The Ubuntu 5.04 distribution was a very comfortable desktop environment. Using Gnome 2, it was very fast and reliable. Now we have MATE, but I miss the simplicity of the older Ubuntu releases, Ubuntu 13.04 was very bad, but now it is picking up again, even though the Systemd init system is not as good as the very old Linux init systems. It is not as easy to run a system with the text console only. The old /etc/inittab file is not used anymore, but the possibility exists to turn off unwanted services and somewhat emulate the behaviour of older systems. But I fear that Linux is getting too complicated, they are fixing things that are not broken. That is the price of progress I guess. The main strength of Linux is the hardware support, and that has gotten much better due to the amount of drivers in the kernel, and the firmware added to Linux. it is very easy to get a TV dongle working on Linux now, compared to the old days. And software like Kaffeine that supports DVB tuning. This makes multimedia very simple.
At least, we have projects to bring back KDE 2.2 to Linux, and the aforementioned MATE desktop environment that supports old Gnome 2 themes. Professional software such as Davinci Resolve is available for Linux machines, this allows pro level video editing on Linux. That is great. it has its problems, but it can be coaxed into working. Lightworks is another video editor that can be run on Linux natively, and is very good at creating nice videos. So, Linux is getting there in terms of available software, but it needs better support from the software companies that release this software. At least Arma 3 is available for Linux, but it is lagging behind Windows in releases and therefore users on Linux cannot play online. That is a shame. And I have found it to be unstable compared to the Windows version. Ubuntu is slower to boot these days, with many services loading on boot, it really needs a speed up badly.
4.4 Thu Oct 24 jason@Yog-Sothoth 0: $ systemd-analyze critical-chain
The time after the unit is active or started is printed after the “@” character.
The time the unit takes to start is printed after the “+” character.
graphical.target @1min 20.338s └─multi-user.target @1min 20.338s └─snapd.seeded.service @55.286s +24.481s └─snapd.service @1min 14.480s +5.281s └─basic.target @40.432s └─sockets.target @40.432s └─snapd.socket @40.367s +64ms └─sysinit.target @40.366s └─swap.target @40.366s └─dev-mapper-fedora\x2dswap.swap @40.359s +7ms └─dev-mapper-fedora\x2dswap.device @40.358s |
This should not happen these days, it should be simple to load your operating system very fast, but sadly, this is not the case. The Snapd service is slowing down my system, and I am using an LTS release, so sudo do-release-upgrade does not help. But this is time to maybe turn off this service if I do not really need it.