Zesty flavours
Dislike of Unity needn’t compel you to abandon Ubuntu. Why not check out the other official flavours? Om nom nom.
Criticism of the Unity desktop environment (DE) is fairly common. Whether this is due to it genuinely pushing users’ buttons, or people not being able to find appropriate buttons, or just internet people jumping on the fun-poking bandwagon (as they are wont to do), we couldn’t say. Whatever the reason, dislike of the desktop is no reason to dismiss the whole distribution. Ubuntu has many thousands of users and a thorough testing process to ensure those users are well catered for. Huge efforts are devoted to making sure applications work out of the box
There are of course other distributions that are awesome in their own way, such as Arch Linux (will you shut up about Arch, this is an Ubuntu feature! – Ed), but all too often users are too keen to run away based on appearances (have they not seen Beauty and the Beast?). So many distros are based on Ubuntu now anyway, so why not choose an official flavour? You’ll get all the stability of the Ubuntu base together with the desktop environment of your dreams. Assuming you dream of KDE, Xfce, LXDE, MATE, GNOME or Budgie, that is.
There are a few other official flavours – Edubuntu (for schools), Ubuntu Studio (for artists, musicians, videographers and other creative types, see LXF223) and Ubuntu Kylin (for Chinese users) – but these all still use the Unity DE. This release cycle we also mourn the loss of the long-lived MythBuntu, which since 2005 has eased the pain of getting a working MythTV setup. Alas, due to a dwindling development team that project has folded. Meanwhile Lubuntu continues its move away from the ageing and buggy GTK2 in favour of the LXQt desktop. The changing of the guard won’t happen this release, but users wishing to see how progress is coming along in the lightweight-yet-modern, Qt5-powered desktop can do so by installing the lubuntu-qt-desktop package. As we’ll see later, this and other desktop packages can be installed on any Ubuntu flavour, so that users can choose a desktop at log in, depending on their mood.
We’ll focus on two official flavours here, Budgie and GNOME, because the others only feature minor package updates this release. Budgie is the newest addition to the Ubuntu family. The avian desktop originated in the Evolve OS distro, which nowadays goes by Solus Linux (see LXF208), but has since seen contributions from without. Budgie has hitherto been a GNOME-based affair, but in trying to create a desktop with elements that hearken back to GNOME 2, albeit with modern conveniences like insta-search, the developers have consistently run into things that needed to be hacked around. This is symptomatic of a sea change in the GNOME ecosystem, in which GTK, once a general purpose toolkit for making nice and consistent looking widgets, is becoming more and more subsumed by the GNOME aegis. As a result, trying to do things with GTK3 that don’t involve the GNOME desktop is becoming more and more challenging. So the Budgie team, like LXDE, will be migrating (haha – Ed) to Qt5 in the future. Interestingly, Unity 7 is an alternative shell for GNOME that is implemented as a Compiz plugin. It has
“It’s amazing how many controls they’ve managed to fit in without it feeling cramped.”
managed to circumvent these GTK-GNOME assimilation thus far, in part by copious patching and in part by relying on a different toolkit called Nux. If this all sounds very convoluted then don’t worry, it is, and that’s why Unity 8 uses the deviceagnostic Qt5/QML instead.
Back to Budgie, then, and the first thing one notices when it starts is a friendly welcome screen which features a very democratic browser ballot screen. This puts one in mind of the one the EU forced Microsoft to implement in 2009 after deciding their bundling of InternetExplorer with Windows was anti-competitive. Chromium is installed by default, but users can install Chrome, Firefox or Vivaldi with a single click. This is a nice touch, seeing as web browser preference is a contentious issue among users – many prefer Google
Chrome, and resent the fact that many distributions make it hard to install, whereas equally many would be flabbergasted to find such an epitome of proprietary nastiness installed by default. Budgie, unlike its parent GNOME desktop and (maybe this is being unduly harsh) Unity has userconfigurability at its heart. There’s a handy sidebar – the Raven Sidebar – which can be popped out by clicking the icon on the far right of the main toolbar. From here one can control widgets, notifications, panel layouts and font settings. It’s actually quite amazing how many controls they’ve managed to fit in here without it feeling cramped. That said, the roadmap for the next Budgie release sees some of these settings slated for shipping off into the main settings applet. We’re in two minds about this: on the one hand it’s nice to have easy access to these settings, but on the other hand things like font sizes are the kind of thing that only get modified once (if at all), rendering their accessibility somewhat moot.
Budgie uses the Plank dock/launcher area, which is initially set up as a left-handed affair, but it’s smaller and less distracting than Unity’s. It can be configured to autohide or even intellihide and can be augmented with ‘docklets’ such as a clock, a CPU monitor or a desktop pager. Budgie also makes use of the rather excellent Terminix application. Not only can it split horizontally and vertically (like Terminator), but it can also save your session in gloriously parsable .JSON. Like Unity, there’s plenty of bits of GNOME 3.24 in here, but obviously not as much as in Ubuntu GNOME, to which we will soon direct our fiery gaze.
This release of Ubuntu lines up nicely with the release of Kernel 4.10, the latter having been out in the wild for five weeks before the Zapus was released, and obviously available for testing long before this. Of course, different projects follow different release cadences and things don’t always align so nicely. One such example is the GNOME desktop environment, version 3.24 of which was released just two weeks before Ubuntu. At the time of writing this has yet to be fully incorporated in any Linux distribution. Be that as it may, parts of GNOME 3.24 have been co-opted by vanilla Ubuntu (Calendar, Videos, Disks). This is thanks largely due to GTK’s new long term release cadence, which makes it easier for developers outside of GNOME to better track the library and avoid being bitten by API changes. However, one gets more (but still not the whole shebang) of the GNOME 3.24 experience if one uses the official Ubuntu GNOME flavour, or one adds the desktop (all 800MB of it) with sudo apt-get install ubuntu-GNOME-desktop . Ubuntu needs a heavilypatched Nautilus and terminal to integrate with its peculiarities, so older (3.20) versions are included. Likewise GNOMESoftware (patched and rebaptised UbuntuSoftware) is based on the 3.22 edition, but it includes support for Snaps and Flatpaks, which was not present in previous Ubuntus.