Ubuntu MATE 18.04 - Progress so far

Since latest update OpenVPN does not work with 18.04 daily .
Worked ok before yesterday . It did not have notification of VPN connection , but it connected. Now after selecting OpenVPN connection profile from network manager, nothing happens . Hopefully it will be fixed in Alpha2 ? I want to stay on 18.04 to report bugs …

awesome…

IKRadulov is great hacker

Here are some things I’d like the next LTS to have:

  1. Caja - stable and robust; at present it grays out when attempting to display a directory with 1000s of items, or if a network I/O is occurring (I use PCManFM for any major file operations, but even it runs slow on 17.1)
  2. Eye of Mate - stable and robust; crashes all the time from large image files, not super large, in the ball park of 5-10 Mbs
  3. Cron - I have been running cloud backups manually because Cron does not work, from 16.04 onwards; please do not release without a properly tested Cron
  4. Dual Audio - can Mate remember my audio settings for me? I have an external audio device in addition to the onboard one, but I cannot get Pulse to remember my settings between reboots; it is a crapshoot whether it will recognize the device correctly and configure it as before (believe me, I googled and tinkered for days before I gave up) - when I have it manually configured right, it works perfectly, but I want to tell it, ‘Save Settings’ and be done with it
  5. Samba - can Mate mount my Samba shares for me? I have to do it manually from CLI every time I reboot (I have tried tinkering with fstab but haven’t gotten it to work - password perhaps?)

All of these things have been working in Windows for a very long time, and they don’t sound to me like difficult things to do technically, but I could be wrong about that. You have to understand, dumb ass users like me aren’t too impressed when you say, “Oh, that’s easy, just open a terminal and type in blah blah blah” — are you kidding me? You should NEVER tell users to open a terminal and type stuff in: that is not the mission of a desktop GUI.

I am comfortable with the CLI. I don’t mind occasional CLI use to install and configure something, but not for everyday stuff. I have a whole list of commands saved in a text file, for daily copy and paste convenience—thank goodness the terminal takes clipboard input!—but I want very much to STOP doing that. PLEASE liberate me from the CLI. I’ll take the permanent betaware feeling of the Linux desktop as a trade off for file system strength and faster speed generally, but daily use of CLI is too much.

I am very happy to hear no new features are being added to 18.04 in the interest of getting it stable. Very happy. Work hard at it, fellas, as if your bread and butter depended on it—tough thing to fake, but there it is.

Thanks again for everything, and good luck!

MATE 1.20 is already on daily builds :smile:

I can’t comment on #1 and #2.

Item number 3 - cron works correctly in 16.04. I’ve used the same scripts in cron since 10.04, no problems here.

Item number 4 - I routinely have 5, 6, or 7 audio devices connected. Pulse keeps track of all of them correctly in 16.04.

Item number 5 - There are problems with caja and samba in 16.04 and bionic development version with gvfs-smb-browse at least.

To make sure your problems get fixed, please file bug reports. Reported bugs do eventually get fixed.

djb

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anyone knows if 18.04 will be available for Raspberry pi too?

Can’t wait for working HiDPI :slight_smile:

Thanks for the reply, Dave Barnes. I could be wrong about exactly when Cron broke; maybe it was 16.1 instead. I remember Cron working fine before.

I have recently decided to switch to the Firefox browser, instead of Google Chrome. It is causing thermal shutdowns from excessive CPU usage! This is insane, people, what the heck is going on? This is a Core i7 which I almost never manage to push beyond 25% of CPU usage. Most of the time it is in the ballpark of 10% — with 2 Wine apps running, and sometimes a Windows 7 or 8.1 VM running. Now suddenly Firefox is hogging 75% of the CPU if the Flash plugin is enabled. What are we supposed to do, not use Youtube?

If the idea is to drive me back to Windows, it’s working!

Youtube works fine without flash. I’ve never installed Flash in the 2 or so years I’ve used Linux full-time and had uninstalled it long before that on the Mac I used before that.

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Neither did I install Flash on my Ubuntu MATE / Mint PCs / Windows PCs during the past 3+ years. If I need Flash I open Google Chrome (it comes with the Pepper-Flash plugin).

None of the sites I am visiting require Flash to play a video (YouTube does no require Flash! - see https://youtube-eng.googleblog.com/2015/01/youtube-now-defaults-to-html5_27.html)

@Isaiah_Sellassie: I would suggest to uninstall Flash if you do not require it for something specific:

sudo apt remove adobe-flashplugin flashplugin-installer

Afterwards, restart your computer - if required - and then visit the sites that previously required Flash.

Thanks for the reply, elcste. I have had my Youtube setting on HTML5 for a number of years. I do not understand this, “Youtube works fine without flash” — why does it show me a placeholder with a button for enabling Flash plugin?

Thanks for the reply, radax05. I may have to switch to Chrome for video as a workaround.

If you have Flash installed, Youtube will load it. (With click-to-activate, your browser still tells sites that you have Flash installed, otherwise it would never be used.) If you uninstall or deactivate it, then sites will use html5.

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It works! CPU usage is cool as ice. Thank you, elcste and radax05.

17.10 here and cron works perfectly.

Thanks for the reply, quonsar. I have a Java based app doing backups now, supplied by the cloud service provider. I still have use for one cron job backup on another computer running 17.1, so I’ll test it again.

Nope, Cron is not working on my 17.1.

Isaiah

Can you give us an example how cron fails … I’m curious.

Does it just not run the jobs you have set up? Any clues in the logs? Do
you have an email in your crontab so it can send the output to you?