@Natty tp

@Natty tp

@EliahKagan oops, I didn't look after voting, only saw when I voted that 3 votes were for another reason

I don't know how the system decides which sub-reason to list first.

I would have thought it put the most popular one first, but apparently not!

The complexity of Stack Exchange strikes again.

:)

I think this suggested edit should be rejected. It fits "attempt to reply" but I used a custom message:

> This doesn't describe the OP's situation and doesn't really improve the question. Ideally it should have gone in your bounty message. You can comment.

Though I wonder if that bounty should just be refunded. We don't yet support 19.10.

also attempt to reply - I think the editor should just post their own answer.

I rejected those edits

@EliahKagan ouch. Yeah we don't support it even for bounties. Should a custom flag be raised?

I'm not sure.

When a user posts a bounty on a question, does that cause the user to be pingable?

If they're willing to chance it, I don't think any policy bars them from posting a bounty for solutions in general and hoping something works on their unsupported system.

@EliahKagan I'm not sure about that, but it should!

@EliahKagan that makes sense

But I think it would have been more in their interest to have posted a separate question about it somewhere problems on Ubuntu+1 is supported, like Launchpad Answers or (especially if they can describe their problem in enough detail from the outset) presumably Unix & Linux.

IMO Launchpad Answers is one of the best places to post questions about Ubuntu+1 because questions can be converted into bugs. And also because such questions are on-topic there.

So, the unanswered question they put the bounty on is on-topic. But if it were asked today it would be off-topic because 18.10 is EOL. The poster of the bounty wants help with 19.10, which is unreleased. I'm not sure there's any moderation action that would improve this situation.

I've already perhaps made it worse by using a custom edit reject message instead of the "attempt to reply" one. I didn't think about how that might create the impression that this bounty is a good idea and will be well-received and that the poster of the bounty is well-served to put more time and effort into it, none of which is particularly likely to be the case.

I think a bigger problem is that the OP and bounty poster's problems may be totally different and we have no significant technical information about the bounty poster's problem. If it were on-topic, they should post a question. As it is, they should ask somewhere it's on-topic. Or they can try reproducing the problem in 19.04. This is a good idea anyway because if they can't do so then it's fairly likely (though not certain) to be due to a bug in 19.10.

The bounty is only about 2 hours old. If it might get refunded, it's probably best if that's done fairly soon, like sometime in the next day or so. I don't think a custom flag is wrong. Maybe a meta post would be better. Or maybe it would be best to wait to see if they can comment. They have enough rep to do so.

@Natty report askubuntu.com/a/1168488/22949

[ Natty | Sentinel ] Link to Post Low Length; No Code Block; One Line only; Low Rep; 3.0;

→ 11 messages moved to Island of castaway thoughts

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Url-only title, bad keyword in body, bad keyword in title, blacklisted website in body, blacklisted website in title, +3 more (788): mumybear.org/north-valley-cbd-oil/ by manjot137 on askubuntu.com

@EliahKagan I would have guessed that it's an issue of incompatible theme, but it seems it's only specific to Inkscape.

I think this question should stay open. I don't think it's off-topic because I don't think questions asking how to upgrade to a supported release are generally off-topic. And I don't think there's sufficient reason, right now anyway, to think it's a duplicate, because the linked questions don't really answer it. Skipping a release is sometimes supported in such scenarios.

This question about "vi" should be edited or closed. I hope it gets narrowed, but right now it's too broad, primarily opinion-based, and maybe even (if taken literally as asking what the particular people the OP has vaguely referred to are thinking) off-topic.

It may also be off-topic in that it's asked in such a way as to suggest that it's not really interested in the use of the vi command in Ubuntu, but I've interpreted it otherwise for my (CW) answer.

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body, bad keyword in title, blacklisted website in body, blacklisted website in title, pattern-matching product name in body, +3 more (690): www.supplementsell.com/velofel-male-enhancement/ by wedrorow on askubuntu.com

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad ip for hostname in body, bad keyword in body, blacklisted website in body, body starts with title and ends in url, link at end of body, +3 more (591): Keto Select Green supper additionally by LixerBufle on askubuntu.com

@EliahKagan They deleted the answer.

@EliahKagan closed as POB

@EliahKagan I think it's high time to revisit help center. Questions that you should avoid: Support for versions for Ubuntu releases past their Support or "End of Life" (EOL) — unless the question is asking how to upgrade to a supported release.

@Kulfy It's also a duplicate of How to install software or upgrade from an old unsupported release? and Can I skip over releases when upgrading?.

[ Natty | Sentinel ] upgrade Kernel upgrade to 5.0 and SELinux By: reut zeevi 4.5;

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad ip for hostname in body, bad keyword in body, bad keyword in title, blacklisted website in body, body starts with title and ends in url, +6 more (789): UltraFast Keto Boost by finasin on askubuntu.com

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body, blacklisted website in body, blacklisted website in title, pattern-matching product name in body, potentially bad ns for domain in body, +3 more (398): www.theguidestore.com/ketogenic-valley-keto/ by jaffholds33 on askubuntu.com

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body, bad keyword in title, bad keyword in username, blacklisted website in body, blacklisted website in title, +9 more (984): Look My Site @>>> fitnesreviews.com/keto-gx800/ by Ketogx800 on askubuntu.com

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body, blacklisted website in body, body starts with title and ends in url, link at end of body, pattern-matching website in body, +2 more (491): which is caused by a low red platelet by marianmartin on askubuntu.com

[ Natty | Sentinel ] 18.04 Ubuntu server 18.04 Slow ethernet upload with r8169 By: ThomasB 6.5;

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Url-only title, bad keyword in body, bad keyword in title, blacklisted website in body, blacklisted website in title, +7 more (792): nutrition4deal.com/ultra-fast-keto-boost-keto/ by TylerWang on askubuntu.com

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Url-only title, bad keyword in body, bad keyword in title, bad pattern in url body, blacklisted website in body, +8 more (886): www.thebackplane.com/keto-gx800-reviews/ by avidjhreer on askubuntu.com

@Natty tp

@Natty tp

Whoa, the vi question really went big! It got another good answer too, before closure.

The OP accepted my answer, which I think indicates that they're okay with interpreting the question in a way that's narrow enough and on-topic enough for hte site. Is there a way to edit it to fix it up so that it would be reasonable to reopen it? As it stands now (with stuff like, "Are people who write these books/blogs/whatever aware") I don't think I'd vote to reopen it.

[ Natty | Sentinel ] boot Very slow boot time and poor perfomance By: Frederik De Ruyck 3.5;

currently unclear

I sympathize with the goals of this edit but I don't think it improves the post.

Also, since "bash" may mean the command/executable, it's not obvious that capitalization is needed even if the cited source is to be taken as credible (a better source would be the Bash reference manual, which does capitalized it as well), and titles that aren't questions should have question marks added without any other change.

(However, if you disagree, you should of course go ahead and give it an Accept review.)

I don't think that's NAA. I don't want to give it fp feedback because I think it's ne. But I also don't want to give it ne feedback without editing it and without it ever having been edited. And the way the post ends does suggest it may have been intended, at least in part, as a comment--though its author does have enough rep to post comments.

@Natty report askubuntu.com/a/1168575/22949

[ Natty | Sentinel ] Link to Post Ends with ?; Low Length; Low Rep; Self Answer; -0.5;

Is this reasonable?

AFAIK Ubuntu once in a day automatically checks for updates.

@karel Yeah but still OT flags are raised.

It's also OT so it's OK. The duplicate link comments won't be automatically removed if this question is closed as off topic.

[ Natty | Sentinel ] pdf Converting DJVU to PDF By: matthieu 4.0;

@karel Questions asking how to upgrade form an unsupported release to a supported release of Ubuntu are not off-topic (except when there is some other reason they are off-topic, of course). As the help center says under "Questions that you should avoid":

> Support for versions for Ubuntu releases past their Support or "End of Life" (EOL) — unless the question is asking how to upgrade to a supported release.

But with this question I think what ended up happening is actually fine (even though I was concerned before), because it's closed as a duplicate, the linked questions in the dupe banner are useful, and I've commented with two more links that I think are useful (and some contextual explanation). I do not want to reopen the question.

Speaking of which, should How can I upgrade from 17.04 to the latest non-LTS Ubuntu? be closed as a duplicate of How to install software or upgrade from an old unsupported release? I am not sure.

@EliahKagan I must have been at least dimly aware that that question isn't best CVd as off topic because my CV was as a duplicate of "skip release when upgrading".

@EliahKagan I don't think there's any point to having hundreds of skip release when upgrading from an unsupported release questions. I'd prefer to close most of them as a duplicate of both the "skip release" canonical question and the "unsupported release" canonical question, but if there are hundreds of such questions that means 1000s of reputation points, so if I can't catch them in the beginning I'll probably ignore it and let the duplicate questions accumulate as they will.

I'm concerned with two points here style and laziness. I'm possibly the only Ask Ubuntu user who is sticky on this particular point of style, so what's the point of arguing about it?

The point of style is if there is one definite canonical question go ahead and close everything as a duplicate of it, but who has the energy to catch both of two canonical questions hundreds of times?

There are potentially thousands of users out there who want to ask the same degraded question about skip upgrading from an unsupported release because they think it's a gold mine. If their release is unsupported these gold miners will claim that the question can't be a duplicate of the "skip release" question because their question is about an "unsupported release" too.

I think the answers to How can I upgrade from 17.04 to the latest non-LTS Ubuntu? are good enough and current enough that I can use it as a canonical question link for similar duplicate questions going forward. The older similar questions will have to stay even though they are basically obsolete.

This doesn't seem like a duplicate to me.

@karel Do you think it should stay open for that reason? You could still vote to dupe questions to it, even if it is closed as a duplicate of the main EOL upgrades question.

Regarding those other questions, I do think it would be better if Can I skip over releases when upgrading? and Why does do-release-upgrade skip a version? were one question instead of two, but I'm not really sure what to do about the situation now.

The real answer to "Can I skip over releases when upgrading?" is "Yes, often you can, especially in the situations where you're most likely to want to, but you can't always." Both questions have very useful information in their answers, including in the top-voted answer to Can I skip over releases when upgrading?...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@Kulfy Is the idea that duping it to that question is the best we can do?

If a duplicate closure is totally wrong but the question is off-topic, then I think it would usually be best to fix that. But if there's a question that's the best we can do and just sort of less helpful than ideal, then I can definitely see the case for keeping the dupe closure.

@EliahKagan I think so unless someone can answer. But it's now reopened.

@EliahKagan I'm not sure how that would help anyway.

@Kulfy Hmm. Okay. It it clearly off-topic? Should it be closed for that reason? I'm fairly week on site policy regarding Ubuntu touch.

@Kulfy Probably best it was reopened then, whether or not it gets reclosed.

@EliahKagan Redirects towards @Zanna

Unrelated to the Touch thing and about the other thing:

@EliahKagan ...but the answers to that question are actually wrong, because those upgrades are typically supported, and officially so, when the target release is supported and releases in between are EOL. I think that I'd have better ideas about how to handle if it I had stronger technical knowledge about the relevant issues.

In particular, just using Why does do-release-upgrade skip a version? might also be misleading, at least some of the time, in that do-release-upgrade and the Software Updater can sometimes themselves be mistaken in saying that such an upgrade is supported.

(This happened for one, but not the other, of the release-skipping upgrades I attempted while researching that answer - see the end section).

^^ cc @karel

@Kulfy Does that answer when Ubuntu Touch 16.04 goes EOL?

Ubuntu 16.04 is still supported, in general.

Yeah. But Mark Shuttleworth announced that Canonical Ltd. would terminate support for the project due to lack of market interest on 5 April 2017 and it was then adopted by UBports as a community project.

@EliahKagan There is nothing else good to use that I know about. Most of what was posted before August 19, 2019 was either junk to begin with or else it's obsolete now.

So, if we consider general policy of AU, if Canonical don't support, we won't support (ESM is an exception)

I'm not an Andy about that.

I don't think that's the general policy of AU. I think the general policy of AU is (currently) that we support Ubuntu, except EOL releases (where EOL is construed in such a way as not to include releases that Canonical supports only through ESM). If Ubuntu Touch 16.04 is actually officially end-of-life, then I think the current policy is not to support it.

If instead the situation is that it's non-EOL but Canonical has, in practice, stopped most or all support for it, then I don't see that as affecting AU policy in any way. I do think questions specific to UBPorts are off-topic, though, since that's effectively an unofficial derivative of Ubuntu Touch, if I understand it correctly.

I don't think my technical knowledge of Ubuntu Touch is necessarily sufficient to figure this out. But I don't think AU policy is actually directly determined by the entirety of what Canonical supports.

Asking a meta question might help?

Yeah, probably so. I was sort of inclined to wait to see how things go in general with the EOL policy, but recent developments have (rightly) led to a related meta question being posted. So maybe this is the right time.

I take much of this as reason to suspect our current EOL policy does not scale. It seems like our consensus, or what is widely assumed to be our consensus, is collapsing under its own weight as more and more weird exceptions (or things that seem like exceptions) arise, like the weird thing where Lubuntu 16.04 LTS might be unsupported even though they did a point release recently and it's made entirely of packages from supported repositories that can be installed on a regular Ubuntu system.

Like, I have a "Lubuntu" system where I installed those packages after installing from the minimal CD. Are questions about that system on-topic here or not? I have no idea! And then there are questions relating to EOL upgrades, which often attract OT close votes, the help center clearly says they're on topic, but the sub-reason description in the close dialog is ambiguous about it.

I think one of three things should happen with the "EOL" policy: it could be simplified (nobody who just started using Ubuntu knows what EOL means and I'm not sure I do at this point either) and we could hope it's simple enough, it could be made precise and we could hope its new complexity wouldn't cause too big problems, or it could be gotten rid of entirely.

That third option may sound extreme, but for years we had no such policy; we got one after at least two major failed attempts to get enough people to support it. By the same logic, we can certainly discuss the policy again, and even if we try to keep it as similar to what it is as possible, I think it still needs to be communicated better in the places where text that is official to the site attempts to state it.

Also, there's some reason to suspect the pendulum may have swung back, that getting rid of the policy might actually reflect a current or emerging consensus. It's hard to know what people want from meta votes, especially new votes on old questions, because everyone seems to have a different idea about what disallowing questions about EOL releases even means in the first place. But I don't think those votes should be ignored.

I've never felt like I knew what our policy should actually be about EOL questions... but these days I have an increasingly angsty lack of any real opinion, compared to my lack of any real opinion in the past. :)

@EliahKagan Anyway, the new meta question I was referring to is Is Lubuntu 16.04 LTS EOL?

@EliahKagan I meant to say it's sometimes hard to know. Obviously it is sometimes, even often, easy to know what people want from meta votes.

@EliahKagan Can you please provide me a screenshot of the deleted answer from here? Actually I need it comment on this post

No problem, hold on.

In case it's more useful than an image, the body text (of that now-deleted post by Dimitrios) was:

I have the same problem but the End of Standard Support is @ April 2019

The End of Life is @ April 2022

So i think this is not a issue

pomsky's comment was:

Actually I'm writing a comment for Mark. If I were writing an answer, I would have preferred text.

> This doesn't look like an answer at all, rather a comment on the answer by OP. Also I don't know what exactly you meant, but Ubuntu 14.04 did reach its End of Life in April 2019.

@Kulfy Well, I'm about to go afk for a while, so I figure it might help. (Also, not everyone can read text from images.)

@EliahKagan And your comment was:

> 2022 is for those who opted for ESM and that's off-topic here.

Well this is the comment I was writing.

Okay.

Makes sense.

[ Natty | Sentinel ] 16.04 Cursor jumps frequently to top left By: Curtis 3.5;

@EliahKagan AFAIK Lubuntu uses the repository information of Ubuntu. Packages that are specific to Lubuntu are taken down. For example, Ubuntu dropped 32 bit version for Ubuntu but still had that for *ubuntu. Once *ubuntu go EOL after 3 years, all packages would disappear from repositories. Same goes with PPC. 64 bit versions are special case.

As guiverc said: just please be aware you're talking about an OS that officially is EOL & thus consider security implications of using the EOL software. You won't be able to use Lubuntu support options either.

@Natty tp

@Kulfy I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

For example, gnome-shell in 18.04 is not specific to any of the derivatives, and Ubuntu 18.04 itself has no official installation media for installing a desktop system on i386. But it continues to have that package and other such packages, and they continue to be maintained, including in that architecture.

ek@Kip:~$ apt list gnome-shell
Listing... Done
gnome-shell/bionic-proposed 3.28.4-0ubuntu18.04.2 i386
N: There are 3 additional versions. Please use the '-a' switch to see them.
ek@Kip:~$ apt policy gnome-shell
gnome-shell:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 3.28.4-0ubuntu18.04.2
  Version table:
     3.28.4-0ubuntu18.04.2 500
        500 us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-proposed/main i386 Packages
     3.28.4-0ubuntu18.04.1 500
        500 us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/main i386 Packages

I guess Universe get updates for 3 years?

@Kulfy I think those packages stay as it is, i.e. no further updates and maintenance.

@Kulfy I'm not sure which packages you mean, though. i386 packages that are only used on desktop systems and aren't likely to be present in any unofficial derivative continue to be updated now. The -proposed repository has new packages.

@Kulfy As for packages in Universe, they also seem to still get updates, even in 16.04 when they are specific to Lubuntu: launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lxpanel

OK that's a complex topic then -_-

Yeah, it's super complex and I don't know how it really works.

Maybe questions should be posted on the main site, not asking what AU policy should be (since that's OT for main) but just asking about the actual EOL policy for official derivatives that seems to be documented as non-LTS when the corresponding Ubuntu release is LTS.

I think it may be hard to come up with good policy changes if nobody active on the site knows what the policies of the relevant projects actually mean. I don't want to insist that this is the case--maybe somebody here does!--but I sure don't.

Yeah that makes sense.Since that's about Ubuntu not Ask Ubuntu

Remembers Jorge Castro

:)

Is it OT?

I voted to LO.

[ Natty | Sentinel ] multiple-monitors Apple_Thunderbolt_Display as 2nd Monitor By: Madbreaks 6.0;

[ Natty | Sentinel ] 11.10 Lost all permissions to my NTFS partition By: Ted Pecks 3.5;

[ Natty | Sentinel ] command-line devnagari script in terminal By: egmont 4.5;