Episode: 3576
Title: HPR3576: First impressions of Ubuntu 22.04 as a daily driver.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3576/hpr3576.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 01:38:07

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3576 from Monday the 18th of April 2022.
Today's show is entitled, First Impressions of Ubuntu 22.04 as a daily driver.
It is hosted by night-wise, and is about 23 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, night-wise gives his first impressions on the latest LTS release of Ubuntu.
Hey there, Hacker Public Radio.
This is nightwise from thenightwise.com podcast checking in.
I know I wanted to tell you about my latest geeky exploits.
I have been playing around with the latest version of Ubuntu 22.04.
It's set to release at the end of April, but I decided to go a little early, jump the gun.
Jump the shark?
I don't know what you say.
And install it on my Lenovo X1 laptop.
I use Linux mostly as a daily driver, actually, when it comes down to doing this stuff that
I do.
I'm a freelance consultant, I work from home, I have my own company which has most of
its stuff in the cloud, and the clients that I work for mostly have Citrix or cloud-based
environments.
So as a remote worker, I can just kind of pick whatever operating system works best for
me.
And, you know, Ubuntu is pretty sweet there.
Linux is pretty sweet there.
Told you about my little setup in my previous podcast.
Now this week, I wanted to, as I said, try 22.04 because I had been hearing some good
things about it.
Before I start, I want to say what I think about Ubuntu or Ubuntu, or however you call it.
I've been using it since 2005.
I listened to the Slashtop Review podcast in the day, and I still remember very lively
its host.
Any Mekaski talking about this Ubuntu podcast with this high-end accent rolling in
office tongue and telling us about this new version of Linux that was out and that
would, you know, probably just work.
I've been in distro hopping quite a bit by then.
I got introduced to Linux in the early 2000s and had been doing the, yes, I'm going
to try Linux and yes, I'm going to see that it all works and yes, I'm going to stick
with it.
But I was in this phase where you would install a distro play around with it and then you
would bump into some error or some feature that you just couldn't get working.
That could be hardware support or something simple like MP3 play a back, which just, you
know, sometimes it would work.
And I've been hopping around from Susie to Mancharo to Manray, to whatever, back then.
And I hadn't settled on any permanent distribution as yet.
That changed when I got in contact.
When I got infected by the Ubuntu bug and I've been around the operating system ever since,
using it as, well, not a daily driver, secondary driver, mostly.
And I've been enjoying it quite a bit.
Now with 2204, I did something that I normally don't do.
I don't download betas, I don't mess around.
I'm not a bug tracer or a bug hunter, I don't report bugs.
I should, but I just don't have the time of the focus for it because my philosophy is
that technology just needs to work for you.
And I cannot afford to spend hours and hours and hours tinkering to get something operational
and stable.
It just has to work, especially when it's on a production system.
Now, when it comes down to just fapping about with computers, okay, I'll take an experimental
Linux here and something that's not really cooked yet and just install it and see how it looks.
Why not?
So, I downloaded the installer and I've earned it to a USB stake using Rufus.
Rufus is a Windows application that I run on my Windows machine that lets you install.
ISOs on a USB stake.
And one of the reasons I sometimes like to work with this app is that you can set a persistent
volume to your install.
And that makes for a very interesting experience because not only do you have a live CD or
a live image that you can, with a USB stake, pop in anywhere.
This also allows you to store data on there and have all the settings and the applications
that you install remain persistent on the stick, basically giving you a computer on
the go.
Not this, though, no persistent volume required.
I just wanted to install it and see how it went and that I did.
Popped it in, booted up the thingpad, master the entry key to like at the boot menu, booted
off the USB stake and the install started and it didn't go anywhere.
I had to enter my username and my password and stuff like that, but when it came down
to after formatting the hard drive, copying down the applications and the data, it just hung
somewhere.
Reds and funky error codes and basically the dialog screen said it was stuck on, it's
stalling the Firefox snap, which has been quite controversial and so it didn't go anywhere.
Right again, same thing and then I went like, you know, let's just do the very minimum.
So instead of installing the third party extra and downloading the updates, I just went
with a very minimal install and no internet connectivity.
Punched again, you know, didn't install again, chose only to download a minimum install,
no internet connection and zoom it went, just fine.
One of the reasons I mostly was playing around with the Installer was because I wanted
to give the new, known look a little once over because I heard that, you know, they've
fets around with the color screen and did some stuff there.
But I just wanted to have a look because I was not planning on sticking around on this
distro at all.
I don't like no, I really, I'm really sorry, I'm not one of these people who is getting
into the desktop wars, this, you know, this UI is better than that UI, UI for me has to
get out of the way.
It's the applications and the things that I do with them that is important, the UI has
to be able to give me access to it, but that's about it.
Most of the Linux installs that I do, I install, I make sure that all of the launch bars
and everything are out of the way and that I have my own launcher, which is an app called
CUPFA, that's KU-P-F-E-R, it's German for copper, as a launcher, which is basically, you
mash the super key and whatever and you get a little text bar and you enter whatever data
and application in there and it just launches.
I like my own launcher, when I'm on a Mac, I use the Finder, when I'm on Windows, I just
use the super key, I don't really pay a lot of attention to the way things look, things
have to look nice, but they have to be responsive.
Here's my little gripe with known for the last couple of, I don't know, iterations, I
feel sluggish, just teeny, teeny, teeny lag, but it was like, no, yeah, do this, okay,
no, yeah, do this, okay, but it was this little, this little, you know, pause between asking
you to do something, no, and that responded like, no, no, yeah, like it was, like it's,
it was doing something else, it was, you know, I don't know, reading twice, or whatever
and you just, it felt like you were waking it up and it became pretty attentive, but still
I felt like it lacked, and maybe it was just, you know, in my head, it's perception,
it's feeling, could be, but that's why I kind of shone away from it.
Now I have learned that moving to secondary, or non-primary flavored UIs does get you into
trouble with hardware support from time to time, I've especially noticed this with mate,
looks like old-school known, pretty responsive, guess out of the way,
hardware support, not that good, I mean the Bluetooth agent in maint is downright terrible,
found budgie, why did you work, why did you work fine, and I've also tried
mint with cinnamon, also worked fine, great hardware support, very happy there, but no, yeah,
so I decided to give it a go, boot it up the machine, and it was, you know, looking at the new
gnome, which looks fine, press the super key a couple of times, and it looked quite responsive,
so I decided, you know, let's just, you know, take as far as it goes, and do all the updates,
connected to the internet, did all the updates, downloaded a slew of updates, even though I
downloaded the daily build, so there's a lot of active development there, and great, it was there,
it was fast, oil was fast, and I was pretty impressed by the look, I was pretty impressed by the speed,
and I might like wow gnome, you're really paying attention now, hard way, and it was great,
so I decided, let's take this one step further, let's see how far this OS goes before it breaks,
because this is basically what I was planning to do this afternoon, just, you know, download a beta,
play around with beta, break the beta, and go do something else, come back in three weeks,
and I've got this little bash installer script that installs all of the apps that I use on a daily
basis, and it's not an elegant script, it's an ugly script, it looks like, you know, the command
line version of a cave painting, you know, but I'm not a coder, I just write and bash the commands
that I use to type in manually, and I just run them, so it installs all of the favorite apps that I've
got, and there are a couple of command line apps on there, you might want to check out the
Nightwise.com podcast, for that I did a show on my favorite command line apps, and it was,
it was, I went like, you know, I'll just run the script, go get coffee and see where it breaks,
it didn't break anywhere, it just installed everything, it installed all the apps that I wanted,
it installed all of the graphical apps that I wanted, it connected to all the repositories,
third party repositories that I set up, it did all the things, it installed the snaps,
it installed the Python 3 layer, it installed all the apps that I installed using PIP,
and it did all the tweaks that I do, I was just there, I don't want like, oh, the script ran
without any errors, that would be like, yay me, and also, you know, yay distro, and I decided
you don't want this, now it's going to be fun, now we're going to launch these apps, and these
apps are just going to crash, because this operating system isn't done yet, I've been taking
the cookies out of the oven before, they're done, well, I was in for a surprise because
everything just worked, and I'm talking about, you know, everything, all the apps that I chose,
boom, no dependency errors, everything worked from the get-go, and pretty soon, in about, I don't
know, 20 minutes, I could do on this experimental beta release of Ubuntu 2204 on the laptop,
what I could do with my super stable budget install on my desktop, 2004, based on 2004,
I was impressed, I was really impressed, decided to take it up one more notch and go with some
apps that I hadn't installed on any systems yet, and I've been looking around for an application
that allows me to sync my OneDrive, yes, yes, I am an Office 365, but I run my own business,
I'm not a bearded geek, living in a trailer with a shotgun on the wall behind him, and I don't know,
yelling, get off my lawn and chugging beer, no, no, I'm a consultant, so I have to work in the cloud,
get with a program, and that means that I've got my personal OneDrive, my Office 365 OneDrive,
actually, where I do a lot of my, where I store a lot of my data, because sometimes I'm on my
network and my machines, but sometimes I'm on the machines of clients or on the networks of clients,
so having access to this OneDrive is pretty crucial to me, there's a lot of workflows that
cross that path when I want to get things done, and for the life of me, I can't remember the name
of the app, but I will put it in the show, I promise, download it, it actually costs 15 euros,
or 15 dollars, which is, you know, like, three euros, I don't know, I don't know, the exchange rate
at the moment, it'll be something like 10, like 12 euros or something, 50 bucks, but you can run
it as a trial, this will be the very first time I'm actually paying for Linux software,
and even that worked, and behold, it even allowed me to sync some of my personal SharePoint sites,
so before I knew it, I had this machine cobbled together that ran Linux,
and did all of the things I wanted it to do in order for me to get my stuff done,
and it was an experimental pre-release version of Ubuntu,
so aside from being pretty impressed by this, and really wanting to take this machine to work with me,
which haven't got a chance to do today, but I'll probably play around with it pretty soon,
you know, taking it into a production environment, see how it goes, I have to say, you know,
Linux has come a long way, it's been, you know, 18 years since I've found out about Ubuntu,
and Linux has been around for quite a while, and in the beginning, my frustration with Linux was
that it was super geeky, and I love working with it, and it was really something different,
but if you had a question to the community, it would be helpful, but in the beginning,
there were real jerks, you know, you would, as a new poser question, and get a bunch of bearded,
or maybe unbearing guys, in the news groups back then, there was no social media, you know,
kind of flipping you off, going like, go away new, and there's no room for us on, for graphical
user interfaces, and you have to do everything with command line, and you know, they would be really
neat, Ubuntu, and the maturity of Linux changed that, the support got better, the hardware support
got better, and then there was this massive fragmentation of distros, you know, everybody was
spinning their own distro, and for the longest time, I have found this fascinating, but I have
noticed or thought that the attention, I don't know, talks about this on the podcast before,
the attention of the developing community is going towards shiny things, you know,
you know, oh, look at this, look at this distro, oh, it looks good, look at this distro, oh, it
looks good, I have my own distro, it looks a little bit different, it was like going to a
car tuning show, and everybody would have a Ford Fiesta, and everybody would tune differently,
but, you know, all of the quirks that you have with a Ford Fiesta, or whatever car you want,
we're still there, because nobody was fixing stuff under the hood, we're never just making a
shiny, and I thought that a lot, and I still think that a lot of attention of the developers
is going into shiny things, into different distros, and Linux is fragmented because of it,
that's one of the reasons I have tried to stick to the main distros, try to stay as close to
the main releases of a distribution as I could, you know, with Ubuntu, I tried to stick to Nome,
I didn't go for some kind of experimental flavor out there that some kid build,
you know, kudos to the kid building your own distro, wow, but I'm here for the long term,
this has to work for me, and for that reason I got frustrated with Linux, I went
like, come on guys, you know, we have 25 shiny distros out there, but I dare you to pair a Bluetooth
mouse on a Lenovo X1 using Mate, you'll be thrown back into the 90s because that part of the operating
system, or that part of the hardware support, doesn't get any love, because we're all looking at
Shell, so with Ubuntu, I have found out, or I have learned to experience that, yes, there is
attention to detail, attention to the form and to the way things look, but that is not a
differentiating factor, the hardware support in the core is still good, and that is something that we
need to focus on, and that is something that's sticking to a mainstream distro, and you know,
Ubuntu gets a lot of flak, because yeah, and it's close source packages, and it's not free
on Libre, but I'm not going to run Slack, where I'm not going to compile my own distro, I don't
have freaking time for that, I want to work with Linux, not play around with Linux endlessly,
going like, yay, my car starts, yeah, are you taking it anywhere hell now, I drive my Linux
machine to work every day if I can, so yeah, I was impressed that even a beta release of Ubuntu
2020 full delivered a long-term support of a distribution that was not even ready yet,
but didn't manage to give me a productive system. The end question is always, is this the year of
the Linux desktop, hell no, it'll never be the year of the Linux desktop, the year of the Linux
desktop has come on by, because people are no longer focused towards desktops, they are focused
towards applications, they are focused towards compatibility with their platforms in the cloud,
I went to the garage, the car salesman, to buy a new car, one of my, I was overhearing one of the
other salesman's, pitching a car to this 80-year-old girl, and she had a grandfather with her,
and it was this beautiful mesh of technology where, sorry to go off topic just before the end
of the show, but bear with me here, they went to buy a little Fiat 500, which is an amazing little
car, and she brought her grandfather, this guy was boomer in his late 50s or something,
he was a, you know, grandpa knows something about cars, and this car salesman was pitching
this semi-electric Fiat 500 to it, where this guy was totally stunned that, you know, the engine,
you know, watch, it's impossible, you know, that's not an engine, that's a toy, I don't know,
you can get this on that, and you know, the technology of the engine was totally different,
as to the cars he used to buy, it's not about power anymore, it's not about this, it's about that,
it's about, you know, being green, and being fuel efficient, and stuff like that,
even like, okay, and then he looked at this girl, and this girl said, can I ask you a question?
Yeah, does it run Spotify?
Backtrack here, does it run Spotify? That was what this little girl was
concerned with, and the same thing rings true for operating systems, and for computers,
does it run the platforms that I use? Is it compatible with the stuff that I have already
committed to in the cloud? That can be my Spotify account, that can be my Office 365 account,
that can be my Netflix, that can be my whatever, is it compatible with that?
How it looks, what car it has, is fine, but whether it's a Mac, a Windows, a Linux machine,
an Android telephone, an iOS telephone, a tablet, a smart refrigerator, or television set,
if it's compatible with the platforms that the users are committed to, then it has a chance
of survival. So there's a year of the Linux desktop is coming back, because all of the platforms,
all of the operating systems are out there, are compatible with the platforms, and if you have one,
it's some kind of free, open, Libre,
sandal wearing, version of distro, that is completely free, but doesn't work with anything,
you don't stand a chance, it's not about freedom, it's not about open code, it's about stuff that
connects with the platforms that you use, and if those platforms are closed,
if those platforms are closed, if those companies are evil, users don't care, users want something
that works. So for me, in that 2204 distro that I've installed just worked, really happy about it,
and you might want to take a look at it, check it out, and see if Linux would work for you too.
It's just nightwise of thenightwise.com podcast, signing off, talking to anybody out there that
still has a microphone, and some time, and some geeky stuff to tell us, please record a show,
upload it to the queue, and make Acro Public Radio, I don't know, great again, probably not.
Make it, make it interesting, yeah, yeah, do that, see you guys, bye-bye.
You have been listening to Acro Public Radio, and Acro Public Radio does work.
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