Yesterday I took the beta release off DW (Distro Watch) Xubuntu 25.04.
Most things seems to be fine for an early beta release on XFCE.
Wayland on xfce is still a work in progress, The panel shows some oddities (missing indicators) and my VPN wont work in Wayland (segfault)…it has to be a flatpak or a snap.
I’ve been told at best full Wayland support will come in with XFCE 4.22
Power management has some kinks to iron out (Screen Blanking every 2 minutes)
I found on a ZFS system when a kernel upgrade was available it would freeze at updating initramfs forever (It ran for hours). And if you manually stopped the frozen process, there was NO kernels (or logs) to boot from. (Not Good)
LVM on encryption works ok, so I took that for this test-bed. (lvm/ext4)
And manual partitioning was an option.
X11 sessions are still stable sessions for xfce currently.
I installed Flatpak, and had to jump through a bunch of (key privilege’s) hoops to make it work. (That is just sad) I feel I’m being pushed to other linux systems to have it my way. (And that is Ok by me, I won’t complain)
Canonical has made it’s choice, now I’ll make mine.
wget https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.gpg
cp flathub.gpg ~/.local/share/flatpak/repo/flathub.trustedkeys.gpg
cp flathub.gpg ~/.local/share/flatpak/repo/flathub-beta.trustedkeys.gpg
ls -la ~/.local/share/flatpak/repo/*.trustedkeys.gpg
-rw------- 1 me me 2844 Mar 29 13:01 /home/me/.local/share/flatpak/repo/flathub-beta.trustedkeys.gpg
-rw------- 1 me me 2844 Mar 29 13:01 /home/me/.local/share/flatpak/repo/flathub.trustedkeys.gpg
Terminal has a new look…LOL
This is of course not meant for a production machine just yet.
Big Sigh! Things Change but, I really miss my Ubuntu’s of old…
The End
@1fallen
Thank you for your input, and look at this experimental distro.
I have this version ( 25.04 headless server) on the backup server, so it was good to see this.
IMHO bad / broken code forces one to work around failings, and no I’m not attacking the choices of anyone or any company.
Nice to see those work arounds posted / shared.
Before anyone runs to defend or get’s all up in their feeling it is good to see exposure prior to release of production models. As one can’t fix anything without first knowing of a failing. I personally have not ran into that issue, as I haven’t tried flatpak. So naturally my mileage would be different.
On my experience with zfs ( version 2.3.1-1ubuntu1 src version 3CBA3F639287005F1F50BB3) on 25.04 in a headless environment I haven’t thankfully ran into that yet.
But thus far initramfs (img-6.14.0-13-generic) has been updating without issues.
Leaves me to wonder if it’s Hardware, GUI, or ZFS version that is playing a role here with your intramfs.
So far 2 days in a row ZFS is the only affected system, I have to roll back my system, nor can I gather any logs to help find the reason.
BTRFS Good to go.
LVM/ext4 Good to go
In fact all other formats are Good to go except>>>>ZFS I’m done trying now.
Funny it (zfs) ran rock solid for years 18.04 thru 20.4, then came 22.04 and many issues or bugs since, But my Arch installs on ZFS are very solid and stable. (My problems solved right there
I consider myself a reasonable and forgiving sort, but constant repeats and I’m out.
Oh well it’s fun to test only, no production machines for buntu.
I don’t fault any of the Developers I have much Love there!
The only Delta (difference ) I can surmise or assume is the
a. ZFS versions
b. GUI vs Non-GUI
c. Hardware … I’m using Xeon (single) with ECC Ram … and base VGA
I don’t fault your thinking on ARCH with ZFS, but does cause me to wonder why are we having different outcomes??? did something get fixed with the ZFS version I chose that Plucky is happy with vs the current release of ZFS???
Almost makes me wonder if I rollback my ZFS Version to the current supported version if I would experience the same fate.
Or if upgrading to the same version of ZFS as I have , fix your install ? (IIRC I posted details in the lounge on PLUCKY and ZFS, provided you want to pour salt on the wound LOL sorry my sick humor there).
Agree with your comments on the Dev’s that is not where I was going with my comments.
( on a side note I have noticed increased boot times with my version of this setup …usually systemd-networkd.service which eventually fails too lazy to see why, but the zfs modules are loading perfectly)
So far all is good, and nothing is installed past the initial install yet.
nVidia is installed:
nvidia-smi
Tue Apr 1 11:09:07 2025
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 570.86.16 Driver Version: 570.86.16 CUDA Version: 12.8 |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 ... Off | 00000000:01:00.0 On | N/A |
| N/A 32C P8 4W / 60W | 32MiB / 4096MiB | 31% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=========================================================================================|
| 0 N/A N/A 1908 G /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg 21MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
I let Ubuntu-Drivers do that this time.
Flatpak installed correctly no hoops to jump through.
And now for the acid test:
sudo update-initramfs -u
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-6.14.0-13-generic
I: The initramfs will attempt to resume from /dev/sda3
I: (UUID=66384887-2cc6-4941-9d04-082bc780b027)
I: Set the RESUME variable to override this.
mkinitramfs: copy_file: config '/etc/zfs/vdev_id.conf' not found
mkinitramfs: copy_file: config '/etc/zfs/initramfs-tools-load-key' not found
mkinitramfs: copy_file: config '/etc/zfs/initramfs-tools-load-key.d/*' not f
Power-Management now obey’s settings.
To quote a title “What a difference a day makes”
Pardon the noise but I like to keep on-line notes here.
Current Disks involve:
Retitled this to make it more specific as it was giving “generic” context and attracted some topic hijacking, and this is certainly specific about Xubuntu.
