Sorry for the delay on this one – it’s been a… Busy weekend for me personally, so I’m only just now catching up with most of the news from the past few days.
Codenamed “Zesty Zapus”, Ubuntu 17.04 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.
Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 4.10-based kernel, and much more.
Ubuntu Desktop has seen incremental improvements, with newer versions of GTK and Qt, updates to major packages like Firefox and LibreOffice, and stability improvements to Unity.
This is possibly the last release to feature Unity, which makes it oddly notable. Interesting, too, how that lines up with the Z name.
Unity was a noble experiment. At a time when both Unity and Gnome3 were nascent and immature, I tried both. Eventually, the polish and completeness of Gnome3 drew me over. I can’t say that I dislike Unity, just that it always had some odd quirks for a Linux desktop that kept getting in my way. There were always practical limits to how many terminal sessions and how many desktops could be put to use at one time. In large debugging sessions, Unity becomes a high hurdle to jump over every time some critical piece of information was needed from the multiple terminal sessions. Your workflow may have been suited to Unity, mine wasn’t.
It feels much better to have the scarce free software resources concentrating on the same essential core GUI. I hope that the Unity devs who may not be interested in contributing to Gnome3 find some new projects.
Shuttleworth put a lot of funds and people behind Unity to pursue a unified UI design. Undoubtedly, there will be new projects that get funded from the demise of Unity.
I think a lot of people were turned off by Unity’s unshakable keyboard dependence. I know I was. And starting two instances of the same app was, well, unnecessarily complex.
I use Ubuntu MATE every day, even on remote cloud desktops. It’s still the best for my work style.
Edited 2017-04-18 17:38 UTC
I’m just about to get a new Ryzen PC, so it’ll be interesting to see how this performs on it, though ultimately I’m staying with CentOS 7 (with a 4.10 kernel because the stock CentOS 7 kernel apparently hasn’t had Ryzen support added yet, which is a bit surprising).
I’ve already run Ubuntu MATE 17.04 in VirtualBox and it’s pretty well what you’d expect – no major surprises. Still doesn’t run an ssh server out of the box, but that’s always something I’ve had to add to Ubuntu post-install. At least it runs systemd-timesyncd – in the early days of Ubuntu, ntpd wasn’t installed by default, which was sheer madness.
I’m quite looking forward to Ubuntu 17.10 or possibly 18. I never really took to the Unity interface, I can’t wait to see what they do next tbh.
Might just hang on for 18, Until then Mint is certainly good enough.
MarkHughes,
We’ll see what the future has in stock. With Unity (and to an extent the gnome shell guys too) the developers just weren’t the least bit interesting in community feedback, and I’m ashamed to say it felt reminiscent of the way microsoft treats users “we hear you loud and clear, we just don’t care”. Mint, the small underfunded distro that cropped out of nowhere and become as popular as it did by actually listening to users, so I hope ubuntu has learned a lesson from that. I’m truly grateful for the work and resources they’ve put into linux but please don’t forget about the users.
I’m finding Mint to be so good that by the time Ubuntu 18 comes out they will propbably need something really sweet to get me to move over… I will be trying it out regardless but it isn’t forced to stick around.
‘Z’ is the last letter, you know.
In english. There is still plenty of letters after z in many languages.
They haven’t done the A or C release, nor the B in order (Breezy Badger was the 3rd, not the 2nd).
I think they said GNOME 3 would be introduced with the 18.04 release, not 17.10, so that means one more Unity release.
Edited 2017-04-18 19:50 UTC
They’ll probably just wrap around and use different words. Just because there’s only 26 letters in the roman alphabet doesn’t mean they’re stuck with 26 words or phrases.
The next release with be the Albino Albatross!
JLF65,
To be perfectly honest, I don’t like named releases. They doesn’t serve a useful purpose, it’s harder to follow and I personally don’t find it amusing. I have no idea if I’m in the minority on this, but just call it “Ubuntu” and version number. The name identifies the software, the version increments, everything is good in my simple mind.
I guess there’s resistance in marketing against versions that go past 10:
Now that it reached 10, Mac OS has ceased to increment past X.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-version-of…
You got that right – named releases are a pain, especially when trying to determine is an update is available for your release. I NEVER remember what the release I’m running is named, but I know the number – it’s 16.04LTS. I always update on the LTS release. What 16.04 is CALLED I haven’t the slightest. So when someone posts that a massive new update for “whatever” is available for Yakkety Yak, I haven’t any idea which version they’re talking about until I google it… again… for the tenth time. :/