First steps with Ubuntu 22.04

As curious as one can be with new toys, I’ve been playing safe and lazy for a while now by upgrading my laptop only to a new LTS when it is available.¹ “Upgrade” is a misleading word, though, because in my case it means that I start from afresh by erasing the disk, installing the new LTS, running my Ansible Playbooks and retrieving my backup data.

Anyway, Ubuntu 22.04 is my first step into the Wayland world. Beside building Emacs with PGTK and not noticing much of a difference from my years with X Org, I discovered soon that vokoscreenNG does not work here.² Well, this is only true for the version available via apt, because the 3.3.0 (beta) on the official website seems to do what I need.

The most annoying thing I found out is Firefox provided through snap. I avoided snap on Ubuntu 20.04 by simply disabling everything related to it. I wasn’t ready to leave the reliable apt aside for my basic package management needs. I still don’t much care about snap to be honest, but the problem is that Firefox via snap does not play well with KeePassXC-Browser. So I moved to LibreWolf and be done with it.

Last but not least, the Network Manager. I need to connect to my university VPN when studying from home, which is what I do most of the time anyway. The university VPN is necessary to access the ever helpful library system and spend insane amounts of hours through papers and other niceties. The university website recommends the installation of network-manager-vpnc-gnome, which is what I was using on the previous LTS. On Ubuntu 22.04, though, vpnc support in the Network Manager is broken³ so I have to resort to the command line to make it work.⁴ However, there is a GUI solution that can be achieved with nm-connection-editor.⁵

I faced other minor problems with the provided Ruby version and the building of my websites, but luckily rvm helped me fix everything. I am confident it will come a day when installing a new LTS will just be a smooth matter. For now, I am glad I know what I am doing.