The article is just a reword of release notes[1]. Half of it is listing of included versions of software. It's not a review, authors didn't even tried to run it in VM. Don't bother reading this "shareware press".
From the article: I tested Ubuntu 17.04 in an Oracle VirtualBox virtual machine (VM) on my main Linux Mint system. I also installed it on my primary Ubuntu PC. They ran it in both a VM and on bare hardware.
This Ubuntu version has also replaced Unix/Linux's ancient swap partition with a swap file. The net effect should be to make Ubuntu a bit faster in situations where the system is overburdened with applications and has to resort to using drive space in place of memory.
There are reasons a swap file might be preferable to a partition, or maybe to get rid of swap altogether, but it's not this.
"This means it supports the AMD Ryzen and Intel Kaby Lake processors. Microsoft, in stark comparison, won't fully support Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 on either high-end CPU"
This is a weird statement - comparing the very latest kernel release on Linux to older windows versions isn't particularly meaningful. If it was 3.2 or 3.4 then sure, but 4.10 is roughly 5 days old...
Linux long-term supported releases, including Ubuntu, have so-called Hardware Enablement, where support for newer hardware is backported to the LTS version during its lifetime.
"
There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
"
With the privacy concerns about Windows 10 and Apple's diminishing focus on macOS this was the perfect time for Ubuntu with its desktop focus to thrive. The only missing link was a hardware focus. Every other Linux thread on HN confirms the underlying demand for a fuss free Linux hardware experience.
Inspite of the 'organized hatchet job' on Unity by folks never under any compulsion to use it to explain the 'hatred' it was the best placed to do this. It was by far the most polished and modern looking Linux desktop. It was Ubuntu's USP and its tragic they imploded at a time they could capitalize the most.
I fail to understand all these 'community' spokespeople who have suddenly cropped up on discussion boards who seek to act as 'gatekeepers'. This is not how open source works, people have always done their own thing. No one is in a position to decide what is NIH, fragmentation, duplication of effort or 'good' for the community. Individuals cannot speak for a community.
What is wrong with having Mir or having an alternative to Android on phones, all bankrolled by Shuttleworth? These would be welcome and how some have managed to convert these Ubuntu investments into a huge negative is simply inexplicable. No disinterested user or observer can be so bitter about other projects.
Ubuntu still needs to make money and serve some kind of audience. They have a philosophy and goals as an organization. Writing software that no one will ever use does not serve their organization. If a feature is just going to go to a black hole it is a waste of their time.
There is no real problem for the community, but there is a problem for Ubuntu. Also, I think you could argue that there are, effectively, gatekeepers for the most important projects (Linus/Linux, etc.).
Totally agree about the privacy concerns of Windows 10. I would even say with Sierra I have definite privacy concerns for macOS. The direction is more and more in the walled garden direction for macOS and I do not like it one bit. I ditched Apple/Win for a Linux system even though it meant several weekends of tweaking to get a Linux laptop correct.
An amusing anecdote regarding that, I think a lot of the time cost is just knowing which things work well on Linux. Things are not always "seamless" on Windows or macOS and once you know how to configure a Linux software stack into a productive desktop environment it doesn't cost you that much more than any other OS.
Thing is, most folks make an effort to migrate over and conflate two separate things of learning the hardware and the actually dysfunctional Linux desktop things with finding software that is similar to what they are using on macOS.
It was by far the most polished and modern looking Linux desktop.
That is an opinion not shared by everyone. I found it to have questionable design direction. Unity was best on the platform where it was initially released, being screen-size constrained netbooks. It just stops making sense on the desktops everyone has. Hiding menu/scroll bars and the like...
No one is in a position to decide what is NIH, fragmentation, duplication of effort or 'good' for the community. Individuals cannot speak for a community.
It's called sharing one's opinion, and it happens everywhere. Mir had nothing to offer to the larger ecosystem, and neither did Unity. Uniqueness or being a "third option" isn't a virtue all on its own, and it looks like that lesson finally hit home.
I hated it because it was incredibly user hostile, at least for users like me.
It broke the alt key. I need three things to work: emacs, web and shell. Two of those three need the alt key. Also, it was always flaky under virtualization (due to needing 3d acceleration).
Finally, the last time I tried to use it (16.04, I think), it was full of spyware by default. By the time I removed all the lenses, etc, apt was so confused that the machine couldn't boot. I have been running debian / ubuntu for nearly two decades, and this is the only time this has happened to me.
Fixing these problems would be trivial compared to the effort of implementing unity from scratch. I suspect the core problems with unity were symptoms of structural issues at canonical. Hopefully they'll be fixed now that Shuttleworth is back in charge.
I personally did not like Unity all that much, but I think this was not a wise decision by Ubuntu. Linux is all about the long game. And because of that, tablets and phones are here to stay. It does not make sense to abandon Unity it will be useful if not now then in the future. It's a question of time. Ubuntu should continue with Unity and maybe push it to a community model where it pays for a few developers to keep working on it and the rest of the work is continued by the community.
I want to eventually see a powerful Ubuntu tablet that I can use for my daily use. As it stands I don't trust Android or the manufacturers of my phones enough to actually put important data on there like banking info and passwords.
I love their decision. The only problem is I don't really like GNOME. But I do like that Ubuntu is now targeting projects that are being developed by others and they are stopping their phone projects. Lately, I've had issues with Ubuntu in my VM not allowing me to use the tweak tool and some other odd issues I haven't seen.
For the first time in years I’m considering Debian. Not because Ubuntu is bad in any way, there just seems to be less difference between it and upstream Debian these days. Many are praising this as a good thing and I don’t disagree. As an end user I’m just thinking “is there enough difference, why not run the original?”.
> So, in sum while you may not feel compelled to switch to Ubuntu 17.04 on your PC or laptop, on the cloud you might well want to use it. Its improved network speeds look really, really good.
Does anybody use non-LTS Ubuntu releases for servers?
The only time I've come close is when Docker was first released and it required a newer kernel. And that was only for non-prod experimentation.
I ran 11.04 in production for Docker, ~100 servers. If you're in an environment where you know you'll be refreshing servers by the time the LTS drops it'll be fine. Just don't get stuck running on non-LTS when they end of life the release.
I also had a ton of issues with degraded network performance while upgrading on a non-LTS release.
I use non-LTS for everything. I don't want once-every-two-years pain. I want to do a test upgrade on a dummy server with the same config (I clone the image in Digital Ocean), I ask questions from the maintainers, then I do the upgrade.
Sometimes I just start from a clean image of the new release if the project has a really solid testing suite. That way I'm not dragging along state.
I installed yesterday, on the surface there don't seem to be any changes.
My dns stopped working every time after a minute though there seems to be some issue when dnsmasq is installed.
I hit this all the time on ElementaryOS too. I wish there was a simple (under the hood), usable linux distro.
Why do desktops need to run their own DNS servers, anyway? What about all of the other random enabled by default services? Each one is another thing to break, and another attack vector.
[+] [-] ungzd|9 years ago|reply
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZestyZapus/ReleaseNotes
[+] [-] sp332|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwmj|9 years ago|reply
There are reasons a swap file might be preferable to a partition, or maybe to get rid of swap altogether, but it's not this.
[+] [-] pilif|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stock_toaster|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcguire|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smcl|9 years ago|reply
This is a weird statement - comparing the very latest kernel release on Linux to older windows versions isn't particularly meaningful. If it was 3.2 or 3.4 then sure, but 4.10 is roughly 5 days old...
[+] [-] csense|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vetinari|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehvatum|9 years ago|reply
" There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. "
[+] [-] senorjazz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foolrush|9 years ago|reply
Design 101.
[+] [-] throw2016|9 years ago|reply
Inspite of the 'organized hatchet job' on Unity by folks never under any compulsion to use it to explain the 'hatred' it was the best placed to do this. It was by far the most polished and modern looking Linux desktop. It was Ubuntu's USP and its tragic they imploded at a time they could capitalize the most.
I fail to understand all these 'community' spokespeople who have suddenly cropped up on discussion boards who seek to act as 'gatekeepers'. This is not how open source works, people have always done their own thing. No one is in a position to decide what is NIH, fragmentation, duplication of effort or 'good' for the community. Individuals cannot speak for a community.
What is wrong with having Mir or having an alternative to Android on phones, all bankrolled by Shuttleworth? These would be welcome and how some have managed to convert these Ubuntu investments into a huge negative is simply inexplicable. No disinterested user or observer can be so bitter about other projects.
[+] [-] bitexploder|9 years ago|reply
There is no real problem for the community, but there is a problem for Ubuntu. Also, I think you could argue that there are, effectively, gatekeepers for the most important projects (Linus/Linux, etc.).
Totally agree about the privacy concerns of Windows 10. I would even say with Sierra I have definite privacy concerns for macOS. The direction is more and more in the walled garden direction for macOS and I do not like it one bit. I ditched Apple/Win for a Linux system even though it meant several weekends of tweaking to get a Linux laptop correct.
An amusing anecdote regarding that, I think a lot of the time cost is just knowing which things work well on Linux. Things are not always "seamless" on Windows or macOS and once you know how to configure a Linux software stack into a productive desktop environment it doesn't cost you that much more than any other OS.
Thing is, most folks make an effort to migrate over and conflate two separate things of learning the hardware and the actually dysfunctional Linux desktop things with finding software that is similar to what they are using on macOS.
[+] [-] Karunamon|9 years ago|reply
That is an opinion not shared by everyone. I found it to have questionable design direction. Unity was best on the platform where it was initially released, being screen-size constrained netbooks. It just stops making sense on the desktops everyone has. Hiding menu/scroll bars and the like...
No one is in a position to decide what is NIH, fragmentation, duplication of effort or 'good' for the community. Individuals cannot speak for a community.
It's called sharing one's opinion, and it happens everywhere. Mir had nothing to offer to the larger ecosystem, and neither did Unity. Uniqueness or being a "third option" isn't a virtue all on its own, and it looks like that lesson finally hit home.
[+] [-] hedora|9 years ago|reply
It broke the alt key. I need three things to work: emacs, web and shell. Two of those three need the alt key. Also, it was always flaky under virtualization (due to needing 3d acceleration).
Finally, the last time I tried to use it (16.04, I think), it was full of spyware by default. By the time I removed all the lenses, etc, apt was so confused that the machine couldn't boot. I have been running debian / ubuntu for nearly two decades, and this is the only time this has happened to me.
Fixing these problems would be trivial compared to the effort of implementing unity from scratch. I suspect the core problems with unity were symptoms of structural issues at canonical. Hopefully they'll be fixed now that Shuttleworth is back in charge.
[+] [-] cowardlydragon|9 years ago|reply
Google could have finished off Microsoft with a death knell investment of a relative pittance:
- get LibreOffice to 100% parity and compatibility with office
- pick and polish a desktop environment to a perfect OSX, Windows-7, and Ubuntu interface
- get CrossOffice/WINE to near-100% compatibility
- near-perfect android app use.
Instead... ChromeOS?
Google could have added a multibillion dollar industry for the investment of $100 mil.
[+] [-] devoply|9 years ago|reply
I want to eventually see a powerful Ubuntu tablet that I can use for my daily use. As it stands I don't trust Android or the manufacturers of my phones enough to actually put important data on there like banking info and passwords.
[+] [-] toyg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeeHwang|9 years ago|reply
It seems like they are refocusing their efforts on their core, rather than being stretched.
[+] [-] helthanatos|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seiferteric|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nominated1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koolba|9 years ago|reply
> So, in sum while you may not feel compelled to switch to Ubuntu 17.04 on your PC or laptop, on the cloud you might well want to use it. Its improved network speeds look really, really good.
Does anybody use non-LTS Ubuntu releases for servers?
The only time I've come close is when Docker was first released and it required a newer kernel. And that was only for non-prod experimentation.
[+] [-] abrongersma|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3pt14159|9 years ago|reply
Sometimes I just start from a clean image of the new release if the project has a really solid testing suite. That way I'm not dragging along state.
[+] [-] conceptme|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hedora|9 years ago|reply
Why do desktops need to run their own DNS servers, anyway? What about all of the other random enabled by default services? Each one is another thing to break, and another attack vector.
[+] [-] reddotX|9 years ago|reply