Ubuntu 19.04

[Stephen M]

Latest Ubuntu upgrade has not been out long enough to look at properly, just wondered if anyone had any first impressions. From a cosmetic viewpoint it is good to see their artwork for the main screen is still good. The Cosmic Cuttlefish is still my favourite and was not sure to expect from Disco Dingo but think they have done a good job.

 

[chateauferret]

If you're using NVidia drivers it'll trash your computer and what's more it'll do it properly. The 5.x kernel doesn't work with any but the latest NVidia drivers and if you try to install them it won't let you. If you try to fix that it'll remove the existing 390 version driver and leave you unable to boot to a GUI altogether. There's a whole series of other broken packages I haven't even had a chance to look at yet but they include linux-firmware and a couple of other things that look fairly fundamental. I was reduced to installing an OS again from a USB stick but even that doesn't work because it reckons the microcode is goosed. That could just be a dodgy stick I suppose so I'll try with another one tomorrow. Oh yes, and it uninstalled about half a dozen large applications including QGIS and also managed to arrange for Frescobaldi and Lilypond to keep crashing. There's probably a lot of other things I haven't even discovered yet. Poor.

 

[Stephen M]

Sorry to hear of your problems. I have not had any major stuff go wrong, did lose a couple of apps on upgrade but there was a warning this could happen so was prepared to have to re-install them.

Surprised about the Nvidia drivers, the 418s now show in the menu on the additional drivers but the 390 are still in use and all working fine.

If this info is any help, the kernel is 5.0.0-13, CPU i9-9900k, GPU GTX1070

 

[chateauferret]

I got out of it without reinstalling everything but it was still mentalness. One of the packages it didn't like was initramfs-tools and when I purged that it allowed the others to be installed in recovery mode. It still wouldn't start the desktop until I removed both the 5.x kernel and the 418 NVidia driver and reverted to 4.18.x and 390 respectively. But it thought it had put up the GUI login screen because it made that funny Ubuntu hello sound that sounds like a cat landing in a box of marbles, you just couldn't see anything on the screen.

What you do have to do is turn Wayland off and I've done that but it still won't start a GUI using 418. There is also advice to use the nomodeset option on the kernel launch but if I do that it goes bonkers again and it's back to recovery mode.

 

[Stephen M]

I have had issues with other machines in the past with GPU drivers and at times it has had to be trial and error, trying all available to see which works as it has not always been the latest driver which works. I am on the 390 for my PC and laptop, a year+ old Octane, which has the 4.15.0-48 kernel.

 

[Mnemonic]

I thought I'd take Kubuntu 19.04 for a spin, and have just installed it on my Defiance II. Installation was fairly painless, almost everything seems to be working okay.

I'm using the Nvidia 430 driver. In Intel GPU mode, it's idling at around 10W (which is great - better than previous releases), and is near silent when just using Firefox to browse the web. It's quite noisy when I switch to Nvidia mode (which required a reboot).

There's still an issue with waking from suspend when using the Intel iGPU, but I'm used to using the workaround (which is to ALT + CTRL + F2, then ALT + CTRL + F1 to get the screen desktop back).

I haven't re-installed any of my apps yet, but will hopefully do this during the week.

 

[markh]

FWIW, I've been using Ubuntu Studio 19.04 with the 5.0.x kernel and haven't had any problems besides the usual wake from suspend issue (which was fixed by installing Ubuntu Unity Desktop), though my current laptop doesn't have a discreet GPU. What you describe above sounds like a nightmare, sorry to hear.