Arg: no mdadm on Ubuntu 18.04.5 Desktop install disk?

[Robert Heller]

At Mon, 4 Jan 2021 00:56:25 +0100 "Ubuntu user technical support,  not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:

> 
> On Sun, 3 Jan 2021 at 02:06, Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com> wrote:
> >
> > This is seriously dumb. I mean why drop these modules and tools? To save
> > space? Huh? I mean are they worried about the ISO not fitting on a 2gig thumb
> > drive? (Can you still get thumb drives that small?)
> 
> The Pareto Principle, AKA the 80:20 rule.
> 
> It's not a simple proportion.
> 
> The reason software gets so bloated is that although 80% of people
> only want 20% of the functionality, they don't all want the _same_
> 20%. They all want a different 20%. When you add together a base and
> all the other different 20%s that different audiences want, the result
> is... well, a lot.
> 
> Ubuntu desktop and server have different foci, and Canonical seems to
> be trying to broaden the gap. Also, it has ZFS now, and this
> effectively replaces both LVM and mdraid.
> 
> So, stuff is taken out, too.
> 
> > I have yet to see a desktop MB with fewer than 4 SATA ports, so having a RAID
> > array on a desktop is possible, pretty much out-of-the box, at least on the
> > hardware side. (Yes, I know laptops don't generally provide for multiple
> > internal hard drives, so a *laptop* with an internal RAID array for the system
> > disk is unlikely.)
> 
> Just FWIW I have at least 2 Thinkpads with both a SATA bay and an
> mSATA slot (X220 + T420), but it's neither here nor there really.
> 
> Laptops are where it's at now, and Ubuntu is an easy distro for
> end-users, remember.
> 
> > I do software development work (mostly with open source projects) and want to
> > maintain a level of downward compatibility on my development systems.  I want
> > to be able to support older (and still maintained!) systems.  *I* hate it when
> > open source projects require "bleeding edge" O/S, esp. when the projects are
> > not doing anything that really requires the "bleeding edge" O/S, but merely
> > because the developers are just developing on bleeding edge O/S.
> >
> > It is not like 18.04 is going EOL anytime soon. And I will upgrade in a couple
> > of years. I have never seen any *good* reason to stand on the bleeding edge.
> 
> OK. Fair enough.
> 
> > Something I would rather avoid.  The "standard" Ubuntu installer is way to
> > user-friendly for my tastes.  I would really rather avoid an X11 based
> > installer if at all possible (it looks like it won't be with Ubuntu).
> 
> So, install Server and then just do `apt install xubuntu-desktop` or
> something like that. It's easy enough; I've done it a lot in my
> experiments to build a GNUstep-based (and ROX Desktop-based) remix.
> 
> > Oh, I won't be having anything to do with GNOME or Unity -- just some minimual
> > bits from Mate.  (I find *all* of the "modern" desktop environments horribly
> > hard to use.)
> 
> Xfce causes me the least grief. It does everything MATE does, smaller
> and simpler, but also supports a vertical taskbar, which MATE can't.

I don't like Xfce either -- it is what comes with Armbian, which is what I
installed on my Banana Pi M64 (quad core arm64 in a Raspberry Pi like form
factor). Like Mate it *insists* on a graphicial file manager. Something I
really, really do not want.  I have figured out how to hack Mate into not 
have a graphicial file manager (I manually hacked the so-called 
"required-components-list" to remove the components I really don't want).



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