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authorluxagraf <sng@luxagraf.net>2016-10-22 10:28:49 -0400
committerluxagraf <sng@luxagraf.net>2016-10-22 10:28:49 -0400
commit6b2392ecdcd0c3b3bfa78fae0ad910a7aa1ecea6 (patch)
tree01e8e17813aab240d7f1cb0c1653b23edd217faa
parenta17b730b65d32674b33d6b0bda2ebb93a1755ca7 (diff)
more on the ubuntu review
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@@ -6,7 +6,9 @@ Still, while the Unity 7.5 desktop offer stability and speed today, it's not lon
In Canonical's defense, the competing display server project, Wayland, hasn't exactly taken the world by storm just yet. Wayland will likely [be the default for the Fedora Project's](https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-release-fedora-25-beta/) next release, Fedora 25. The differnce is that GNOME 3 isn't tied to Wayland and has been cranking out impressive releases for some time now while Unity 7.5 is feeling, well, a bit dated.
-It's worth noting that Ubuntu 16.10 is the first official release of Ubuntu to ship with Unity 8 and Mir available. Good luck getting it to run though. Older hardware isn't up to the task and most new NVidia-based hardware won't work either. For this review I used both a Dell XPS and System 76 Oryx Pro and neither one of these very modern, well-specced pieces of hardware can successfully boot to Unity 8. Most accounts I've seen (like this video) show a streamlined Unity interface with a new set of icons. It's banal enough to make you wonder what the fuss is about.
+It's worth noting that Ubuntu 16.10 is the first official release of Ubuntu to ship with Unity 8 and Mir available. To try out a Unity 8 session, just click the Ubuntu symbol next to your username when you login.
+
+Good luck getting Unity 8 to run though. Older hardware isn't up to the task and most new NVidia-based hardware won't work either. For this review I used both a Dell XPS and System 76 Oryx Pro and neither one of these very modern, well-specced pieces of hardware can successfully boot to Unity 8. Most dissapointing, those accounts I've seen of people who can get Unity 8 running (like this video) show a streamlined Unity interface with... a new set of icons. It's banal enough to make you wonder what the fuss is about.
But of course the fuss is about "convergence". The fuss is about the purported future in which you plug your phone into a monitor and it turns into a full desktop computing experience. I've started to feel like Fox Mulder waiting for Unity 8. I want to believe. I really do, but I've started to think convergence is about as likely as the zombie apocalypse and that the truth, the reality we'll end up with, will be somewhere below Canonical's fantasies of do anything phones and flesh eating updates that install Windows instead of Linux.
@@ -16,15 +18,60 @@ In the mean time Canonical is shipping a very nice desktop operating system that
## Kernel 4.8
-The biggest and best news to arrive with 16.10 is probably the move to Linux kernel 4.8.
+The biggest and best news to arrive with 16.10 is probably the move to Linux kernel 4.8. While earlier this year I called kernel 4.6 one of the best to come along in years (paraphrasing Linux Torvalds), 4.8 is a significant upgrade for the additional hardware support. There are three notable developments in 4.8, improved Skylake support, better support for NVidia Pascal and support for the raspberry pi 3.
+
+Skylake has been a very hit or miss series of chips in both Linux and Windows, though it seems particularly prone to problems in Linux. Kernel 4.8 fixes a Skylake power management bug that can crash your system and seems to generally be much more stable than earlier releases. I still occassionally experienced a bug with Chromium and YouTube both on Ubuntu and Arch running 4.8, but otherwise 4.8 has solved all the problems I've noticed on Skylake machines.
+
+Nvidia Pascal cards get some love in this update as well. The new support applies to the open-source Nouveau driver, and its far from complete, but it's a start. I'd still suggest sticking with Nvidia's proprietary drivers for now, but at least Nouveau support is in the works.
+
+The Raspberry Pi 3 support is good news for anyone looking to get Ubuntu installed. Previously Linux kernels had to be patched to work with the Raspberry Pi 3, which in practical terms means you needed the Debian patched Raspbian, but now RP3 support native to the Linux kernel, any distro should run just fine, provided you turn off any graphics-intensive UI.
+
+There are also a couple of more universal improvements to ACPI low power mode, which might squeeze a few more minutes out of your laptop battery, and some big improvements to USB camera and HDMI device capture, which will be welcome to those of you editing video in Linux.
+
+## Unity 7.5
+
+The most noticeable difference in 16.10's Unity desktop is the speed improvement. Unity is just plain fast. Applications launch quickly, windows minimize quickly, suspend resumes quickly, even boot time is minimal.
+
+This release also sees some significant updates to the GNOME components and applications that Unity depends on, bring most of the GNOME stack up to version 3.20 (a couple appear to be at GNOME 3.22, which downright cutting edge by Ubuntu's backporting standards). Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the Nautilus file browser, which gains the new search filters, progress indicator and icon size control that GNOME users have enjoyed for some time now.
+
+In Ubuntu the best of these new features is the greatly improved search features, which are not only much faster, but also allow you to chain filters together. Files, as Nautilus is known these days, also comes with a much more compact preferences dialog, which offers new settings for showing the permanent delete and create symbolic link buttons.
+
+Most of the rest of the standard GNOME-based Unity application stack has been updated to the latest version. LibreOffice has been updated to 5.2, tk is at tk. There are two other under the hood changes that some users may be pleasantly suprised by: If there's a GTK3 version on an app available it'll be used by default. LibreOffice is one example of this and it looks much better than previous releases.
+
+Unfortunately one place Unity seems to lag behind GNOME is detecting HiDPI screens. While 16.10 has excellant HiDPI support, it never detected my screens. I had to manually turn on scaling, which is a minor point to be sure, but a new user who doesn't know that they need to turn on dpi scaling might be quite lost, staring at tiny text on a 4k monitor.
+
+Also worth noting, systemd is now used for user sessions. Previous release (and this one) used systemd for system sessions, but not user sessions. Upstart, Ubuntu's previous session manager is still around for Unity and some indicators, but these too are in the process of being migrated to systemd. Soon it will be just systemd turtles all the way down.
+
+## Stability and Performance
-kernel linux 4.8.0 support for pi3, supports NVidia pascal, ACPI low power mode, and skylake. Big news for anyone interested in video editing as well. USB camera and HDMI device capture.
+Despite feeling a bit faster, Ubuntu 16.10 was a bit more resource heavy than its LTS predecessor. I found that idle performance for 16.10 was nearly identical to 16.04, though 16.10 was using about 25 percent more RAM. There's better news when it comes to power use though. Using the powerstat application (developed by an Ubuntu engineer Colin King) with brightness at full, Wifi on and bluetooth off, I found 16.10 used roughly 10 percent less energy. At least some of that improvement may be due to the aforementioned kernel power management improvements though. In other words, once it's backported to 16.04 power consumption may be much closer, but in the mean time, 10 percent is a significant improvement.
-Unity 8 and Mir are available, preview mode. Mir is still highly beta, and entirely optional. However it's now relatively easy to use, just login to a Mir/Unity 8 session. In fact it more or less mirrors where competitor project, Wayland was about a year ago for GNOME-based distros Wayland is pretty much ready to go. Or at least Fedora 25 is planning to use it, that could of course fall on its face.
+One place I found Ubuntu 16.10 a giant leap ahead of 16.04 was stability and bugs. Generally this is the opposite of what I would expect, ubuntu's October releases tend to more experimental, a place for developers to try reasonably stable new ideas that might still have a bug or two. Unfortunately I found 16.04 to be quite buggy -- which could have been related the Skylake issues upstream from Ubuntu itself -- as released, though things have settled down a bit now.
+
+With 16.10 all my trackpad issues and X session crashes have vanished (save the aforementioned Chromium/YouTube bug). Once again the majority of the stability fixes will likely be backported to 16.04, but if any of these or other bugs have bitten you with 16.04 it might be worth making the leap to 16.10 to see if that improves your experience.
+
+## Flavors
+
+Unity is the flagship relejase, but by no means the only way to enjoy Ubuntu. The list of improvements in 16.10 for Ubuntu's various flavors is beyond the scope of a short review like this, but there are two releases in particular that deserve mention. The first is not technically a flavor, but it's already the most used version of Ubuntu out there -- the server edition.
+
+OpenStack Newton
+
+Ubuntu 16.10 includes the latest OpenStack release, Newton, including the following components:
+Please refer to the OpenStack Newton release notes for full details of this release of OpenStack.
+
+OpenStack Newton is also provided via the Ubuntu Cloud Archive for OpenStack Newton for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users.
+
+WARNING: Upgrading an OpenStack deployment is a non-trivial process and care should be taken to plan and test upgrade procedures which will be specific to each OpenStack deployment.
+
+Make sure you read the OpenStack Charm Release Notes for more information about how to deploy Ubuntu OpenStack using Juju.
+
+### Ubuntu MATE
MATE 1.16 is GTK 3, so if you depend on GTK 3 apps MATE will now work much better, HiDPI support is also much much better. software boutique.
- - Unity 7.5 backported stuff from Nautilus. dpi doesn't appear to be backported
- - high dpi is not on by default and doesn't autodetect
- It's fast. applications launch quickly, windows minimize quickly, suspend resumes quickly, boots fast, etc.
+## Conclusion
+
+
+Decent release, still no Unity 8 which is disappointing, but hang in there. Worth the update if you don't want to wait for backports, otherwise most of what's great about 16.10 will get to 16.04, eventually.
+