What does the Zapus bring?
“Evolution, not revolution” might best describe the changes in 17.04, but there’s still plenty of juicy bits to get excited about in this release.
Ubuntu aficionados will perhaps be most eager to see the progress of Unity 8 with this release, and we’ve dedicated two pages overleaf to the Mirpowered, device-agnostic (and not long for this world) desktop environment. But there’s plenty of other new stuff to get excited about in Ubuntu 17.04.
Most of it though, is under the hood – the default Unity 7 session looks much the same as it has done since last year, users aren’t going to have to learn to manage packages differently (although that option is available) and the default selection of installed applications remains unchanged from 16.10. However, starting at the bottom we have a brand new kernel, 4.10, a new version of systemd, which now assumes name resolution duties through systemd-resolvd , a new version of the X.org server and some handpicked components from GNOME 3.24.
The newer kernel means better hardware support, in particular AMD’s new Ryzen processors will work much more efficiently with this kernel. Also on the AMD side there’s support for their Polaris 12 architecture, and fan information is now exposed via hwmon . There’s also experimental support for unlocking Boost frequencies on Nvidia GPUs with the free Nouveau driver. More importantly, users of newer Nvidia cards can now control the onboard LED via a sysfs interface. Plus there’s support for a slew of less-expensive new hardware – yes, the chances are the new USB dongle you just bought is supported!
One change that bucks the trend is that swap partitions are done away with. These have been a staple of Linux installs since the very beginning – when running out of memory was a thing that happened regularly. Instead the default install (unless you already have a swap partition, in which case you can elect to continue using it) will use on-demand swap files, which is a slightly more efficient way of doing things. The oft’ repeated but rarely considered advice to set-up a swap partition twice as large as the amount of RAM is downright wasteful in an age where 8GB of RAM is the norm. That 16GB swap partition could accommodate a whole other distro.
Printer panacea
Printing on Linux has always seemed to be far harder work than it ought to be. The dark truth is that more often than not people just print to a PDF and take that PDF to a Windows machine or use Google Cloud Print when they want to get a hard copy. As is the case with other bits of hardware, the situation is confused by manufacturers offering drivers on their websites that have not a hope in hell of working with a modern Linux distribution, and actually stand a reasonable chance of breaking it entirely.
Of course, drivers are available within the CUPS package, but with 17.04 comes driverless printing, and perhaps an amelioration to the ongoing situation. This only works with some models, including those that support IPP Everywhere (see http://www.pwg.org/dynamo/eveprinters.php) and Apple Airprint, but it’s a start.