Navigating the Interface
two haven’t received developer attention for quite a while: Empathy and Brasero. Both of these applications have been zapped from the official ISO image of the distro. While they are no longer available in the default installation, you can still easily fetch them from the official repos.
Of the two, Empathy was pivotal to one of Unity’s key components: the Messaging menu. With Empathy no longer installed, the icon for the feature is missing from the top-right corner of the menu bar. Also, the Online Accounts feature will no longer allow you to add accounts on instant messaging services and XMPP servers. However, you can bring back the Messaging menu by installing either Empathy or the much more actively maintained instant messaging application, Pidgin, which ships with the Unity Integration plugin, enabled by default to hook up with the desktop environment.
The one major application to be dropped from the 16.04 release is Ubuntu’s marquee Software Center. Like the other applications, it didn’t receive much love from its developers (Canonical itself), beside the one-off patch for fixing vulnerabilities. This, coupled with rumors of a new improved software center for Unity 8, led the Ubuntu Mate spin to drop the Ubuntu Software Center from its distro. With the 16.04 release, Canonical has validated the move by dropping it from the main release, as well. Instead, the distro has switched to the actively maintained Gnome Software, which is steadily picking up new features.
In more packaging-related news, the Ubuntu developers have also reworked the mechanism for labeling dependencies behind the scenes. Several dependencies have been moved to the “Recommends” section, instead of their original “Requires” position. The result of this change is that you’ll be able to remove particular applications from your installation without breaking the desktop—for example, you’ll be able to remove LibreOffice without removing the Ubuntu Meta package along with it as well. The change is meant to allow users more control over what packages are on their desktop.
Another application that Ubuntu has picked up from the Gnome project is Gnome Calendar, which is more feature-rich and integrates well with the Ubuntu desktop. Gnome’s calendar app was chosen over Ubuntu’s own because it strikes the right balance between offering more features and usability—for example, the application can visualize your upcoming events in several different ways, and it enables you to search the calendar, too.
Phew—that’s quite a lot of changes for an LTS release. If you were waiting for the right release to come along before plunging head first into Ubuntu, this is it. Follow our installation guide on the next page, and drape your computer in the Ubuntu (purplish) orange.