impulsively, I ran do-release-upgrade on my Xubuntu 16.04 system last night

I am yet to notice any ill effects

@Zanna So now it's 18.04?

@EliahKagan correct

The change from 16.04 to 18.04 seems less breaking than the change from 14.04 to 16.04.

I have an 18.04 system that ran 14.04 until the week before 14.04 went "EOL," when I upgraded it to 16.04. Then its wireless kept cutting out, so I further upgraded it to 18.04, which made it cut out less but still quite often.

I did find the solution eventually.

this is only the second time I've done a release upgrade. On my other laptop, I installed over every time until the USB ports gave me trouble (partly because I installed so much stuff trying to answer questions about compiling, and the disk only has 32GB, and partly because the hardware is so fussy). This laptop my dad gave me some time early last year IIRC and I installed 16.04 then

(He had installed Mint KDE but I don't like the KDE environment, much as I admire the project)

@EliahKagan what was the issue?

It had to do with power management and would have occurred on a fresh install, too. Strangely, I am having trouble finding what I did to fix it, and the Ubuntu Forums post that had the fix. The very helpful post was by chili555, but that doesn't narrow it down all that much. :)

hahaha

I haven't had any wireless issues on this device, for once!

So am I right to think you now have three usable machines, or two not counting the Raspberry Pi?

yes, although I am considering not bringing this laptop back with me

I will probably bring it

but I dread carrying it

Ah, I didn't realize you were still on your visit to the UK.

Can it be shipped?

yes... I guess I'm put off that by the cost

Ah.

I think I'm imagining something less big and heavy than it is.

I'm pretty sure this was the post that gave the solution that worked for that machine: ubuntuforums.org/…

I mean, I probably edited the file by hand. But that was the change that fixed it. I have:

ek@Kip:/etc/NetworkManager/conf.d$ cat default-wifi-powersave-on.conf
[connection]
wifi.powersave = 2

it's not that bad I guess. It's a luxury problem. My mum gave me some birthday presents. Even my brother & his wife sent some books to me here for my birthday. I shouldn't complain about having too many nice things to carry

In contrast, on another machine where I have made no such modifications I have:

ek@Io:/etc/NetworkManager/conf.d$ cat default-wifi-powersave-on.conf
[connection]
wifi.powersave = 3

@EliahKagan nice. I think I had to do something similar on a laptop I set up for someone else

Was it also a case of Bug 1408963?

to be honest I don't remember now

DEAUTH_LEAVING sounds omnious

That's understandable considering that I didn't remember, for a machine I use regularly. :)

haha :)

I had meant to try to answer some unanswered Upstart questions before 14.04 went "EOL."

I could still do so -- I don't think those questions should be considered off-topic now -- but my urge to do so is less.

Also I don't have a 14.04 system anymore.

Anyway, I don't know what it is with this sudo post... I want it to exist, but I never feel like working on it.

even my 14.04 tshirt has reached the stage of cleaning rag duty

@EliahKagan oh that's such a familiar feeling

especially on V&V with answers that need lots of research

@Zanna Is that what, for shirts, might be regarded as Extended Security Maintenance?

hahahaha

@Zanna I haven't had this feeling a lot on Ask Ubuntu. When I have, it's usually been when I'm writing an answer that is way, way more complicated and of less value than I thought. In those cases I usually save a draft and stop writing the answer.

in this case it will be of great value!

@Zanna Is it the research part or the writing part that's the issue?

they seem to combine to produce a real slog

but I usually end up being very happy with the work I write when I have to do a lot of research and find it hard

I remember how hard I found it to write the academic essays I had to do for my post graduate certificate in education. Such intense effort, but it was very rewarding and I wish I was getting pushed to do that stuff sometimes these days because I sure can't reach that level of motivation myself

@Zanna Thanks; I hope you are right.

I am struggling to give a useful history without going into too much detail. So far, in the section that summarizes events, I have avoided mentioning anyone by name, because if I did, I'd feel I should mention just about everybody by name, and the length would be much greater.

Even just adding the names would make it longer, but I'd also have to make sure to write in such a way as to make clear precisely what who said when, lest I misrepresent someone. And the time to write it would be much longer, because some people probably consider themselves to have had only a minor role, while others with a more major role might regard the post as a work of journalism (which I think it is not) and have concerns about that, so I'd have to figure out how to avoid those problems.

There is also the issue that, while I don't consider anything I am saying to constitute a criticism of any person or process, some people might read it that way, because it is about a long-standing Ubuntu-specific change that has come to be regarded as harmful and which would likely not have been made if its security implications were better understood.

oh I see

I hadn't thought about those issues

that's really tricky

One of the tags I have on the question is history-of-ubuntu. If six tags were allowed, I'd also have security, a close runner-up. But my main goal is to help people use their computers, and to provide a reference that can be linked to in other posts -- like I plan to do from that popular answer of mine -- to avoid misleading readers.

I might scrap the rundown of events. I am not sure.

It's long enough that I've already decided it must go at the end and that I must summarize its most important points higher up in the answer anyway.

@EliahKagan that could be fine

This is the current draft of the answer:

For years, Ubuntu has [shipped a patched version of `sudo` that preserves `$HOME` by default][1]. Besides Ubuntu and its derivatives, [very few other operating systems (perhaps no others) do this][2]. It has been [**decided that this causes more problems than it solves**][3], and [starting in Ubuntu 19.10][4], `$HOME` is no longer one of the few environment variables `sudo` preserves.

In terms of *what* the change is and how it affects users, the key points are:

- **As of Ubuntu 19.10, <code>sudo *command*</code> does what <code>sudo -H *command*</code> does in previous releases.** It can…

Besides the ultimate resolution and decision not to backport the change to earlier releases, what's left to add is the most important parts of this mailing this conversation.

@Zanna Do you just not like how heavyweight the interface is?

I've been thinking of trying KDE again.

I last seriously used it a long, long time ago.

Years before Plasma.

@EliahKagan the history reads fine and satisfies my curiosity but I guess it's not super important

Well, it does have two possible advantages, I think.

I mean, keeping it would have two possible advantages.

First, although I feel that I have to give a summary earlier, that summary could be sparser if I have the full history than if I omit it. The summary could basically consist of two or three quotes. (That would also sort of address the issue of who to name: the quotes would be attributed, but the items in the full history would remain in the current style.)

@EliahKagan yes I prefer something light and calm, but I felt it was sort of awkward to configure stuff in a way that felt like I was using Windows

Second, the detailed history sort of had tendrils into all the other subtopics I want to cover in the post. I plan to show how to get the old behavior on 19.10 and later and how to get the new behavior on 19.04 and earlier. The history provides relevant perspective in deciding whether or not to do these things.

nice

@EliahKagan almost done!

@Zanna I mean, I hope it does.

I feel it definitely does

@Zanna Does that come across from the history as presented in the draft so far?

@Zanna Yes, but in accordance with the 80/20 rule, I feel I will be old and gray by the time I finish it. :)

hahaha

@EliahKagan yes, but I see how that leads to a worry about seeming judgemental

in that it's about people's opinions as to whether one way or the other was a bug

I think I need a better section title than "sudo and $HOME: The Last 20 Years."

The reason is that the section is mostly (though not entirely) about sudo and $HOME in Ubuntu.

@EliahKagan seems ok

oh

so other things went on elsewhere

but they are omitted

Well, I don't know, but sudo is an upstream project. As much as is practical, I want to avoid misleading readers who may not be familiar with the upstream/downstream distinction.

I should have mentioned that sudo preserving home is Ubuntu-specific in that answer originally. I was unaware of this at the time, though. Or perhaps at that time it wasn't just Ubuntu in which sudo preserved $HOME; that is, perhaps at the time other OSes I used had versions of sudo that were based on old upstream versions or that were patched like sudo in Ubuntu was patched. That might explain why I never noticed this.

I had no idea it was an Ubuntu thing

but that totally explains why so many users/visitors were using sudo gedit

actually maybe I had heard it was an Ubuntu thing, but before I knew what was actually happening, therefore the information didn't stick

@Zanna I'm not sure if that's why or not. Since one uses sudo in Ubuntu to run a program as root, it makes sense that one would think to run gedit as root with sudo gedit.

@EliahKagan true, but I mean, I felt like lots of people with obvious Linuxy knowledge were doing so

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