dawnofsunday

[dawnofsunday]

My Thoughts on Ubuntu GNOME 17.04

Oh, yes~ It’s 2017, and it’s time for a new release of Ubuntu~ A few days before this latest 17.04 release code named Zesty Zapus, Canonical’s founder Mark Shuttleworth announced via the official Ubuntu blog that the company will abandon their efforts to develop their vision of convergence. This basically means that the default desktop environment for Ubuntu 17.10 onwards will be GNOME for the foreseeable future. 

Personally, I’m quite excited for this change. I was never a huge fan of Unity, and I’m glad Canonical is willing cooperate with the greater Linux community once again. Unity already shared a lot of software with the GNOME stack, despite the newer Unity 8 being based on QT. I haven’t tried Unity 8, so maybe Canonical created their own Unity stack as well? Who knows. Anyway, this move represents Canonical turning back the clock and going back to their GNOME roots. I know some people are saying that they should have went with KDE instead, but I’m sure that’s an entirely different can of worms on its own. Let’s not forget the whole Kubuntu drama that happened a while back... Also, KDE neon exists, so there’s going to be a lot of shuffling around if Canonical adopted KDE as its default stack. However, I’m sure it would have been very interesting. Perhaps I’ll write about it in another blog post. Anyway, let’s finally get to what I think of Ubuntu GNOME, which will be the last release from the Ubuntu GNOME team before they are folded into the main Ubuntu team. 

Let me begin with my thoughts on the previous release of Ubuntu GNOME. I didn’t like it very much. I use NVIDIA’s proprietary graphics drivers with my system, so it basically made the gdm greeter shit the bed every time I booted the system up. I wasn’t about to install lightdm to fix the issue, so I went with Kubuntu for my desktop distribution. That was the end of my experience with Ubuntu GNOME. Fortunately, the whole greeter issue has been fixed with this release. I loaded my graphics drivers in, and restarted my machine. GNOME came up as expected, and everything worked just fine. Kudos to the GNOME team for fixing this issue. One big thing I noticed with this release was the sheer speed of the DE. Compared to Ubuntu GNOME 16.04, this latest release is blazing fast. I used to have to wait about 20 seconds or so after logging into GNOME for everything to start churning into action. With this latest release, I don’t even have to wait for the Activities menu to warm itself up. I simply slam my cursor to the top left corner of my screen and fire up Chrome. This release really makes me appreciate the beauty and speed of Linux software and Google Chrome. Remember when Chrome and Firefox were considered fast web browsers? Those were the days. 

I would also like to do a quick comparison to the previous Kubuntu release, which I used for a few weeks until Zesty’s official release. Kubuntu was quite alright, in fact. I didn’t have too many problems, but it was quite slow to start up, and it wasn’t very good at remembering my settings. It had a real problem with remembering which wifi network I preferred to connect to, as well some of my Google Chrome settings. Also, Kubuntu still has that really annoying “feature” of KWallet wanting to do.... something... every time you log in or start Chrome.. or any browser, if I remember correctly... I’m not really sure what KWallet is for, and I have no doubt it will be absolutely confounding to new users. KDE and GNOME tend to be complete opposites in this regard. KDE dumps a bunch of settings and customization features into your lap, which is great for power users. However, I just want to get my work done. I rarely even change my desktop wallpaper on my PC. I used to really dislike GNOME for being so bloated and slow, but I’ve warmed up to it considerably since those bad old days. I appreciate its simplicity and its valiant efforts at providing a streamlined user-friendly experience. Also, GNOME is so utterly unique to Linux; you will never find a user experience quite like GNOME’s in any other operating system. KDE is obviously inspired by Windows’ desktop experience, while Pantheon/ElementaryOS tries to emulate the macOS experience. GNOME stands on its own as something totally unique to Linux, and I think that deserves a lot of praise. Say what you will about their ridiculous Outreachy program, but the software that the GNOME developers deliver is one of the best in the Linux world. Ubuntu GNOME reflects this ethos well, and delivers a great vanilla GNOME experience right out of the box. I look forward to what the team can do with the added resources of Canonical and the rest of the Ubuntu team. 

[dawnofsunday]

My Thoughts on Ubuntu MATE 16.10

I know this is a bit late, but I didn’t have the opportunity to try the new October release of Ubuntu’s MATE spin until the semester was over. Now that I’m done with my exams, the first thing I did was wipe out my SSD to put a fresh OS on it. 

I initially had trouble with backing up my data, until I gave up and synced all my important data to Dropbox/MEGA. Then, it was off to the races with Ubuntu MATE. I have a Thinkpad X201t, which tends to run quite hot when it’s attached to the docking station. So fancier desktop environments like GNOME were out of the question. But I did like the GNOME apps, and Ubuntu MATE offered the closest experience, with other nice offerings such as support for GTK3 in this latest release. How exciting! 

I was initially hesitant about upgrading from 16.04 LTS. I was experiencing massive upgrade fatigue, and it was becoming a huge hassle keeping up with Ubuntu’s quick pace of 6 month release cycles. When 16.04 Xenial came out, I told myself I was going to stay on LTS releases from now on. That is, until I watched Linux Action Show’s review of 16.10 Yakkety. Chris Fisher’s glowing endorsement of Yakkety was what put me over the edge.  If Yakkety was that good, I just had to try it. So, off I went. 

This is my second day with the brand-new OS, and I like it so far. It only took me an hour or so until I was mostly settled in, having installed all my updates and must-have apps like Steam, Chrome, and Dropbox. 

Steam gave me a bit of trouble, though. I initially installed it through Valve’s site, but I got a weird error. I didn’t even see the error until I tried running it through the command line. After the initial install, Steam simply refused to start. I searched for answers on Google, and came across another person with a similar problem on Github. Apparently, installing Steam from Ubuntu’s repositories solved the problem. So, I uninstalled Valve’s copy of Steam and went with the Steam package provided by Ubuntu MATE’s Software Boutique. It worked flawlessly. Big thanks to the guys over at Ubuntu MATE! Now, I can play Undertale and Cave Story (and maybe finally beat Blood-Stained Sanctuary? lol). 

Anyway, those are my quick thoughts on Ubuntu 16.10, code named Yakkety Yak.