Ubuntu 19.04 ‘Disco Dingo’
Mayank Sharma wonders just what separates the two leading Gnomebased distros – besides their packaging formats…
Reaping the performance and feature benefits of the underlying distro, it’s a regular non-lts release that scores well for its customisations and the icon extension.
Pitting Fedora against Ubuntu isn’t a straightforward task. You can’t compare them in terms of the included components since the list is almost identical. For instance, they both use kernels from the 5.0 release branch, and draw their desktops with Gnome 3.32; most of the highlights of both of these distros originate from these.
Kernel numbers don’t really have any importance any more, and the 5.x series included in both doesn’t bring any headline improvements. However, it does boast support for Intel Cannonlake graphics and AMD’S Radeon RX Vega M graphics processor. Another highlight is the reduced impact of the performance hit that came with the Spectre and Meltdown bug mitigations.
While both distros have polished internals, Fedora 30 has been more vocal about its own and how that translates to improved user experience and performance. Staring with Fedora 30, all repository data will be compressed using the new and efficient Zchunk format. This translates to faster installs and updates, since dnf only downloads the differences between the metadata. One work-in-process improvement is the fluid, flicker-free
boot process from boot to the login manager. It currently works flawlessly only on machines with Intel graphics, and builds on the hidden GRUB menu feature in the previous Fedora release with a new Plymouth theme.
Same, but different
Usability is one of the main keywords that separates the good distros from the rest. Fedora and Ubuntu have taken slightly different approaches for their default desktops, despite using the same graphical stack. The Ubuntu devs spend time and effort customising Gnome to maintain several aspects of Ubuntu’s discontinued Unity desktop. The most prominent is the always-visible Dock on the desktop, which on stock Gnome appears inside the Activities Overview.
Another highlight is the distro’s default Yaru theme, which first appeared in Ubuntu 18.10 and now extends to third-party apps as well. Yaru is the most striking visual update to Ubuntu’s themes in several years, and it now removes disparity in icon shapes by making its own ones in various different contours. Surprisingly, despite a mix of squares, circles, vertical and horizontal rectangles, the icons all blend nicely with those of apps like
Libreoffice and Firefox.
On the other hand, with Fedora 30 you get a pure Gnome experience out of the box, which among other things means windows with no buttons to minimise them. Also, Fedora 30 still has a very limited right-click contextmenu, while Ubuntu 19.04 now enables you to create icons on the desktop. Gnome decided to drop the legacy code in its file manager that was responsible for putting icons on the desktop. The previous Ubuntu release shipped with an older version of the file manager in order not to rob its users of this functionality, which it felt was key to its user experience. By the time Ubuntu 19.04 came around, the devs had readied an extension to provide desktop icons.