GNOME's Precarious Relationship With Ubuntu

43 thoughts on “GNOME's Precarious Relationship With Ubuntu”

• nixos mentioned, let's go! brodie, nixos video when?

• Explicit Sync is explicitly a bug fix and should have been patched in a long time ago.

• Sorta wish they aren't so rigorous in that department. I get the ick of making major changes in an LTS & the potential of something breaking, but I really hope they make the smart move and actually adopt it.
  And I hope that they actually expand the pool to other software when it comes to cases like this.

• Nixos ftw 🎉

• Canonical's overreliance on the 6 month cycle to this day is one of Ubuntu's pitfalls, and it should be more like Mint or Fedora

• My opinion on the matter is that users dissatisfied with a corpo decision should not be steered towards another corpo solution. Much less Fedora. Redhat already has enough power over Linux, any more concentration over there and the real danger of enshittification monopolies arises. Best steer dissatisfied corpo users to community distros.

• thank god, i need the spacebar heating to keep my house warm in the winter

• But it's not a Feature! it's a Bug!!! (?)

• mmm ubuntoes 😋

• Ubuntu explains its LTS and interim releases on its own website, from which we can determine their LTS users would expect not to have new hardware support added:
  "Ubuntu LTS releases receive 5 years of standard security maintenance for all packages in the ‘Main’ repository."
  "Interim releases will introduce new capabilities from Canonical and upstream open source projects, they serve as a proving ground for these new capabilities."

• Personally I'm blown away that GNOME has experimental settings at all :p

• That's how we get these exciting bugs like any windows started with x11 being clickable through (issue 3404). It is still going on for months and frustrates everyone who wants to get any work done, since it affects mail clients, browsers, games, music players, IDE tools 🙂 this LTS i learned to love, but it is giving me April's fool vibes. Valar Morghulis.

• As a Kubuntu user, what GNOME does generally is not something that I worry about. However, something like this could be shipped on 24.04.1.
  My main reasoning for this is because just how long LTS releases are supported, it makes little sense for something so important to be held off until the next LTS.

  But then, I just move to the next release of Kubuntu a month after release, just so I can have the newest base, but even on LTS I have a lot of newer versions of drivers, kernels and software from third party repositories.

• Am I correct thinking that the only thing making this a "feature" is that you have to turn it on? As I understand it, from a user perspective explicit sync basically boils down to adding the "unfuck NVIDIA cards" button.
  I can't imagine what workflows that could possibly break. I doubt anyone was relying on the presence of a race condition that flickers the screen.
  I think there are strong arguments for letting the update in.

• I think rules and rigity are fine but the Nvidia explicit sync will make so many peoples lives so much better and it will finally put to bed a major reason some folks won't use Linux. If you have an Nvdia card this is quite important. I think they need to make an exception for this as it's more fix then feature.

• Just don't use Gnome.
  And you'll have no gnome problems.

• LTS be damned. If you're an LTS user you need stability, and if the excplicit sync change is likely to break stuff for anyone, which I'm sure it is, 24.04 can stay at 46.0 for eternity… Well, until 26.04. Everyone else can get on the explicit sync wagon at 24.10. There's no problem. Also, Ubuntu hardly makes any changes to things anymore so each short term release should be pretty darn stable anyway.

• If Ubuntu isn't going to bring in a feature that's a huge stability improvement into their stability-focused release, then yeah, people are screwed. Ubuntu-people vs nvidia-users is less clear, but someone's going to suffer here. And frankly, "stable" shouldn't mean "never update". There absolutely is room in the Linux world for a distro that values updating to the latest version of stuff without adopting pipewire before it is battle-hardened. In this case, I think it's fair for Ubuntu to force some testing on gnome/mutter, but if it takes Ubuntu longer than a point-release or two of the LTS to get the GNOME update into LTS, it'd be really nice to see some documented test failures.

• You have a strange white noise in your audio, just fyj

• "this was granted by the technical board" isn't a phrase that I want on my computer. But "we can treat this as grandfathered" is t-shirtable

• Gnome don't find explicit sync to be a big feature, its just a small, tiny feature, almost like a bugfix. Ubuntu don't.

• loved the ending. did you try nixos before?

• Man, I get the whole concept of LTS being time tested packages with generally security updates, but yeesh, this is an important feature that involves proper hardware support. Maybe put in through an extra QA pass on the distro side, but release it with an expectation of rolling back if there is the unlikely event of a major issue because this kind of patch is not going to be the norm. I don't have a dog in this fight of course because… "I use Arch btw"

• So, basically Canonical wants a Gnome LTS version without new features in point releases?

• I still don't understand even you explaining it. Do the Canonical developers understand it themselves?

• The Royal Family is offended.

• It’s a big fix not a feature

• "…just get something that moves a little quicker, like Fedora"

  Quite the understatement

• Idj wgatvi justvwatched dotkrry im jistv Zinkdf

• If explicit sync may cause issues on hardware that was already working well without it, it should be kept out of stable release, but if this is supposed to fix a lot of issues on nvidia it should be included. Enabling for nvidia and disabling it for others is likely the right way for this.

• Gnome

• And canonical scrapped unity, they could have gone through the effort of Making it the first viable Wayland compositor and they wouldn't be butting heads with gnome

• GNOME point releases (such as 46.1) are comparable to KDE patches (micro releases) such as 6.0.4. in KDE there is definitely a rule of no major features in a patch release – you wait for the minor release for features.

• If only there was some sort of system where software, even a desktop environment, could be shipped when it was ready. Like something where these things could be Packed up into Flat files for easy download and version controlled even. But that's too much to ask for, it's not like you can Snap your fingers and have Ubuntu do something reasonable and standardized.

• Free Sync!

  Edit: If not for the fact that i already know that Brodie flips his camera, i would've roasted his handwriting on that 'y'

  Edit 2: im not sure anymore on which camera orientation is the canonical one

• Isn't the lack of explicit sync considered a bug by most Nvidia users on wayland? So whats is the problem? (This is a joke, I know it is way more complicated).

• Deciding for 10 years ahead ain't fun 🫠

• How strange that the one system a majority of LTS Ubuntu users depend on – the Desktop Environment – and without which most of your day-to-day application usage is severely limited is one of the few exceptions where the testing is less rigorous than the rest of the system. 🤔

• Exactly why when I started using Linux I switched from mint to fedora much as I did love mint. I wanted that still stable, simple to use, and more up to date software wise so I changed to fedora and been with it ever since

• IMO it's a big enough improvement (and the buggy behavior is bad enough for some people, myself included) that it qualifies more under a severe bug-fix label than a "feature".
  Even if it is technically a "new feature", it only matters because the preexisting pipeline was not functioning correctly.

  I don't think it's reasonable to make those who prefer to stick on a particular LTS release until it's EOL wait until 2027 to have a working graphics stack just because the solution wasn't quite ready until barely a month after the initial release window where many people still haven't switched.

  Just because some people don't know it's broken or it doesn't personally affect them doesn't mean it's not broken for many and it's unnecessary support burden unless there's demonstrable issues.

• rolling release cycles should be the standard for personal desktop systems.

• No, Canonical, you're a MicroReleaseException

• Don't let this distract you from the fact that GIMP 3 was announced for May 2024

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