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Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark released
- roryrjb 9y agoObviously this is significant because this is the first release with Gnome 3 instead of Unity. I actually liked Unity a lot but also like Gnome 3, what are people's thoughts?
- vesak 9y agoGnome 3 seems quite fine, at least how it is in Fedora 27. It's rather pretty by default, and with Wayland, it handles things like multi-monitor DPI better than anything else I've seen. And not only in Linux side, but also versus Windows and Mac OS. I've been a rabid tiling WM user several years before. I'm liking the other benefits enough that I'm willing to let that go. Gnome developers are working on some sort of tiling support, so we might be able to enjoy that as well in the future.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y agoFedora really is excellent, just a shame I couldn't get it to play ball with my XPS 15 (9560). The situation doesn't seem to have improved in 27, sadly. Anything Ubuntu-based seems to work fine, though.
- krullie 9y agoI've taken a real liking to Fedora. It actually made me switch from my custom Arch linux with i3 to almost default setup Fedora with Gnome. Worked flawlessly on my old Dell XPS 13 developers edition and my new one. Sadly after the switch to Wayland my pen tablet doesn't get picked up by most applications I use daily including Chrome, Firefox, VSCode, Kritta, Blender, etc. It's a real shame as Gnome/Wayland handles switching the tablet between monitors and multimonitor setups really well! Running Gnome on Xorg also isn't an option, it tends to crash a lot now... I do get 2 cursors though which is interesting.
- jhasse 9y ago> Running Gnome on Xorg also isn't an option, it tends to crash a lot now... Strange, for me it's the other way around. I'm using Fedora 26 with GNOME on Xorg and no crashes so far.
- krullie 9y agoIt's been crashing for me since the switch to wayland as a default. I don't mind really, this stuff needs to get adopted. I tend to use my keyboard way more than my tablet these days.
- _eht 9y agoI was not a fan of early Unity, but now that it's been updated significantly over the years it has grown on me. Welp, seeya later.
- bostand 9y agoSame here, 2017 unity is fast, stable and beautiful. I hope this move results in the same improvements coming to gnome. but I'm not upgrading for now.
- dm319 9y agoPeople should know that Ubuntu-mate with mutiny layout is an alternative for some. Unlike 17.10, it keeps the global menus and HUD, but not the launcher (uses synapse instead).
- tabletiptop 9y agoI'd say that Ubuntu MATE (16.04) with the redmond layout and advanced menu enabled is the best alternative to Windows 7 I've yet seen in a Linux distro.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y agoI've been running the Artful beta as my daily OS but was having some weird scaling issues with certain apps on my 4K displays. Chrome particularly looked "fuzzy". Decided to give Linux Mint Cinnamon a week back and so far couldn't be happier with it. I know Cinnamon is available on Ubuntu too, I'm surprised it's not more popular as a DE as it's very polished.
- alexseman 9y agoI agree with Cinnamon being polished and deserving much more attention than it currently gets - but what stops me from using it is the impossibility of arranging the virtual desktops (workspaces) vertically Gnome style and the refusal of the Cinnamon devs to implement that - I for one cannot get myself to horizontal workspaces, especially after using Gnome. Some extensions did provide this in Cinnamon but the functionality appears half-baked and the extensions break after each Cinnamon release.
- twic 9y agoI switched to Cinnamon on Ubuntu after struggling with Unity for six months. Works perfectly, and personally, i much prefer it to Unity.
- sz4kerto 9y agoNo proper hidpi support. Gnome3 doesn't support fractional scaling, so if you need smtg like 125% scaling, then you're out of luck. (Example: 4k 32" displays need this.)
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y agoIt can be enabled but is buggy, in my experience.
- yxhuvud 9y agoOuch. This can be a dealbreaker for me.
- pritambaral 9y agoFWIW, KDE 5 has supported fractional scaling since ... as far back as I can remember.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Vinnl 9y agoI've been using GNOME Shell in preparation for this, and with almost the same customisations as the Ubuntu devs have done by default, it almost feels like the same experience. Perhaps even a bit smoother, given that most of the apps were actually made with this experience in mind.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- basemi 9y agoRelease notes: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArtfulAardvark/ReleaseNotes
- aargh_aargh 9y agoThis would be a much more useful link for this post rather than the link to the download page.
- mcjiggerlog 9y agoActual link - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArtfulAardvark/ReleaseNotes https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArtfulAardvark/ReleaseNotes
- roenxi 9y agoPay attention to the 2nd dot point under known issues. This release uses Wayland, and that has profound implications for screenshot, streaming and remote desktop-ing. The Wayland protocol apparently made some bold decisions to enforce security through isolation, and apart from the compositor it is all but impossible for anything to sneak a peak at what other programs are doing visually. It'll be interesting to see if that causes users a problem.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y agoNot to mention HiDPI problems and serious issues with the proprietary nvidia driver. The situation is improving all the time though and hopefully this should mark the beginning of some good times for Wayland. More choice is always a good thing. Of course, the option is right there on the login screen to start an X session instead, if Wayland doesn't work for you.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoThat's interesting, I was hoping for some improvements in HiDPI support with the shift to Wayland.
- lultimouomo 9y agoOn a Debain sid install I was somehow recently bumped from Gnome3 on X11 toi Gnome3 on wayland. Chromium and Qt apps got broken scaling; I solved it by forcing the session to be Gnome3 on X11. This is just anecdote of course! I would have liked to dig more into it and figure things out, but honestly I just had too much to do and chose whatever was working for me.
- jbicha 9y agoHave you tried again after upgrading to gnome-shell 3.26 (it's only been in Debian unstable for one week)?
- 9y ago
- vmp 9y ago> ifupdown has been deprecated in favor of netplan and is no longer present on new installs [...] > Given that ifupdown is no longer installed by default, its commands will not be present: ifup and ifdown are thus unavailable, replaced by ip link set $device up and ip link set $device down. Sad to see this go; I always use ifup, ifdown and ifconfig. Yes, they're old and clunky tools but in a way they are the staple of a proper Linux installation to me. Not to mention that it's quite a handful to write out "ip link set $device up".
- josteink 9y agoYeah. This will no doubt affect me too. On a related note, I've been meaning to read this article from 2011 for a good while now: https://dougvitale.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/deprecated-linux-networking-commands-and-their-replacements/ https://dougvitale.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/deprecated-linux... I guess it's getting about time to get it done now :)
- jaster 9y agofyi: you can shorten ""ip link set $device up"" to "ip l s $device up" (same for all ip commands, e.g. "ip address" can be shortened to "ip addr" or simply "ip a")
- topranks 9y agoYeah but please don't.... or at least don't create documentation or guides with the abbreviations.
- amyjess 9y agoTo be honest, I didn't even know "addr" was short for address. When I was first taught iproute2 in 2007, I was told that the command was "ip addr" (and I'm fairly sure the very first iproute2 command I ever typed was "ip addr show").
- eliaspro 9y agoI wonder why netplan instead of straight-up systemd-networkd? To avoid the usual "systemd takes away all my toys" shitstorm? Does systemd-networkd fundamentally lack anything which netplan doesn't?
- lonk 9y agoThe time, labor and money spent for unity in the end went to waste.
- NaliSauce 9y agoSuch is the nature of trying new stuff. Fairly often it fails and the effort is at least partially wasted.
- madez 9y agoIt wasn't waste. It was investing time to explore the space of alternatives.
- jstanley 9y agoIt almost certainly influenced Gnome, so it might not all be wasted.
- curt15 9y agoGnome shell beta pre-Unity: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_JSR8IC77Ub4/TGI7upt62cI/AAAAAAAAA38/Ls5TEoVDYdU/s1600/Screenshot-4.png http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_JSR8IC77Ub4/TGI7upt62cI/AAAAAAAAA3... Gnome shell after the Unity release: http://linuxbsdos.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/fedora-gnome-desktop-3-613x460.png http://linuxbsdos.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/fedora-gnom...
- cisanti 9y agoBut what is the reason they still don't have proper window list / dock? Do many people use third party solutions like dock to Taskbar etc that clearly mimic Ubuntu.
- jdlyga 9y agoego
- marcoperaza 9y agoWow, they've abandoned Unity, LightDM, and Mir (for desktop at least) in favor of Gnome, GDM, and Wayland. They must have poured unspeakable man-years of engineering into those projects, and have now abandoned them in favor of what everyone else was doing all along. Does anyone know to what extent these were pure engineering decisions vs. a scaling back of ambitions (and budget?) for the Ubuntu project as a whole?
- sz4kerto 9y agoNot unspeakable at all. We're talking about a (few) hundred man-years, tops (probably less than that, depending on how strict you are). Ubuntu devs have mentioned in the past that Mir could have been finished with an extra $1M (which is ~ 10 man-years), but Canonical/Mark S. didn't want to invest that money into it. So the whole Linux-on-the-desktop is extremely underfunded compared to any moderately serious enterprise project.
- Santosh83 9y agoApparently Mir is still being developed for IoT devices, so it's not abandoned in the same way Unity is.
- josteink 9y agoCanonical mostly did those projects to assist/enable Ubuntu Phone, in ways the wider Gnome/Opendesktop/Wayland community had little interest in supporting. With Ubuntu Phone officially dead, Canonical literally had nothing to gain by working outside the community, and had no good arguments for why they should keep on doing their own thing in these aspects. It must have been a tough decision to make, but I'm sure it was the right one. It was widely applauded from the rest of the Linux-community.
- pizza234 9y agoA few notes: - this is the first release supporting Surface devices out of the box (due the recent `linux-firmware` package) - people using PPA may have some troubles, since without tweaking, PPAs with obsolete keys are rejected - ack grep is not included (yet?), due to build issues with perl
- bostand 9y agoThe surface support sounds interesting. Has anyone here tried that?
- pizza234 9y agoI'm a longtime Surface user; you don't really need 17.04 though - all you need on older Ubuntu version is to install a more recent mainline kernel, and install the artful version of the `linux-firmware` package (in such conditions, the installation process will require an external keyboard and the pre-downloaded package). Arguably, a Surface device can work well as double device: - windows as tablet - linux for work, with minimalist hardware usage (no hw button, no pen, the SP4/SB have no camera support) The Linux Surface community is mostly made of script kiddies, so it's very unreliable (there are a variety of reasons for this judgment). My personal favourite options for this mixed use are: - Surface Pro 3: better compatibility, and cheaper - Surface Book i5: fantastic tablet SB laptops above the i5 are expensive, and it's a waste of money for a laptop that is not completely supported (if I have to spend 2000$ on something, I expect sleep to work).
- nathell 9y agoJust use ag (the-silver-searcher) or ripgrep in lieu of ack.
- baq 9y ago+1 for rg, it's amazing
- TorKlingberg 9y ago
- gigatexal 9y agoHmm I really liked ifconfig I hate seeing it gone.
- gigatexal 9y agoUnrelated but how does one forward apps over SSH with Wayland?
- josteink 9y agoI'm going to guess over X11 with Xwayland. Or does anyone else have any better solution?
- shakna 9y agognome-remote-desktop for Gnome on Fedora, it uses Wayland's API and VNC, so it works fairly well.
- majewsky 9y agoThat only shows you X11 windows. Xwayland has no idea about the content of native Wayland windows (i.e. at least all applications that use Qt5 or GTK3). The most likely solution IMO is a VNC server.
- jhasse 9y agossh -X still works thanks to Xwayland.
- joaomsa 9y agoI wonder if Canonical will also release 17.10 as a Windows Store WSL app or stick to LTS releases and wait until 18.04 for an update.
- mishac 9y agoI think they'll probably stick to LTS. There's no 17.04 for WSL AFAIK, so I doubt there'd be a 17.10.
- ausjke 9y ago32-bit installer images are no longer provided for Ubuntu Desktop. The Ubuntu Desktop now uses GNOME instead of Unity. On supported systems, Wayland is now the default display server. The older display server is still available: just choose Ubuntu on Xorg from the cog on the log in screen. GDM has replaced LightDM as the default display manager. The login screen now uses virtual terminal 1 instead of virtual terminal 7. Window control buttons are back on the right for the first time since 2010. Python 2 is no longer installed by default. Python 3 has been updated to 3.6. The Ubuntu GNOME flavor has been discontinued. If you are using Ubuntu GNOME, you will be upgraded to Ubuntu. Choose the Ubuntu session from the cog on the login screen if you would like the default Ubuntu experience. Additionally, there are quite a few "Known issues" for Desktop that made me dare not to upgrade. I will stay with 16.04 and wait for 18.04 then.
- oblio 9y ago> Python 2 is no longer installed by default. Python 3 has been updated to 3.6. And so it begins. I think/hope that the next RHEL will do the same thing, at which point the final nail will be in Py2's coffin.
- cisanti 9y agoFabric is still not supporting py3, it's important tool for a lot of admins.
- shakna 9y agoThere's a maintained Fabric fork [0] for Python 3, it is basically a drop-in and available via pip. [0] https://github.com/mathiasertl/fabric/ https://github.com/mathiasertl/fabric/
- collinmanderson 9y agoIn addition, fabric 2 is making progress.
- 9y ago
- Tepix 9y agoCongratulations on the release. It's too bad that gnupg 2.2 didn't make the cut, at least it will be in the upcoming LTS release.
- jasonkostempski 9y agoThought they were gonna go with Aaronic Aardvark and then just stop updating because there are no words starting with "Bb".
- geofft 9y agoJust you wait for Ubuntu 18.04 BBS BBL, which is fantastic for running dial-up services that are frequently offline.
- jimzvz 9y agoReally sad that they were bullied into getting rid of unity. No global menu in gnome is a joke. Feels like going back in time.
- rainbowmverse 9y agoCan you expand on how they were bullied? It looks like it just wasn't as well-received as Canonical hoped and no longer fit their goals anyway.
- newscracker 9y agoI like Unity too, and found GNOME wanting after I used Unity for a while. The keyboard shortcuts to search/launch, to search menu options in the foreground app, etc., are useful.
- axaxs 9y agoThey weren't bullied...they were wasting money. It still used compiz, which the maintainer even said was...my own words...junky. Then they decide to go mir and convergence even when the community said not to. I like what ubuntu has done for linux use, but they seem really good at blowing money. Upstart, Mir, Unity, etc...
- city41 9y agoHas anyone tried installing a window manager or another DE? I’m curious if GDM and Wayland might cause issues for X11 WMs.
- jdlyga 9y agoFirst Ubuntu to work out of the box on the 2013 (trashcan) Mac Pro I use at work. I'm seriously impressed!
- jejones3141 9y agoI read that Canonical didn't like having to fiddle with lightdm to make it work and play well with GNOME shell, and thus Ubuntu 17.10 comes with gdm3. My upgrade went south, so I installed Kubuntu. It's using sddm, which I understand is the successor to kdm. Now I find that Gnome under X just hangs. Does GNOME shell require either gdm or something hacked as Canonical did lightdm to work?
- jbicha 9y agoMake sure that gir1.2-gdm-1.0 is installed. I think the dependency was accidentally dropped.
- jejones3141 9y agoThat did the trick; thank you!
- jbicha 9y agoThere will be an update for that soon. (Ubuntu non-security updates are normally in -proposed for at least 7 days first.) https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/3.26.1-0ubuntu5 https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/3.26.1-0ubu...
- 0xbear 9y agoNo fractional scaling => no deal, better luck next time. I can't use this on my X1 _or_ on my 4K desktop display: everything is too large at 2x and too small at 1x. Unity supported this near perfectly.
- throw2016 9y agoToo much noise to signal on this thread. Too many people promoting both Fedora and Wayland with cookie cutter statements about 'improvement' with no supporting points. Readers can see it for themselves. This reduces the value of HN.