ON YOUR FREE DVD Ubuntu 19.04 Fedora 30
We were just in time to miss getting Ubuntu 19.04 on the disc last month, but better late than never, eh? There was a time when we’d make the cover more orange than the Netherlands on King’s Day whenever a new Ubuntu release hit the mirrors, but these days our celebrations are more tempered. The LTS releases are still a big deal, so expect to see lots of orange in our May 2020 issue. Since those long-term releases are shaped by these interstitial ones, they should definitely not be ignored. With that in mind, we’ve extended our DVD pages slightly to give you a glimpse into what’s new and what the ‘Disco Dingo’ can do for you.
Ubuntu’s transition from Unity to GNOME may have been a rocky road that lost it a few fans, but it really does seem like desktop and
distro are finally working harmoniously. The latter GNOME releases were dogged with performance issues and memory leaks, and it seems a few of Canonical’s attempts to fix these things didn’t quite go to plan, neither in 18.04 nor 18.10. With Ubuntu 19.04 we have the latest version of Gnome (3.32) which has extensive performance improvements to Mutter (its window manager) and the Gnome Shell UI.
One of the most obvious changes in the Disco Dingo release is the funky new icon set, and indeed an entirely refreshed Yaru theme. Yaru, you will recall, is the community-created theme that became the default in the previous release. The oranges and greys of the Ambiance theme that for many years defined Ubuntu are no more, consigned to history like the oranges and browns that coloured its first five years. Outside
of Ubuntu, Gnome has updated its Adwaita theme, so if you don’t like Yaru’s dark and stark stylings you might like to switch to Adwaita using the Tweaks tool (see below).
Previous Ubuntu versions included forked relics from older Gnome releases, most notably the file manager – since that provided support for desktop icons, which were all but abolished from Gnome in version 3.30. Those old apps were all integrated through the magic of snaps, but that magic is no longer required as the Desktop folder is now handled by an extension. It doesn’t quite offer the same functionality as previous versions; for example, you can’t drag a file from the desktop onto a program launcher to open it. But it does provide a folder representation of the desktop and thus enables you to forget all about proper filing and spill documents all over your desktop.
Hopefully you will have no trouble running the Ubuntu live environment from the LXFDVD (if you do, see our DVD FAQ or complain to Jonni), which will give you a good idea of what Ubuntu looks and feels like. You can add software and meddle with settings to your heart’s content without so much as touching your machine’s hard drive. If you’d like to see it running more smoothly, though, you’ll have to install it – there’s a lot of overhead involved in running off optical media or a USB stick. Ubuntu’s Casper installer will guide you through the installation process, offering to install alongside other Oses or erase an entire disk. If you already have multiple Oses installed on one drive (or indeed some other complicated drive layout, like LVM arrays or LUKS volumes), you’ll need to use the manual partitioning option.
Despite developers’ best efforts to make installation foolproof, horror stories continue to surface about lost data and unbootable systems, so do back up important files before you proceed. For those worried about dualbooting with Windows, our experience has been that Windows updates are much better at breaking Linux than installing Linux is at breaking Windows. Modern UEFI installation obviates the old (but easily fixed) problem of Windows overwriting the GRUB bootloader, so if you’re already running Ubuntu 18.10, you can upgrade that directly.
What to do
If you’re like us and like to tinker, one of the first things you’ll want to install is the Gnome Tweaks
Tool. From here you can configure extensions and tweak the various other settings that newcomers to Gnome are aghast can’t be tweaked from the outset. Tweaks can be installed from the Software Centre, or the old fashioned way with
$ sudo apt install gnome-tweak-tool
Gnome has come a long way, and Ubuntu has done a great job making it palatable for fans of the defunct Unity desktop. But oranges are not the only fruit and there are plenty of other official Ubuntu flavours, so do check out Kubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Lubuntu and Ubuntu Budgie too.