finishing up ubuntu review

1 files changed, 32 insertions, 5 deletions

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@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ In a [blog post](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1518) announcing 17.10
 
 The last bit hints at the future of desktop Ubuntu. So does a recent call for community input on a new Ubuntu desktop theme. These hints point to a new Ubuntu desktop, one that's much more community-centric. Canonical got rid of most of its design team so in one sense it has no choice but to farm these things out to the community, but that's not the entire story here. This is pure conjecture on my part, but I think that Canonical's course reversal on "convergence" goes much deeper than just abandoning Unity. Canonical shows signs of also abandoning its sometimes rather rigid belief system as well. Gone are the days when feature requests were dismissed as "wont fix" simply because they conflicted with some designers vision of how the desktop should work.
 
-Instead I believe that Ubuntu realized its mistake wasn't just pursuing convergence, but that convergence wasn't what its users wanted. I believe that the new Canonical, the new Ubuntu, is going to listen more closely to its community. Will the actual paying customers' needs set the ship's course so to speak? Probably, but that doesn't mean the desktop community will be abandoned. After all more than a few developers started using Ubuntu on the server because they were already using it on the desktop.
+Instead I believe that Ubuntu realized its mistake wasn't just pursuing convergence, but that convergence wasn't what its users wanted. I believe that the new Canonical, the new Ubuntu, is going to listen more closely to its community. I also think that the desktop release will eventually be spun off as a community-driven product only loosely affiliated with Canonical. Mark Shuttleworth has already said Canonical is prepping for an IPO, hence the focus on money-making uses of Ubuntu -- embedded, server, etc. If that happens the desktop will very likely slide to the side. There's plenty of prior art here, think Fedora and Red Hat, OpenSUSE and SUSE. That's not necessary at bad thing. In fact it can be a good thing. Keeping things separate allows the desktop to develop and grow largely independant of Canonical's bottom line. 
 
 This is a major release for Ubuntu not just because it's a brand new desktop experience for users, but also because it's a preview of what's coming in the next Long Term Support release  -- Ubuntu 18.04, coming April 2018. 
 
@@ -28,12 +28,39 @@ The first time you log in to 17.10, you'll notice that it doesn't look all that
 
 How much this matters to your experience with Ubuntu 17.10 depends on how much you used anything of these things and how well GNOME plugins can mimic them. Let's start with the bad news: if you were a heavy user of the HUD features in Unity your transition to GNOME will be painful. There is no GNOME plugin to pick up the slack (there are some admirable efforts underway, but in my testing none of them were ready for prime time). Worse, this is the kind of feature request that will have you hounded right off the GNOME developer mailing list so don't even bother. GNOME will never have a HUD, undo your muscle memory and move on. Or stick with Ubuntu 17.04 until it reaches end of life in 2022.
 
-If the HUD wasn't your go-to tool in Unity then the transition to GNOME will be less painful. In fact most of what unity could do can be imitated with GNOME plugins.
+If the HUD wasn't your go-to tool in Unity then the transition to GNOME will be less painful. In fact most of what unity could do can be imitated with GNOME plugins. Want Ubuntu style notifications and indicators? There's [an extension](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-support/) for that. Want a Global Menu? There's [an extension](https://github.com/lestcape/Global-AppMenu) for that as well, but alas, it doesn't really work. Want a *working* Global Menu? Ubuntu 17.04 is for you.
 
+Still, Ubuntu 17.10 is at least visually similar to its predecessors, which helps smooth the tranistion to GNOME somewhat. And since Unity was built on top of the same GTK libraries, GNOME components and GNOME apps as, well, GNOME itself, most of the apps and interfaces you'll see and need to find in Ubuntu 17.10 are either identical too, or very similar to their Unity counterparts. 
 
-By choosing to drop Unity most of Ubuntu’s home-grown usability efforts also fall by the wayside.
+In some cases though even the familiar will feel a little strange. Files, the default GNOME file manager app, is a good example of this. For Unity 7 Ubuntu used an older version of Files and heavily patched it to add some functionality that had long since been deleted by the GNOME developers. With 17.10 Files is up to date and those features are gone. One thing that Ubuntu did manage to hack in there is support for the desktop as a place to put stuff. The GNOME developer apparently consider the desktop just a wallpaper display tool, but Ubuntu you can actually put launchers, folder and files on your desktop, which should be welcome news for many Ubuntu users.
 
+The top bar in GNOME behaves a little differently than the top bar in Unity. It has app indicators, status messages, network controls and user sessions like unity, but also add a different app menu, a calendar applet in the center of the screen. There's also something like a global menu, minus the menu. When apps are maximized the name of app appear in the top menu, along with a one item menu -- quit is generally your only option. A couple of apps have few extra items in their menus -- Terminal and Files for example -- but it's a far cry from Unity.
 
-In Unity’s place comes a bespoke version of GNOME Shell that is ‘customised’ to resemble something that’s superficially close to the Unity desktop layout (but is not a like-for-like replacement).
+There's one other thing you'll notice in this release, the window management buttons back to the right side of each title bar. Back when Unity first arrived Ubuntu moved the buttons to the left (or wrong) side of the window in the name of innovation. Actually they had a pretty good reason, when you made a window fullscreen in Unity the buttons because part of the top bar and you can't to that when buttons are on the right side. But with the unified top bar a thing of the past there's no reason to have the buttons on the left side. If you really liked them over there you can change the setting in the GNOME Tweak tool.
+
+Once you get past the differences with Unity however there's much to like about this release. GNOME Shell is different from Unity, but it's not necessarily worse. It's certainly a pretty desktop, especially if you swap out the default theme that ships with 17.10 for something a little sleeker (I happen to like the dark variant of the Arc theme), something Ubuntu itself is planning to do before 18.04 LTS arrives. The default GNOME apps are generally the same as what you had in 17.04, though, as noted above, some are quite a bit newer (Files and Terminal are the most notable of those). 
+
+For those already well familiar with GNOME, Ubuntu 17.10 ships with GNOME 3.26, notable for its improved, streamlined  
+search view, a new settings app (called Control Center rather than Settings) and full text search support for Files. 
+
+
+In the end what you get with GNOME in 17.10 is close enough to Unity that it doesn't take more than a couple of days to wrap your head around the differences and get on with your work. 
+
+It's worth noting that in my testing GNOME uses slightly more RAM and CPU than Unity on the same hardware doing the same things, but it's only about 10% more on the RAM and let's face it, neither of them are lightweight desktops. If you want something light, try i3.
+
+## Kernel and System Updates
+
+Once you start digging below the GNOME surface of 17.10 you'll find quite a few reasons to upgrade, both on the desktop and, perhaps even more so, in the server edition.
+
+While Mir never arrived, Ubuntu has left Xorg behind, replacing it with the Wayland display server. If you've got the hardware to support it, Wayland will be the default. There are still some annoyances about Wayland, particularly with anything that needs access to your display -- apps like RedShift, screen capture tools and similar -- but aside from those issues you're unlikely to notice that you're using Wayland.
+
+It's worth mentioning that the 32-bit installation image is no more. Ubuntu previously offered both 32-bit and 64-bit installation images. With the 17.10 release, there's only 64-bit ISOs. Before you freak out bear in mind that all the 32-bit libraries and apps are still around so you can upgrade existing systems without issue. And if you want a fresh install there's still a 32-bit minimal ISO available. Install the base system from that and you can just install all the graphical tools you need on your own. The 32-bit road is, however, looking like it's narrowing down and probably won't be widening. Ubuntu won't be the first distro to drop support completely.
+
+Ubuntu 17.10 includes the Linux kernel 4.13, which has some fixes for SMB-related security vulnerabilities, initial support for Intel Cannonlake chips, some 3D support for the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA drivers, Thunderbolt improvements, along with the usual slew of odds and ends updates, patches and improvements. 
+
+## Alternatives
+
+While I highly encourage you to take Ubuntu 17.10 for a spin -- try it in virtualbox so you don't have to commit -- if you do and really hate there, are, as Shuttleworth mentions, "KDE and GNOME and MATE and many others." Of those I would suggest starting with Ubuntu MATE, which is some ways has more Unity-style features than the default GNOME release.
+
+Ubuntu MATE 17.10 has two things for unhappy Unity refugees: Global Menu support, and the HUD search tool. These are available in three of MATE's many panel layout options -- Mutiny, Cupertino, and Contemporary. Of these Mutiny is the Unity-inspired layout. You'll need to head into the MATE Tweak tool to switch to Mutiny, but once you do you can have your HUD back and works almost exactly like the Unity version -- you can search and run menu-bar commands without taking your fingers off the keyboard. Like regular Unity, it supports GTK and Qt applications.
 
-The Ubuntu 17.10 desktop uses a two panel layout: a full-height vert