Guest post by Ars Technica once again provides us with an in-depth Ubuntu review:
If you’ve been following the Linux world at all, you know this has been an entire year for spring cleaning. Early in 2017, Canonical stopped work on its homegrown Unity desktop, Mir display server, and its larger vision of ‘convergence’ – a unified interface for Ubuntu for phones, tablets, and desktops.
And now almost exactly six years after Ubuntu first switched from GNOME 2 to the Unity desktop, that has been dropped, too. The distro is back to GNOME, and Canonical recently released Ubuntu 17.10, a major update with some significant changes coming to the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system.
In light of the GNOME switch, this release seems like more of a homecoming than an entirely new voyage. But that said, Ubuntu 17.10 simultaneously feels very much like the start of a new voyage for Ubuntu.
This is one of the biggest problems with GNOME vs Unity or Xorg vs Wayland: There’s no difference to most users. Normal users, not us geeks.
They’ve put in all this effort for what? Nothing! Users cannot tell the difference.
Except that in Gnome3 animations lag, the window manager takes more memory than the entire DE in xfce of kde, the entire desktop is singlethreaded in an environmrnt where such coding is very much frowned upon and add to that the bad Poetting style of absorbtion of other tech.
Poettering fucked up logging to a state where it is almost as bad as windows, printing to a point where linux is no longer “plug and play” like it used to be with just cups, fucked up the sound system for an completely useless abstraction layer.
I left linux after 20 years for for the same reason i hate windows. If Poettering is a microsoft operative he definitely succeded in making the linux OS boring and full of flaws.
Come on. You’re exaggerating, it is not all as bad as you are saying. I feel your comments are more of an opinion than an actual fact because you’re disagreeing with the direction being taken.
Gnome is still running excellent after 4 years on my i5 laptop. We’ve seen a lot of functional improvements, without performance degradation over the years. No lagging animations here. At work i’m running it in a VM and there lagging sometimes occurs. But thats a price I am willing to pay for using a very well polished and consistent (!!!) desktop environment.
I am so sick of people saying: it doesn’t lag for me. It’s BS, it’s beyond BS. You must not be doing anything with your computer.
It’s a fact, by design gnome shell and mutter share the same thread. There is nothing they can improve besides seriously refactor gnome shell. Also, mutter is crap.
I do real work on my computer, i’ve got a 7900x and a gtx 1080, when i compile the kernel it slows the whole ui and when i listen to netflix the video sometimes skips. I have 2 screens and the problem is even worst because of the way mutter handles rendering.
Forget about wayland, not long ago the mouse was driven ON THE SAME THREAD as gnome shell! The mouse was behaving like in windows 3.1.
Just stop with my gnome works fine. It doesn’t. You’re not special.
The desktop in Linux is broken. We are in 2017 almost 18 and we have gone backward. There are good stuff here and there but everything is broken.
Gnome vanilla is horrible. KDE doesn’t play well with gtk3 csd (no menu shadows for example). XFCE is dead? Compiz is still good if you patch it which i did. The rest is for the 1%.
I am a software engineer, i contribute to many linux project, like compiz, mutter and the kernel in different distros.
I’ve looked at the code, i understand the code. It’s some of the worst crap i have seen. Javascript is stupid, mutter is a pile of garbage and I just hope Ubuntu will get in there and bring sanity. I hope Ubuntu has a plan to fix these issues. I want a modern, flexible all in one desktop that really works.
Honestly, you should trying Englightenment or Moksha (fork of E17).
http://www.enlightenment.org/
Moksha is maintained by it’s own distro, Bodhi:
http://www.bodhilinux.com/
Bluetooth support on linux is also unbelievably crappy. If you need to use extra tools to route music via bluetooth speakers and audio is glitching on 8 core CPU then system is unusable.
Oddly enough Bluetooth works on the latest Ubuntu. I think it is my first experience of Bluetooth actually working without any fiddling.
Wrong. I spend 9 hours a day running GNOME on Centos 7 and I am very happy with it. Developing code with (mostly) Netbeans and running Glassfish, Apache & HHVM locally for testing. At the same time I am usually streaming music in the background. The performance is great and it is very reliable.
Exactly my experience. Running the same IDE and more or less the same stack with docker etc.
Too bad you got a downvote; it seems the bias of some of the loud screamers counts more that the actual experience of users running the software as intended.
Thanks a lot for your comment. I’m so happy to see finally somebody speaking up. I’m so disappointed by so many open sources project that continue building uppon shit. Take for example the Qt3D module that is part of QT. It has been developed since many years. One of the main classes is Qt3DWindow. Like one year ago I report the incredible bug that when the it this class is crashing your application when the destructor is called. It was flagged a Critical… and one year later still flagged as “unresolved”. If you are beginner c++ developer, and you write a class that crashes the application uppon object destruction, I cannot imagine that it takes you more than 1 day to get fired. This is the absolut minimum that one expects from any class that on object creation and destruction it doesn’t crash the whole applcation. But for open source is perfectly fine. And the abosut big question is. This is like the main class in Qt3D, nobody ever tested it in all these years of development?
And when I tell that QT is shit…. the fanboys appear calling me troll. Same story with wayland. Also a piece of shit and the fanboys think wayland will be the next big thing. Sorry no.
cipri
I understand your pain, I suffer it too but about a different open source project. GCC. Look at those two still unresolved bug reports and for how long they are open :
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=39985
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=65455
And the recent ‘man’ (after midnight) “easter egg” also reveal the typical mindset in the FOSS community. Not even speaking about how everyone owes them everything and have to release their software under GPL because anything else is wrong and a sin.
Who said it’s perfectly fine? There are many similar bugs in proprietary source software that go unfixed for years, and all that exists is some hack workaround that no one knows why it works.
Or is that okay for closed source software for you?
Closed/proprietary source have an ‘excuse’ of not being easily maintainable. Bug tracked open source haven no excuse, if not laziness.
That’s just a ridiculous double standard. Closed/proprietary have LESS of an excuse – because you pay MONEY for it. You should get your money’s worth. You probably don’t contribute a dime to the open source projects you use.
Now, if the argument was levelled at Qt only, then I might agree, since people pay for proprietary licence. But that wasn’t the argument, was it?
Oh, you can always pay what you want a close source software, if the company decide it is too old for maintenance or that the upgrade plan is now to be paid (service pack vs. major upgrade) then you can do whatever you want, you’ll get no bug fix at all. See how Microsoft pretended Windows XP is now too old to be patched, that they now sell newer versions of Windows, despite you paid for Windows XP but not for its bugs.
So, what is the excuse now for FOSS ? Because it is free and based on volunteering, does that permit laziness in fixing tracked critical bugs ? What have they to sell that is newer and render the previous version obsolete and useless to maintain ?
You’ve already loaded your question by presupposing it’s laziness. Quit JAQing off.
Then tell me a valid reason for a tracked reproducible bug to remain open for more than 8 years and a half ?
Lack of people. Lack of time. Difficulty reproducing the problem.
But I suspect you’ll dismiss any reason anyone can come up with because you’re hell bent on pre-concluding that it’s laziness.
I bet GCC ain’t maintained just by a couple of guys, and 8 years and a half is enough time to reproduce the bug that was documented fully. That’s no valid reasons, try again.
You’re the one giving too many void excuses to defend FOSS and it’s lack of QC. At least that provides you with many up votes and me many down votes while I showed how much this situation is biased.
Just like I predicted. I don’t even know what bug you’re referring to, so I don’t even have a context, but you’re just showing no reason will ever be good enough for you because you’re hell bent on your presupposed conclusion.
Try again.
Obviously you don’t follow the topic, I pointed the two bugs here : http://www.osnews.com/thread?651535
So you keep proving my point. You have a presupposed conclusion that you’ll push and push and have no interest in being proven wrong because you have already decided on a conviction.
Dated ‘20170725’ but still missing from the latests releases as the ‘const’ bug remains. It’s not like no one worked on it, but the effect of any correction so far remains to be seen IRL.
Btw, Microsoft received a bug report in an obscure office component relating to formula edition and corrected it in 10 days, binary patching a 17 yo software they obviously lost the source.
Not same priorities, not same effectiveness.
So? Your argument was that it’s laziness. Laziness means no one is bothered working on it. The evidence shows you’re wrong.
You lose.
More than 8 years to do it, I call this laziness.
If it was the only bug in the queue, then yes.
The bug was found in 4.4.0. GCC is now at 6, with many OTHER bugs fixed along the way.
Like I said, you lose, but you were never going to accept anything else other than your foregone conclusion.
You’ve already got no more legs to stand on. Keep exposing yourself as a hack if you want.
And you keep excusing open source projects, even though my main grief was the slowness of fix, pretending no one works on GCC, or are incompetent, or bugzilla is ineffective to describe and track bugs, that shouldn’t be there in the first place because open source, wada wada.
More than 8 fucking years to solve a tracked critical bug. Be it Microsoft to have showed such lightness on the subject, I’m pretty sure you’ve been of the ones going thermonuclear on them.
I’m fed up with FOSS pretending being the panacea to free the world from evil corporations and their nasty closed source software, yet incapable to keep up with steady yet simple quality check. That you keep failing to understand this simple fact just shows how much you are mentally dissonant. Just like your freetard brotherhood.
You lose.
Not only it took more than 8 years for someone start taking considering the bug, but even though it looks like someone is working on it and submitted a patch in July, more than 4 months back and still not into the main branch ? Should I consider it included in 2020 ?
The bug resolution is so slow in the open source community, that is obviously so scarce in resources, than someone else opened a related bug more than 6 years after the first that is still officially unresolved and remaining open.
And yes, since you still haven’t provided me with VALID reasons for not involving more resources into bug tracking and resolving, I’m not going to accept your petty remarks and snarky tags to keep avoiding addressing the main issues.
I suspect that is an nVidia thing.
People have complained about it and AFAIK there are patches out there that help nVidia users.
If that is the case then yes, there are people out there that dont suffer from it.
Edited 2017-12-02 23:22 UTC
You are stating everything as facts. As if god himself descended to earth to share his objective truth.
No, I am not special. And neither are you.
I am not saying Linux Desktop is perfect. I am just saying that Gnome works very well for me. And yes, I am doing something with my computer; I earn my money as a Java developer. And the Gnome desktop helps me in this regard. Who are you to tell me it doesn’t suffice?
I did notice some lag on Gnome Shell (when I tried it a few months ago) that I don’t have with Unity.
The only time my Gnome-Shell seems to lag is after I’ve left something (I haven’t figured out what it is yet, could be Steam, could be a video playing in flash, whatever) running for some time and then unlock my computer. Then I do alt+f2, type r, and it’s all happy again.
Though now that I think about it, it didn’t do it this morning, and I am now wondering if it’s the weird monitor setup I have. I have two 2560×1440 displays at high refresh rates (144hz) and one 1600×1200 monitor at 60hz. Last night I left the 1600×1200 one off because I was playing a game in Steam and it always likes to throw the game there, so I disabled it to play a game, and left it that way until I woke up this morning and had no issues…
Will have to experiment with that, I already joined a bug about how on Laptops if you close the screen on the laptop with external monitors it locks the ability to arrange your screens. They were already working on a fix.
xfce is dead?
Gnome 3 is probably to a large extent dragged down by GTK 3. As for the latter, there are probably a number of factors but what is mainly bogging it down might be the decision to incorporate ‘web technologies’ into the widget toolkit. All the rendering is more and more controlled through CSS.
It seemes to me design decisions on GTK are by now almost single handedly taken by a person called Matthias Clasen (https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/). That is very sad for those us who are invested in GTK in one way or another.
He has his own ideas for a GUI desktop architecture, deprecating and removing API functionality at will, reincluding it when it turns out the decision caused a mess and so on. Performance or lean design is obviously not a consideration.
Perhaps they should have used Qt… (ducks) ;P
If you ask me, Qt is not much better when it comes to bloat. Qt tries to make up for what is wrong with C++ through its object framework, at a heavy expense on performance. On top of that they came up with Qt Quick/QML which is Java Script but not quite Java Script – a mess that is only barely surpassed by GTK 3, if at all.
Uhhh, why do you think xfce is dead? They just released Xubuntu 17.10. I’ve been using Xubuntu 17.04 since it came out and it works very well. Light, bluetooth is great. Can’t complain
> I do real work on my computer, i’ve got a 7900x and a gtx 1080,
THERE’S YOUR PROBLEM. Nvidia drivers are GARBAGE, especially on Wayland. You get a bit more FPS in games but everything else is CRAP. Intel or AMD is the way to go for GPUs on Linux and has been for quite some time.
No, Judgen is right. When you have to use an i5 based machine for Gnome to even attempt to approach the smoothness of Windows on a Celeron, you’re doing something wrong.
I’ve done a ton of independent testing of various distros, OSes, and DEs/WMs over the years as a hobby, and by far Gnome 3 and KDE are the worst offenders, though KDE is much better than Gnome by far (and I don’t even like KDE to start with). Unity is much, much more performant than Gnome 3 on the same hardware, on par with Cinnamon. I’m baffled by Canonical’s decision to switch, unless they really were hurting so bad financially that they had to scrap their UI team, as the various articles suggest.
How would you rate the latest MATE?
Performance wise, I’d say it’s between Xfce and Cinnamon. I currently run it on a Raspberry Pi 3 via Ubuntu MATE Edition and it’s quite nice on that little board. It’s not quite an everyday desktop experience but then no OS/DE is on the Pi.
On a regular desktop machine I like it but I prefer Xfce as that’s what I’ve used the most over the years.
In my experience Unity is performing worse than Gnome. It was laggy. Thats my experience. Your experience is just…. your experience. So, whats your point?
Windows on a Celeron smooth? lol
That’s how vast majority of Celerons are used, and their owners are reasonably happy with it…
Ha, this reminds me when a friend of my sister had been given an eMachine (remember those pieces of crap?) and I installed Ubuntu on her machine because WindowsXP was terribly slow on 256mb of ram. Then her video died, which was on the motherboard and I had to swap that out. Unfortunately I made a mistake and bought a motherboard that required PC133 instead of DDR1 (I think that’s what it was, this was years ago). I only had 128mb of PC133 laying around, so stuck that in there. XP vs Ubuntu.. XP took about 10 minutes to load OpenOffice. Ubuntu took 5. It was long enough ago that it was running Gnome 2 though. That story still makes me laugh. It was really slow, but at least semi-usable under Ubuntu. XP was a memory pig.
I quite succesfully used a 192 MiB XP machine for browsing, ~office tasks and games…
Same, I have a Dell Latitude CPx with 512MB PC133 on a Pentium III 500MHz. It is amazingly fast with XP (originally came with Windows 2000), and purrs like a kitten with Slackware, OpenBSD, and BeOS (not Haiku, BeOS Pro 5.0 from the original disc).
I just bought a battery for it this year, and it has CardBus cards for USB 2.0, WiFi (one for XP, another for the other OSes) and 10/100 Ethernet. No Intel ME, no UEFI, no ultra-widescreen, no chiclet keyboard. Just pure Y2K era mobile computing at its finest! 😉
Ahh yes, on that 192 (and at first – 64) MiB RAM & AMD Duron 600 MHz machine I had my first forays into ~alternative OS. IIRC Red Hat at first (back when it was free, though I suppose I kinda bought it – with a magazine; I only had access to metered by the minute 56k internet access, so downloading many OSes would be prohibitively expensive), which didn’t turn out so great – my GFX card, Matrox Millenium G400, didn’t (yet) have good open source X drivers …so only small area of the desktop was displayed/scrolled, like when using a magnifier tool; IIRC it had something to do with X having access to only small part of GFX card memory.
OTOH, BeOS worked like a charm.
Though there wasn’t much I could do with it, since it was quite barebones (the free edition that installed to a file on a Windows partition; also came from a magazine 
) …but at least my Lucent Winmodem was supported, so I mostly browsed on it, oddly enough, …SGI-related sites 
(still have to re-find some info from them, like for example something about a game where you control an abstract leafless tree with an SGI Indy camera). And it’s possibly how I first stumbled on OSNews.
Still it came up second most used platform on stack this year (if not taking into account AWS).
Linux desktop can be a horrible experience in so many ways, but just for back-end services it does the job very well (you also don’t need any GUI for this or even peripheral input)..
where exactly did you go from there, if you don’t mind me asking?
So it’s no longer Miguel de Icaza and Mono?
I disagree.
Users can’t *name* the difference.
But regular users often go into crisis mode if a button is not in the same place as it used to be.
And it can be irritating for everybody. I still haven’t quite gotten used to the moved refresh button in new Firefox…
zima,
You are not the only one. I’ll have to get used to it, but logically it made more sense where it was. When you type an address you still get the “enter” arrow to fetch the page, refresh serves almost the same function and IMHO it should have stayed where it was.
Anyone else having trouble with dropdown boxes in the new version? Maybe 5% of the time I run firefox, the dropdown boxes just stop working until I restart firefox. Weird
My biggest gripe with the new Firefox is that, with the 57.0.1 update, it silently changes your search provider to Google. I spoke with a Mozilla dev about it and their not-so-friendly response was “LOL don’t use a spyware search provider, use Google”. Thanks, but I use Startpage because I don’t want Google spying on me. Startpage isn’t spyware and is one of the safer search engines.
Another dev pointed me to the bug entry for the “feature”, which says any search provider not using HTTPS will silently change to Google. Startpage uses HTTPS only, so that’s also not true. It’s a blatant attempt by Mozilla to sweeten their new deal with Google, and it’s disgusting.
Morgan,
I’ve noticed things like this too, such as my search engine and “tab page” preferences being overwritten by firefox updates. While I do consider this unethical, I understand that accepting money from advertisers including google is mozilla’s primary source of revenue. Therefor I’m at a loss to suggest what they should do here. By refusing to go along with unethical advertiser demands, mozilla faces a serious existential crisis due to lack of funding.
Hypothetically users could start paying for firefox themselves. This would require changes at mozilla because right now they have a bit of “our way or the highway” attitude towards users, which would have to be reversed in the event that users were paying. However users have an expectation that browsers are free and ultimately I’m highly skeptical that they would pay for firefox when other browsers are free. So I don’t know what choice mozilla has other than to shed its paid staff or get in bed with advertisers?
Steve balmer was wrong, linux isn’t cancer, advertisers are, ha! After all, nobody is forced to use linux, but advertisers are invading all aspects of our lives.
I agree, it’s a sticky situation for Mozilla. I just think if they’re going to say “we’re bastions of Internet freedom and we fight for your right to a free and open Internet”, they should rethink their overall approach to their user base. Silently changing user’s custom settings and lying about the reason behind it (claiming non-Google search providers don’t use HTTPS when they clearly do is dishonest at best) is user-hostile and runs the risk of turning away those very eyeballs Google just tried to buy.
Not to mention, people like me who have tried to excise Google from their lives now have to weigh whether the Google/Mozilla deal impacts that decision in other ways. After all, the only real cross-platform alternative to a Mozilla based browser is a Chrome based browser. Edge is nice but it’s Windows only.
I do notice the difference between GNOME 3 and Unity. Neither of them are a patch on GNOME 2 circa 2007, which was about when that desktop had reached a good level of stability, but Unity was a valiant attempt to provide some degree of stability for Ubuntu users when GNOME changed out of all recognition, and to borrow Mac-like functionality such as the global menu and dock menus, even if they’re a bit more awkward to program than the Mac dock menu. These days, Ubuntu has adapted it as much as it can to look like Ubuntu and to be fair this is the first version of GNOME shell I’ve left on a machine since it first appeared about 2011 or so. I’ve always found it unusable.
Ubuntu has been broken for years now, although it has provided stable packages for the most part. Every install always requires tweaking to the tune of an hours time or more to make it right, and then it STILL does not play multimedia properly. Same reason I don’t use Fedora or Centos as a desktop, or Suse anymore, Mandrake (Mandriva), whatever they go by now. I go with Mint, as they took Ubuntu and fixed it so it actually works on install properly. I never understood why Ubuntu got so big…wait yes I do, the owner has money, no other reason.
That’s interesting- because it’s the opposite of my experience.
I do almost zero tweaking after a fresh install. I enable wobbly windows because I like it.
Oh – and I check the local menu checkbox (can’t stand global menu). That’s it. A couple minutes of tweaking.
Video and music work out-of-the box – both on an underpowered Netbook and my gaming laptop.
To me Ubuntu (Unity) provides a very nice and clean environment. With that I can surf, play videos, listen to music, play games, do programming, etc…
What exactly is Mint “fixing” that is so broken in (Unity) Ubuntu?
(I’m not a fan of Gnome Shell – recently tried it for a second time – still don’t like it).
Really curious about 2 things. 1) why are you upvoted to 6 just for basically saying you don’t like Gnome (guess that’s a question for everyone else). 2) What in particular do you not like about Gnome?
The switch was because of shifting existing resources from desktop use to “cloud and IoT story for Ubuntu”.
Most of the updates that came from this shift where only in this area, the others being left in a somewhat stable build (although the list of known bugs or “won’t fix” ones for desktop version have been increasing since 16.04).
Thanks to GNOME 3 I started to appreciate KDE Plasma 5, and I’ve discovered KDE Connect, which is a killer app IMHO.
Everything old, is new again.
I keep to Xubuntu. The one I feel is simplistic enough and still provide features that I want. I don’t care what other people do or use. I just do my thing.
But you care that other people know that you don’t care and do your thing.
Reading comments it would seem like everything was going downhill in the Linux world. My experience is different. I have never enjoyed using Linux on desktop more than now. No hardware problems at all – wifi, Bluetooth, graphics – all working after installations without a fix. Having three computers at home all are running either Fedora 26 or Ubuntu 17.10 and all do serve wonderfully, one as a laptop, the other desktop, and finally a multimedia/”game console” machine connected to TV. Gnome/Ubuntu/Fedora work wonderfully in all these scenarios.
True, it was a pain getting used to Gnome 3 back in the day but now pushing that mouse pointer to the top left corner became a habit even on Windows at work. It’s damn annoying when nothing happens! Had to fix that on Ubuntu 17.10 though – with one single command. You gotta love that.
I for one am glad Ubuntu came back to Gnome. Like the articles says – they came back home.
Btw, if there was no Ubuntu many of us would probably never step so firmly into the Linux world. It was the kindest and the most user friendly distro back then. And if there was no Ubuntu, there would never be Mint.
Disclaimer: I am, I would say, a normal, average user – no excessive multitasking and two or three monitor setups.
I use Gnome 3 at work every day and with the Dash-to-Dock extension it feels perfectly natural. Using Fedora and now Ubuntu on a 3-year-old i7 laptop with integrated graphics – in comparison to Windows 7 it really flies, haven’t had a performance hiccup yet.
Moochman,
I wish I had a 3 year old i7 laptop, I have a 6 year old i3 that I bought used, haha. For average tasks it’s still usable, but it can be painfully slow for some of the development I throw at it. I’ve been looking for something to replace it, but I’m finding that for the same budget as before, higher spec laptops have not really become more affordable. It’s just hard to justify spending alot for a new laptop that serves as my secondary machine.
I’ve never been less excited about a Linux release (or maybe Lunux in general) than I have been about Ubuntu 17. I’ve dislike Gnome in many ways for years and always have. Unity didn’t help.
Linus as a server os is pretty much awesome and I love it. But as a desktop, i’m not sure it’s ever gonna catch on in anything other than nitch groups. I guess my biggest gripe compared to MacOSX and Windows 7 or now later releases of Windows 10, is that Linux desktops just never feel polished compared to them. Unity was such a foreign and weird UI that I never got used to it AND I could never quite sell students or other business people on it either. Weird mixes of flat and realistic icons, strange uses of flat and bubbled ui.. Linux just looks and feels second class and that disappoints me because I so WANT to use a linux desktop.
Ubuntu is laggy and too foreign for the general populace to adopt. Kubuntu constantly crashes when simply dragging an icon a panel or opening the discover app.. Mint black screen of deaths with every upgrade/update. Fedora.. well fedora is fedora and still Gnome, but uglier.. Elementary is beautiful but hobbled beyond all belief — I wish someone could do a linux desktop right that just worked with all the devs on the same page.
Who knows.. maybe I’m just venting my frustration and disappointment, but I can’t believe I’m the only one.