.2 installed and ran nicely on 18.04 but has dependency problems on 20.04.
Sagemath from the repository installed perfectly.
OBS (Open Broadcast Studio 24.06), from the repository, runs nicely, giving me high quality at 60 fps.

The first time I used Kubuntu was in the first week of Febuarary of 2009, when I installed 9.04 Alpha. It never gave me any serious problems. Subsequent updates generally increased usibility and decreased deficiencies.

Focal is giving me a good start.

[jlittle]

A word of warning... a new Ubuntu-based release, early in the release process, will start not much different from the previous release. I imagine the repo is cloned, then the release devs set to work. A big, breaking, change can land at any time. I recall a Kubuntu that became unstable only about a week before the release date (at least on my hardware).

Thanks to the trail blazing work of the KDE Neon folks I'm not expecting KDE problems at any time in 20.04, but upstream in Ubuntu who knows. Running both as many do here keeps a foot in both camps, but keeping both up to date can be a chore.

[MeMyself]

I love the sound of the input in relation to 20.04! As someone who finally dumped Win10 and went full time Kubuntu, I'm excited to get to 20.04. I'm currently running 19.10 and love it. If I were to get brave and try upgrading is there a command line that I can use as I did for the move to 19.10? My one reservation as someone who loves running Beta and testing - is I have one program running in WINE that I'd be concerned about messing up. It had no problems with the upgrades to 19.04 or to 19.10, nor with the WINE upgrades to the weekly RC.

[NoWorries]

It is now 4 months to the release of Focal.

I am continuing to find this distribution very stable and have no hesitation to use it as my production system.

As I use the Pre-release updates with additional repositories for the latest kernel and plasma, I get:

	5 Months to go	4 Months to go
KDE Plasma Version	5.17.3	5.17.4
KDE Frameworks Version	5.64.0	5.65.0
QT Version	5.12.5	5.12.5
Kernel Version	5.4.0-6-generic	5.4.0-9-generic

As you can see, Focal LTS is advancing on all major fronts with the exception of the QT Version. This table only highlights the major developments, but I am very happy with the progress being made in other areas such as VLC, LibreOffice, Gimp and Kdenlive. As I use the improved features in these applications regularly, it is the main reason I always use the latest distribution.

[GreyGeek]

That's my evaluation as well. I was planning to wait until it went gold next March, but it is running so good I'll probably install it before New Year. My first Kubuntu was 9.04, which I installed in the last of January or 09, was rock solid and gave me no problems. Ditto for 14.04. So was 18.04. Seems to be a pattern!

[Don B. Cilly]

So I played with it a little more.
It looks rock solid, everything - admittedly not a lot, I didn't really install much stuff on it - worked perfectly.
I didn't notice any xapian index system freezes, kwin did not crash - which on 18.04 it tended to do for the first few runs, and then settle down - once.
Nvidia driver, it got the 430.50 at installation, no issues.
Even Baloo did not rear its fat head at all. Very smooth.

I almost decided to install all my stuff on it and start to use it at my main OS... except I'm kind of crazy, so I cannot have something called "Focal Fossa" running as an everyday tool