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Failphone 3? Ubuntu Horrible Horse? Who would trust us? Are we being slack, again? And more, answered in Mailserver…
Ubuntu horrible horse
I’m horrified, having thought to have upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04, only to find it catastrophic. Not that the few apparent changes to the operating system itself are so bad (though I haven’t seen anything improved), but the deletions from the repositories are as far as I am concerned, a disaster.
GEDA (electronics design suite) removed. GTK+3 (graphics and more) removed. Epson Stylus Photo R300 support gone. FREECAD (3D CAD software) is supposed to generate code for 3D printers etc, but requires an add-on for that isn’t installable. If my printer isn’t supported, I doubt my scanner will be.
Of about the 200 programs I’ve written (over 15 years), most no longer run or compile. My PIC programming software can’t be installed. I’ve seen comments that make me suspect Debian and Fedora have made similar deletions, and when I have attempted to build the needed software from source
(gtk3, GEDA), that’s failed too.
There are other nuisance problems too, for example with Thunderbird. Do you have any idea what distro might be less of a disaster? I hope you’re all staying safe and healthy. Roger Burghall
Neil says…
I would guess that many of your issues are down to the removal of Python 2, with Python 3 now being the default, which to be fair to Ubuntu, people have had about eight years of warning to sort out. Even the developer of Calibre, who once threatened to singlehandedly keep maintaining Python 2, has updated to Python 3.
GEDA, for example, hasn’t really had any development work for five years. There’s a support thread at https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2441675 pointing out that it’s no longer supported because it fails to build for Ubuntu 20.04. The suggestion is to use the forked and maintained version called Lepton (see https://github.com/leptoneda/lepton-eda).
Why trust us?
Privacy and security questions have become more important to me. I now own a de-googled phone with Lineageos. Sometimes, as I look at a prompt to update on my Mint laptop, I wonder how much of the new stuff is not actually helping me, but improving the surveillance practised by so many. I know about FOSS, but I lack the know-how to look at the updates and figure out if I actually want those ‘improvements’. What can I do? Are various files marked for their functions, including telemetry?
Most distros will likely claim they take into account our privacy, but some will be better than
others. I’d love to hear your thoughts, or even see a magazine about these issues. Bob Abspoel
Neil says…
How do you trust anything you install on a system? The NSA (the US intelligence agency) created the Selinux security module that’s widely used. Do you trust it? Or do we have shared goals and are doing things through auditable open source, which means there’s an embedded level of trust in the systems we all use? I have no useful answer, but paranoia is a bad rabbit hole.
It’s connected to your other point about the number of ‘improvements’ updates bring. A modern OS takes an army of developers to keep it up to date. The Linux Kernel 5.10 release had 700,000 new lines of codes added as part of 1,000 patches. Will you check them all?
Not fair
I’m facing new troubles with Fairphone support. I started to complain about it on the forum, after its support wasn’t taking my request seriously. I wanted to share my story with others, because I think Fairphone is basically leveraging its customer good will to avoid its consumer-right commitments.
I bought a Fairphone 3 as soon as it came out in France (September 2019). A few days after I received it I found a problem, which I reported (it’s not the only one) to the forum: http://bit.ly/lf274fair.
In August 2020, I brought up the problem with its support. I was asked to run many tests and reports, which I did. Skip to January 2021 with no improvement and Fairphone trying to dismiss issues, I asked to return the phone or have a replacement unit. Eventually Fairphone agreed to reimburse me, but explained it would reimburse my phone based on the opening date of the support ticket in support. I was offered 220 euros, instead of the 450 I paid.
I went back and read the topic I started and realised that my case was not an exception, and that support seems to ignore the problem many people suffer from. I started another topic (http://bit.ly/lxf274support) that gained interest and it revealed to me that other people seem to feel the same way. Bastien
Neil says…
That’s obviously a frustrating issue for you. We’re not consumer protection experts, so can’t give you any legal
guidance. However, generally we’ve read “Under EU law, within the legal guarantee period of two years, defective products must be repaired or replaced without any cost to the consumer,” so that sounds like you’re covered for repair or replacement. If Fairphone is offering compensation, you could read that as an admission that the product is defective and should be replaced.
We asked Fairphone to comment on the case. It said: “We apologise for the inconvenience the customer has experienced. Our customer service department has been in contact with the customer and offered to give him a free replacement, which he accepted. In addition, the issue he reported has now been identified and will be addressed in the next software update going live by the end of the month.