24.04 LTS - Not to shabby!

[TheFu]

Hello,

I'm reading this a lot in the forums and I cannot understand it. I do not have gdebi as well in my system, yet, if I want to install/check a deb file I double click it and it installs fine. I can follow the terminal way as well, yet I do not understand all this fuss about not being able to install deb files in newer/newest versions. Am I missing something? I'm using ubuntu 24.04 by the way.

Regards!

I could be wrong, but since nobody else has tried to answer, the issue is that in other releases, installing a .deb file COULD be accomplished using the built-in GUI and in 24.04, that isn't working. Some say it is a bug and others say it is intentional. I don't know which. It isn't something I do very often for reasons outlined in my post just above.

Gdebi has been a GUI method available to install .deb files for a long time - at least 15 yrs, perhaps much longer, but it isn't pre-installed, or integrated into software center or other package management tools. Gdebi looks at each .deb file for dependencies and resolves those dependencies by installing the needed packages, if possible.

apt-get has never supported installing .deb files directly. apt added that capability a few years after it was released and that capability has been working for some time, handling .deb file dependencies as needed (if possible). dpkg was the "official" way to install .deb files, but dpkg doesn't handle dependencies at all. It is low level and assumes the admin knows what they are doing. These are all CLI tools. Typical users want to avoid the CLI if they can, which makes perfect sense.

Anyway, that's what I think the complaint is about, but I could be wrong.

Casual users of Linux often do things the hard way and type far to much. They don't know about tab-completion or how to use regex to let the shell find files. There's pretty much no reason to mistype any filename in Unix/Linux and hasn't been since the mid-1990 when tab-completion became a standard in the modern shells. If you don't know and use tab-completion in all your shell commands, you are likely doing it the hard, error-prone, way. Tab-completion is one of those things that is hard to explain in text but trivial to learn and use with audio+video demonstrations in under 30 seconds. After knowing about it, using it constantly for the first week to ingrain that method is needed. After that, it is muscle memory and happens automatically.

About 1 in 100 uses, tab-completion doesn't work for some reason. That where using regex patterns for filenames comes in. I also use regex to feed multiple files with the same pattern into batch processing tools.

Don't do things the hard way. It is painful to watch.

[BBQdave]

...if I want to install/check a deb file I double click it and it installs fine. I can follow the terminal way as well...

My experience too And 24.04 LTS is very responsive - fast. I'm impressed too with this release.

I appreciate the information provided by TheFu, as I update the system (and snaps) through CLI.

Ubuntu is providing a very nice experience with this release

[gezzer2]

@TheFu
not being able to install .deb files seems to be intentional for 'security' reasons. here is an article on it.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/04/...24-04-released

it would seem Ubuntu are going to push snaps relentlessly ..

[Claus7]

Hello,

I could be wrong, but since nobody else has tried to answer, the issue is that in other releases, installing a .deb file COULD be accomplished using the built-in GUI and in 24.04, that isn't working. Some say it is a bug and others say it is intentional. I don't know which. It isn't something I do very often for reasons outlined in my post just above.

Gdebi has been a GUI method available to install .deb files for a long time - at least 15 yrs, perhaps much longer, but it isn't pre-installed, or integrated into software center or other package management tools. Gdebi looks at each .deb file for dependencies and resolves those dependencies by installing the needed packages, if possible.

apt-get has never supported installing .deb files directly. apt added that capability a few years after it was released and that capability has been working for some time, handling .deb file dependencies as needed (if possible). dpkg was the "official" way to install .deb files, but dpkg doesn't handle dependencies at all. It is low level and assumes the admin knows what they are doing. These are all CLI tools. Typical users want to avoid the CLI if they can, which makes perfect sense.

Anyway, that's what I think the complaint is about, but I could be wrong.

Casual users of Linux often do things the hard way and type far to much. They don't know about tab-completion or how to use regex to let the shell find files. There's pretty much no reason to mistype any filename in Unix/Linux and hasn't been since the mid-1990 when tab-completion became a standard in the modern shells. If you don't know and use tab-completion in all your shell commands, you are likely doing it the hard, error-prone, way. Tab-completion is one of those things that is hard to explain in text but trivial to learn and use with audio+video demonstrations in under 30 seconds. After knowing about it, using it constantly for the first week to ingrain that method is needed. After that, it is muscle memory and happens automatically.

About 1 in 100 uses, tab-completion doesn't work for some reason. That where using regex patterns for filenames comes in. I also use regex to feed multiple files with the same pattern into batch processing tools.

Don't do things the hard way. It is painful to watch.

My experience too And 24.04 LTS is very responsive - fast. I'm impressed too with this release.

I appreciate the information provided by TheFu, as I update the system (and snaps) through CLI.

Ubuntu is providing a very nice experience with this release

thank you for your responses.

Regards!

[TheFu]

@TheFu
not being able to install .deb files seems to be intentional for 'security' reasons. here is an article on it.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/04/...24-04-released

it would seem Ubuntu are going to push snaps relentlessly ..

Thanks for the link.

Snaps seem like a great way to manage powerful IoT devices so that end-users don't need to remember to patch anything and get updates within a week or so. For many people, that's fantastic on their desktops. Make the OS immutable (Google did this with ChromeOS on the chromebooks), then use snaps for **100%** of software installed to a system. With Snap packages, there are always 2 copies, if not 3. I've tried to delete the 2nd Snap package after an update comes out AND is proven not to be bad, but that's impossible. Initially, snaps retained 3 copies (current, N-1, N-2), but we could change that manually to be use 2 copies (current, N-1).

But for people who want more control, snaps suck. There's little that Canonical can do to make that group happy, since snaps take away so much local control over how a program is allowed to behave, where it has access and a few other things. To me, Snaps are like Unity that isn't the answer for everyone and needs to be 100% optional without too much effort to have or not to have them.

More and more Ubuntu is becoming distro that does what Canonical thinks everyone should want to do, not actually what people do want to do. As flexibility continues to erode, some users will choose other distros. That could be a good thing for Canonical as a business. I don't think anyone wants them to fail and snap with IoT-like management for IoT devices AND desktops AND servers may fill a business need. Hard to tell at this point, but they are trying some bold choices on all of us, like they do every 5-10 yrs.

RedHat has backed Flatpaks, only wants them used for Desktop Applications, AND provides local control over the constraints. No RedHat server will have a Flatpak installed or running by default. It is a different philosophy.

Of course, there are lots of parts in Linux distros that are fixing problems I've never had, so it is frustrating when new things are forced, not just suggested, onto us.

I haven't said this yet, but last week I installed Xubuntu and Lubuntu 24.04 and discovered some things that will never allow it to be production on hardware here. LVM with custom layers won't be supported by the installer. For that reason alone, I'll never use 24.04 on any real hardware. I tried to get a simple, custom, LVM layout working with both installs and failed. After screwing around in front of about 20 people watching my attempts, I decided to stop, start over and just click next-->next-->next-->next accepting all defaults for the installs. The installs were using a virtual machine hosted on a 20.04 KVM/QEMU box using virt-manager. This version complains that it doesn't know about 24.04 as an OS. I've never seen that be an issue before. It complained more loudly. The vHDD was an LVM LV created for each new install sitting on an NVMe SSD. Inside the VM, it was just like any other block device. This is a common way to use LVM storage for VMs. Very fast. No file systems in the way. No qcow file or vdmk or vdi ... just a raw device as an LV.

I used the same hardware for both installs. 4GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 25G of vHDD and virtio for the NIC. Both installs choose QXL as the display driver.

Xubuntu - default install. After it finished (about 10 minutes), it asked to reboot via <enter>. That didn't work. Ended up forcing the VM off and manually starting it. Came up in about 15 seconds. I logged in, opened a terminal to see how much storage was taken by the install. Tried to grab the terminal window to move it on the screen and the system locked up. Force-Reset (using VM controls). Login again. It was a little faster, opened a terminal, but waited a bit before trying to move it. That worked. Resized the screen/display to be better for the remote viewers, opened the browser, saw that it worked, went through some settings with help from the peanut gallery who use XFCE and changed to a dark mode, and set my desired Focus-follow-mouse policy. Used the system for a few minutes, then it locked up again. Decided Xubuntu 24.04 wasn't ready for production use. The LUG meeting moved on to other topics. I wiped the VM and LV storage.

Lubuntu - the next day - default install after failing to get LVM going at all. Install was fast. Boot is fast. No lockups. Quite useable and I didn't notice any slowdowns at all.
Here's the virtual hardware:

$ inxi -bz
System:
  Kernel: 6.8.0-31-generic arch: x86_64 bits: 64
  Desktop: LXQt v: 1.4.0 Distro: Lubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat)
Machine:
  Type: Kvm System: QEMU product: Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9, 2009) v: pc-q35-4.2
    serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: N/A model: N/A serial: N/A BIOS: SeaBIOS v: 1.13.0-1ubuntu1.1
    date: 04/01/2014
CPU:
  Info: single core AMD EPYC-Milan [UP] speed (MHz): 4200
Graphics:
  Device-1: Red Hat Virtio 1.0 GPU driver: virtio-pci v: 1
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 21.1.11 driver: X: loaded: modesetting
    unloaded: fbdev,vesa dri: swrast gpu: virtio-pci resolution: 1440x900~75Hz
  API: OpenGL v: 4.5 vendor: mesa v: 24.0.5-1ubuntu1 renderer: llvmpipe
    (LLVM 17.0.6 256 bits)
Network:
  Device-1: Red Hat Virtio 1.0 network driver: virtio-pci
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 25 GiB used: 6.86 GiB (27.4%)
Info:
  Memory: total: 4 GiB available: 3.82 GiB used: 829.9 MiB (21.2%)
  Processes: 181 Uptime: 9m Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.34

Storage details:

$ df -Th -x tmpfs
Filesystem     Type  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1      ext4   25G  6.9G   17G  30% /

Swap/Memory:

$ free -hm
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           3.8Gi       895Mi       2.5Gi        17Mi       648Mi       3.0Gi
Swap:          511Mi          0B       511Mi

How fast is the boot? 7 seconds. That's before any tuning AND with avahi and snap stuff still installed/running.

$ systemd-analyze 
Startup finished in 2.704s (kernel) + 4.186s (userspace) = 6.891s 
graphical.target reached after 4.137s in userspace.

$ systemd-analyze critical-chain 
The time when unit became active or started is printed after the "@" >
The time the unit took to start is printed after the "+" character.

graphical.target @4.137s
└─multi-user.target @4.137s
  └─snapd.seeded.service @2.224s +1.913s
    └─basic.target @1.783s
      └─sockets.target @1.782s
        └─spice-vdagentd.socket @4.057s
          └─sysinit.target @1.763s
            └─snapd.apparmor.service @1.324s +438ms
              └─apparmor.service @760ms +553ms
                └─local-fs.target @751ms
                  └─snapd.mounts.target @750ms
                    └─var-snap-firefox-common-host\x2dhunspell.mount >
                      └─dev-vda1.device @211ms +2.495s

$ systemd-analyze blame 
2.495s dev-vda1.device
1.913s snapd.seeded.service
1.664s accounts-daemon.service
1.635s snapd.service
1.599s apport.service
1.576s logrotate.service
1.525s rsyslog.service
1.267s polkit.service
1.260s dpkg-db-backup.service
1.201s gpu-manager.service
1.098s udisks2.service
1.025s avahi-daemon.service
 794ms systemd-networkd.service
 769ms grub-common.service
,,,

And the list of default snap packages:

$ snap list
Name               Version          Rev    Tracking         Publisher   Notes
bare               1.0              5      latest/stable    canonical✓  base
core22             20240408         1380   latest/stable    canonical✓  base
firefox            125.0.2-1        4173   latest/stable/…  mozilla✓    -
firmware-updater   0+git.5007558    127    latest/stable/…  canonical✓  -
gnome-42-2204      0+git.510a601    176    latest/stable/…  canonical✓  -
gtk-common-themes  0.1-81-g442e511  1535   latest/stable/…  canonical✓  -
snapd              2.62             21465  latest/stable    canonical✓  snapd

That seems strange, since Lubuntu has been based on Qt since 20.04. Why would any Gnome/GTK+ stuff be installed at all?

I purged network-manager and setup a static IP using a netplan YAML file. I didn't remove systemd-resolved like I normally would. If there is any issue, it will be gone. It does point at my LAN DNS servers, however.

Lubuntu 24.04 has been good, though I'm not a fan of boated GUIs at all. My next step is to add my normal fvwm WM and purge LXQt and anything-Gnome to get a faster system.
What am I thinking? This was just a trial, not a migration. I'm happy with my minimal Mint + fvwm desktop. For people who want LXQt and 24.04 installed, I haven't run into any issues at all with it, but I've used it less than 45 minutes total. So far, seems production ready, if the lack of LVM doesn't matter to you. LVM is a central part of my backup methods, so not having it makes system backups problematic.

[1fallen]

Well it read,

and no, the App Center still can’t install 3rd-party DEBs you download from the internet but as you’ll hear later on they may no longer run anyway due to security changes…

Third party anything .Debs and Snaps should be considered "User Beware" and how many malware Snaps have been discovered:
https://www.techradar.com/pro/securi...-apps-overload

https://popey.com/blog/2024/02/exodu...-490k-swindle/

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/0...ls-snap-store/

https://techrights.org/n/2023/10/01/...oatware_.shtml

Snaps or Debs it's up to users to study diligently , with appropriate effort and report any findings to the responsible party/s

I tried to keep it short, so some meanings might be viewed differently by the reader.

[gezzer2]

@1fallen
within the article is another link which does have a little more information on .debs but it seems downloaded .deb files are going to prove difficult to install.
i have tried Vivaldi via a downloaded .deb it installed but run terrible hardly anything would work so i then found the chromium snap which works like a charm.

Debian and MX Linux warn not to have or use Ubuntu repro's enabled as it will break the system which is a heads up.

all i am pointing out is that Ubuntu are going to push snaps relentlessly and .debs are not going to be the get out of jail card they used to be.
so if anybody wishes to stay with Ubuntu they better 'snap' too it ..

[1fallen]

all i am pointing out is that Ubuntu are going to push snaps relentlessly and .debs are not going to be the get out of jail card they used to be.
so if anybody wishes to stay with Ubuntu they better 'snap' too it ..

Yep I read all that, and when or if Snaps are the main source for installs then I'll face that hurdle then.

Please know my production machines are "not" Ubuntu, I just like to test and help when i can, I've been apart of this Community Since 2005
and have made some very nice, and knowledgeable friends here and possibly a few enemy's as well. LOL Just goes to show you just can't please em all.

Thanks for the Link though....may the force be with you.

[TheFu]

Actually, installing .deb files directly has been a way to end up in APT-Jail for a long time. It was odd when that didn't happen, IME.

Deb files will start working with 24.04 as more developers move their code to the new release. Some server stuff created by other companies takes a year or more from every LTS release to have their own software updated releases. They don't touch non-LTS Ubuntu releases at all. Whether a pre-installed GUI tool will make installing .deb files easy is a different answer. They have to be supported, since most of the OS depends on .deb packages from repos. That won't change for many years.

Canonical has been pushing snaps the last 4 yrs. It all started when Chromium browser was only provided as a snap package in 20.04. There were ways around it. When I moved to 20.04, I setup a non-ubuntu VM with a non-snap version of Chromium that would run inside a constraint system I control. Then I'd run chromium using a remote XWindows connection (which has been possible for 30+ yrs). The lack of control is my main issue with snaps. Slowly, a little more control has been provided back, but not nearly enough. Until I can specify anywhere on the system (including network storage) that can be accessed by all and/or individual snaps, snaps don't allow sufficient control. I consider them "broken by design".

Wayland gets in the way of some of my other workflows too. We are more likely to see snaps become optional in Ubuntu than we are to have wayland support my workflows, I fear. It is a security thing that I use for my workflow that Wayland prevents. Wayland is a much bigger issue, since nearly all Linux distros will be forced to use it in about 5-10 yrs when Xorg maintenance dies. But that's a different issue for a different thread.

[ajgreeny]

Should it ever get to the point that all Ubuntu apps (or even a majority of them) are available only as snaps, that is most certainly the point at which I shall move way from the 'buntu family to something else. It will I'm pretty sure be a .deb based system as that is what has become second nature to me now after 20 years.

But snaps would certainly push me away. Just like TheFu, I hate the lack of control the user has; that was one of the main reasons I left the land of proprietary OSs behind, and how refreshing it was to find Linux!

Maybe Mint would be my destination, maybe Debian (stable, testing or unstable, I'm not sure yet having tried them all) or perhaps another .deb distro but it will be a snap free one, whichever it is!