Ubuntu 16.04.01 first glance

[littlegreen]

I am only making this thread to do some testing for @asiga
.... and to complain a little bit

AMD is being slow (as usual) on drivers. Besides I am not entirely getting why are the drivers from 15.10 not working on 16.04 LTS - they do share the same kernel after all...

Anyway, I did a fresh install (which is sluggish because on a laptop hard drive I had lying around) and "sudo update && sudo upgrade" , reboot, repeat - 3 times. Incremental updates are sometimes funny like that.

Suspend is working just fine for now. I have graphics acceleration from the default graphics driver, so maybe there is something behind that proprietary NVidia driver you are using? I am using an AMD card (for now). I probably will be able to report back this weekend when my 1070 finally arrives. Something weird from the "System information" though... here's a screenshot:

Completely forgot to mention what I thought was weird:

1. My Memory is obviously not 31.4 GB. It's reading wrong for some reason.
2. My root partition is 65536 Megabytes which should read as exactly 64 gigabytes.... hmm
3. Don't even get me started on how the GPU is recognized and displayed...

Please do post your results (and mention me if you can remember), I am curious as well.

From what I've found searching, vanilla Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with Z170 Skylake and with NVIDIA proprietary drivers, means hibernation+suspend don't work. It seems to be caused by a regression in the kernel. But 16.04 LTS was released months ago, and while I can understand that sometimes regressions happen, a crash/freeze when waking up is a critical failure that should have very high priority, and still hasn't been fixed after all these months.

It's not a rant against Linux, just that I was convinced that Linux was going to fix my current discomfort with new Apple strategies, but I just learnt that Linux has the same issues it used to have a decade ago.

 

[CaptainKernelPanic]

Unity is bloatware. XFCE for the win.

 

[asiga]

Definitely it seems the problems for suspend+hibernate are on some kernel incompatibility with the NVIDIA proprietary driver. I'll try either a new kernel and/or the tuxonice patched one to see if it fixes it.

Regarding the desktop, I choose Unity because I really need to be as close as possible to the MacOS UI.

From my research, Unity is the only desktop that provides window icons on the left together with the app menus at the top. While ElementaryOS might look more Mac-friendly, my conclusion is that they aim to be different from the Mac, which causes Unity to be closer to the Mac.

BTW, I also installed the older package manager (much more useful than the software center IMHO).

I also fixed the two switched keys from the Apple USB keyboard.

Things that I've still to do are:

-fix suspend+hibernate

-symbolic link to use open-xdg in a similar way to open in the Mac.

-try to get proper pairing and multitouch with the Magic Trackpad.

-symbolic links to use /home/myuser as /Users/myuser and /media/myusb as /Volumes/myusb, because that will ease my workflow.

-remove journaling in my external HPFS+ formatted drives so that they can be mounted RW in Ubuntu.

-Check if it's possible to use MS Office from 2007 or so under Wine (only for Excel and Word in my case).

-get a convenient way of "open terminal here" on the nautilus file manager.

-install clang

-investigate GNUstep but always having Unity as the desktop. Don't touch Unity, work with GNUstep in a user directory without touching any system files.

-keep an eye on Darling (OSX binary emulation layer)

-more stuff I don't remember.

 

[hemon]

I would like to use Ubuntu too but I have just one problem: Office 2016.

It works just over virtualbox and I think that this could be problematic because of stability and on laptops because of battery too.

Can anyone clarify this?

 

[thedocbwarren]

This is all good stuff. I'm managed to duplicate almost my workflow in Linux. The trackpad is the only thing I can't get reliably working as well as I'd like. The older model works better than the new one BTW.

I have not been able to get any kind of gestures as the framework that supported them is not unity compatible. Overall, though, I'm finally happy with the desktop experience. The only problem is when I need to compile out iOS apps but I have a real Mac Pro if I don't want to boot up the macOS partition. And Ironically my 5.1 Mac Pro beast is faster than the Hack, but uses a ridiculous amount of power (reason I built the Hack actually.)

I wish they would open up XCode or allow iOS development on Linux (fully.)

Definitely it seems the problems for suspend+hibernate are on some kernel incompatibility with the NVIDIA proprietary driver. I'll try either a new kernel and/or the tuxonice patched one to see if it fixes it.

Regarding the desktop, I choose Unity because I really need to be as close as possible to the MacOS UI.

From my research, Unity is the only desktop that provides window icons on the left together with the app menus at the top. While ElementaryOS might look more Mac-friendly, my conclusion is that they aim to be different from the Mac, which causes Unity to be closer to the Mac.

BTW, I also installed the older package manager (much more useful than the software center IMHO).

I also fixed the two switched keys from the Apple USB keyboard.

Things that I've still to do are:

-fix suspend+hibernate

-symbolic link to use open-xdg in a similar way to open in the Mac.

-try to get proper pairing and multitouch with the Magic Trackpad.

-symbolic links to use /home/myuser as /Users/myuser and /media/myusb as /Volumes/myusb, because that will ease my workflow.

-remove journaling in my external HPFS+ formatted drives so that they can be mounted RW in Ubuntu.

-Check if it's possible to use MS Office from 2007 or so under Wine (only for Excel and Word in my case).

-get a convenient way of "open terminal here" on the nautilus file manager.

-install clang

-investigate GNUstep but always having Unity as the desktop. Don't touch Unity, work with GNUstep in a user directory without touching any system files.

-keep an eye on Darling (OSX binary emulation layer)

-more stuff I don't remember.

 

[asiga]

I would like to use Ubuntu too but I have just one problem: Office 2016.

It works just over virtualbox and I think that this could be problematic because of stability and on laptops because of battery too.

Can anyone clarify this?

I don't know about that. Note that you can probably use it through web. Anyway, I don't like Office 2016, so my goal is to get some older release working through Wine rather than Virtualbox, if that's possible.

The trackpad is the only thing I can't get reliably working as well as I'd like. The older model works better than the new one BTW.

I have not been able to get any kind of gestures as the framework that supported them is not unity compatible.

My Magic Trackpad is the version without force touch. I believe it's the first version. BTW, regarding gestures, if you are talking about touchegg, I've read that on Ubuntu 16.04 you need to start it before X11 starts, or something like that (I don't remember exactly, I must search for it again). Also, I found a detailed post explaining how to get dual pairing Linux<>OS X on a machine with dual boot. Not sure if it will work, though, because my BT dongle seems to be dead in Ubuntu if I don't unplug and plug it again.

I wish they would open up XCode or allow iOS development on Linux (fully.)

The Darling project seems to be getting close to be able to run an Xcode build chain from the Terminal (not GUI, just Terminal). It doesn't work yet, but if they achieve to get it working, then it will be possible to crosscompile to iOS from the command line.

 

[littlegreen]

If memory serves Office 2007 used to install flawlessly and run Great with Wine!

I have not tried running Office on top of Ubuntu for a while though. I very rarely switch my Office environment, so I guess I probably won't be attempting that anytime soon anyway. (I mean I went from Office XP to Office 2007 ....)

I do not own a trackpad of any kind, so I am pretty much useless about that.

Regarding graphics - my 1070 should arrive tomorrow at some point - I will install the nVidia proprietary driver and report back with the sleep / suspend functions - which for now are both working just fine. (Kernel 4.4, Radeon 7770)

 

[pgriss]

My biggest annoyance with Ubuntu right now is that the basic keyboard shortcuts are different from OSX, so when I switch between the two I always hit the wrong key. If anyone has any tips on how to fix this, even partially, I'd be very interested.

Chief among my grievances is that the CMD key's functionality in OSX is provided by the CTRL key in Linux. For example, copy/paste is CMD+C/CMD+V on OSX and CTRL+V/CTRL+V on Linux. And since I am using a Windows keyboard, the "CMD" key is actually the Windows key.

One way to solve this would be to map the Windows key to CTRL but I couldn't find a good way to do that (I messed a bit with xmodmap but I didn't have much luck...).

 

[asiga]

Update: I updated my kernel to 4.8.15, and now suspend+hibernate "almost work". The only problem now is that it resumes with the second monitor off and the primary monitor with a wrong resolution and with the mouse cursor offset to the right from its true position. If I unplug the second monitor and plug it again, then both monitors work fine again (I use two monitors).

Any idea on what might be causing this? BTW, I'm using 375.26 NVIDIA proprietary drivers, with Pascal Titan X.

BTW, littlegreen, I'm also seeing 31.4 GB in the system details...

Second update: Ooops, I tried to suspend again, and it didn't resume. It's still broken in the 4.8.15 kernel. Or it's the 375.26 drivers. Or maybe it's a problem with dual monitors. No idea on how to proceed next.

 

[asiga]

My biggest annoyance with Ubuntu right now is that the basic keyboard shortcuts are different from OSX, so when I switch between the two I always hit the wrong key. If anyone has any tips on how to fix this, even partially, I'd be very interested.

Chief among my grievances is that the CMD key's functionality in OSX is provided by the CTRL key in Linux. For example, copy/paste is CMD+C/CMD+V on OSX and CTRL+V/CTRL+V on Linux. And since I am using a Windows keyboard, the "CMD" key is actually the Windows key.

One way to solve this would be to map the Windows key to CTRL but I couldn't find a good way to do that (I messed a bit with xmodmap but I didn't have much luck...).

This is also in my todo list (it fits on the item named "more stuff I don't remember" )

There're several approaches to tuning the modifier keys behavior, I need to investigate that, and choose the approach that more conveniently resembles the Mac.

But I won't be doing any other thing from the todo list until I find a fix for suspend+hibernate. This is my first priority because it might need kernel changes or other system stuff, and because I won't be using Ubuntu daily until hibernate works.