New and noteworthy
A look at some of the best features of the new release.
A n Ubuntu LTS release is always a special affair. The primary goal of the Ubuntu developers is to provide a stable platform that can run reliably for the duration of the extended support cycle. On top of it, they must also take into account future developments in the larger opensource software ecosystem that might have a direct bearing on their support infrastructure. For instance, Ubuntu 16.04 doesn’t support AMD’s proprietary fglrx drivers any more, as AMD has announced plans to wean users away from its proprietary fglrx driver to the open source amdgpu drivers.
LAST THE TERM
Ubuntu 16.04 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release that will be supported until 2021. Unlike traditional Ubuntu releases, LTS releases come out every two years and continue to receive updates for the next five years. The LTS releases are prepared with more care than regular releases and only include components that have been well tested by the Ubuntu developers or the larger community of Linux distros. The regular Ubuntu releases have already switched to the Systemd service manager and 16.04 will be the first LTS release to do so as well.
The distro is powered by Linux kernel 4.4, which is also an LTS release that will be supported for the next two years. This kernel makes significant strides to supporting Intel’s new Skylake family of processors, as well as for ARM’s 64-bit processors. Thanks to the addition of 3D support in the kernel’s virtual GPU driver that enables virtualisation guests to use the host graphics card efficiently, you’ll be able to run graphics-intensive applications inside a virtualised Ubuntu 16.04 installation as well.
Talking of graphics drivers, as mentioned earlier, the fglrx driver is now depreciated in the 16.04 release. The developers have backported code from Linux kernel 4.5 to provide a better experience using the much improved open-source alternatives, namely radeon and amdgpu. If you use AMD graphics cards, note that not only will the upgrade process remove the proprietary drivers, you’ll also not be able to be manually install them after moving to Ubuntu 16.04. This is because the distro ships with Xorg 1.18, which doesn’t support the AMD proprietary drivers.
Another feature in the 4.4 kernel that may have a significant effect during 16.04’s support cycle is the kernel’s ability to deliver updates through a standardised procedure. Coupled with Gnome’s (currently under-development) fwupd tool, you could update your BIOS/UEFI firmware easily using Ubuntu’s package management tools.
SOLID FOUNDATIONS
One of the major additions in Xenial is support for the ZFS filesystem. The filesystem was available as a technology preview in the last Ubuntu 15.10 release. However, starting with 16.04, the filesystem is supported officially by an OpenZFS-based implementation (which will be controversial in some quarters due to licensing issues). The ZFS filesystem is a popular and much sought-after filesystem by system admins for implementation in situations where data integrity and resilience are paramount. The file system is the default on distros used for building data silos such as FreeNAS. While ext4 remains the default file system of the distro, Canonical is hailing ZFS and the file system for hosting containers in Ubuntu 16.04, thanks to its data-crunching features.
On the desktop side of things, Ubuntu 16.04 ships with the Unity 7.4 desktop environment, as the new Unity 8 isn’t quite ready yet. While the overall look for the Unity interface hasn’t changed much between the previous releases and Xenial, the desktop has had numerous minute improvements that help make it rock solid and very usable.
The Unity desktop now adds session shortcuts for logout, restart and shutdown options in the Unity Dash which also features new scroll bars. There are several other small usability improvements as well, such as the icons for the external storage and Trash windows will indicate the
number of open windows just like any other icon on the Launcher.
Furthermore, Unity will no longer wait for a resource-intensive application to load completely before it places an icon in the Launcher. If you use multiple workspaces and enable the workspace switcher, you can now right-click on it to access a new quicklist menu. The quicklist options for removable drives now sports the option to format the device. Also, if you have a microphone connected, you can use the sound menu to adjust its input volume with a slider.
After repeated requests from the users, the previous version of Unity allowed users to show the menus for the windows in the window’s title bar instead of the menu bar. In Unity 7.4, users can choose to display this menu automatically instead of the earlier option that displayed the menu only when you hovered the mouse over the designated area.
There’s further evidence of the Ubuntu developers paying heed to their user’s feedback (read: criticism). The project has received much flak from its users for including the Amazon scope which passed all user queries from the Dash to the ecommerce website to bring up
relevant results besides the applications and documents you were looking for. Ubuntu had earlier implemented a kill switch to disable this much panned privacy-invading feature and has now finally decided to disable it by default in the latest release.
Another change that took over six years to implement, and is a major departure from Ubuntu’s adamant position of governing the usability of the Unity desktop, is the option to move the Unity launcher to the bottom of the screen. This placement will be default on Ubuntu Kylin (the official Chinese rendition of the distro) who did all the heavy lifting to implement this feature. To move the Launcher on the main Ubuntu release, install the dconf-editor and navigate to ‘com > canonical > unity > launcher > launcher-position’.
Talking of fixing long-standing issues, the onscreen keyboard in Ubuntu brings up a virtual keyboard that floats around the desktop. That’s changed in Ubuntu 16.04 with the developers making the application pin a keyboard across the full-width at the bottom of the desktop. This implementation now looks more polished, refined and consistent.
APPLICATION SWAP
The one thing that has been quite consistent between Ubuntu releases is its default set of applications. The distro has been quite usable straight out of the box and the developers haven’t heard enough noise from the community to alter its winning combination.
While Ubuntu ships with some of the best and widely used open-source applications that are maintained and updated regularly, 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. Still, while they are no longer available in the default installation, you can 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 Xenial’s arsenal is Ubuntu’s marquee Software Center. Like the other applications, it too didn’t receive much love from its developers (Canonical itself) besides the one-off patch for fixing vulnerabilities. This, coupled with rumours of a new improved software centre 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 labelling 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 because it strikes the right balance between offering more features and usability; for example, the application can visualise your upcoming events in several different ways and enables you to search the calendar.
Phew, that’s quite a lot of changes for an LTS release. If you were waiting for the right release to plunge into Ubuntu, this is it. Grab the 64-bit Desktop version at releases.ubuntu.com/16.04/ and drape your computer in the Ubuntu (purplish) orange.